A wild FRESHMAN appears! What will BWOG do? BWOG used CONVENIENT FEATURE WHERE WE ANSWER QUESTIONS. It’s super effective!

Hi Mr. Bwog,

My name is Chris. I am a freshman. I have a question. What happens to me after Saturday? Am I a sophomore? Or do I have to wait until June?

All week this question has made me go :( ARG ARG ARG WAHAHA CHU CHU :P. I asked my philosophy professor and he told me to shut up and go back to taking my test. I asked the security guard in Hartley and she didn’t hear me because she was reading the Spec. I asked my friend Oscar and he said that he didn’t know. HELP ME Mr. Bwog. You’re my only hope.

Your bestest friend of all,

Christopher L

Hi Chris.

You can just call us Bwog, although we do take the royal ‘we’. Kidding. Maybe.

We’re a bit divided on this issue, but the staff has a few possible criteria for defining at what point you really level up.

• “You are a sophomore once you get enough credits. So if you pass all your frosh classes, yes.”
• “‘Rising _____’ is a real thing invented for situations like this.”
• “Technically not until you’re back at school, but bitches love older guys, so say you’re a sophomore anyway”

Take that as you will, Chris. Bwog is sitting pretty at super-super-super-senior status, so we don’t have any trouble with the ladies.

Love,
Bwog

Jonas Kaufmann as hot dolled-up Siegfried

You may have realized that Bwog is secretly a huge opera fan.  So when this question landed in our tip form, we were more than happy to find the answer.

Dear Bwog,

I just heard WKCR is doing a 48 hour broadcast to commemorate Wagner’s bicentennial in a week and a half. Can somebody please get the scoop on this and find out which recordings they are playing, and who’s programming it? I’m planning to skip work both days if the recordings are good.

Regards,

Gesamtkunstwerk-er

Indeed, it’s a big year for opera.  While Bwog’s twiddling our thumbs waiting for Verdi’s Bicentennial, I suppose some people are excited for Wagner’s…  Wagner was born on May 22, 1813, and WKCR will be honoring that this May 22.  Unless you’re busy with Commencement or whatever, we recommend you take the day off (and the next day too) to check out this great collection.  They’ll be broadcasting all of his operas chronologically from Rienzi to Parsifal — “We’d have done his first two, but 48 hours wouldn’t have been enough.”  Check out the lineup, courtesy of Stepan Atamian, CC’16, and WKCR, below:

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The artist at work

Answer us this: who really wants to pay $40 for a new Ving card? Particularly when they get lost around once a week. Bwog’s more crafty staff members, Alexandra Avvocato and Claire Friedman, have a bit of experience in counterfeiting room keys: perhaps less glamorous than making fake IDs, but also probably less illegal. 

To start, get yourself a completely flat card that you won’t mind destroying: make sure the card is roughly the same thickness as the Ving card or it won’t work. We suggest empty Starbucks giftcards – they seem to work the best. Take your Ving card and lay it on top of your new card. You need to cut your card so that it’s the same length as your ving card. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t curve at the top; it’s always worked for us with a right angle at the top. Once your card is the length of the Ving card, it’s time to get a little crafty.

Place the ving card on top of your card and tape the two together. Take a sharpie and draw small dots inside each hole of the ving card. Untape your cards and voila! You should have the same dot pattern of your ving card now traced onto your own card. From here, there are two ways to continue:

1. If you have a hole-punch
Take your hole punch and punch where you drew sharpie marks. Attempt to get the dots roughly in the middle of your punch marks. Punch.

If the card you’re using is too thick or the hole punch you’re using is too cheap, you won’t be able to punch through the card. You have two alternatives:

Nobody owns a hole punch! Read on…

Agnes: McBain’s angry spirit animal

The following brought to you by a sleepless, cold, and confused victim of dorm room facilities.

Picture this scenario: it’s 3:40 am, and you’re lying in bed trying to fall asleep and subsequently wake up for your 8:40 class tomorrow. You’ve managed to drown out the drunk seniors outside Havana, your roommate’s incoherent mumbling, and the suspicious noises coming through the wall. Blissful slumber starts to approach.

Then you hear this.

