Just a few days after the start of the beloved ESC festival of waterguns, over one third of the agents have been officially as dead as Empanada Joe’s, and CUAssassins is starting to get nasty. 

Less violent but just as serious as the war in the street is the competition between killers for the best kill report. Since our first look at them, the reports have only gotten more and more entertaining, sophisticated, and zing-y. One of Bwog’s favorites is even quite lyrical:

Deceased: rosestitos

Time of Death: Tuesday, February 24 at 05:12 PM

Location of Death: 114th between Broadway and Amsterdam

Summary of Death: I saw da Raj I killed da Raj I put his dead body in ma garage

Though few others attempted rhyme, also vying for the position of most poetic report is a more sophisticated stripe of snark

Deceased: Eleanor

Time of Death: Monday, February 23 at 09:34 PM

Location of Death: Outside of Havemeyer Hall

Summary of Death: We lay in wait for this great dame. We sent him to the Whitehouse in the sky.

Close to half of the killers chose to make their report original and quirky by poking fun at their victim’s agent name – some more colorfully than others

Deceased: BAMF

Time of Death: Monday, February 23 at 09:37 PM

Location of Death: Broadway

Summary of Death: When a BAMF gets PW3ND, does it make a sound?

Read more…

- Photo by LDP

It seems that Nussbaum will not be accepting your CUID as payment for breakfast this morning, so best go start looking for that 5-spot in your other jeans. 

According to the nice people behind the counter, this was not an act of Flex-deserting a la everywhere else, but a simple case of a broken machine.

Unfortunately, no information is available on when (or *gasp* whether) the machine will be fixed. 

Here’s to a quick recovery, Nussbaum Flex, and to daddy paying for that bagel.

Wow, this theatre is beautiful. It kind of reminds me of the Great Depression.

Wow, you mean there are actually “recession specials” being offered at local stores and restaurants? In my day we had to hike 15 miles in the snow to the nearest Walmart for those special prices.

Remember what your life was like before that incredibly flawed, uselessly HTML-ridden thing called Courseworks? Us neither.

No, really – when I was your age, Shrek was a movie!

Ah, memories of when money grew on trees: a study by the Council for Aid to Education determined that Columbia raised $495.11 million in Fiscal Year 2008, an increase of 17% over FY 2007, good for third in the country. The only two schools to raise more money than Columbia? Stanford ($785.04 million) and Harvard ($650.63 million). 

Overall, the 1,052 institutions in the report raised $31.6 billion, an increase of 6.2%. However, that number may be the last increase for several years, as Ann Kaplan, the director of the study, told the Wall Street Journal that many institutions “hit a wall” at the start of the year. Kaplan also predicts that the new year could see the steepest year-to-year decline in decades. So if you see one of these people, consider giving them a hug. Seeing Manhattanville in your lifetime could depend on it.

- JCD

- Photo via The Harlem Eye

Ten days ago, student activists and the Columbia administration clashed over the 125th Street establishment Floridita, as the university intervened to kill a NY1 story about the restaurant’s fight with Floridita owner Ramon Diaz. The university claimed to still be in negotiations with Diaz over the termination of his lease (thanks to eminent domain), while Diaz claimed that the university had not negotiated with him since the fall.

After reviewing the evidence, it looks like NY1 isn’t buying what Columbia’s selling: according to SCEG organizer Andrew Lyubarsky, NY1 has decided to run a story after all, “tenatively scheduled for Thursday morning” about both the restaurant and the students defending it, including an interview with Diaz.

SCEG activists, not to be outdone, presented a petition to the administration earlier this evening, asking “that Mr. Diaz’s current lease be honored until its legal expiration in 2015, regardless of whether or not the ESDC has the right to utilize eminent domain to terminate it prematurely, unless the termination is by mutual agreement with Mr. Diaz” and that you accommodate the Floridita restaurant either within the expansion footprint or in a neighborhood site agreeable to him under reasonably and mutually-agreed upon terms.” Activism – it never ceases! Full petition (and the letter presenting it) after the jump. Read more…

As reported last night, the major story out of Monday night’s ESC meeting was the potential replacement of 40s on 40 with a BBQ (albiet one with alcohol). But alcohol was not the only topic of the meeting, the last before ESC begins its annual constitutional review.

The 2009 class council announced that the last SEAS fireside chat was canceled because not enough people registered for the lottery. The dean’s office is working with the council to make the chats more appealing: one suggestion (no doubt taken from months of reading Bwog) is to add free food to the equation by holding the events at local restaurants, and lowering the number of attendees to make the event more intimate.  

Happy news for 3-2 students, however: the council is investigating adding printing in Carlton Arms (the dorm for 4th year 3-2 students), or giving students access to nearby dorms to print there. As of now, students residing in Carlton Arms, located at 108th and Riverside, are required to come onto campus to print. Read more…

Housing Lottery registration is only two days away, and yet, as several commenters and tipsters have noted, 2008-09 cutoff histories still have not been uploaded to Housing’s website. What gives?

Bwog phoned Housing and Dining, and was told to check the website “in the next few days.” Then again, the lottery bulletin board has had a post marked “informative” since the 13th saying “Cutoff History for 2008-09 will be posted on the housing website soon.” Furthermore, one Bwogger has been emailing Housing for a month, and “they kept emailing me back saying “check later this week.”  As of late they’ve just been ignoring my emails.”

So forgive us if we’re skeptical of “the next few days,” but we’ll post as soon as your guide for your new housing groups becomes available.

