Par-tay

On Saturday night I went to my housemate's work's Christmas party. It was "strictly fancy dress" with the theme "Dress as a web site", and against my better judgement I left it until yesterday to sort out a costume.

The idea that had first come to mind was to simply plaster myself with pictures from b3ta, but this would have required a fair amount of planning, effort, and printer ink to do it well.

If at all possible, I wanted to make use of the beige suit (that's me on the left, Rich on the right) I got for ussu fetIIsh night when we dressed as dodgy vicars. The obvious idea was to go as The Man from Del Monte (and hence representing the Del Monte website) but I had been a bit optimistic about getting hold of a Panama hat at ten to five on a Saturday in Guildford (although I did manage to get the other prop: a carton of Del Monte smooth pure orange juice, and very nice it was too).

Without the hat I felt the costume wouldn't work, and gave up on the idea. All was not lost however, as a fallback plan came to me whilst sat at a table on the top floor of Ottakar's. We'd already tried using Google to search for inspiration, but found nothing. So I decided I could go as that very site, emphasising the fact that although it hadn't initially been of any help this time, in the end it was exactly what I needed.

I headed over the high street into WHSmith to buy some T-shirt Inkjet Transfer Paper. I was bemused to discover the new till layout had acquired one of those voice-driven queue system that I usually only have to suffer at the Post Office ("till number eight please" in an annoyingly happy and ridicilously intonated voice). Due to the till transaction process being a bit sluggish the sales assistant and myself had time to discuss the unfortunate limitation of the new queue system, and how it could be vastly improved by the introduction of voices other than the drab male and female announcers. Surely a robotic voice, or even an animal noise would make for a more entertaining customer experience? Anyway, I digress. All that was then left to do in town was to race down to Topman to pick up a plain white t-shirt.

When I got back home, I performed the Google search again (at the time it did not match any documents, although that could obviously change at any time in the future), and did a screen capture along with a capture of the main Google screen with my search typed in. These were to be the back and front prints of the t-shirt respectively.

The images printed out well onto the transfer paper (with the exception of the first attempt for which I forgot to invert the image horizontally. Arse.) and after letting them dry for 30 mins I successfully managed to iron on both the front and back print, only scorching them a little with excessive heat in a bid to make sure they stuck first time.

Costume done, ready to go. Luck smiled on us: we managed to catch the last train for over an hour, and made our way to the par-tay. I happily got stuck into the bottles of Rolling Rock, gratis, the obligatory french-bread-based-nibbles, and spent the first while working out which web sites everyone else had gone as. There was a good selection of ideas, ranging from subtle (like mine I suppose) to brilliantly over the top. Paul had made use of his day-glo t-shirt, whilst another guy had covered himself with pictures of various scantily clad women and FHM selotaped to his forehead. Good effort!

So, the drink was good, the food was good, the atmosphere was good, and the music was great. I claim credit for demanding Camisra's Let me show you, and thereby causing a mini-recreation of the clubbing scene in the Spaced episode Epiphanies.

A series of highly random songs, such as Beavis and Butthead's rendition of Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy (duhduhduhduhdurrrrrrrr), and Wierd Al's What if God Smoked Cannabis? (which I don't think the slow dancers realised was a parody) signified the "go home" message. We helped to tidy things up a bit and got a taxi some time after 5am. I finally managed to get to bed for 6, which I think justifies getting up after 3pm the following day...