Behold the last of our contestants competing for Pumpkin flavored ale! Rollover the photos to see their true identities, and click here to review all the contenders. Bwog will declare the winners of this heated competition and the Pumpkin Carving contest later tonight!

Pull those robes out!

Don’t pack away those costumes just yet! The Block RA staff is hosting trick-or-treating for CU students tonight from 8 to 10 pm. Stock up on candy in Hogan 4B, Broadway Lounges: 3, 6, 9 and 12, McBain Lounges: 3, 5 and 7, and the Ruggles Lobby. Relive your childhood!

Points to anyone who spots a prof walking his kid. Just don’t be creepy.

And if you’re looking for a last minute costume, we have a few last minute recs. Try The Other: collect your friends’ UW Lens Essays. Tape them to your body, overuse the phrase “social construct,” and make people feel generally uncomfortable.

Picture of you via Wikimedia

Our meetings also have chairs but lack tables.

Tonight in the crypt of St. Paul’s Chapel at 9 pm tonight there will be a meeting of The Blue and White, Bwog’s kissing cousin/mother/Oedipal relation paper-friend!

We’ll be pitching issues for the December issue, so stop on over, even if you’ve never written for us before. It is never too late in the semester to start! Don’t wait for spring, under-involved first-years. Oh! And there’ll be free food.

Yalta via Wikimedia

That sure is a lot of space for only three accents...

…or maybe some of our peers need to get on taking a global core class, ASAP.

“The only accents in the world are British and New Zealand…and Australian.”

Emphasis via flickr

Remember the days when class moms would help you into your Power Rangers costume, march you and your classmates down to the school auditorium where you’d parade around the school to the dulcet tones of whatever the marching band was playing? Long before the horror of weekly readings, midterms and term papers plagued your boy band filled, carefree life?

Yeah, us too. This particular group of tots is trick or treating for a cause…

The Inter Greek Council managed to round up the kids for a block party, the kind of community gestures they have to be making if they ever want to get back the housing they lost after Operation Ivy League. Join the fun or have some of your own people watching on Low!

The time for carving may have come and gone (unless you don’t mind going to your 6 ‘o clock class covered in pumpkin gourd) but these pictures are just in time for your night of candy soliciting/wishing Halloween weren’t on a Monday/fighting off whatever you caught from this past weekend’s Halloween eve festivities. The results will be up later tonight!

Try asking one of these guys advice for grad school

There’s no better time to meet your advisor than when s/he is dressed up as a purple Teletubby. Make your way over to 401 Lerner for the 2015 Center for Student Advising Eat & Greet. The fun and opportunity to stuff your face for free lasts till 2 pm.

Eerie purple men via Wikimedia

RoomHop, our dorm-to-dorm pilgrimage, continues seeking inspiration in the form of well decorated domiciles. This dispatch from Lauren Beck prompted by the wonders of hand-crafted tape art.

Make no mistake—the intricate designs on the walls of this EC suite are not the product of an NSOP trip to Urban Outfitters. To the contrary, the scores of tape coating the suite are the result of long (and sticky!) hours of cutting and applying tape, and of an oddly enduring solidarity between the girls living there. (They laugh when I mention that my roommates and I can’t hang pictures without bickering.)

The entire process took three long sessions. The suitemates – Itanza Lawrence, Valerie Pinkerton, and Sofia Pacheco-Fores, Sonal Mallaya, and Jenny Shen – had ideas about what they needed, and began by tacking post-its to the walls, so they could establish a tentative layout.

“We knew we wanted a fireplace there, a cabinet there,” they explain, motioning toward their one-dimensional accoutrements. Working from images pulled off of the Internet and from a book on 19th century Parisian interior design, the five girls sketched out the components of the room on sheets now framed (in tape) on the suite’s dining room wall. Then began the application process, with each girl taking responsibility for constructing individual features. The fireplace, I learn, is Sonal’s work. The fish bowl in the entry way is a Sophia creation.

When taping, the suitemates say, you get to a point when you… can’t stop taping. The most frustrating part of the process, the girls report, was a night so humid that the tape fell immediately from the walls. The best part? “When we decided to turn the A/C to full blast and continue taping that night anyway, and stayed up until 5:00 am working on it.” Their enthusiasm seems to have been unflagging.

It’s not surprising that the girls’ majors are mostly (at least tangentially) related to the arts—among the group is an art history major, an archaeology major, and an architecture major—though none explicitly work in the visual arts. Regardless, the room sits like something of a masterpiece—EC’s crown jewel. Read more…

Hailing from round the map and all along the wealth spectrum, our contestants from Argentina, Wall Street and the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros bring you another mixed bag of costumes. Keep sending ‘em in. Results are later this evening!

