“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

Source: theodoreroosevelt.org

Link: David Foster Wallace Interview (2003) [zdf.de]
(If for whatever reason the above link doesn’t work, try this more direct link)

Via newclear music.

The full-screen works best: http://www.molleindustria.org/everydaythesamedream/everydaythesamedream.html

Source: molleindustria.org

“What has been surprising in the post-Cold War period are those beautiful and deeply moving words pronounced with veneration in places like Prague and Warsaw, words which pertain to the old repertory of the rights of man and the dignity of the person. I wonder at this phenomenon because maybe underneath there is an abyss. After all, those ideas had their foundation in religion, and I am not over-optimistic about the survival of religion in a scientific-technological civilisation. Notions that seemed buried forever have suddenly been resurrected. But how long can they stay afloat if the bottom is taken out?”

Source: Towards a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts, Michael J. Perry, p. 28

This year, for the first time, I kept track of my listening habits. This was courtesy of my iPod & last.fm.

I was interested to find out whether my self-described music taste of “white man rock music” was true or not. Below is the top 10 artists by number of plays for the last 12 months:

1. Radiohead – 408 plays
2. Coldplay – 397 plays
3. U2 – 326 plays
4. The Prodigy – 176 plays
5. Michael Jackson – 155 plays
6. The Mars Volta – 127 plays
7. Eddie Vedder – 123 plays
8. Red Hot Chili Peppers – 98 plays
9. Nine Inch Nails – 92 plays
10. Rage Against the Machine – 89 plays

And looking at the top 10 I feel that’s a pretty good definition of white man rock music. Especially for someone who was a teenager in the 90’s.

Perhaps an exception is Michael Jackson which is just a straight output of Michael Jackson dying. I think I ended up listening to his music intensively for a couple of months.

Eddie Vedder is the only other outlier & he is in there solely due to the ‘Into The Wild’ soundtrack. I played the heck out of that soundtrack over the past year, I really rate it.

If you take out Eddie Vedder & Michael Jackson the next two artists just outside the top 10 are also white man music: Simon & Garfunkel and Fleet Foxes. More folk than rock though which is encouraging.

The Prodigy probably wouldn’t be as high as they are if I hadn’t listened to the track ‘Take Me To The Hospital’ 57 times in the last 12 months. That was one-third of all The Prodigy I listened to & my second most popular track over the whole 12 months. It’s a great tune.

What was interesting was Last.fm lets you graph your listening habits against the greater Last.fm population as part of their Best Of 2009 write-up. Below is my The Prodigy listening habits versus the rest of the last.fm population for October 2008 to October 2009. You can see me as the red line picking up on The Prodigy’s newest album ‘Invaders Must Die’ about two months after the rest of the world :-)

Last.fm The Prodigy listens versus my listens – October 2008 to October 2009

Source: last.fm

My most listened to track over the last 12 months? Iron & Wine’s ‘Naked As We Came’.

Source: YouTube