Can you see the stars?

A few weeks ago, we developed @notbwog, a Twitter bot that imitates Bwog headlines through a randomized generator based on our actual Twitter. This past weekend, the bot tweeted a headline so hauntingly excellent, we knew we had to develop it into an actual post. Managing Editor Betsy Ladyzhets ran this headline through several more random generators, ten rounds of Google Translate, and a couple of dril-inspired conversation programs. The results… may surprise you.

On a cold and terror-filled night, Bwog reviews 616, the middle of campus and NYC.

— Not Bwog (@notbwog) November 26, 2017

It is a cold and terror-filled night. You sit in your dorm room, scrolling through Facebook and nursing a beer stolen from your roommate’s mini-fridge. It tastes of fizz and piss and something heavier, something that sits beneath your tongue like the air just before a storm.

The wifi goes out. You stare at your laptop for a moment – but Facebook is stuck, frozen on the same pane. Your little cousin frowning at an ice cream cone she has dropped into her lap. Her bright green dress stained with chocolate. You refresh, and the page goes white, then tells you something has gone wrong. You reach forward, hoping blindly to knock some sense into the machine, and send your beer flying. Yellow-brown spills over the sides of your desk and onto your roommate’s soft, white rug, as though the asshole who lives three doors down broke in and pissed, just for fun. That’s the story you’ll tell your roommate tomorrow.

Something has gone wrong.

Amaris Hemmings, CC ’19, killing the field

With Thanksgiving over and the holiday season upon us, it seems appropriate to take time to be thankful for the strong fall sports season that Columbia Athletics had this year. With the shocking 8-2 Columbia Football winning season, the Columbia community exposed themselves as true bandwagon fans, but the success of other programs was also something new and exciting to follow for many new Lions fans. This past season was one to remember, and while football may have stolen the spotlight, other teams—specifically Columbia Women’s Soccer—also have earned the bragging rights of a successful season.

The Lions (9-5-2 overall, 5-1-1 conference) had a lot to celebrate this season. With 6 back-to-back shutout wins that would lead them to making program history with a 5-0 standing before their Yale game, Columbia Women’s Soccer experienced one of their best seasons in recent memory. With the exception of Seton Hall early into the season, every game that Columbia won was a shutout, proving that the Lions dominated the field. Despite experiencing losses on the road early into the season, everything seemed to change at Cornell: with a 2-0 win, the Lions would begin to show considerable momentum once they began to play in-conference games. Columbia would later win against Brown and Penn in hard fought overtimes and beat Wagner at a staggering 11-0. The Lions would end their season with a loss to Yale and finish with a tied game versus Harvard.

While the end of their season does not reflect their impressive results amongst the Ivies, several players stood out on the field. Senior defender Natalie Ambrose was recognized as the Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year, goalkeeper Sophie Whitehouse was also recognized for Ivy League Player of the Week and midfielder Natalie Neshat was Top Drawer Soccer’s National Women’s Team of the Week after Columbia’s 2-0 win against Princeton.

Columbia Women’s Soccer held their own this season. After a strong season for both the men and women’s soccer teams, Columbia Soccer will definitely be something worth watching next year, especially if Columbia Football decides to take another 20 year hiatus. Columbia Athletics has had an impressively strong start to a new academic year: maybe it’s time to really start learning Roar, Lion, Roar.

Photo via Columbia University Athletics/Mike McLaughlin

The man behind the screen

If you’ve ever had the absolute pleasure of reading Spectator op-eds, first of all, you and your loved ones may be entitled to financial compensation. Second of all, you may recognize the profile of Man With Axe, a frequent commenter with conservative viewpoints. When I went to his Disqus profile, I realized that he comments on many other college newspapers and blogs. So, I reached out to Man With Axe over email to talk about internet comment culture, the protection of anonymity, and the politics of college students. Some questions were omitted for conciseness. 

Bwog: Tell me about yourself. Are you currently a college student? Where are you studying / did you study? What are you studying / did you study?

