Well, firstly, go and read this, because basically I want to steal this idea. No thoughts expressed in this post are original, yet they might lead to something that is.

The video iPod, and devices that emulate its function (including, in a large part, your computer) are going to change the way we consume video content, and it's going to rush the convergence of television and the internet even faster than it is already going. There's a wave building, and I want to be on it, rather than looking back on it in a few years saying: "Ooh I really should have caught that one." Because it really is going to explode, very soon.

Little TVs in your pocket you take them out and want to watch something. You don't want to watch a half-hour show because you're on the tube and you are constantly getting up to change trains or buses. You want something short, something consumable. Music videos automatically spring to mind, of course, as do a variety of short-form film sites (Channel101 and Strongbad being two of my favourites), but the rise and rise of bloggin obviously indicates a craving for fresh, regularly updated content that is germane to your location and your own personal interests.

A niche that needs filling. Obviously the 'establishment' (whatever you choose that to mean) has started grinding the wheels and will eventually start producing short-form content, but in the meantime the people on the ground, as always, have the potential to be one step ahead- to get into the niche before it gets filled with corporate crud. People on the ground...like you and me.

Here's my game plan: A 3-5 minute downloadable webcast, each episode focusing on a different thing. Made by us.

Plainly, most vLogs are generally useless and inane and hard to watch. Like most blogs, actually. I don't wanna go down that route. Whatever is done needs to be tight, it needs to be about something interesting and informative about that subject, and it needs to have at least a semblance of a professional look about it (but let's not go crazy).

It also needs to be regular. Right now I'm thinking once-a-week. Now, I probably could research, film and then edit a minishow once a week (I have NO idea how rocketboom does it once a day), but it would mean I'd have to pretty much dedicate all my free time to it, leaving no time for all my various other hobbies.

So what I'm thinking is this: Four teams, each one responsible for making one show every month. This takes the pressure off each individual team- not particularly hard to make a 3-5 minutes magazine piece in one month. I'll give you an opening title and bar graphic to maintain continuity between each of the four sources.

The show can be about whatever each team wants it to be about, but it does have be about something (as opposed to most vLogs which are just people blahing into a camera). You need ideas? I got ideas. Take a look at my blogroll. Everyone on it, each of you reading this, get excited by something. Pix is nutty about knitting and photography. Adrian will chew your ear off about string theory and design paths. Lori will show you that little corner of Manchester that only she knows about. There's a year's worth of interesting stories just there. Interview a band. Take us on holiday with you. Review a videogame. Take us rollerblading down the Thames path. Investigate the animosity between skiiers and snowboarders. Investigate the London porn industry. Talk to people. Take us dancing with you. Get mad about something. Get excited about something. Feel happy about something. Make it interesting. Show it to us. Join me.

One show a week. (Oh! We need a name. Think about that, too.) One show a week. You make one a month. I make one a month. I need three other like-minded people who each have access to a camera and some editing software. We band together. We get on the wave. You don't even have to live in London, this can be done from anywhere in the world. I'm excited about this. I'll sink my next paycheck into this.

Think about it. It could work I will be e-mailing you. I'll be e-mailing Londonist. I'll be e-mailing Pick Me Up.

In the meantime, I'm off to the sunny shores of San Diego. Have a Merry Christmas! I'll see you next year.

There's something very elemental in the idea of crawling into the back of a giant, fur-filled cupboard and finding it leads into a magical, timeless world. The sort of feeling, when you read it, that you kind of thought it up yourself when you were a kid, and someone else wrote it down for you. Which I think goes a pretty long way to explaining why a lot of people have a pretty strong connection with The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (I refuse to call it 'Narnia'). I certainly do, and have very fond memories of my dad reading it to me and my brothers, and of being quite traumatized, not by the death of Aslan, but by the humiliation of Aslan, the shaving of him. Seeing a great being bought low, and that he went willingly to his fate- that was the worst part, I think.

Anyway, I didn't have high hopes for the film, but actually came away feeling pretty happy- certainly if I was a kid I would have thought it one of the best films I'd ever seen. Disney are obviously still smarting from turning down The Lord of the Rings, and this films seems very badly to want to be 'LotR for kids', a role it fills in pretty nicely- after two hours of tooty grins and bloodless chase scenes it actually comes across as something of pleasant shock when in the final battle beasties get smashed by rocks, stabbed in the head with swords and bitten in the face by lions. The LotR impression is cemented by the kiwi landscape, kiwi effects design, kiwi costume design- in fact it seems to have been made by the old LotR crew, which is cool.

One thing I did find a bit odd after the WWII opening scene was Lucy's first meeting with Tumnus. He's his naked, hairy dude who invites her back to his house, where he drugs her and then starts crying saying: "I've done something terrible." Eek! Not quite the same effect it had when written in the 50's, I'm sure. Still, a valuable lesson to all little girls not to go home with strange, naked men.

