JTS held a screening and panel discussion of “Inglourious Basterds” yesterday. Sample quote: “Wow, that was fun…I’m not supposed to feel that way, I know — I’m Jewish.” (Times)

Three family members were killed by a career criminal in an Upper West Side apartment; the attacker then fell to his death while trying to escape. (Post)

Citing lack of funds, the New York City Housing Authority is revoking more than 3,000 housing vouchers worth $800 each, in a move that could put thousands of people on the street just before Christmas. (NY1)

And you thought one John Jay radiator was bad: one Bronx apartment had to evacuate after a pipe to its 25,000 gallon water tank cracked. (Gothamist)

Break out the snow shoes: just in time for exam weekend, New York City is currently forecast to receive five to eight inches of snow over Saturday night. (Weather.com)

Multiple reports from the 209 front tell Bwog that about 10-30 people just entered 209 and played “YMCA.” A spate of vicious dancing ensued.

Points to the merry pranksters for getting people to play along, with only a few points subtracted for being decked out in what several tipsters called “80s gear” and spandex. Unfortunately, as the original video shows, the Village People weren’t wild for the spandex.

- Photo by DH

A proposed secret international treaty would greatly heighten penalties for copyright infringement, some threatening civil liberties. SocketHop, the technology decoder for the literature-minded, takes a look.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when it was announced one year ago that the music industry would stop its broad lawsuits against alleged file sharers. Since about 2003, the movie and music industry associations (the MPAA and the RIAA, respectively) have been suing consumers accused of sharing copyrighted files over the Internet. At one point, the RIAA was even targeting students like us directly with threatening letters with the help of (unwilling) universities. The music industry finally learned how to adapt its business model to changing times and consumers hailed the arrival of DRM-free online music stores and new RIAA lawsuits have ended for now.

None of this means that content producers are giving up the fight against copyright infringement. A new treaty, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), is currently being negotiated in various countries around the world. The cause for alarm is that everything is happening entirely in secret, with many of the key players denying involvement and others claiming that it is a purely “economic” treaty. Very few drafts have surfaced but many industry “advisory committees” have access to confidential documents. No one knows all of the details of the negotiations, but enough has leaked that many consumer advocate groups are concerned. The reason for all this secrecy? You could probably guess: “national security.”

Read more…

You’ve been camping in Butler and watching YouTube videos for three days studying hard! You deserve a break!

Friday

Gerhard Richter – considered one of the saviors of contemporary painting, this German artist’s paintings are on show until January 8th.

10am – 6pm, Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 W57th St

FREE

Blip Festival – celebrating chip music and its related disciplines, events include live performances, documentary screenings and workshops

The Bell House, 149 7th St

$15 for single night pass Read more…

At least for this student:

The American Institute of Psychical Research denied any involvement.

Bwog Sousaphone bureau chief Peter Krawzcyk stood on some poor first-year’s desk in 209 to attend this fall’s Orgo Night extravaganza.

This may come as a surprise to anyone of the several hundred that packed into a sweaty Butler 209 at midnight last night, but not everyone attended the fall iteration of the Marching Band’s semiannual Orgo Night performance on Wednesday. If you were too dedicated to studying, writing papers, your grades, your career, your sanity, and/or yourself to take an hour-long break in the name of Columbia spirit and comedy, you probably made the utility-maximizing decision (you econ major you) but you still missed a sometimes funny, if perhaps overly long show.

The show officially began just after 12:00 with the band marching into to the obligatory “Roar, Lion, Roar,” but the comedy started about half an hour earlier, when the Butler 209 began filling with boisterous expectant revelers, bewildering would-be diligent Literature Humanities studiers uninformed of the Orgo Night tradition, who desperately turned up their headphones as loud as they could before leaving to find shelter from the crowd. Post-fight song, the band kicked off the jokes by targeting PrezBo’s salary (“Do you know how hard it is to wake up in the morning knowing the President of the University of Tulsa makes more money than you?”) and recent 125^th st.-Toast bar brawler Lionel McIntyre (His favorite building is Harmony, because “he likes having a building named after his baby mama.”). Read more…

Mama Mexico appears to have had some trouble with the authorities, as Lecture Hop Editor Emeritus Sara Jane Panfil notes that its 102nd Street location has been seized by “The Man” for non-payment of taxes.

The website does seem to indicate the other two locations are still going strong.

