Melbourne: What's Up With The Pots?

This, my second day in Melbourne on this trip, consisted largely of viewing moving images. I blindly stepped into the Australian Centre for Moving Image and found three free and very interesting exhibits, of course!

The first was on the history of video games. Glass containers had old computers, such as the Commodore 64, and other artifacts, such as the old cassette-loading game. A small room had about a dozen running computers, which you could play! It was a great reminder of how frustrating those old joysticks were. I had Way of the Exploding Fist when I was young, but I couldn't get my karate guy to face the opponent before getting knocked out.

There were also a bunch of mini-pod-rooms in which you could sit and select a short film from a screen and then take it in. I watched about ten of them, some very good and each of them interesting, before heading downstairs to the avant-garde video exhibit. There were pieces by younger artists as well as bits by Jean Luc Godard and Chris Marker, both still alive and kicking in France.

Don't judge me for this next part, please. My feet were tired and I wanted to watch this movie while it was still on the big screen. Plus Dana didn't want to see it and I was by myself. So I went to watch 300. My thoughts:

• The good guys throw less-than-perfect babies onto a pile of dead babies.
• Victor Hugo had something to do with the original script, and he reprised the principle character of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, which was played by Gollum of Lord of the Rings.
• The king's name sounds like a type of skin rash.
• Xenophobia is alive and well.
• I'm proud of Glenn's theatrical debut.
  

To mill over the great many theological, philosophical and phisosophical questions raised in 300, I popped into James Squire Brewhouse for a pot of Speculator Ale. One (of the many) thing(s) that cracks me up about Melburnians is their preference for "pots" of beer. A pot, called a "middy" in New South Wales, is a half pint. Victorians nearly always drink pots because they say that pints get warm too quickly. First of all, I've never met someone from Victoria, nay Australia, whose beer got warm before they finished it, no matter what the size. Secondly, Australians are always going on about how cold Melbourne is... but this is the one place where they insist that their beers get warm to quickly. Go figure.

Dana, Adelle and I went to Cookie on Swanston Street for drinks and dinner. Cookie has a fantastic beer selection, and I took in some Emerson's, New Zealand's finest, while I still could. Fellow BeerAdvocates Brendan and Stephan joined us. The food was equally as enjoyable, and we managed to get some shots of "Three Businessmen Who Brought Their Own Lunch" on the corner of Swanston & Hoddle. Melbourne has some interesting art scattered about the city.

All photos here.