Last great sensory experience of last night: waking up in the middle of the night, looking out the window and seeing this relative stillness. I had joked the other day to a friend that it felt like one of the times of year when a snowstorm sneaked up on you. Then one did. Beautiful.

First great sensory experience of the early morning: hearing a snippet of Coltrane's Love Supreme in a BBC story on saving the house where he wrote the album. Had to play the full thing immediately. Beautiful.

I posted the other day that early "wild" word of Springsteen's new album either boded very well or very poorly. With the release of the album's first single last night, put up a point in the positive column.

We Take Care of Our Own has a strong beat, tight (Magic-style) vocals and all kinds of anger. Backstreets says the chorus makes the song "not only be Springsteen's most misinterpreted song since Born in the U.S.A., but misinterpreted in precisely the same way." Sounds exactly right to me. But as the review goes on to state, the ambiguity runs in various directions. While clearly fired up about the American condition, underneath there's a "So-what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it" layer.

As much as I like initial first track, what matters most to a Springsteen album's quality in the last decade are the next several tracks we hear. With this tight sound (I'm not quite willing to say Arcade Fire – again, far too reminiscent of Bruce's own '07 Magic, even keeping the strings), how the music diversifies over the rest of the album will be critical. Can the message hit enough different, right notes to sustain itself?

Part of the fun of reading Shakespeare is his exposure of language uses since lost and forgotten or uses so modern-seeming that they're unexpected in Elizabethan times. When Lori gave me a copy of Much Ado About Nothing to read before our Staunton trip, I enjoyed coming across "carpet-monger," "hobby-horses," "tennis-balls," and others.

Good: The book that held the play came with a glossary. Better: This book came from the Cambridge University Press in 1923. Not only were the editors looking nearly as far back in history as today's reader (me!) was, but today's reader also got a long look back at them. Best: Their glossary provided a mixture of both effects. Below were my favorites.

Everything below is directly quoted. Any quote marks are from Cambridge eds. I haven't added my own quote marks just to save you the tedium.

ADVERTISEMENT: advice, admonition.

BLOCK: (a) mould for a hat, i.e. fashion style, (b) blockhead, simpleton.

CARPET-MONGER: a carpet-knight, a contemptuous term for one who prowess belong rather to the boudoir than to the battlefield.

HAGGARD: hawk which has moulted at least once before being caught, and therefore much more difficult to train than one caught younger.

HOBBY-HORSES: buffoons.

LIVER: formerly considered the seat of the passions.

MARCH-CHICK: precocious youngster.

NIGHT-GOWN: 'It is generally supposed that the night-gown proper, or night-rail, was not worn in England until the middle of the 16th century, and then only by royalty or the nobility.'

PIKE: 'Put in the pikes with a vice.' The pike was a detachable spike, for trusting at the enemy, in the centre of the buckler…. Benedick's indelicate reference needs no comment. [I love this.]

SUN-BURNT: [had just never thought about Elizabethans saying this.]

TENNIS-BALLS: In Shakespeare's day these were made of white leather and stuffed with hair, generally dog's hair.

TOOTH-PICKER: toothpick ("Tooth-picks, introduced from abroad, were much in request at this period….").

In the dark garage, leave it in park. Tap the accelerator. Hear the purr.

Into fall daylight, about four blocks later in the city, the shoot-'em-up Foster the People song comes on the radio, which of course you have going, and the tune hasn't reached overplay yet. Volume. Accelerate.

There are side effects of your organization getting into connected cars.

Like, the guy who sits at the desk next to you leads that product build, and you learn a ton just by listening and asking a few questions when there's no deadline pending. Like, your organization needs to test new technology on a mix of cars, and you get to borrow one of the test cars for the weekend. Like, the test car is a new, fast, pearl-white Mustang.

For competitive reasons, I couldn't post about this test drive when it happened in October. But my colleague and bosses launched the app at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas last week, and our digital ME tweeted about his test weekend. So, I felt the embargo was done.

I'm a Mustang person, you know. I believe — somewhat seriously — that every person on Earth is either a Mustang person or a Corvette person. Somewhat seriously. And I'm a Mustang person. A Mustang had to die so I might live. Really. My parents were driving my mom's baby blue '66 Mustang convertible when I was on the way. Scofflaws were ripping ornaments and mirrors off the body as it sat each night outside their apartment on Connecticut Avenue. They traded in that car for a family-friendly 1980 Datsun wagon. The move couldn't have been easy, but it was a smart one. I learned to drive in that Datsun.

