Send us a picture of your Halloween costume by midnight-ish tonight for free beer and candy. Send to tips@bwog.com!

In the past week significant steps have been taken to follow the example of MoWi in festive Halloween decorations, to varying degrees of success…

The River Lobby: sheer disingenuous-ness. There is NO CANDY!

Brownies: basements are spooky!

A tree on 115th: subtle.

Bagels at Nussbaum: hmm…

Duane Reade: just in case you forgot that the HQ was on 111 St.

It’s Halloween! Celebrate by learning this week’s weather forecast with Pat and Zak. Thanks to Pauline Baudon for filming.

Samhain! (Attire isn't historically accurate, but use your imagination)

Halloween is certainly not a day to give thanks. And it certainly isn’t a day to honor or remember historical figures or noble members of society. But it is a bit more than a night of debauchery and terror tacked onto the end of October. Bwog’s Pagan Affairs Bureau Chief Brian Wagner explains.

The name “Halloween” comes from “All-Hallows-Eve,” which first cropped up in the 1600s and has its roots in Old English. Because double-hyphenated words weren’t even hip in the Renaissance, it was shortened soon after. The name references the massive Catholic holiday following on Nov. 1, “All Saints’ Day,” or “All Hallows,” a celebration of saints and martyrs (think hallowed ground and it clicks). One would think the night would be a bit more somber and less secular, but despite the origins of its name, Halloween and its attendant observation is almost completely rooted in the Celtic-pagan holiday of Samhain.

Samhain, when roughly translated from Old Irish, means “Summer’s End,” a celebration of the fall harvest on October 31st. The Celtic people believed that it marked the boundary between the “lighter half” of the year and the “darker half.” As the temporal boundaries blur, so does the boundary between our world and the spirit world, allowing ghosties and ghouls to cross over for one night. In efforts to spook the spooks, the Celts would don frightening masks and costumes (because they apparently believed that these spirits were none too bright). They even enlisted the help of large turnips, hollowed out and carved with scary images, because few things are more frightening to an evil spirit than a small vegetable with its angry face on. Pumpkins being larger and more numerous in the new world, the transition seemed natural.

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At around 10:50 AM this morning, cars collided at 113th and Broadway. A white compact, two cabs and a truck unloading were involved. The white compact driver admitted to running the light and causing the accident. He is sad. One cab is absolutely totaled. Thankfully, the policewoman on site ascertained that nobody needed an ambulance and nobody was hurt.

NYPD is on the scene, and sirens can be heard from all over town. Lots o’ honking too. Broadway is already getting backed up as only one car can pass southbound at a time. If you’re wearing open-toed shoes, watch out for glass!

Update, 11:16 am: Several more emergency vehicles arrived. Broadway is mostly cleared of damaged vehicles, but glass and debris still litters the intersection. A policeman confirms that nobody was hurt.

Behold…the PrezBo stencil!

Print out the stencil, tape it to a (real) pumpkin, and trace the face onto the pumpkin surface by perforating the black shapes’ edges with a carving knife. Then, remove the paper and carve out the traced areas.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Well, sort of. Hannah Goldstein, Bwog’s New York-Enthusiast-in-Residence, tells you why you should make the un-lame choice and stick around.

Fact: New York is the center of the universe. Fact: Halloween is the center of the New York social calendar. Halloween in New York means four days of pure, unadulterated insanity. And why choose sanity when you can have insanity?

New York on Halloween will restore all your faith in humanity. It will happen when you first get on the 1 train, which will inevitably be making service changes (but this weekend it will feel endearing and not annoying) and when you look around and realize that every single person in your car is dressed as a Flintstone or a Rubik’s Cube or Sonny Bono or a Chia Pet. When you get off, there will be cops everywhere (but smiley cops who will take pictures with you and your costume!) and everyone will be out on the streets heading off to their next Halloween adventure. You will see more ridiculous costumes, like a couple dressed up as a pair of eyeballs, or the full cast of Alice in Wonderland. And then you will experience a spiritual revelation, and all your trendy hipster jadedness will fade away, if just for the weekend. U will ♥ NY. Promise!

You have no excuse not to partake in the collective citywide festivity. Midterms are over (unless they aren’t, in which case we offer our deepest sympathies). You have free time now! And if New York on an off day has enough things to do to keep a weekly time-out magazine in business, New York on Halloween has enough things to do to inspire, well, a Halloween-themed issue of that magazine! Years of lame high-school basement parties where you played Spin-the-Bottle and drank spiked fruit punch did not build up to going back home instead of to a rave or haunted house or costume party on the Empire Hotel Rooftop. It’s the 35th anniversary of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and everyone knows that New York is where it caught on and thus the only place to watch it. There is so much to do.

Why go to your inferior hometown or to an inferior city? Your high-school incarnation would be so disappointed in you. So stay in the city this weekend. Go crazy, and use those two days off to recover. You won’t regret it.

(Clearly he was talking about Halloween.)

A TI-84 Silver Plus was lost yesterday either in Ferris Booth, somewhere in Lerner, or Hewitt. There is a name in white-out on the back, Nicole Lopez , and it’s engraved with the same. On the inside of the cover is a bunch of ridiculous writing. If it’s found, if someone could call at 3219455464, that would be great.