The Business School's alternative costume this year

The Business School joins a Common App-esque initiative, making it easier to get in. Maybe it wants to be an undergrad school for this Halloween? (Financial Times)

Ever wonder in the midst of the OWS protests where on the scale of 1 to 100 you lie? Check out this interesting infographic showing a cross section of NYC employment and its relationship to national income brackets. (NY Times)

Only for Halloween would you want to be a college graduate leaving school in this financial climate, but the story gets scarier as the financial ghosts of your student past may haunt you long after you graduate. (Pittsburgh Live)

Jersey Shore enters the realm of academia at U Chicago. (NY Times)

Lots of people will probably end up being sad, candyless children this Halloween after Saturday’s Halloween eve snow storm left 3.2 million households across the Northeast without power. (Global Post)

 Costume advice via flickr

Lost a Blackberry 9930 Bold Touch night of Oct 29t. Hard, clear black case and Verizon model. Password locked. $50 reward, no questions asked. Contact Info: cme2126@columbia.edu

Here’s another crop of your creative classmates. It’s not too late to send in your pictures! We’ll post the rest of our collection tomorrow for further judgement by the Bwog community. Keep a look out late tomorrow evening for our official results.

Play nice in the comments.

Keep your eyes open for the October issue of The Blue & White, coming soon to campus. Until then, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting highlights of the upcoming issue online. Among the treats to look forward to: Knickerbocker Motorsports: a surprisingly gripping history, an examination of Columbia’s updated sexual assault policy, and the festive search for magic on campus. Here, contributors Matthew Schantz and Alex Jones debate the merits of Times New Roman.

Illustration by Sevan Gatsby

Quite frankly, I don’t understand what there is to debate. Times New Roman is the definitive standard for properly written communication, and deviating from the norm is merely a lazy exercise in subversion—not to mention how dreadfully gauche it is. One simply cannot concede to the baser elements of our society, and choosing something like Cambria (or, heaven forbid, Verdana) is just not done in polite company. Times New Roman’s ubiquity and long-reigning dominance are reason enough to enforce the strictest embargo on competing modes of typographical illustration.

The finest flourishes of ink adorn every letter, rendering each beautifully-crafted word as muscular and balanced as an ancient temple facade. One does not merely type with Times New Roman; one works with the very building blocks of communication. Yet this typeface is far from garish. The serifed font is adorned, but in a humble way—like Christmas trees for poors. Whether it is placed upon a cordial country club invitation or a sharp resumé, no letter will seem out of place. So quickly would I dismiss a cover letter printed in Tahoma—to say nothing of bourgeois Helvetica!

This begs the question: when has Comic Sans ever done the world any good? What are TAs supposed to think of a literary analysis presented like a third grade birthday invitation? Aesthetics aside, some fonts betray an unsavory symbolism—what is Arial but a hammer and sickle in disguise? Cambria is naught but an unworthy usurper to the throne of the default setting (a curse upon the house of the cult of heedless, sloppy innovation at Microsoft). We make mistakes (everyone has mistaken Papyrus for quick-track class once in their lives), but could you envision any time when Wingdings or Dingbats would be appropriate fonts? Can you even seriously say “Wingdings” or “Dingbats” aloud? Computers boast an astronomical number of font options, yet the vast majority of them are completely worthless—mere placeholders to give pull down menus an illusion of depth.

Every modern, decent society necessitates stability, and such stability stems from the ineffable wisdom of our forebears, born out by the travails of time. It was no group of lowly peasants who crafted these computers and software programs, nor flippant graduate students who envisioned the unbreakable rules of collegiate paper conventions, and it likewise was no accident that they chose Times New Roman as the gold standard. And it is quite clear, I believe, that any recent transition to so-called “alternative” default fonts is the unfortunate result of misguided attempts at “hipness”—a hopeless and uninformed play at rebellion.

Read more…

Left Swiss Army Backpack with important binder (notes and HW) in tent near left fountain after CSC Night Market last Friday. Please email jrw2175@columbia.edu if found. $10 Reward.

Bucket List represents the unbelievable intellectual privilege we enjoy as Columbia students. We do our very best to bring to your attention important guest lecturers and special events on campus. Our recommendations for this week are below and the full list is after the jump.

Recommended

• “Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano” Tuesday 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm, 1501 IAB, Yukiya Amano, registration
• “Translating the Indian Past: The Poets’ Experience” Tuesday 7:00 pm, Event Oval, the Diana, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
• “Brian Greene, Live in Conversation” Wednesday 9:00 pm – 11:00 pm, Miller Theatre, Briane Greene, Leonard Susskind, and Saul Perlmutter, sold out
• “Business Innovation and Entrepreneurship: City Strategies Summit with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg” Thursday 8:30 am – 9:30 am, Low Rotunda, Michael Bloomberg, Jeffrey Inmelt, Robert Kasdin, Meyer Feldberg, sold out
• “Political Stabilization: The Role of the U.S. Department of State, USAID, and the U.S. Military in Good Governance and Development” Thursday 12:15 pm – 1:45 pm, 1501 IAB, Douglas Climan, William Buhl, and Stacia George

click here for the week’s full List