IT IS COLUMBIA. Roar, Lion, roar!

Today on Daily Intel, we learned that there is a new website that makes the last 3,981 wedding announcements in the Times and made them into a database. Columbia has been mentioned 615 times. Browse and see if your TA married your other TA! Harvard had only 466 and Yale- Yale!- only 278! MIT is mentioned 663 times (shhh).

That means that a huge chunk of the important/rich/highly-aggressive people who get their wedding announcements in the Sunday Times are your fellow Columbians. Perhaps we spoke too soon against Floorcest.

Update: A commenter points out that “Columbia” also overlaps with British Columbia, and probably some other things mentioned in wedding announcements that aren’t actually about Columbia the school. Bwog remains certain that we beat Harvard, however.

A tipster just wrote that he saw 10 cops handcuff a man outside Lerner and take him away. Apparently there were a lot of cops and Public Safety folk around. Bwog was outside Lerner a few minutes later, but found nothing- no cop cars, no Lerner personnel. We’ll update you as soon as we get more information, but if you saw or heard anything, please email tips@bwog.net or leave a comment.

Update: Public Safety confirms the arrest, and we’re waiting on details.

Update, 3 PM: Alright, here’s the lowdown from James McShane, VP for Public Safety. A man named Daisuke Mizouchi was arrested last night outside Lerner Hall. He was “engaged in a bogus theater ticket scam.” Basically, he would offer Broadway tickets for sale, take the money, and not deliever any tickets. “In at least five cases,” McShane wrote Bwog in an email, “he used Craigslist to promote his sales.” Last night the 26th Precinct of the NYPD (Columbia’s precinct) and CU Public Safety caught Mizouchi outside Lerner and arrested him “after a brief chase.” Bizarro!

In other news, Rangel will officially stand trial on ethics violations after a possible settlement fell through. He is accused of violating 13 counts of House rules. Not good news for your adopted Congressional District, good old reliable #1-5.

Update, 4 PM: Another tipster, Aryeh Hillman, CC’11, sends along this photo of the suspect being arrested, and recounts what he saw of the incident: on College Walk at about 9:15 an undercover police car started flashing its lights for students to get out of the way. The car then did a U-turn and parked on Broadway and 115th, outside Lerner. When Aryeh walked by the 115th gates, Mizouchi was pinned down by a plainclothes cop with his knee on the suspect. The suspect was then handcuffed. Another witness watched the chase and said Mizouchi looked like he was “flying” he was running so fast. As Mizouchi ran past Lerner, plainclothes cops ran out from multiple locations on campus. Mizouchi tripped and fell outside Lerner, where he was handcuffed. According to Aryeh it was all over very fast (which makes sense, as Bwog was on the scene just a few minutes after the arrest), the suspect was whisked away in an undercover police car, and the scence was clear. Also mysterious: the suspect has a Japanese name, but he didn’t look Asian, according to Aryeh and the photograph below. Curiouser and curiouser!

Photo by AH

Bagels are eight cents more expensive at Nussbaum as of this past weekend. That’s 98 cents a bagel instead of 90 cents.

In other news, Marla Maples (who is apparently a real person that used to be married to Donald Trump) was seen at a CC info session on Friday with her teenage daughter, Tiffany Trump. The tension in this scene: Donald Trump hates PrezBo.

Learn things about our new basketball coach, Kyle Smith.

OK, back to bagel time.

Thanks, guy!

Kenneth Cole, a fashion designer who has weird, earnest, sometimes squirmy billboards on the West Side Highway, is teaming up with CC and SEAS to launch the Kenneth Cole Community Engagement Program in the fall.

Want to know what that is? Kay.

Kenneth Cole Productions, Inc., CC, SEAS, Center for Career Education and Student Affairs will develop a year-long curriculum that will combine “community-based initiatives,” according to the press release, with classroom work. Kenneth Cole Fellows, as the project’s participants will be dubbed, will take two required courses, have community-based internships over the summer, and get to live in a “unique living-learning arrangement” in dorms. Here’s hoping that doesnt mean the Living Learning Center!

We don’t totally get it, but sounds like you’ll do some good stuff for the community and not have to worry about an internship next summer. Cole is the chairman of amfAR, the largest not-for-profit AIDS foundation, and a founding member of HELP USA, which provides jobs for the homeless. If you’re interested, contact Todd Smith, Associate Dean of Student Affairs, at ts2488@columbia.edu.

Update: Unlikely friendship made somewhat more likely by the fact that Cole’s daughter just graduated from CU.

A profile of GS student John McClelland II, who was an Army medic in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Warrior Forge. He says that he’s working on his first novel, The War in Glorious Technicolor.

Reason 10,343 to be happy you don’t go to NYU: the Times takes a look at college life in the city, you know, the downtown-city, where you never (!) run into anyone.

A hecka long profile of James Franco in NYMag this week. Prepare to vom all over your keyboard!

