Columbians snagged some Oscars last night! Adjunct film professor Geoffrey Fletcher won Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on “Precious,” and Kathryn Bigelow, SOA ’81, became the first female to ever win an Academy Award for Best Director, and her movie “The Hurt Locker” took home 6 awards in total, including Best Picture. (NBCNY & NYP)

Governor Paterson pledges to keep governing until the end of the year. (NYT)

This time, Ahmadenijad is calling 9/11 a a “big fabrication.” (Gothamist)

The MTA is trying out experimental clocks that will say when the next subway train is due. (NYT)

Obama inspired first-time voters, but not enough. (NYDaily)

Also, please be aware that Bwog has recently updated its comment policy and encourages everyone to familiarize themselves with it.

Last night’s season premiere of Saturday Night Live marked the debut of new cast member and Columbia grad Jenny Slate. Instead of creating a memorable character or nailing an impression, though, Slate set the Internet aflame with news and video of her unscripted “f-bomb.”

Performing as a biker chick with a talk show in a sketch rife with “friggin’ this and “freakin’ that,” Slate suddenly said, “I fuckin’ love you for that,” setting off alarms with the fellas at the freakin’ FCC.

Fortunately for Slate, not only has Internet reaction been sympathetic (both because of the number of “friggin”s to slip up on and because it was one of the few funny moments in the episode), but there’s also a decent chance the network won’t be fined: NBC got off when Bono (who coincidentally, was last night’s music guest) used similar language at the 2003 Golden Globes.

Here’s hoping notoriously grumpy creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels feels similarly forgiving.

 
Bwog extends its heartfelt congratulations to Dr. John D. Clarke, MD, FAAFP, and (evidently) badass MC, whose anti-H1N1 rap beat out over 200 competitors to win Flu.gov’s 2009 Flu Prevention PSA Contest.

Looks like Clarke, who graduated from Columbia’s very own medical school, returned to Alma Mater to earn his MC as well: his swine-bashing video is filmed on the overpass between EC and the rest of the world, with the law school, Amsterdam Avenue, and assorted academic buildings in the background.

In the minute-long PSA, a lab-coat clad Clarke spits lyrics such as “Hand sanitizer I advise ya get it, why?/it makes germs die when you rub and let it dry” over an impressively catchy beat. Check it out- this just may be the best informational music video since back in ’86, when another doctor taught us all to stroke.

Image via Daily Intel

Mark Lilla debates whether conservative ideas are properly studied on college campuses, and adds that, at Columbia “not a single prominent conservative is to be found.” (Chronicle of Higher Education)

HHS Secretary says swine flu vaccines could start early next month, but will that really stop the hysteria? (AP)

The new (and even-more-Twitter-like) Facebook Lite debuts – another new version of Facebook for people to create Facebook groups hating it. (CNET)

Pulitzer-winner Tracy Kidder’s new book is about a “a young medical student who fled the genocidal civil war in Burundi in 1994″ and ended up at Columbia and later medical school and American citizenship. Jeez, we thought it was hard getting out of bed this morning. (Buffalo News)

Finally, our thoughts are with grad student Jonathan Widawsky, as New Haven police continue to look for his missing fiancee. (Daily News)

The brainchild of two former Business School students, DessertTruck has rapidly grown in popularity since it first started its engine in late 2007. The (surprisingly reasonably priced) mobile pastry truck has roamed the streets during the day (making its way up to Columbia from time to time), and hangs out at St. Mark’s at night, drawing more and more devoted customers each month. It was TimeOut New York’s readers’ choice for best mobile food last year, and beat Food Network chef Bobby Flay in a “bread pudding throwdown.” All signs pointed to increasing stardom, word eventually leaking out to tourists, and then becoming too popular for the hippest among us after getting its own New Yorker cartoon.

But now the city has suddenly declared their mobile food permit invalid and denied them the chance to renew said permit, forcing the Dessert Truck to shutter its public operations for the forseeable future. As denying freedom of dessert is the first step on the road to culinary fascism, we urge the city: for the good of New York’s taste buds, please reconsider.

roboppy/Flickr

It’s two of the best-known rites-of-passage for any Columbian: the first time that you forgot to switch to the 1 train at 96th, and the first time someone who was staying with you forgot to switch. The latter, of course, is the funnier, especially if you tell your visitor the wrong directions back, but the former is annoying, and could even cost you a full two dollars $2.25 (still a full hot dog at some local stands!) if you don’t realize your mistake until you’re outside.

