You can help propagate the insanity!

• Go to Google and type in "Jar Jar, you're a genius" (with the quotes) into the search field!
• Put the sentence into your own blog! Completely out of context if you like!
• Get other people to Google the sentence! By fair means or foul!
• Put signs up around town saying "Jar Jar, you're a genius"!
• Take photos of said signs and post them to Flickr! Tag them with "Jar Jar, you're a genius"!

Living in this hemisphere, our TV seasons are mostly six months out of synch with the northern hemisphere. Which means we get all the Christmas special episodes around this time of year. Not all in one week either, since different shows will start a few weeks apart at the beginning of the season. So the Christmas specials spread out to cover a month or more.

So here we go. I have some minority opinions about certain movies. Most people are going to disagree with what I am about to say, but I am confident in my own reasons and want to express them. Right, let's begin.

1. I like Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I really do like it. I liked it enough at first viewing to go back and see it again at the cinema within a week or two of release. I grew up with the original Star Wars trilogy, and like most people my age they form some of the best and coolest memories of my childhood. So, again like most people my age, I was very eager and keen for Episode I and got into the hype and was squirming with anticipation and excitement as I sat in that seat in 1999 and watched the Lucasfilm logo give way to "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

And I was not disappointed. I really, truly, enjoyed the movie. I did find Jar Jar annoying - but not annoying enough to ruin the film for me. I was blown away by the action, the effects, the cool fight scenes, the cool space shots, the pod race, the political machinations behind the story of Episodes 4 to 6. It was a rollicking good ride, and I had a lot of fun. For that, I could overlook Jar Jar.

Attack of the Clones, on the other hand, really sucked.

Okay, that was the opener. Now let's try:

2. I like Alien 3. Yeah, I do. Truly. I agree it's not in quite the same league as Aliens (which is awesome on steroids), but again I did not come away from the cinema disappointed or wanting my money back.

There are flaws in the film, to be sure. The pointless off-screen deaths of Newt and Hicks was a bit of a downer - and I'm familiar with the arguments that it constitutes a cardinal sin against good script writing - but to me it served to enhance the horror of the alien and the implacable deadly universe the squishy humans inhabit. It made the film more scary.

And that's what it was to me, a scary horror flick. Aliens was a kick-arse action blockbuster, and I think a lot of people were expecting a similar feast of human-on-alien butt-kicking action. But Alien 3 went back to its roots in Alien, where there was just one alien against a rag-tag mess of underequipped humans in a claustrophobic setting. And as that, it worked. For me, anyway.

All right. What don't I like?

3. I was underwhelmed by Batman Begins. I was expecting something really good from what everyone had been saying about it. But when I finally got to watch it, it came across to me as no better than the 1989 Batman with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Worse even.

Batman was a feast of action, intrigue, and the sheer surrealism and insanity of Nicholson as the Joker. Backed up by stunning set design. Gotham City felt Gothic. It was dark, it had gargoyles, it had a stupidly tall and imposing cathedral. And the scene where Nicholson fries the guy and talks to his smoking body - that's enough brilliance for two movies.

Batman Begins was hokey by comparison. The whole mysterious Eastern cult to train in esoteric martial arts is so cliched. And then at the reveal when we learn that whatsisface wants Bruce Wayne to join them in teaching the world a lesson, and Bruce refuses, and it turns out the guy is really evil and suddenly they're enemies after one conversation... that was just ridiculous and unbelievable. How could Ra's al Ghul not have figured out by then that Bruce wouldn't be the cool new recruit he was after? After wasting all that training on him?

And then the climax of the film was equally silly. There was no logic whatsoever to the whole city evacuation thing. And the fight and train crash that saved the day ... I actually sat thinking to myself at that point, "Why am I watching this? This is so stupid." The film was a mish-mashed bag of overused cliches and completely unjustifiable character actions.

Honestly, I'm at a complete loss as to how this film has been hailed as the best Batman film ever made. I know the first series of Batman films got incredibly silly very quickly, but the Keaton/Nicholson film still reigns supreme for me.

• [EDIT: removed link] - works on Firefox 2.0.0.14 (yeah, I haven't upgraded yet)
• [EDIT: removed link] - doesn't work on Firefox 2.0.0.14

It is an amazing place - one of the oldest and it claims to be the most famous cemetery in Australia. It is the final resting place of many prominent Australians, including Dorathea Mackellar, Lawrence Hargrave, Victor Trumper, Jack Fingleton, Fanny Durack, and Henry Lawson.

