Moby Q's David Bowie A's :
11. Any good/bad experiences with monkeys?
No, but I've got some extraordinarily funny footage of ig being savaged in Bali by a particularly nasty temple monkey. It started with some friendly shared eating experience and ended as all out war with ig giving a good as he got.
Man bites monkey indeed.
I never really got into the band, but that Aeroplane song was cool. erghergherghplanemodeeeelllergh
9pm tonite recorded at the recent Melbourne gig. Fan page here and here.
Final Fantasy looked great, and parts of the plot were interesting but it was dripping in nasty cheese. The sort of cheese that made Armagedon bad. I'm not saying it was anywhere near as bad as Armagedon, but it could have been better. On a purely technical note, it looks like they've got the look right, but face/head movements are still pretty bad.
Saturday saw me off to Go-Karts at Sidetracked in Oakleigh for some serious being-a-kid. I haven't been on a Go-Kart for a long number of years and had forgotten the thrill, especially when there are three or four people on the course with you who are slower. Passing someone dangerously at "high speed" rules beyond belief. And the challenge and patience involved in following someone who is of equal speed, waiting for their mistake so you can pass them on a corner. Zoom zoom zoom!
Straight after Go-Karts was Laser Force. For those who don't know, this involves chest packs and laser guns. Shoot the enemy, shoot their base. Or, as we had it, all-on-all shoot out carnage. The Laser Force at Sidetracked still has multiple platforms for getting above everyone else, and metal grates in the floor of the top platforms for shooting down, or up. Awesome fun.
Unfortunatly now my legs are killing me, and have been ever since. I know now my riding isn't doing jack. I should be Laser-Forcing every day.
Included on Saturday was mini-golf and dodgem cars, but they're hardly worth mentioning.
Watched "The Cell" again Saturday night (J-Lo, "enter the mind of a killer"), and was much less impressed. It's a very fantasy story, with some of the "real world" plot points making no sense at all, but these are mearly padding for the "real" story, the machine for entering people's minds.
It also doesn't look half as good on the small screen (as big as the TV I watched it on was) and as shocking as some of the torture/murder scenes are, they're far less effective when you know they're coming, and it isn't dark and 60 foot tall.
Sunday, the Melbourne Aquarium. We've been meaning to go for months and finally got of our collective arses and went and did it. It's a nice facility, with some funky looking fish but I was far less impressed than I was at Sydney, although last time I was at Sydney's I was very small so it would have looked a lot bigger. We caught the shark feeding, but were far more impressed by feeding the massive rays.
The "ride the experience" moving-floor-while-watching-CGI thingy was exciting and worth doing, even though it ends on a bit of a low. Definitely do not bother with the non-violent ride. Let's experience being a fish. Oh joy.
Around 5 o'clock Katie and I headed out for dinner and passed the Rialto Building with signs to the Observation Deck. It's the kind of thing you'd do if it was there, but wouldn't come all the way into the city just to do. We were in the right mood...
Looking over Melbourne in the early afternoon, watching the sun go down, then viewing Melbourne at night, while sipping a beer, is definitely worth $13, as expensive as it sounds at the bottom. And all the binoculars are free. The terrible "This is Melbourne" tourist video is a must see in Rialto Vision (um.. widescreen? yay) even just for the views.
The view is comparable to my view when working at Ericsson on the 43rd floor, but the extra 12 floors really make all the difference. Even the 55 floor BHP tower looked small. Check out some views here from the interesting Rocco's Melbourne Photo page.