The kids' acting is usually pretty patchy, but kids are pretty patchy in general so it kind of suited them. The white witch is creepy and cool (and who wouldn't betray their siblings in order to get wrapped up in a fur coat and eat Turkish Delight with her?), Aslan (and most of the creatures, I should say) looks great although I found Schindler's voice coming out of him a little distracting.

Overall- Narnia is a good time in a dark room. It's not exactly breaking new cinematic ground the way LotR did, but it's taking that new kind of 'anything is possible' film-making and using it to bring a great fairy tale to life, and I think that's a pretty good thing. I recommend it.

I've got a funny old relationship with music. On the one hand I can't live without it, listen to it constantly, get untold amounts of energy and inspiration and enjoyment out of it, and some of my happiest moments are dancing at live gigs. On the other hand...I hate most music. Most music sucks ass. It's a taint, a blight on the audioscape of my surroundings. I can't escape it. It brings me down, how bad it all is. You know how many albums I've bought this year? Five. And one of them wasn't even particularly good.

I download a lot of tracks, about one a day I'd say, when you even it all out. You might think this makes me more of a 'singles' guy, but really, I do love a good album. I'm a huge fan of what I call 'track sevens', those tucked-away tracks that are never promoted or talked about or played live, but you think are the best thing the band has ever done and wonder why it's not the biggest song in the world right now -the destruct\hours consist mainly of track sevens- and albums are really the only way you can find these little gems.

Embarassingly, the best new album I've heard recently was sent to me for Christmas by my mum. I have this great vision of her going into Real Groovy Records on Queen Street Auckland and asking some punk behind the counter: "Excuse me, but what is the 'in' sound at the moment? What's 'hip'?" Thankfully, whoever she spoke to was awesome and gave her Pipe Line Under the Ocean, by Pluto.

It's what you'd call a 'grower'. The first time I listened to it, nothing really jumped out at me. The second time I listened to it, I thought Dance Stamina was pretty awesome. The third time I listened to it, I truly believed, and still do, that it was the best album I'd heard all year.

It's insanely versatile. It rolls from bluegrass to hard rock to dance to country to indie, it's all over the show, but all held together by the lead singer's voice, which has a quality that reminds me of a young Mick Jagger, but I mean, his voice is wholly distinctive, it can't be anyone else singing. It's sort of gravelly and, well, massive, for want of a better word. It's really the standout feature of the album, you really can't believe that tiny little New Zealand produced such a massive voice.

I've more orless had this album on constant replay for the last month (apart from the occasional NIN-whirl for violent chapters, it was the soundtrack to the whole nanowrimo experience), and even listening to it now, it still fills me with energy and excitement, like, I'm sitting in my office right now with a serious urge to like, jump up and dance. That, to me, is the hallmark of a good album.

Great, great stuff- reminds me of why I love music so much.

Did I never tell you the story of why I stopped reading Harry Potter? Oh, it's a humdinger, check it out:

So, being an Engrish teacher and very pleased that Harry Potter made reading 'cool' (and this was particularly odd in Taumarunui, where demonstrating any form of intelligence was usually rewarded with brutality), I decided that, in the interests of keeping my finger on the pulse of popular culture if nothing else, I should really crack on and read these Harry Potter books everyone was talking about. I thought the first one was very good, it had an extremely amused, Roal Dahl-ish narrative voice that I found very entertaining. The next three weren't so good, I think, like Lucas, the author started to believe her own hype, and they went from being an amiable fantasy to an overblown drama that took itself far too seriously- certainly the narrative voice has lost its postmodern charm. Still, I was enjoying the ride and looked forward to the fifth one.

Around rolls the release date to book five which was, you may recall, some two or three years ago, now. As it happens the day it was released (I remember it well because one of my flatmates was a Potter-nutter and went to the midnight opening to pick up a copy), I went to Greece to spend two weeks with my brother. Greece was awesome as you'd expect, and a great part of my holidays usually consists of, well, catching up with all my reading. After I'd churned through all my books and started bugging hJeremy for some more, he asked if I wanted to read the new Harry Potter, which he had on his Palm Pilot, and said he'd beam it to mine if I wanted it. I was like: "Wow, really, that's been ripped to Palm already? It only came out, like, the other day."

But he assured me that a copy had leaked to the web a week before the book release and, well, he DID have it on his Palm, after all, so I started reading the latest book (The Order of the Pheonix). And it was very good. It had secret cults and a Griffindor conspiracy and Quidditch and, y'know, all the excellent HP staples that everyone loves. However I do remember, whilst I was reading the first chapter, looking up at Jeremy and saying: "It's a bit racier than the last ones." This was because Harry was like, going through bodily changes and noticing Hermione's figure and a variety of other teenage tropes that the earlier books would have sidestepped. However I had read that ol' JK had been planning to make them more mature, so it all made sense at the time.

