Today, a friend of mine dissertated (!) and now has a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard. Pretty sweet.
I couldn't make it to the actual defense because I had to work, but of course there were festivities afterward. So after work, I headed over to Harvard's Campus to the Queen's Head, Harvard's answer to some combination of the Muddy Charlies and the Thirsty Ear (the "other" on-campus pub at MIT). It turns out my memory had just re-written itself, overwriting "Cambridge Common" with Queen's Head. For so many reasons, Queen's Head was the Wrong Campus Pub.
I figured my mistake out pretty quickly thanks to my helpful friends who were already at the right location, and much fete-ing was done for the dissertee. In fact, JR and I managed to persuade a big group of folks out for live-band karaoke later in the evening. But while I was still at the Wrong Campus Pub, so many Wrong things happened. It's located in the basement of Memorial Hall (pictured above), and as you can see even with my crap-camera-phone shot, it's a lovely old building (albeit a shortened version of a lovely old building, according to the story whereby the Cambridge fire station located across the street sees a part of Harvard burning and lets it burn, an answer to a many-years-old standing feud between Cambridge at-large and Harvard at-small). In the basement, there are some pretty narrow halls that contain several extra tables where one can drink beer purchased in the pub, but there is not much room between the walls of the pub and the exterior walls of the building. For some reason, some Harvard folks decided it would be a great idea not only to throw some sort of rather-obnoxious-and-flamboyant-Oscar-Wilde-style-dramatic-music-ky thing inside the pub, but also to have its cast members darting back and forth wildly amongst beer drinkers in the hall.
So thing number 24 that is right with Cambridge is how deliciously *wrong* Harvard can be. (But then again, it is, more often, right. :))