I never tire of seeing weird, boob-and-video-game-obsessed, meme-reblogging Tumblrs drop everything for an NPR moment. Remember "This Is the Internet" and monkey joke, All Things Considered, video game? The blogger has continued his surprising NPR love this year.

At left, September 8, 2011, the Tumblr salutes a slideshow of David Gilkey's photographs from Afghanistan. Preceded by a napkin joke. Followed by an animated GIF of a lady model squeezing her bustier.

At right, January 10, 2012, the Tumblr reblogs from NPR Ari Shapiro's broadcasting station at Mitt Romney's headquarters for the GOP New Hampshire primary. Preceded by a gay joke. Followed by a dick joke.

"Horse Piano," by Anna McDonald, resolves well but is so strange.

We celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, birthday today, but moreso we celebrate the life that followed. Reversing course this morning, you try to learn about King's birth. Instead, you learn more about antitheses.

… In The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights leader writes little on his birth. "I was born in the late twenties on the verge of the Great Depression, which was to spread its disastrous arms into every corner of this nation for over a decade," King writes in the first sentence. He then writes more about the Great Depression. He makes various mentions over following pages about the street where he was born and his health at birth. But King clearly uses birth just as setup.

He closes the opening section by writing about his family.

My home situation was very congenial. I have a marvelous mother and father. I can hardly remember a time that they ever argued (my father happens to be the kind who just won't argue) or had any great falling out. These factors were highly significant in determining any religious attitudes. It is quite easy for me to think of a God of love mainly because I grew up in a family where love was central and where lovely relationships were ever present. It is quite easy for me to think of the universe as basically friendly mainly because of my uplifting hereditary and environmental circumstances. It is quite easy for me to lean more toward optimism than pessimism about human nature mainly because of my childhood experiences.

In my own life and in the life of a person who is seeking to be strong, you combine in your character antitheses strongly marked. You are both militant and moderate; you are both idealistic and realistic. And I think my strong determination for justice comes from the very strong, dynamic personality of my father, and I would hope that the gentle aspect comes from a mother who is very gentle and sweet.

A simple, beautiful passage.

But then you go to learn when King wrote his autobiography and find: 1998. The book, which initially looks co-written, turns out to be a long-after-death, family-endorsed, scholar creation from King's words over his life. Pages across the Web, from student papers and even in more recent books cite autobiography as autobiography. They're all wrong.

As you look more closely at the book, you find the scholar is up front about the nature of the text and detailed about the varied sourcing.

Critics also tend to rate the book well, acknowledging autobiography as "autobiography" and moving on. Texts can be messy, you decide.

In an end note, you learn most of the opening section comes from an essay King wrote in seminary school about his religious development. What's missing from that essay, though, are the "antitheses strongly marked." The book's other sources from the section come out beyond the reach of the Web, but a Google of the phrase itself is successful.

In his 1963 Strength to Love collection of sermons, the phrase appears in the first sermon, in the sermon's introduction, in the first paragraph. Your source confusion skims off. You are glad, thankful, you searched. The "autobiography" label may be weak, but its hints bring you here:

A French philosopher said, "No man is strong unless he bears within his character antitheses strongly marked." The strong man holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites. Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are no usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self-assertive humble. But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. The philosopher Hegel said that truth is found neither in the thesis not the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two.

Jesus recognized the need for blending opposites. He knew that his disciples would face a difficult and hostile world, where they would confront the recalcitrance of political officials and the intransigence of the protectors of the old order. He knew that they would meet cold and arrogant men whose hearts had been hardened by the long winter of traditionalism. So he said to them, "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves." And he gave them a formula for action. "Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." It is pretty difficult to imagine a single person having, simultaneously, the characteristics of the serpent and the dove, but that is what Jesus expects. We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.

Update, hours later: A colleague tweets the King Center has opened its digital archive today. A search for this sermon turns up earlier and later outlines, as well as the delivered version, all in hand-written form.

I'm working on catching on my New Yorker issues. What else is new?

But I like, when editors put pieces of content together in a magazine, when they fit moods. The grace notes work for no one but the reader who has, for some span of pages, given over himself or herself to the mood, perhaps after finding a personal and shared connection to it.