However, the seed of doubt had been planted. And it grew and grew as the book progressed. And the book was perfectly fine and good, very well written now that I come to think of it, but there was just something a little bit...wrong with it. Something not quite right. And it got less and less right, the deeper I read. And I remember sitting in the airport lounge about halfway into the book when the suspicion turned into a conviction. I looked up from the page I was on (in which Hermione was about to fellate Harry) and realized that, well, this surely couldn't be possible. It'd be all over the papers if JK Rowling had suddenly decided to write teenporn. It'd be the literary scandal of the new millennium. So I turned to the person next to me (everyone in the airport was reading the same book) and asked if I could please just read the first page of the new Harry Potter.

I didn't need to even read the first page. The chapter heading alone told me all I needed to know. I'd been reading...fan fiction! Some psychotic Potter fan with waaaaaaaay too much time on their hands had written this mammoth, FAKE version of Harry's fifth year at Hogwarts. And I'd been reading in, thinking it was the real thing! Someone had been fecal vomiting into my mind and I'd been a willing accomplice, spooning it up! I felt dirty. I still do.

I tried to read the real thing, God how I tried. I couldn't. I couldn't finish the fake version and I couldn't start the genuine article. Because the sad truth is...the fake Potter had character growth and consequences and it broke the mold and treated Harry like a real teenager with real teenage problems. The real one just repeated the same opening chapter as the previous four books, and I knew I couldn't believe in the world anymore- the fourth wall hadn't just been torn down, its ruins were covered in fornicating teenagers. I gave up on the world of Potter. Although word on the street is: Dumbledore? Dead.

Now, what was I saying? Oh yeah, the movie review. The first two movies were shit. Like, not even amiable, they were just confusing and messy. Chris Columbus couldn't find his way to the India of quality films (huh? huh?). Three was gorgeous. I mean, even if you take off points for the confusing time-travel plot, the film just looks amazing. It's actually an exemplar of how important a director is to a film, because this previously shitty franchise suddenly just looked so damned good. I loved three and thought that, all else aside, it was a brilliant fantasy film (and there aren't many).

Four is, well, it's certainly better than one and two, but I didn't think it was quite as good as three (although to its credit it is very, very close). I think it's a pretty healthy melange of the two extremes. It's a decent, often amusing, good-looking kids film that advances the overall plot and is a lot of fun, but also feels pretty rushed, despite being incredibly long- it's streamlined very cleverly given the massive size of book four, but still feels like it's cramming, and the first twenty minutes in particular are confusing and poorly edited.

Plus... I really miss the sex scenes.

As anyone who reads the Daily Links will know, I'm a huge fan of The Daily Show and its host Jon Stewart (and have been for many years, even back when its host was Craig Kilborn)- it's certainly the best thing on TV at the moment (yes: even better than Lost). Which why I was very pleasantly suprised when my sometimes extremely lovely/othertimes extremely hostile flatmate just showed up and gave me a Loge (ie-awesome+v.hard to get) ticket to the show! I was very excited, and based on the enormous queue outside the theatre, pretty lucky to get tickets at all.

The show opened with excerpts from The Daily Show's take on the London bombings, which I'd not only seen before, but also posted in the daily links at the time- so not much new for me there. Then Jon came out and chatted for a bit, and said he was going to read some excerpts from his book America: A Guide to Democracy Inaction, which I guess this was pretty much a promotion for (the background was just an enormous projection of the book). Unfortunately, I'd read the book in like April, so while it was something of a treat to have Jon Stewart read it to me (it's also always nice to be in a laughing crowd), I'd heard all the jokes before. He also invited out the producer and head writer of the Daily Show to read with him.

It seemed like the three or them were having fun up on stage, which is always a good way for the crowd to have fun- it's a nice energy between performer and observer. But I did feel that they could have done more than just read verbatim from the book. I mean, the guy is a trained actor and stand-up comedian, surely he could have learned the lines as a routine and performed them? I guess it felt lazy. I've since heard that it's not uncommon in America to just have 'audiences' with famous people, like, they just show up and that's the show. But c'mon, Neil Gaiman does that for free- why should I pay to listen to someone's book promotion? I guess I expected a little more, uhm, effort?

Interesting side note: Woody Harrelson also jumped up from the crowd and joined in with the reading at one point, which was quite neat. He was obviously having a ball, as well.

