Rock the Party

Friday night. Jel and I are having dinner at Ito Noodle Cafe. We're on our way to a farewell party for Jason Badower, comics artist extraordinaire and  friend since uni.

Jel: We should have brought Munchkin with us.

Me: No one wants to play card games at a party.

Jel: Yes they do. Jason's always playing PlayStation at his parties.

Me: That was years ago. His last few weren't like that.

We go to the party. Everyone is crowded around an enormous plasma TV playing Rock Band.

Me: Okay. Point conceded.

Rock Band works quite nicely as a party game. You have to get the song mix right, though. You have to have your cool songs ("Wave of Mutilation", "In Bloom"). But you also have to have your cheesy pop and appalling 80s hair-metal. Bon Jovi's "Dead or Alive" only really makes sense in a room full of drunken people singing the chorus so loud the other "musicians" can't hear the track.

Although Rock Band has now ruined Smashing Pumpkins' "Cherub Rock" for me, simply by printing the lyrics on screen. Dear god. There's a reason rock stars slur and mumble their words.

The Magic of Melbourne

Jel and I went to the Hocus Pocus exhibition at the City Museum this afternoon.



It traces the history of stage magic in Melbourne, from the first performances in the gold fields onwards. There are lots of advertising posters, potted biographies of the magicians, and various props.

The posters were wonderful, but it's quite a small exhibition - just two little rooms. Not a patch on ACMI's Eyes, Lies and Illusions exhibition from a few years ago.

Still, it was only $5. And that included entry to the rest of the ground floor of the museum.

Where we saw a great documentary about Melbourne's old cable tram system.

It ran from 1885 to 1940. The trams were powered by clamping on to a moving cable that ran beneath the streets. The cable was powered by giant steam engines in the various powerhouses around the city, like the one on the corner of Nicholson and Gertrude street (photos at http://www.cable-car-guy.com/html/ccoznz.html).

The documentary had lots of 1930's footage of the trams and the powerhouses in action. It took some wonderfully and absurdly elaborate engineering to make it all work. Very, very steampunk. Not to mention dangerous to maintain, as the documentary narrator explained in a jolly voice. 

From the 1920s, the cable tram system was slowly replaced with electric trams. The last cable tram ran on October 26, 1940.

The weird thing?

No one told the public. Patrons caught the tram in to the theatre that evening. But when they came out, the trams had been replaced with double-decker buses.