It sounds like a terrified woman screaming as she gets repeatedly stabbed. Is there an exorcism taking place under your bed? A new breed of city rats gathering to eat the dropped Milano’s sandwich on the floor? There’s no rhyme, reason or rhythm to the noise; on most nights, an irregular banging also occurs. There seems to be an especially enthusiastic session around 1:30/2:00 am — a.k.a. when you’re trying to be a good person and go to sleep early-ish.

The guessing game ends below the jump.

This is what it’s all about

Everybody has questions, and Bwog has your answers. In this edition of AskBwog, an intrepid explorer reports on a café that you’re probably either very familiar with or have never heard of before. Read of the delights below.

Dear Bwog,

Every time I walk down to Riverside Park for my morning run I see the mysterious signs for Cafe Nana in the Hillel center. I’m filled with the burning, desperate desire for knowledge about this little sign and the wonders it may conceal. Please help me learn so I don’t have to go in there myself and figure it out.

Sincerely,

Puzzled in the Park

Dear Puzzled,

Never fear—Bwog will bravely venture into this hitherto unexplored building to satisfy your intellectual curiosity.

For some reason, we assumed that Cafe Nana was an Indian joint—maybe we mixed up the lettering and subconsciously read “Naan” the first time? Then, we wondered whether someone’s grandmother had taken residence in the Hillel center and starting cooking, hence the name “Nana.” After realizing that these assumptions were unfounded and a little ridiculous, it was clear that a practical investigation was in order.

Lo and behold…

Obesity waiting to happen

We’re all trying to get back in the swing of things for the new semester, especially waking up at the buttcrack of dawn for that 8:40 lecture. While the go-to energy source is the ever-reliable black gold, coffee, some purists would prefer to avoid caffeine induced seizures. If you’re one of those types, Bwog is here to tell you that another potential energy source is out the window: sugar.

Dear Bwog,

My mom would never buy me sugary drinks or candy as a kid because she said it would make me “bounce off the walls.” I’ve got some early classes this semester that I’m having trouble staying awake through, and I’m not a coffee drinker. Will eating those sugary snacks denied me as a child help me remain alert in my classes and while pulling all nighters during finals?

Yours from dreamland,
Exhausted in EC

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It’s not AskFreudSex for a reason

In this cross between AskBwog and BwogSex, we advise Edward what to do when Bella says “Jacob” in her sleep take a deep look into the psyche.  Send your questions (and stories!) to sex@bwog.com.

Hey Bwog,

Is it a big deal if my boyfriend said his ex-girlfriend’s name while he was asleep?

Yours confusedly,
I’m Positive He Loves Me But WTF

Dear I’m Positive He Loves Me But WTF Current Girlfriend,

‘Nuff said. You got the man now (assuming this happened at night and you were in the same bed). Clearly you have options, but some may seem crazier than others. It is NOT a good idea to bring it up to him–he’ll either be:

1. offended you spied in his sleep (and this may not play out as The Spy Who Loved Me).
2. embarrassed and will spend the next few days grumpy because he’ll have stayed up monitoring his sleep speech all night.
3. inspired and will take it as a sign and run back to the ex (…too soon?).

So what’s the real solution here? Obviously you should go slap the ex in the face for having incepted him. If violence isn’t your thing, you can pee around the house to mark your territory. If public urination isn’t your thing, just get a dream catcher and cuddle closely to keep warm during the cold winter.

Sleep well current girlfriend; in CC Freud may teach you that all dreams mean something, but last night Bwog dreamt it was dating a balloon and it looks like that’s not happening any time soon.

Go to sleep!

Bwog

Your buddy Sigmund via Wikimedia

The Crown Jewels

Dear Bwog,

I was casually walking around naked in my girlfriend’s Shafted Woodbridge duplex post-coitus when I heard giggles. Two girls from across the shaft caught me snacking naked in the kitchen. Shafted (and in so many ways!), I now turn to you for advice: how should I handle this situation?

– Buttler

Dear Buttler,

First, put some clothes on before writing your email—I live across from your shaft too. Second, let’s address this situation pragmatically. Depending on your character, there are a few ways you could handle such a situation:

• The Surrender: put some clothes on and avoid the girls for the rest of the year at all costs.
• The Batman: next time you want to go for a naked stroll, turn the lights off, put the blinds down, and wear a cape. The night is your friend.
• The Conciliator: turn around and face the window like a man… don’t half ass it.
• The Avenger: gain some weight and repeat your public naked frolics.
• The Entertainer: dance. If you’re going to entertain, do it all the way.