The site is enormous, and it sits perched on the sandstone cliffs overlooking the sea, so the backdrop is spectacular.

There have been a few movies I've watched and when the final credits roll I find myself breathless and just thinking, "Wow" and wanting to watch it again immediately. This was one of those movies.

I have a printer connected to the serial port of a Windows XP machine. I have a Windows Vista machine on the same LAN. (I have successfully managed to share files between them, but it took me ages to figure out how to do it, and I'm not sure what I actually did to enable it and am not confident I can repeat it.) I wish to print from the Vista machine (without transferring files to the XP machine and just printing from there).

On the walk home, I like to scan the branches of the trees lining the streets for any movement that might indicate possums. We see them roughly every 4 or 5 times we're out after dark in the streets around our home. Sometimes we see them walking along the power lines to get from tree to tree.

Tonight there was a large black shape just sitting still on one of the power lines. As we got closer, I saw that it was bigger than any possum, and it was upright. I was amazed to see that it was an owl. Not a small owl either, this thing looked big and heavy, about 60 centimetres tall. I had my pocket camera with me, but the flash wasn't powerful enough to get a decent shot from the ground. The owl just sat there despite me flashing it in the eyes a few times.

We continued walking home, and then I decided to collect my SLR, with a long lens and proper flash unit, and go back to see if the bird was still there. I ran back up the hill and around the corner, and yes, he was still sitting there!

I reeled off abut 30 shots in quick succession, with the owl patiently enduring the flashing in its eyes. I fiddled with my camera settings a little to see if I could get a slightly different result, and when I looked up again, the owl was gone. I never heard so so much as a rustle of a feather as it flew away.

When I got home and took a good look at the photos, I trawled the net a bit and identified it as a Powerful Owl (Ninox strenua). I knew there were owls in the Sydney region, but I've never seen one within the city before. And it turns out that powerful owls are not terribly common, either, being listed as a vulnerable species within New South Wales.

I've been lamenting for years the fact that I don't have enough time to read all the books I want to, or watch all the movies and TV shows I want to. It's been somewhat confusing, because I love reading, and I really enjoy movies and certain TV shows. Where does my spare time go?

In one sense it's obvious, but in another it's taken me until recently to really nail it down. On a rough count, in an average week, I spend something like 10-12 hours writing, photographing, image manipulating, and doing coding for Irregular Webcomic!, another 6-8 hours on Darths & Droids, maybe 3-4 hours taking photographs for recreation, 5-6 hours digitally processing photos (either old or new) for presentation and uploading. That adds up to a lot of time, and that's just for creative pursuits that end up publicly visible. In the past I've also spent considerable amounts of time writing: published game material and content for my own web site.

In contrast, I spend maybe 4-5 hours a week reading and 3-4 hours watching movies/TV. I don't play computer games at all.

What else would I like to do, if I had the time?

• Read more.
• Watch more movies and TV.
• Play some computer games. I often say I don't like computer games, but really there are some that I have found enjoyable in the past, and I would like to spend some time with them. It's just that... there are so many other things I'd rather do.
• Learn a new language. Really put the effort into doing it so I could be at least competent. I've wanted to do this for ages.
• Do more photography.
• Write more stuff. That novel I had the idea for 10 years ago. (Yeah, everyone's got one of those, but hey.) But also educational material - something to explain modern science in terms simple and compelling enough for non-technical people and children.
• Just basically make more cool content for the web, and possibly for other methods of publication.
• Learn to play an instrument; be a part of a band.
• Make movies. I like movies, I really do. But I watch one movie maybe every 2 or 3 weeks. I just don't have the time to watch more than that! If I had more time, I'd watch more movies, and I'd have a go at making some too.

I'm never going to have enough spare time to do everything I want to. I have to prioritise.

I've long been perplexed by the fact that other people seem to read 3, 4, 5 times as many books as I do, even though I really, truly, love reading. The thing is, I love creating stuff even more. I get fidgety when I'm not making something, or thinking up something new and exciting. Books and movies are great, but I don't just want to absorb stuff - I want to do something with it.

So... embedding video...

The very first thought that entered my head, unbidden, was, "Gosh, he sounds so American."

• College Roomies From Hell
• Diesel Sweeties
• Dragon Tails (exactly 2,001 strips)
• Goats
• Kevin and Kell
• Real Life
• Melonpool (although the archive is not available on the web)
• Narbonic
• PvP
• Schlock Mercenary
• Sinfest
• Sluggy Freelance
• Superosity
• User Friendly