Keepin' it short and sweet

UC Davis chancellor “feels horrible” about the pepper-spray incident. (LA Times)

Where the 51% at in the OWS movement? (Atlantic)

We want you to have good sex. (NYT)

HuffPo Canada’s managing editor experiments with a vodka-soaked tampon…and then writes about it. (HuffPo)

Three American students have been arrested for having participated in the recent demonstrations in Cairo. (WaPo)

Adorable blonde bob from Flickr/gemsling

Don't let midterms leave you with a prickly virus.

Bwog’s resident SGA’er Reneé Kraiem reports not-quite-live-but-chronologically-close from last night’s meeting where talk of liquor and the new enrollment policy ensued.

• The Council established a task force to respond to student concern regarding the new enrollment policy. They have plans to improve the channels for students to voice their opinions about the announcement and communicate them effectively to AHinks and the administration. SGA is a “legitimate way to funnel communication” to the administration and utilize assure that it will be productive, contended one council member. SGA encourages students to email Dean Hinkson directly or speak to a class dean, or advisor, in order to make their opinions known; otherwise, says PrezBla, the Administration will underestimate the magnitude of the policy change’s effect on the student body.
• The administrative guest last night was the charmingly British Brenda Slade, Barnard’s Duchess of Health Services. After declining PrezBla’s pizza offer, Slade spoke elegantly about the mission of Health Services. She primarily championed the importance of daily necessities, which, she insists, are those that often get “jettisoned” during times like midterms. Whatever you’re doing with your time is not as important as obtaining sleep, adequate nutrition, and exercise—not just walking up the stairs to the second floor dining room at the Diana. “I think health promoters and health educators have always tried to concentrate on helping people build up good coping mechanisms because we don’t seem to be able to do much about is the world in general,” said Slade. “In my next lifetime I’m going to sort out the government.” We can only hope so.
• Slade also addressed last spring’s survey of the student body that emphasized the coping mechanisms that Barnard students use to deal with stress. Though the results are still being tabulated, it appears that Barnard women are, in fact, stressed.

Read more about last night’s meeting after the jump.

In this week’s Cooking with Bwog, resident culinary expert and quasi-mixologist Matt Powell shows you how to make love potions for Valentine’s Day out of the two most potent aphrodisiacs known to man—chocolate and alcohol!

Like this, but chocolate and alcohol...and not in a heart-shaped bottle!

I may not be a mixologist, but I’ve always liked to experiment with different kinds of drink combinations. It probably all started when I was young. My mom would catch me mixing her good perfumes and expensive spices in a large pitcher… Let’s just say I’ve made some progress since then. At least my drinks are nontoxic now.

But seriously, these drinks would be perfect for your funny valentine. With a plenty of sweetness, they could be considered desserts in their own right. And they only take a split-second to make (as compared to the desserts from last week).

The Mephisto

Serves 2

In this drink Amaretto paired with strawberry ice cream to create a milkshake-like dessert.

Ingredients

• 8 scoops of Strawberry Ice Cream
• 1/4 C whole milk
• 1/3 C Amaretto
• 4 fresh strawberries, plus 2 for garnish

Read more…

These times, they are a-changin’. Saturday Morning Cartoons keeps you up to date on cutting edge technology. Now if only there were an app for recording your night, post-blackout…

Cartoons by Jody Zellman

Bacchus smiles favorably upon you tonight! May all your parties look like this.

Tonight is the most important night of your life, the first night of college. You’ll probably do something sort of fun. Here’s what some of your elders did their first nights at Columbia. It gets much better from here. Don’t throw up! NB: Not every Bwog post has bullet points.

• When I got here I was alone and I hadn’t slept in something like 72 hours, and hadn’t eaten in just under a day, so I stumbled around for quite a bit, going through check-in, unpacked, and then spent the next ten hours walking these huge circuits around Morningside Heights, coming back up the John Jay stairs to the 9th floor and back down in the heat maybe twenty times, before finally tiring myself out and passing out for half a day.

• My first night of college I got drunk in Carman then went downtown and got high. I could have skipped the first part.

• An international student, I moved in a day early. A number of us—students from Canada and Kenya and China—went for a long walk in the summer evening down Broadway, up Amsterdam. We talked about politics and America and things we hadn’t expected to happen in the past seven hours, and travels and family and what languages we spoke and what languages we wished we spoke back home and. (Home, no matter where you come from, feels very far away if the people around you are not using the metric system, and say, ‘zee,’ and correct you if you ask for the “washroom.”) Later that night I sat out by myself on the balcony of my John Jay room (I found out the night afterwards I wasn’t supposed to), looking northwards to campus and southwards to the city. I fell asleep in a strange bed.

• I spent the first night talking to one of the girls on my floor—she’s been my roommate and/or suitemate every year following. Some other floor members wandered in and out, and at one point someone told us they were going to a party and promised beer if we attended. We both declined, and as rising seniors neither of us has been to a frat party yet.