Jeffrey Sachs is everywhere lately, including in his own dreams. An anonymous Facebook-loving tipster has sent in this screenshot, in which Sachs says publicly what we’ve all been thinking:

He’s a fan! Good for him for being honest! It’s nice to see that not all professors have been scared away from the internet.

James Hansen spoke out against global warming twenty years ago. Now he’s raising a (peaceful) army. Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an adjunct professor at Columbia’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Department, has issued an invitation to “the largest mass civil disobedience for the climate in U.S. history.” On Monday, March 2, Capitol Climate Action will stage a non-violent demonstration at “Washington D.C.’s Capitol Power Plant.” The demand: stronger action on the climate crisis from the new president. 

The CCA’s website doesn’t give specifics, but it suggests participants carry at least $50 at all times. That’s the minimum cost to bail yourself out of jail for activist-related civil disobedience in our capital city.

Those who’d prefer not to demonstrate can attend the rally beforehand, or any one of the many events of Power Shift 09, the weekend-long youth climate conference preceding the march. Consider it the most civic-minded midterm-week study break you’ll ever see.

The Interdisciplinary Science Building: One big interdisciplinary lovefest.

PrezBo cops to long-simmering desire to merge with Harlem.

We chose Columbia for its passion. Then we read Herodotus.

College Democrats and College Republicans debate affirmative action and get everybody all riled up.

Does the ability to make babies preclude the ability to make a spaceship? (Spoiler: No.)

Late-breaking news out of Satow tonight, as SEAS ’09 president Kim Manis announced at the ESC weekly meeting that 40s on 40 could be replaced with a senior barbeque.

Details will not be finalized until another meeting between adminstrators and students tomorrow night, but Manis reported that “although details are still being worked out, alcohol would still be provided.”

CC ’09 President Mark Johnson, who declined to go into specifics at last night’s CCSC meeting, told Bwog that “after our final meeting tomorrow evening we should be able to provide reliable and confirmed information on any replacement event.” If things hold, maybe seniors can still shout “hooray, beer!”

- JCD, with reporting by SVZ

Intrepid Lecture Hopper Anna Kelner headed to Philosophy this blustery February evening to hear Joyce Carol Oates speak about the process of revision, a part of The Creative Writing Lecture Series at the School of the Arts. 

The cups of wine, the plaid, the audience taking notes on Moleskine journals: the School of Arts clearly hosted the Joyce Carol Oates: Revision lecture, a talk geared towards graduate students laboring over their Ulysses. As a second-year fiction student introduced Oates rattled off the author’s many accomplishments–she has published over fifty novels, plays, and collections of poetry and essays, is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes multiple times–a clear affinity between Oates and her literary listeners emerged. Read more…

- Image via Gothamist

Last September, we reported that PrezBo made a cool $1.4 million in Fiscal Year 2007, and in November we learned that that number ranked him third among all university presidents in the country. Sounds respectable, right?

Well, maybe not: it turns out that Fearless Leader still is not the highest paid university employee. No, that honor once again goes to dermatology professor Dr. David Silvers, who received $4.3 million in compensation in FY 2007, second in the country only to some dude who draws arrows on blackboard for a living (USC head football coach Pete Carroll, who received $4.4 million for winning two national championships and being on national TV way pretty much every Saturday in the fall).

This is at least the fourth year in a row that Silvers has been Columbia’s highest paid employee, and he’s making it count: according to the Daily News, as of last year “he owns a $1.3 million Tribeca apartment, a Park Ave. home and a $1 million pad in Southampton.” Three houses – why, that’s more than Dr. Zizmor! Maybe he can spare a dime.

- JCD

Why didn’t you think of this first? 

Six CC ’09 gentlemen who met on their pre-Orientation COOP trip have started a blog from their EC townhouse. Designed with a bright red hue to echo their townhouse’s decoration (“as if McDonald’s built a ski chalet”). Casting reformed gender norms to the wind, the group has chosen the title of “The Mansuite,” an epithet for the group that existed long before the blog.

Updated often (for now, at least), the Mansuite blog boasts a photo album with rotating shots of recent parties the bro-consortium has hosted. One such photo, which depicts the archetypal scene of a frenzied and cramped college party, is the permanent bottom banner of the site. Previous posts have included documentation of the Mansuiters’ $450 spending sprees treks at the 125th Street Fairway and of scooter rides down the Lerner ramps.

It is unclear where the idea to start the blog came from, but in a short play one member (who would only go by the alias of “Colin Drummond”) wrote for Bwog in an attempt to link Mansuite back to its roots, the member wrote of a fallen scooter, upturned risotto bowl, puddle of spilled wine and a freeze frame of Gossip Girl forming the letters B-L-O-G. If this description is any indication, the Mansuite is certainly worth a read.

- ECS

Housing buzz began this afternoon in earnest when prospective Living-Learning Center residents were emailed acceptance and rejection letters from Scott Helfrich, the Associate Director of Residential Programs.

Helfrich, the man who determines the fates of rising sophomores determined not to end up in the McBain shaft and a few juniors and seniors who presumably just like being close to Hamilton, sent out emails at 4 PM today.

Congratulations to all those who have gained entrance to Hartley or Wallach a few days before everyone else has to apply for a lottery number. Online room selection begins on Thursday and lottery numbers are posted online on March 24. The full nerve-wracking housing calendar can be found here. The 2009 housing lottery: get ready to go back on all your promises!