When you were in middle school, Halloween was a time for wholesome, all-American fun. You probably went trick-or-treating around your neighborhood or marched in the costume parade around your school gym. But you’re in college now, and costumes aren’t like they were in the days of your youth. Upholding a longstanding Bwog tradition, Hannah Goldstein offers some risqué Halloween ideas for Columbia-spirited boys and girls alike:

Alma Mater

Desecrate the image of our matron goddess in style! If you’re feeling irreverent, purchase a drapey black minidress—try this one!—and pair with leaves you glued to your hair. Scepters are available here. Then pick up your heaviest book and carry it around with you throughout the evening. Don’t forget to hide the owl somewhere secret!

PrezBo

Remember that time PrezBo bared it all with the swim team? Relive that glorious moment in Columbia history as Slutty Prezbo, complete with your own Columbia Under Armour hot pants! Bonus points if you wear a toupee and, of course, if you carry a copy of Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open.

Roar-ee

With your #1 team jersey on, none of the athletes will have to know that you’re really dressed as the Cowardly Lion!

Hawkmadinejad

SCREEE! Halloween is not just for bats anymore! Don your favorite hawk beak and start making trouble like the naughty Columbian that you are! This costume is also appropriate for Mischief Night.

Alexander Hamilton

Nothing says “good Halloween costume” like the Columbian Federalist! We have just the costume for you. But where’s the “slutty,” you ask? To which we respond: it’s all in the eyebrows.

The College Walk of Shame

Keep last year’s VShow alive! This is an easy costume to make at home! All you really need is an oversized Columbia t-shirt and a hickey.

Not feeling costumes this year? If after everything you deign to sit at your computer instead of going out, don’t worry. You can just tell people you were Alice.

What up, D.C.?

The New York Times blogs from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in D.C.!

The Medical Center and Harvard have discovered that women who drink large quantities of alcohol are at greater risk for mouth cancer. (Health News Digest)

Crime in Central Park almost doubles this year. (NY Daily News)

Honor-system? What’s dat? (Gothamist)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

You better get out of the library and down to Ricky’s if you’re supposed to be getting a costume for tonight. The store has reached capacity, and there’s a long line out the door. If you’re desperate, you might have more luck at the temporary Halloween location on 96th.

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Fun fact: there are 34 Ricky's pop-up stores in the city for Halloween.

The long lines all have made their mark. Bwog spotted this kind of silly array of beverages on the window sill:

Most people associate pumpkin with only two things: pumpkin pie and jack o’ lanterns. What we often forget is that this fantastic squash has many other uses. It can easily cross the border between sweet and savory. This Halloween, be more adventurous with your pumpkin! Here are four fantastic uses for pumpkin:

1. Pumpkin Soup Bowls
(Makes 1 soup bowl)

Happy Halloween!

Ingredients:

1 small cooking pumpkin

1 tbsp. sugar

1 tbsp. salt

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cut the top off of your pumpkin and carve out the inside, removing all of the pumpkin goop—just like carving pumpkins when you were little!

2. Sprinkle the inside of the pumpkin with the sugar and salt.

3. Bake on a baking sheet for 20-30 minutes, until the inside of the pumpkin becomes relatively dry.

For squash soup recipes, visit the Culinary Society Blog at http://cuculinary.wordpress.com/?s=soup. This recipe can be made with any squash you like!

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Tipster Danielle Benson sent us a photo of this sign, found in the John Jay elevator. Apparently, certain elevator patrons have been removing light bulbs from the ceiling and smashing them on the ground. Clearly, the John Jay community is now speaking out against this gross violation of elevator etiquette. If smashing light bulbs was meant to relieve midterms stress, perhaps the culprits should’ve smashed things on Low on Wednesday with AMSA instead. In these trying times, constructive stress relief is key.

Play nice, first years.

You are young and alive. Vote! Peter Sterne tells you how.

If you’re registered to vote in New York, you should receive information in your Lerner (or Altschul if you’re at Barnard) mailbox telling you that you’re registered to vote and where your assigned polling place is located. If you haven’t received any mail from the Board of Elections yet, you should probably call them to figure out what’s up. But if you just want to find out whether you’re registered, you can check online here and then figure out where your polling place is located by typing in your street address here. Like Housing, the Board of Elections likes to assign most Columbians (specifically, those living in Columbia undergraduate housing) to Wien.

Of course, if you’ve decided not to take advantage of going to school in the greatest city in the world, you can apply for an absentee ballot to vote in your home state. The deadline to apply for an absentee ballot varies a bit by state (here’s a handy chart). Once you receive your absentee ballot, you usually have until election day to send it back to your home state.

Finally, if you’re registered to vote in New York but still want the thrill of voting before next Tuesday, it’s possible to vote early. But you have to go to the County Board of Elections downtown (specifically here), and you have to give them a good, compelling reason as to why it’s impossible for you to vote on Election Day. It’s like switching LitHum sections, but even more pointless.

Most importantly, however you decide to vote, make sure that you don’t forget to do it. And if you have any other questions related to voting not answered in this guide, send an email to columbiavotes@gmail.com.

Lost purple Nano iPod. It had blue headphones attached. Lost somewhere on or near Barnard campus. Contact: briana.fasone@gmail.com