Victor Suarez, CC’11 and Laura LaPerche, CC’10, shot a feature film in New York, Chicago and Las Vegas called “As Luck.” It will be released in Bangladesh next year. Congratulations, dudes! Watch scenes from the movie:

“As Luck” (t2i & 5D) from Victor Suarez on Vimeo.

O hai Charlie

Breaking news if you’re into this kind of thing:

New York’s 27th congressional district will likely find earmarks a lot harder to come by soon, as a House investigative committee has found that longtime congressman and lord of Harlem Charles Rangel “violated a range of ethics rules.”

The eighteen-month-long investigation was investigating whether the former Ways and Means chairman “improperly rented four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem at a price well below market value” and “improperly used his office to provide legislative favors for an oil-drilling company that pledged a $1 million donation for an academic center named for Mr. Rangel and improperly failed to report taxable income received from a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic.”

And if precedent’s any guide, Rangel won’t have a happy ending: the last congressman to face equivalent violations was expelled from the House. On the sort-of-bright-side, Rangel still looks better than his predecessor, Adam Clayton Powell, who not only had his own corruption scandal, but was also a homophobe. A step up!

Date: Thursday July 22nd 7-10pm

Location: Russell Courtyard Teachers College, 525 West 120th St.

Come join us for a barbecue in Russell Courtyard.

What better way to enjoy a nice July evening than to hang out with your friends and eat free BBQ and free drinks?!

Columbia and Gossip Girl have been pals for a while.

Hangin' in Sulz, after a fro-yo binge at Hewitt

There was the time that real-life Blake Lively was going to take classes here. There was that great episode “New Haven Can Wait” (relentless, GG, relentless!) filmed on campus that the CW pretended was Yale. Then they filmed all around campus all the time, and it was exciting.

There are rumors that a new, strong, beautiful chapter of the CU-GG alliance is about to begin. Before we say more, let’s get one thing straight, compadres: these are rumors. This is an idea. It’s a big, big maybe.

And here it is: the CW and the Barnard administration are in talks about including Barnard into the plotline. One of the main characters on the show would be a first-year at BC. That means that Barnard will be featured pretty prominently and regularly, and that the GG crew will be up on campus fairly often, filming and looking for extras (hey you, in the leggings, that’s you!)

Barnard confirms that CW/BC are in talks about this, but warns that it may well not happen.

And…exhale! We’ll keep you posted.

Completely unrelated: help Esosa Oviasu, CC’12, win a guest appearance on 106th & Park by following this link. Go to BFABB Contest (Esosa) and vote!

Pretty soon (August 30th doth approach!) dozens upon hundreds of fresh-things will run around campus screaming and sitting outside Carman just waiting for something, anything to happen.

We want to help them out. We’re reviving an old Bwog tradition and sharing stories of our first nights at college (if you did something funny or sad or interesting, tell us!) and our first fake ID’s (the more McLovin’-esque, the better). We’d also like to know what you wish you knew your first day at Columbia. If you have a good story or some inspired advice, send us line or two at tips@bwog.net. Don’t write angry comments if your “first” doesn’t go up: we can’t post ‘em all but we’ll try to get as many as possible.

Bwog was taking its early evening constitutional (not to be confused with our Wednesday afternoon constitutional), enjoying our watermelon parfait weird plastic whatever from Pinkberry (1/2 off watermelon yogurt, 5-7 everyday!) when we noticed something.

It was a mini-truck where the dosa cart used to be. Then we discovered: it was the dosa cart, made into a mini-truck and called “VeggieNation” Vegenation. Wa-hoo!

Today was Vegenation’s first day back at Columbia after some negotiations with a mysterious and bad-sounding man who was making the two Dosa Dudes pay “too much money” for their spot on Broadway between 115th and 116th. That man has since been vanquished, and we are left with VeggieNation (“Eat Your Veggies”) which has an all-vegeterian menu of dosas, rice, uttapams (like a dosa), samosas, a “lunch box special” and a lot of food you wont find close to the Steps, like the Mysore masala dosa with coconut and onion chutneys, lemon and coconut rice, etc.

They also have falafel, which is good, because if there’s one food that’s difficult to find in Morningside Heights, it’s falafel.

Crazy cowboy philosopher and Columbia Department Chair Professor of Religion Mark Taylor came out swinging today with a New York Times opinion piece condemning his own job. The longtime gloom-and-doom prophet of educational decay made his stand against the tenure system, calling it a financial and intellectual blunder and accusing its defenders of acting purely out of self-interest.

Yet for Taylor, a man who once claimed that, “Graduate education is the Detroit of education,” these are soft words. And at least he has an alternate plan—seven-year renewable contracts for high-performing professors.

We shot Taylor a few questions about his seven-year plan. He responded: “The seven year idea is my own and I have been promoting it for more than a decade. It does not have a chance at Columbia or most other places.”

