I'm disapPOINted!
Aaaand... no Noam Chomsky for me.
Because I was foolish enough to assume that when the university homepage explicitly states that admittance to the lectures starts at 7 pm., they will actually start admitting people no earlier than 7 pm.
What they actually meant, apparently, was "Oops, if so many people are waiting by 6 pm that the hallways are blocked, why don't we just let them all in right then? And then notice that oops, by 6:30 the auditorium is full, so anyone arriving at the actual time of admittance is fucked?"
To be fair, they did organise another auditorium where people could watch the video stream of the lecture together, but that was likewise all full by 7 pm. Besides, if I'd just wanted to see the video stream, I could've stayed at my computer at home... where, of course, I didn't arrive before the lecture was almost over. Meh.