• I went to school with Mono and Lyme Disease, so not only could I not drink, but I was so exhausted that I slept through most of NSOP. I remember few things from that week. Word of advice to freshmen: beer pong is an evil, disease-spreading game. Although my beer pong skills may have been at their prime for my entry into college life, I could not use them and thus lost them. However, I was unaware of this, and bragged about how skilled I was. Imagine how unimpressed my highly skilled friends were when I played for the first time in months! Embarassing. Haven’t touched the pong ball since.

• My 18th birthday fell on the second day of orientation and I had this brilliant idea to take a shot for every year of my life. Then I went to a COOP party and danced like a hooligan. I think this was the night my RA dubbed me and my friend The Mischevious Ones. Don’t remember much else.

• I went to a frat (pretty sure it was Beta) party my first night. The few college parties I’ve been to before that were strict on letting guys in without girls so I went with this one NSOP friend who I convinced to drag along like a good chunk of her Carman floor with me. I remember going up to the steps being like “hey, I’ve got GIRLS!” or something. They didn’t care. Probably cared more about guys actually, for recruiting. Anyways, afterwards I went with a few NSOP friends and walked (walked!) all the way down to 90th St. or so and back drunkenly. Needless to say, I hardly interacted with anybody in this story again. Shows how far NSOP goes.

• We started the night by using the beer pong table we stole from campus the night before. Stealing that table was a story all in itself because we ended up walking into Carman around 3 at night, bloodied up and hammered. God knows how we got by the security guard. That story, however, will not be explained because the current story ends much worse. So back to beer pong. I had filled up a camel-bak with around 8 shots, 2 monsters and some gatorade. With that gone, I was pretty drunk but wanted to play beer pong anyway. Many patrons from our floor and floor 12 came in to to compete in the awesomeness known as beer pong. A few games and Bon Jovi songs later, we got written up. I poured out most of the booze, but then tried denying the giant plastic jug of vodka behind my back that I was trying (read: badly trying) to hide. Upset with Sgt. Buzzkill of the 12th floor, we decided to go to Pike’s beach party. I don’t really remember much of the short trip there, but next thing I know I have a drink in my hand and I’m ready to go. The next memory is me allowing people to line up and five-star my back as hard as they could. From there on out, there is nothing that I remember though it has been told to me from multiple people. I was apparently launched from Pike by the frat boys because I lined up in a corner and bull charged (with my head down) the whole crowd of people. My next memory is the wake up the next day. I awoke in my bed in quite an unusual state: still drunk, swimsuit only, broken phone, bed soaked in some kind of liquid and a peeled banana smashed all over my ass crack. Apparently my roommate’s friend thought it would be funny to peel a banana and smash it under my suit.

Spotted on 114th and Broadway, near Book Culture. Just what you needed before that “graduation” chat with your folks…

Photos by AB

Photo by CU Arts

Though we probably can’t see as many free exhibits nowadays, at least we’ll be able to drink our underage art-deprived sorrows away. The CU Arts’ latest initiative, CUlinary Arts, now gives Columbia students special deals at restaurants around the city – 12 out of 32 of which involve free alcohol, mostly in the form of free prosecco or champagne (an interesting choice of deals given the largely < 21 target population). However, the list features a decent range of budgets, cuisines and locations. There’s SushiSamba for Japanese/Brazilian fusion, Ouest for American, French at DB Bistro Moderne and Indian at Bay Leaf. For the less geographically adventurous, Community, Mama Mexico and Sezz Meddi are also participating in the program. CU Arts, our palates and wallets thank you.

Photo by Lacey Harris-Coble

On Thursday evening, ABC News director of polling Gary Langer appeared on behalf of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) to deliver a lecture on the Whys and Wherefores of Newspolling. Lacey Harris-Coble, the Premiere Poobah of lecturehopping, reports.

Seen the real poll numbers on Obama’s ratings post-SOTU? Bullshit – unless, of course, they came from ABC News and were inspected by its celebrated data cop, the Premier Poobah of newspolling, Gary Langer. A two-time News & Doc Emmy winner and a leader in the newspolling industry, Langer, a pleasant fellow, arrived on campus and did not hesitate to begin bashing the omnipresent Internet click-in polls, which he calls manufactured data that easily “acquiesces to biases.”

That’s right – the data on the news is not real data, says Langer, who claims to be one of the few men left in news with standards and who can allegedly guarantee news reporters good, credible data while “shit-canning the bad.” To Langer, bad data is an epidemic spreading everywhere from CNN to The New York Times, the American Medical Association (AMA), and even occasionally ABC News itself (but only when the Good Morning, America hosts can do the fact-checking, of course). So where does this ubiquitous bad data come from? People like you! You’ve seen those pop-ups asking you to sign up to be an online survey-taker and get paid for it; well, some people actually do sign up, collectively completing thousands of surveys each day. The results of these convenience surveys are presented and sold to the news companies as accurate statistical fact, and the news companies in turn present the data as truth.