Tenure…it’s a movie!

Best Photoshop work in history by "D.Sion.G"

It’s a good morning for our pal Mr. Bo: he’s just been appointed the Chairman of the New York Fed Board of Directors, movin’ on up from the title he currently holds, Deputy Chair. We know you’ll be awful busy, but we hope you still have time to chuckle at us when we sneak kegs into EC!

And according to HuffPo College’s Twitter, PrezBo has a good nickname. They’re calling for other College president nicknames. Forget JSex, pick MiMoo!

Congratulations, Lee. Hey, if you’re not too busy today, can you just give us a Tweet or two?

Oh haaaay

The New York Times is reporting that federal investigators uncovered the existence of some crazy shit at a prestigious Columbia brain-scanning lab: Scientists regularly injected patients with a commonly used low-level radioactive substance that might have had traces of dangerous chemicals. Then some staffers tried to cover it up by forging documents. Um!

An internal investigation released on July 6 concluded that no one appears to have been harmed—many of the studies focused on imaging the brains of schizophrenics and other people with serious mood disorders—but the research at the lab, the Kreitchman PET Center on 168th street, is on hiatus, and some heads have already rolled. David I. Hirsh, Columbia’s executive vice president for research who, according to a letter from PrezBo posted in the comments, resigned on July 9 and will step down when a successor is named, told the Times, ”we are fundamentally reorganizing the lab’s management and operations in response to what the F.D.A. told us.”

More from the article (which, as of now, is the top story on the Times home page):

The F.D.A.’s latest investigation, which took place from Jan. 5 to Jan. 21, listed six categories of violations. It found that since 2007, “at least 10 batches” of drugs had been “released and injected into human subjects” with impurities that exceeded the level the lab had agreed to set. At least four injections “had impurity masses that more than doubled the maximum limit implemented.”

The report highlighted an equation that the lab routinely used, resulting in injections that exceeded the limit for acceptable impurities. The lab did not adequately check “the identity, strength and purity of each active ingredient prior to release” for injection into patients, the report said.

The first building to go up in Manhattanville will be the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, which will be used for brain research. Budum-ching!

In the words of our tipster: you stay classy, Columbia.

It’s summer, and it’s that magical time of year when things change and you come back next year only to think, “Hey, when did this happen?” Well, now is when!

Lerner Renovation: First and foremost, the plans and models we saw back in May for a new Lerner 4th Floor, home to the new Center for Student Advising, are finally beginning to materialize in real life. Prefrosh about to take Gateway next year, take note… this is how it’s done. The changes to Lerner have also caused the Office of Multicultural Affairs to relocate to Lerner 5.

Pupin Scaffolding: Mysterious scaffolding has shown up on Pupin; we’re assuming it’s for some sort of routine cleaning, but if you have a better idea of what’s going on, be sure to let us know in the comments.

“Premium Rush” Filming: This one stars our very own Alma Mater, folks! Well, sorta. Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars in this film about “a bike messenger [who] picks up a package at Columbia University and subsequently catches the attention of a dirty cop.” Close enough, Alma! A tipster informed us that they are filming today at 116th and Morningside–could they possibly encroach on campus grounds soon? Let us know if you see/hear anything!

Starbucks Gets Fancier: We’ve been tipped that the Starbucks on 114th is now shinier and all-around snazzier. Now the environment you sit in can send just as bold of a message as that frap in your hand. If you have any pictures of these renovations, please send them along to tips@bwog.net.

We Getting Slang Soon: Seeing as these aren’t exactly terms we hear on campus on a daily basis, there are some big changes coming to our lexicon. Huffington Posts documents a bunch of college slang that we can only assume every other place of higher education in America uses. Remember incoming shmen, don’t skip your gut classes and blitz us with tips!

Lerner photos by HEH, Pupin photo by Daniel Sims

Roar, Lion, Roar! Photo via designscene.net

Here is some news: the Emporio Armani Fall/Winter 2011/2012 ad campaign is public!

Here is why that news is sort of relevant: those ads were all shot on our fair campus mere months ago!

Take a look: there’s the model shrouded in smoke wearing all black next to a building that looks like Uris, the other model shrouded in smoke wearing all black on Broadway next to Lewisohn, and variations on that theme.

The Bwog listserv chattered late into the night about which buildings were which in these photos. It’s kind of impossible to tell, what with all the smoke and models, but give it your best shot in the comments.

Different, yet similar: Gossip Girl is shooting today on 105th and West End.

Different, and not similar: PrezBo wrote an Op-Ed for the WSJ, calling for public funding for the press. (Hey, Mr. President, we know you read this: do you think we could talk about Bwog getting an office? Just our own table at Brad’s or something! Much love, editors@bwog.net.)

He also writes that the priority should be expanding America’s public broadcasting network, and imagines an “American World Service,” similar to other global broadcasters like the BBC and China’s CCTV.