Man With Axe: I was a college professor for 31 years, now retired. I have degrees in history, law, and business administration. My undergrad was from an Ivy school and my graduate degrees were from another highly ranked private university.

Bwog: You comment on just about every major campus publication. What are your favorites and least favorites?

MWA: My favorites are the Ivies, Stanford, Duke, and some of the major state universities, such as Michigan, Berkeley, Maryland, Texas, UNC, and Virginia. The only negative thing I would say about some schools is that they rarely print anything. For example, Ohio State doesn’t do much.

Bwog: Your comments usually come from a conservative social and political perspective. Why do you think fewer op-eds from college websites come from a conservative perspective? Is this an issue?

MWA: The fact that so few op-eds are written from a conservative perspective is why I comment as much as I do. I spent my life with college students, and I’m very interested in what they are thinking. I’m troubled to discover that they are receiving a partial education from their virtually all-progressive faculty. They seem to come to college already hell-bent on being progressive activists, and they don’t seem to realize that half the country disagrees with them. Or, perhaps they do realize it, but they believe that the half that thinks differently are all evil and/or stupid. And they thought this before the rise of Trump. This belief that the other side is evil leads them to adopt anti-free speech positions, to believe that violence is justified to silence their enemies. And then they go out and demonstrate these beliefs. “Your speech is violence, and my violence is speech.”

More ManWithAxe !

ceremony of sparkly lights thanks to our student councils

Happy Wednesday! Bwog’s GSSC (General Studies Student Council) Bureau Chief, Alex Tang, is back with updates on last night’s council meeting.

This week’s GSSC meeting was one of a nitty-gritty, technical nature, focusing mostly on structural and financial matters regarding the council.

To start, GS President Sam Demezieux introduced the plan for the four Columbia undergraduate student councils (GSSC, CCSC, ESC, and Barnard SGA) to form a four-school fund. Since there are certain events that all four schools share (including Tree Lighting and Glass House Rocks), creating a common fund would make logistics much easier. Allocations for funds would be set up in the beginning of the term, saving discussion time during student council meetings. At the earliest, the four-school fund would be implemented by the coming spring semester.

VP of Policy, Raisa Flor, introduced and passed two bylaw amendments to the current GSSC constitution. Firstly, the removal of any associate of the GSSC must now require a majority vote by the executive board (rather than at the sole discretion of the committee chief). The GSSC policy committee will also add a health/wellness position, due to the immediate importance of the issue at Columbia.

Click here for GSSC’s plan to revamp its elections process, as well as other updates

You turn around to flush the toilet… you see him… what do you do?

Happening In The World: The Australian state of Victoria becomes the first in the nation to legalise assisted dying. After over 100 hours of debate, the legislation has been approved, allowing terminally ill patients the “right to request a lethal drug from mid-2019”. Patients must be at least 18 years old with less than six months to live. (BBC)

Happening In The Nation: A beautiful iguana visited a woman on the toilet. A Tampa-bay resident noticed a spiny tailed iguana floating around in her toilet bowl. Her neighbour quickly extracted the foot-long iguana from the toilet using a net and cooler. The iguana has since been named Flushy by Matthews Wildlife Rescue. (BayNews9)

Happening In NYC: Sayfullo Saipov pleads not guilty to 22 federal counts. Saipov is being charged for killing eight people and injuring a dozen more on October 31st, when he drove his pickup truck “down a bicycle path near the World Trade Center”. The incident has been labelled as New York’s deadliest terror attack since 9/11. Saipov will next appear in court on January 23rd. (CNN)

Happening On Campus: Columbia Law School is hosting a panel discussion about New York’s abortion laws tonight at 6:30 to 8:30pm in Jerome Green Hall, Room 103. The discussion will be about “New York State’s current abortion laws and how they contradict Roe v. Wade and how anti-choice extremist try to prevent women from accessing abortion care”. Make sure to RSVP for the event, Outdated and Dangerous: New York’s Abortion Laws Are Failing Us!

Overheard: “You should go to the stacks with him.” “I should go eat his ass?”

Sensual iguana via JimRules42