Of course, we may have forgotten a few, but this should give you a few options to play with next time you find yourself in such a situation.

Much love,

Bwog

The Full Monty via Wikimedia Commons

The woman behind it all

In the latest edition of AskBwog, we tackle a local mystery for the ages and expose the secrets behind the woman who has captured our hearts and stomachs: Westside’s Maria of assorted dips and snacks fame. You may not be able to handle the truth. 

Dear Bwog,

Who is this woman that I have given hundreds of dollars to in the form of various late-night snacks? Maria seems to always know what my soul is craving, be it pumpkin-flavored cold oatmeal, salmon chive dip, or a slightly squashed tiramisu. Is there reality to the legend? Or am I just buying into a lie when I get four containers of quinoa at 3 a.m.?

-Clueless in Carman

Bwog approached this mystery with the pre-assumed hypothesis that Maria was a little old Italian grandma residing deep in the basement of Westside, faithfully churning out cold oatmeal and protein-rich dips for her hungry goslings. But the cold, hard truth had to be faced: she’s too cool for us. A quick Google Hours of painstaking research in Butler produced the above picture and this web page. Maria Zoitas is not a cultural Columbia fable—she is a real woman, presumably with a real kitchen somewhere, and probably has more important things to care about than how you use her guacamole to eat your sorrows away. And, according the web page, her kitchen “is where the magic happens.” (But is that sanitary?) Maria runs the kitchen in all three of Westside’s locations, so we’re really not that special. Incidentally, she’s the wife of the guy who created Westside and isn’t Italian, but Greek. Close enough.

There may be a glimmer of hope: according to the gods of Westside, everything she makes is “prepared fresh and made with love.” So, somewhere out there, Maria is watching you and loving you just like you pretended.

And hey, she may be someone’s grandma.

Magical Maria via www.wmarketnyc.com

Platonic disapproval

It’s that time of year again, when Columbia students choose their classes, make new friends, and get hot and bothered when Professor Sexy Time bends over to pick up the chalk. Despite all the TAs, professors, and guest lecturers who look like the soles of Michael Phelps’ feet, there are still countless babes-with-brains teaching on Columbia’s dime. But, ask the more ambitious students, how about some hands-on education—or, to put it another way, what are Columbia’s views on private office hours in a nice place downtown with a quiet bar and a quieter doorman? Bwog’s ‘Licit Sexpert Rae B. tackles this burning question…

Take a cold shower and turn in your Econ homework on time, because the official Columbia University policy on student and teacher/TA relationships is NO. That is pretty much as subtle as the official wording gets. In the policy listed by the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action, faculty members are forbidden from having consensual, “private” relationships with any student “over whom he or she [the professor] exercises academic or professional authority.” Also, if you have any previous personal relationship with a faculty member, they can’t touch you with a ten-foot laser pointer. (Not literally touch you, of course, as lasers are made of particles and waves and things that don’t touch anyone—bottom line: if you want to do the teacher, drop the class.)

The policy for Teaching Assistants is even stricter. “Personal relationships, whether intimate or not,” are so deeply un-okay that—rumor has it—TAs who get to know their students too well are grouped by academic focus, entered into a lottery, and forced to fight to the death in a forest arena beneath the Teacher’s College. Although it is acknowledged that some TAs are not made of stone and consequently might become friendly with their students, the official stance is that any kind of relationship whatsoever outside of the academic environment can be grounds for removal, for showing “poor judgment as a TA.”

The main concern for the University seems to be that student and teacher/TA relationships “pose a threat to academic professionalism in situations where they compromise, or appear to compromise, the faculty members’ judgment of students.” Fair enough—there’s no way to prove that Professor von HitDatAss isn’t giving that chick in the fourth row an A because he’s doinking her, or giving her an F because he isn’t anymore. It is also unfair to students who rely on professors and TAs for time and attention if some can exert pressure based on an intimate relationship.

But, there’s some good news for those amorous at heart! Although Columbia does have these policies in writing, there are no automatic penalties: all complaints are reviewed by the administration before action is taken. So if you do get a chance to, uh, “manually elevate” your TA’s grading curve, don’t worry, coming clean won’t get anyone fired, at least right off the bat.