After that they opened the floor up to questions, which was initially extremely funny and Jon was obviously having a good time chatting to folks (the audience seemed to be comprised overwhelmingly of Americans, interestingly). But then something happened, it's hard to pin down, but the best way I can describe it is that Jon...lost his patience? Like he was suddenly very tired or something, and there was a series of particularly inane questions. He put his head in his hands, and from that point on just gave people very short, sharp answers that actually sounded quite irritated (or at least very tired) and then cut the questions off and ended the show. It was kind of disconcerting and a little disappointing. Again, perhaps after having seen so many plays and concerts that consist of people trying their very hardest to entertain the audience have just spoiled me, raised my expectations to such a degree that I was simply unaccustomed to this kind of event- expectation being the death of happiness and all. But then, the guy is an entertainer, and the nature of that profession should make one very wary about becoming complacent.

I should clarify that I still like Jon Stewart a great deal. An enormous amount, in fact. TDS is still my favourite show. But I like him a little less than I did when I went in, which is not a good impression for a live show to impart.

Odd book, this one. It's a "classic", although whether this became true before or after it became famous for being in the pocket of American serial killers whilst they were on gun rampages I am not certain. Despite the fact that it was banned for much of its existence, I got the feeling that because it is an interesting portrayal of American youth, it should perhaps be distributed liberally among high school English classes as an example of disaffected youth (which we all know high school students just love to read about).

I read it while I was writing my own novel, and since they're both first-person narratives involving someone talking to someone else, I approved of the style and probably hijacked the thought patterns to make Dalent's own stream of conciousness ramblings. While I still appreciate regular-type God's-eye-view novels (they certainly can be more artfully constructed), the more I read the more I come to realize that first-person perspective is really the only perspective I can really buy into, and think my reading is tending more and more into that direction at the moment.

Plotwise, there's not a lot going on: 'Teenager wanders about New York city thinking about things' would pretty much sum it up. I mean he does stuff, but nothing particularly interesting- it's more interesting just to read the ebb and flow of his thoughts. Although not, I should say, absorbing- I didn't find it to be that great a novel.

There's this song that goes:

I'm afraid of people who like Catcher in the Rye
Yeah, I like it too, but someone tell me why
People he'd despise say: 'I feel like that guy'

Which is, oddly, kind of the opposite of the reason I think I didn't really get into the book. I just didn't really like Holden (the teenager) enough to care about his fate. I mean, you can't really blame me, even he didn't like himself enough to care about his fate. He had admirable traits, and had some good thoughts, but they were all so adrift in this sea of misanthropy that I found it difficult to warm to him, which made it difficult to warm to the book...which makes me wonder why it achieved such a lofty status.

Looking back over the films I've reviewed in this rapidly closing year (all 21 of them! That's like two a month. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?), I seriously wonder if any of them is as good as The Constant Gardener, which is uniformly excellent from beginning to end.

I can't really tell you much about the plot because the very first thing to happen in the film is an enormous spoiler that I really hope you haven't been told yet by some blabbermouth Guardian reviewer who doesn't know when to shut up. But that's okay, because I can rant about how much I liked other things.

For starters, it looks great. Not just the cinematography, but the locations are amazing. Kenya looks incredible, shot in a washed out, heavy grain. London, conversely, is shot in a dull, modern style, with heavily saturated blues and greys, and it looks beautiful. There's a scene where the walls of a conference room lift up and you realize you're looking out of the Tate down across the Thames- it was so wonderful it actually caught my breath. (aside: there's a lot of shaky-cam action, so it might pay to not sit directly in front of the screen, as I did)

The film itself is quite layered: For most of the time it is a high tension thriller, indeed many scenes have no overt threat in them, yet are filmed in such a way as to make them incredibly tense (which makes it all rather exhausting to watch). However as well as being a thriller it's also a touching, tragic love story, and also an important, informative political statement about the relationship between Africa and the West.

The acting is dynamite, a veritable who's who of British thesbs, with Ralph Fiennes standing out particularly as the title character.If anything, the movie is largely an homage to stereotypical British nebbishness, which is usually considered a source of mockery, but in this film reveals itself as a source of strength and resilience. There were at least three scenes where I was practically yelling: "Punch the bastard!" to the screen, yet he never does, which is perfectly in keeping with his character and goes to make him all the more memorable and worthy; as he makes his transition from a man who is completely in the dark about what is going on around him to someone who, as he says 'knows all of your secrets now'.

I could not recommend that you see this more strongly.

As some of you will recall, I recently contributed the answer to a Star Trek related question which was directly asked of Patrick Stewart during Chris Evans' Radio 2 show. Direct evidence of this question being asked (Patrick, sadly, did not recall) can be listened to here. (I also highly recommend listening to the entire show, which the BBC has archived here).

Even more exciting than listening to the show was seeing my question namechecked on the Trektoday news item about the show. Even more exciting than that was having Mark show up the next day with Patrick Stewart's signature on the very e-mail which I submitted the answer through! How cool is that?!? Patrick Stewart wishes me 'all the best'. And you can't say fairer than that.