Read more…

Drop those Jello shots, folks—the Columbia Bartending Agency has officially reopened after a several-month hiatus.  Though the School of Mixology has offered its signature five-course, real-alcohol training programs for the past three seasons, the Agency, responsible for hiring out bartenders to private events, was asked to shut down temporarily after sending several students to an unlicensed warehouse party last fall.

Having conducted a rigorous internal review, the Agency has finally begun to re-train employees under a newly revised protocol.  Managing director Bryan Wesley Reid believes the Agency to be far more comprehensive and organized than its previous incarnation, and newly instated administrative and pricing changes should help its services remain accessible to prospective clients.  In addition, the School will run four evening courses as planned this October, and will continue to donate a portion of each student’s $200 tuition to the America Reads and Community Lunch organizations through Community Impact.

Your days of drinking Schnapps straight from the bottle may be over.  But then again, probably not.

A mild Sunday night meeting started off with some great news: the Bacchanal College Days T-shirts had been universally praised and were in high demand.  In true Columbia form, however, the only leftovers are extra-large.  And speaking of Bacchanal, the Campus Life Committee had originally wanted to have a pre-concert festival was originally planned for Saturday, but were told that it “needed to be silent.”  George Krebs offered no further explanation other than that they had actually been considering a mime show.

The majority of the meeting was spent on familiar topics: meal plans and substance policies.  After last week’s hullaballoo, the upper class meal plan is no longer part of the Ferris Booth proposal.  Those optional meal plans have already been adjusted by increasing the number of meals in most plans and adding “free meals” to each plan. In order to save the struggling venue, however, both sides are still pushing for John Jay-style swipe access.  Breakfast would be priced from $6-7, lunch from $8-9, and dinner from $10-11.  It would be a continuous swipe system (much like the system John Jay will transition to by 2010) and no, the food won’t go down in quality, though portions may be reduced. Curses! Read more…

Much of last night’s CCSC meeting split two ways was concerned with the CCSC Town Hall and College Days, with George Krebs and Robyn Burgess reminding the council members to come out. Actual news was little in evidence, with one exception:

VP for Policy Adil Ahmed, CC 2010 President AJ Pasuca, and CC 2010 VP Sue Yang reported on their Wednesday meeting with Dean Cristen Scully-Kromm, in which they discussed noise policies and other parts of the War on Fun. Yang told the council, “In terms of the noise policy, I feel we agreed there needs to be a more informal system for minor noise warnings to small groups.” Currently, some RAs have logs differentiating for these, but there is no formal system for this approach: each complaint must be registered with ResLife. 

Pascua noted that “”Dean Kromm expressed a strong willingness to move forward in the near future with CCSC. She’d prefer to work over the summer, rather than working hastily now.” However, he also cautioned the council: “although Adil, Sue and I felt that we’d like a resolution as soon as possible, we felt some intransigence on the other side.” Ahmed also expressed concern about the actual influence CCSC would have: apparently, Kromm told them that ResLife is already working on a new policy, but when the CCSC representatives asked to see it, Kromm refused, saying that the policy was “unconfirmed” and asked CCSC instead to submit their own ideas separately in writing. Hey, at least she’s consistently secretive. Read more…

At tonight’s CCSC meeting, VP for Policy Adil Ahmed announced that, after a meeting with Dean Cristen Kromm, alcohol may be allowed in common areas next year. Currently, Columbia does not allow alcohol to be kept anywhere except in an overage student’s room, declaring the common area a “public space” (locks and doors not withstanding).  

Ahmed emphasized that the step “is still a plan,” and that the changes would have to be written into official ResLife guidelines over the summer. If it goes through, the change will be in place by next year, and denizens of EC, Hogan, and other popular senior locales could finally stop pretending that a second door suddenly made their alcohol private. A first step, perhaps, but we doff our caps to the councils. Now let’s work on that whole 40s thing.

- JCD

How to start the weekend? Why not cheap beer? Sources tell Bwog that Pourhouse has 300 40s left over from Tuesday’s celebrations, and will sell them for $4 until they run out. After all, today is the real 40 days until graduation (celebrations were moved to Tuesday because of Passover), and starting the night with cheap beer means things can only get better. 

Afterwards, Bwog recommends bouncing on over to La Negrita, which is commemorating its last weekend with a “Drink Us Dry” special.

-photo by JPMB

It seems the curse of the closing restaurants has again struck Morningside, and this time, under- (and over-) age drinkers university-wide will be feeling the pain.  According to a notice spotted this morning at La Negrita, Bwog’s go-to boozerie will shut its doors “indefinitely” next Saturday, the 11th of April. While they couldn’t be reached for comment, Bwog would find it totally unsurprising if this tragedy turned out to be the fault of the big R.

Regardless, should you need to drown your sorrow in liquor, well, La Negrita will be there for you one last time, as they’re hosting “‘Drink us Dry’” specials on Friday (the 10th) and the fateful Saturday.