There’s a video flying around the interwideweb you might enjoy. It’s of a University of Wisconsin a capella group singing Nintendo themes. For me, it brought back fond memories of those many, many, many, many hours spent with Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, and the Legend of Zelda.
I hope you’ll pardon another MIT-based reverie, but it also reminded me of MIT’s co-ed a capella group, the Chorallaries. Their most famous song is “The Engineer’s Drinking Song,” which has many verses and grows yearly.
The Chorus goes like this:
We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers
We can, we can, we can, we can, demolish forty beers
Drink rum, drink rum, drink rum all day, and come along with us
‘Cause we don’t give a damn
For any old man
Who don’t give a damn for us!
The first few verses have to do with Lady Godiva and one or more engineers:
Godiva was a lady who through Coventry did ride
To show the royal villagers her fine and pure white hide
The most observant man of all, an engineer of course,
Was the only one who noticed that
Godiva rode a horse
It’s not exactly staid. Much of it is beyond crude. But then, it is a drinking song. The rest of the song deals with drinking, studying, the heaven and hell of MIT, and the joys of engineering.
A maiden and an Engineer were sitting in the park
The Engineer was working on some research after dark
His scientific method was a marvel to observe
While his right hand held the figures,
His left hand traced the curves
And then there are a number of verses dedicated to Harvard and other schools:
A friend in ol’ New Haven called me up the other day.
He said he was depressed because he hadn’t got an A.
I said to him,