Still bitter after all these years

Eight years ago, my graduation ceremony's keynote speaker was the head of British Petroleum, whose name was something totally innocuous like John Brown. I'm pretty sure that the only reason why he was chosen was that our dumbass dean, Paul Wolfowitz (yes, THAT Wolfowitz), thought that he would donate money to the school. Oh, so wrong.

Instead, we got a speaker who started out his talk by saying, "I'm going to discuss the Caspian oil reserves for the next twenty minutes," and by god that's what he did. It was bad enough for us graduates, who in theory had been exposed to sufficient international relations in our studies that we would be interested in his talk, but the families were the real victims. To this day, my family speaks of that ceremony with a shudder.

The year before I graduated, Kofi Annan was the keynote speaker. The year after? Hilary Clinton. And this year? Mohamed ElBaradei. GODDAMMIT.