Mike Shinoda and politics.

I like all but the Chester Bennington ‘Amen’ part. In the recorded version,the ‘Amen’ is sung by a church choir.

Fort Minor and mental malaise.

I’m listening to Fort Minor, which I discovered yesterday through Pandora and Wikipedia links (Linkin’ Park -> Mike Shinoda -> Fort Minor), with a torrent file from isohunt.com, downloaded using Azureus, played on my 13’’ Black Macbook using Apple iTunes. Incredible the plethora of technology used for such a simple action.

On music: “This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill, fifteen percent concentrated power of will…five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain, and a hundred percent reason to remember the name.”

My will is flaccid! anaemic! noodly! Is it worse, I wonder, to be unaware of one’s faults and thus do nothing about them. Or to be fully aware, yet make little progress towards correcting those faults? The latter certainly makes for greater mental strain.

Apparently unrelated (yet related in my mind), I linked to an Arts & Letters Daily article on writing good english that gave me pause. Lately I’ve grown sensitized to the way people speak. I watch very little TV in the past four years (and before that); watching now, it is incredible the number of clichés thrown around my normal people. I hope to not fall into such a habit. In this, being Chinese probably helps because I didn’t grow up listening to my parents use clichés (they didn’t know them). It’s funny how language is (as the article author noted). In Chinese, the use of 成语 bespeaks education, culture, breeding while the opposite is true in English.