OOkay. This autumn's Department Party at the Chem. Eng. department is over (for me) and I'm sort of in damage limitation mode now.
I realize I am an old and grumpy man by the standards set by younger students. Once dinner was finished and everyone moved to the place where the party was to go on, I found myself frequently bitching about the crappy music. But then I have to say the music was really horrible at times. When I tried to introduce some variation (well, that means putting on a hard rock song instead of the loop of techno songs/dance songs/ABBAsongs/Walk OF Life) someone else woukldcome and put on another crappy song. I mean, imagine queuing up
The Final Countdown (which I thought was an acceptable compromise between hard rock and party music) someone put on this shit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6_Nas9eoAY&feature=fvst
When I put on Van Halen's
Jump it was allowed to play for half a minute before some wanker put on this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d6_5n6u2e4
Other goodies like Run To The Hills and Turbonegro's
I Got Erection (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHcFWcnS94E) had a few guys headbanging to it - only to have them replaced with some dance shit half a minute into the songs.
Yeah, and the professor held a pre-party offering caipirinha to those who wanted it. One of the m.sc. students had brought an accordion
and a guitar. Of course I ended up with the guitar. Played
the most cliché song one can imagine -
Tears In Heaven - only to find that a German exchange student (she was extremely cute, by the way) had an awesome singing voice. During the party dinner she was persuaded to play the piano and sing a couple of songs. Wow. Only afterwards did I hear that she had finished 17 in the German verison of "Idol" last year ...
Yeah, and that very same piano saw myself sitting down to play Metallica's
The Call Of Ktulu at 2 AM on my way home, after I'd had enough of the horrible music and the sabotaging of my attempts to spread the heavy metal gospel.
I don't think many people heard me play.
And by the way, the steak we got for dinner was really great. Best food I've had in such a large-scale event in years.