The MTA has passed a wide range of service cuts, including ending free fares for the more than half a million students who currently receive them. (Times)

The laws regulating tap water are so old that many Americans are drinking legal yet unhealthy tap water. Water filter makers everywhere put their fingers together and hissed “excellent.” (Times)

Robert Morgenthau’s feud with Mike Bloomberg cost the city $20 million. No word yet on whether Adam Schiff would’ve approved. (Post)

The state teachers’ union and school administrators have filed suit to prevent Governor Paterson from withholding ten percent of upcoming payments. No doubt this’ll be resolved just as quickly as your typical education dispute. (NY1)

The man who fatally stabbed a guy cutting in line at a midtown food cart has been acquitted. In other words, stick to buying tickets for Avatar online. (Gothamist)

Photo: Malla_mi/Flickr

Finals got you down? Midnight Breakfast is here “to help you get your groove back” according to the event page. Breakfast food will be in LeFrak Gymnasium for Barnard first years at 11pm, the rest of Barnard at 11:30, and open to the rest of the CU community at midnight. Nothing like the smell of pancakes in the… total darkness.

The abandoned stone structure on 119th and Amsterdam sort of looks like a medieval castle – a very, very small one. It isn’t quite the stuff of architecture classes, but the little building stands out – you’ve probably wondered what it is or was as you passed the forgotten, weedy lot. It’s not like there’s a dearth of old buildings around here, but everyone knows the deal on St. John the Divine, the old St.Luke’s hospital buildings, and you know, Columbia. Bwog unveils this final mystery – a riveting tale of the forgotten, the clandestine, the underground… literally.

The trail of the underground aqueduct in Manhattan

It turns out that the 119th street gatehouse, as it is called, is part of a now defunct and closed off aqueduct system that runs from the Croton River upstate, through the Bronx and under Amsterdam. The gatehouses give access to the New Croton Aqueduct and pumping mechanisms underground. The original Croton Aqueduct began construction in 1837 after a really big fire made it clear that a growing city needed a real water source and a real distribution system. Two reservoirs were constructed to hold water for the city brought in from Croton – one where the New York Public Library now stands and one on what would become the site of the Great Lawn in Central Park.

Read more…

In an alert titled “Security Alert – Sexual Abuse – Forcible Touching,” Public Safety reports that several females were accosted in the late afternoon on December 13th in separate incidents near campus. The victims were “grabbed” by male assailants, who then fled on foot. Full Public Safety alert after the jump, including fuzzy photos of the assailants.

Read more…

Students from a Radical Democracy course are ending the semester with a bang: a truelife protest on Low Steps. This is not, as hypothesized by some, a final project, but rather an independent project dreamed up by a group of “classmates and friends,” as one mini-Mark Rudd put it.

One young radical was seeing waving a Soviet flag, and others passed out a poem called “Wake Up Columbia”, others held a sign with the same slogan. Things got real when the hooligans were kicked off the Steps by Public Safety. Public Safety threatened to send the group to a dean who would, the cops claimed, identify the students and hold a hearing to assess consequences for the students’ protest.

The confusing revolution is continuing at the 116th Gates. One vigilante sent us this photo from the frontlines. Read the poem that was being passed out after the jump.

Read more…

You probably haven’t been as excited to evaluate your courses as that automated Courseworks student-pestering system thinks you are. Yes, robot, I must have just forgotten to do my evaluations, thanks for the reminder! But at this point you’ve got to start thinking about it, since the deadline for most class evaluations is tonight (presumably) at midnight. It will satisfy the narcissism of your professors and more importantly you won’t be held responsible for holding up the reporting of grades for your entire class.

Also remember to fill out CULPA reviews! Not like Columbians are obsessed with cults of personality or anything, but reading about professors on CULPA really does affect your fellow students and it is guaranteed to someday affect you (if it hasn’t already). Remember that class you suffered through freshman year because there was no CULPA review? Think of the children.

The Grant Houses Community Garden Project is exactly what it sounds like. Columbia students want to help public housing residents just north of us build a garden for communal use that could become a sustainable and nutritious food source as well as a source of community pride. Liz Naiden reports on the saga of this unusual attempt to go green off-campus.

Twice a week, Rebecca Davies leads a handful of Columbia students up Broadway to the Grant Houses, a public housing development just 7 blocks from College Walk. The students currently lead regular workshops there for an after school program on all things green, sustainable, and nutritious. Well, all things green that kids could ever care about – in recent workshops they have explored worm composting (below), the water cycle, how to roast pumpkin seeds, and the journey that every element of a hamburger takes to get to your plate. The kids learn that everything they eat comes from the soil, and as a bonus “they love anything slimy they can play with, or anything they can taste,” says Davies. But that isn’t all the Grant Houses Community Garden project has always hoped to be.

Over two years ago, Davies got involved in the development of the Food Sustainability Project’s on-campus Community Garden project. In the process of getting recognized as a university group, Davies helped gather professor endorsements for the project, including the endorsement of Professor Sudhir Venkatesh. It was he who first asked Davies what more she would do with the community garden idea if she had the support. She wanted to bring a community garden to “the community outside of Columbia,” she said.

Read more…

Is on college walk! Get your most personal papers destroyed for eternity today until 4pm or tomorrow between 8am and 4pm. It’s free!