Yes, subways can be deceiving. Fear not, though, subway novices, for if you have enough money to spend on an iPhone/Blackberry/Android/Kindle, then you can buy the new iPhone subway app from an start-up company called Exit Strategy NYC. While it admittedly won’t prevent such boneheadedness as missing your stop, it will save you time: the app – created by ten weeks of riding the entire subway system – tells users which car will be the closest to another line or an exit.

Still, this is just an smartphone app – why mention it here? Because the app, which was blurbed in CityRoom and amNY, was conceived/programmed by two former Columbia students – Jonathan Wegener, CC ’07 and Benny Wong, SEAS ’07. Though CityRoom says Wegener had no experience in developing a mobile application, neither alum was a web neophyte while on campus – Wong’s LinkedIn profile says he worked for CUIT (and is now at Morgan Stanley), while Wegener used to run the original Columbia-specific website, CULPA. That’s using your education.

UPDATE: Wegener got in touch with us to stress that the application does not have a map of the subway system, an impression the first version of this post mistakenly gave (Google’s handled much of the actual mapping). He also provided us with a sample image, and said the program will be getting some TV coverage soon.

What are your travel plans for the summer? All proud of the money you saved to travel to the country/continent of your dreams? Well, Ryan Johns CC ’09 will see your trip and raise you: he’s traveling across Europe, and staying in shape!

Yes, Johns, a former cross country team member, is running across Europe.”I intend to average about 20 miles a day,” he says on the trip’s website. “As a collegiate runner, I find myself frequently running around a hundred miles a week…yet every morning I wake up in the same place. I want to try running something other than loops for a while. I like to travel, why not put this free transportation to some good?” A wonderfully logical answer.

Johns will return to hitting the books (grad school in architecture) next year; in the meantime, you can follow his trip on his blog, which appears to be updated almost daily, and covers such important topics as shin splints and trespassing brewery grounds (photo from Johns’s Flickr photostream).

- JCD

Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Times covered former Dems president and current White House staffer Josh Lipsky, CC ’08, and his trip to Buchenwald as part of Obama’s team. Lipsky, who worked on Obama’s advance team during the campaign, did not volunteer just to get out of the Visitor’s Office; rather, he wanted to visit the camp where his grandfather had been a prisoner:

“By the time Lipsky got to the camp last week, its caretakers already knew of his connection from other young staffers already there. Within hours of his arrival, the information began to flow…A guide found a letter from a prisoner, telling of a camp cook in the later years of Buchenwald who used to line his clothing with potatoes and sneak them to the hungriest… Later, someone from the camp’s foundation came to him with his grandfather’s check-in slip, on which the young cook had signed his name — in a manner bearing a striking resemblance to the way Lipsky writes his own signature.”

Our modus operandi is to make a snarky comment here, but in this case, just read the whole thing (photo by Chris Usher of the Times).

Want to go to the Venice Biennale this year, you eager little Art History major you? Uh, YES. Well, the Columbia Alumni Association can take you! 

Kinda, sorta, ish. They can take you to all sorts of cool events once you’re already there. In order to get to Venice, they recommend that you… spend your (parents’?) money at their favorite travel agency.

Yeah, it’s probably the richer end of the alum spectrum that would go to an event like this, surely expected to purchase their own tickets. But it seems that, fortunately or unfortunately, this email went out to all CC and SEAS students as well. Bwog thinks we should pool our resources for a sailboat.

Full email (with pretty picture of Venice) after the jump.

Read more…

- Wikimedia Commons

Make that two cabinet officials: sources confirm to Bwog that the Class Day speaker will be announced at midday tomorrow on Low Steps, and that discussions are underway with Attorney General Eric Holder, CC ’73 and Law ’76.

Holder, the first African-American attorney general, has previously been Attorney General for the District of Columbia, Deputy Attorney General under President Bill Clinton, and one of three members of President Barack Obama’s vice-presidential selection committee. The two alums were in the news together over the weekend, in fact, when Obama told the New York Times that he disagreed with Holder’s characterization of America as a “nation of cowards” on racial issues. According to Columbia College Today, while in the College, Holder “majored in American history at the College and served as a mentor at a Harlem youth center.” Unlike his boss, who has rarely talked about his time at Columbia, Holder has often returned to Morningside, and was at one point a member of Columbia’s Board of Trustees.  Any questions about the speaker can be addressed to ccsc09@columbia.edu.

And, to help along the inevitable comparisons, here are some other schools’ chosen speechifyers: Eric Schmidt (Penn), Katie Couric (Princeton), Howard Dean (University of Vermont), Christopher Buckley (Yale), Vice-President Joe Biden (Syracuse), and Oprah Winfrey (Duke).

- JCD