Háskólaböll

The University of Iceland, as it so turns out, has balls. Hoo boy, does it ever..

The posters started popping up maybe a month ago on bulletin boards across campus advertising this year's "Háskólaball". Event of the year, be there or be square bla bla bla. These posters would not have been so noteworthy really, if it hadn't been for the fact that L #1 was in fact not an L at all, rather a Playbunny in some very festive-looking underwear sitting in the shape of an L. Not even remotely resembling a single member of the female student body as seen to date. Then there was the feature band picture underneath. Sálin hans Jóns míns: the usual 5 or so feature-band-looking guys. The Duck assumes that they too were wearing underwear, given social convention and such, but it was rather difficult to say whether or not they were really festive given that the band members were all cut off at about the waist. Neðanmálsgreinin kom aldrei til greina.

Current poster statistics:
Man:woman ratio = 5:1
Man-foot:woman-foot ratio = 0:1

It was several days later that the Duck was witness to the first public poster-defacing. It was in Árnagarður, and the Duck was going for reasons forgotten down a set of stairs. The female university student in front of Blue Duck, on a cellphone no less, casually reached out with a pen and scribbled a large HA? on the poster in front of her (Icelandic for whaaaa? and many other things for that matter), connected it with a line from the bunny to the bottom of the poster, then walked casually off again. On closer curious investigation, it turned out that the sponser of this hallowed event was none other than an erotic shop. Who seemed to have provided the costume, at least.

Some time passed. The posters did not fare well. It was as if a floodgate had opened. In Árnagarður, someone had pinned a paper over L #1. Travelling on to Oddi, the white spaces on the offending posters had been filled in with various observations and the glaring grammar mistake in the text was pointedly pointed out. Manneskja, ekki markaðsvara: Human, not market meat. Or the Duck's personal favourite: I am a person, not an L! Ég er manneskja, ekki L.

2005 marked the 30th anniversary of Women's Day in Iceland. Things were supposed to be different today. But universities are perhaps staunch traditionalists, slow-moving and resistant to the face of change. That's why universities also have students to correct the balance.

The next morning, the posters had vanished.