On one page of the December 12 issue, we read about Jon Gruden:

Gruden wakes up early, at three-seventeen (an arbitrary alarm-clock setting that stuck), and on a recent Thursday morning he arrived at the F.F.C.A. at around three-forty-five, pulling his white Mercedes into the empty lot. He wanted to learn everything he could about the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs, who were playing in the following Monday’s game. Gruden spent the morning examining “melts,” video compilations that allow him to view every play from just about every angle.

He is fit and reflexively physical, with a habit, common to coaches, of accentuating his statements with pokes, taps, and gentle shoves. But he has trained himself to sit still for hours, holding a professional-grade remote control called a Cowboy clicker, watching plays forward and backward, at full speed and in slow motion. He works in silence, except for his own occasional remarks. Every week, as he gets to know the two teams, he quickly comes to view their achievements and blunders as his own. “That wasn’t very good,” he murmured, after one uninspired Chiefs sequence. “That wasn’t our best effort. Wonder what happened.” Then he hit rewind and watched the play again.

The next page, as the Gruden pieces continues, we get a poem called "The New Song" by W.S. Merwin. He begins, "For some time I thought there was time / and that there would always be time / for what I had a mind to do." The poem starts sadly, acknowledges the time passing in repetition, but manages to find a pleasure in the onrushing reality.

If life is the Cowboy clicker, at least you love football. At least you love, as Merwin does, the song of a waking thrush. In the winter, when the mornings are harder, the Cowboy clicker requires more of an answer.

Friend and fellow Bruce fan Steve came across the article this morning. The good news? An "earwitness who's heard some of the music" tells The Hollywood Reporter: "It’s very rock 'n' roll. He feels it's the angriest album he's ever made." The potentially bad news? The sound "veers" to "unexpected textures — loops, electronic percussion … an amazing sweep of influences and rhythms, from hip-hop to Irish folk rhythms."

Everything could be fine, I know. There's a new producer in the house, and he might make sure the experiments fit (in a way the producer of the last couple albums didn't). But still I worry. And hope for the best.

Similarly, the pub puts the album among its most anticipated albums of 2012. But also on the list? Adam Lambert, Justin Bieber, Lana Del Rey.

[1.1] An orchard, adjoining the house of Leonato; at one side a covered alley of thick-pleached fruit-trees; at the back an arbour overgrown….

(Also known as Central Virginia, a few hours from D.C., last weekend.)

Shakespeare, people. I knew he wrote comedies. I knew, at times, he could be funny. I didn't know just how funny. When Lori suggested we see Much Ado About Nothing at a theater in Staunton, Va., I was game. But I expected more challenge than gut-busting laughter. I was wrong.

Much Ado was very funny. The American Shakespeare Center troupe at Blackfriars Playhouse was very funny. The performance was easily the most funny thing I've ever seen staged. In the heart of the Queen City of the Shenandoah Valley, the crowd roared. It was an amazing show.

We went on opening night, and we had front-row tickets. Somehow. I had been reading the play during my Metro commutes all week, thanks to a gift from Lori. Maybe I was biased. But I'm pretty sure I was won.

Go. The show runs into April. The theater, beautiful, is the world's only recreation of Shakespeare's indoor theater, and it works under original staging conditions. (Theater motto: "We do it with the lights on.") The cast gives themselves only a couple of days to put together Much Ado.

They make their own costumes. They introduce their own shows, play their own music from the balcony during the intermission, look straight into the eyes of the crowd, and all around enjoy themselves. They may be the country's most alternative and originalist Shakespeare players at once. The cast looks liberated, and you feel released just for going.

Silence may be "the perfected herald of joy," but you get this blogging. As modern as ASC's Benedict and Beatrice seemed, a blog feels right.

(If only they let you take pictures inside the theater.)

The weekend was full of surprising moments.

After the long drive down Friday evening, the hotel clerk recommended the Mill Street Grill in an old mill nearby. We walked in, found the place covered in old wood paneling and random holiday ornaments, saw the menu running all over the place, and nearly walked out. Then we found an online review saying the place looked and felt strange — "Shouldn't they decorate more like an old mill?" — but tasted great. We stayed.

On the wine list, we found bottles of Barboursville Chardonnay, one of Virginia's best, for an shockingly low cost. Then we had ribs and shrimp up there with the best we'd had anywhere, and our waitress possibly the nicest either of us had ever met. We were happy we had stayed.

The next day we explored the town. We lucked into beautiful weather.

Mystery Freemason bunny and blue sky.

Old mill and blue sky.

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