However, smoke 19 feet away from a dorm and they’ll cuff you like the devilspawn you are.

Free razors via Wikimedia Commons

A fearful tipster spotted this truck outside of John Jay with the words ”From Food to Fuel” stamped on its side. Intrigued, we couldn’t help but wonder: is this what happens to dining hall leftovers once they’re beyond being recycled as pizza toppings? We thought that was just a Simpsons plotline…

Fueling our food

We did some heavy Googling sleuthing and found this:

RWA Resource Recovery provides free, on-demand, efficient pickups of waste cooking oil to food service establishments in New York City. Participating clients enjoy fully-licensed and insured pickup services that guarantee compliance with New York City waste cooking oil disposal regulations.  All waste cooking oil collected is recycled into ASTM standard biodiesel. Biodiesel is fuel made from vegetable and animal sources. Biodiesel can be used in any diesel engine without modification and burns 78% cleaner than petroleum diesel.

Get that.  John Jay serves not only cleans out your intestines, but the environment, too.

But, I am le tired

In AskBwog, we tackle hard hitting issues facing American teens today.

Dear Bwog editors,

Class registration for Fall 2012 is fast-approaching (scary!), and I need to take a global core class. I’m writing you for help picking a class, and also because I’m sure many other CC students would appreciate Bwog’s input as well. I want a class that’s not super demanding, but I’m not necessarily looking for just an easy A. I understand that the point of the Global Core is to expose students to interesting things they would not otherwise study, and I want to take something interesting! Do you have any suggestions for a good global core class, ideally with an awesome professor, being offered in fall 2012?

Thanks for your help!

Globally Off-Centered

Yeas and nays, below

Drama over Obamanard aside, the president of the United States coming to speak at Barnard is a BFD.  All of his carefully considered appearances are under extreme scrutiny, especially in an election year.  Thus his decision (as DSpar explained, he requested to speak and was not asked) to speak at any college had to have involved a lot of thought, planning, and coffee.  Bwog set out to see what goes into a move like this, and to pick the brains of the big minds on campus.

A Political Move

Flora Davidson, a political science (and CULPA silver nugget) professor at Barnard, was quick to agree that this is a strategic political move.  She explained that Obama’s decision to speak will “help him to highlight a demographic he thinks he can sway in his favor.”  However, she went on, moves like this do not change the mind of voters but serve to “reinforce preexisting dispositions.”  In this case, Obama is looking at women voters.  Rosalind Rosenberg, retired history professor at Barnard who taught courses about women and politics, stated that “Obama’s decision to speak at Barnard signals both that he cares about women’s particular health care concerns and that he recognizes his reelection is going to depend on women’s votes.”

Female (Electoral) Power

Obama won the last election thanks, in no small part, to young female voters.  Ester Fuchs—who taught political science, including the American Parties and Election course, at Barnard for twenty years, worked with Bloomberg, and is now Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science and Director of the Urban and Social Policy Program at SIPA—gave figures to prove this.  In 2008, 70.4 million women voted, while only 60.7 million men did.  The turnout rate was approximately 5% higher for women than men.  This has been a trend since 1980, giving women more power in the electorate and showing that to win an election, one really needs the female vote.  As Fuchs put it, “ignore women at your own peril.”  In the 2008 election, 56% of women voted for Obama while McCain got 43% of female votes. Among the male voters, it was nearly an even split.

It was more than just women, though, Obama relied on the youth vote for his election.  In 2008 there was a 7% gender gap in turnout rates for the 18-24 year-old bracket, with about 1 million more women voters—again, Obama needs the women.  Moreover, in general the 18-24 bracket is a “very important group to Obama.”  The 2008 election saw a surge in this group with a 52% turnout rate versus 2000’s 34.6% rate, a majority of whom voted for Obama.

Other Relevant Considerations

Clogged arteries are a small price to pay for this kind of joy

Bwog recently received this email from someone who may or may not have been sober, and our interest (and appetite) was piqued.

Dear Bwog,

I feel like doing something crazy this weekend. Are there any places where, if I manage to eat a crazy amount of food, I get my picture on a wall or some other award?

Get CAVA on speed dial,
Hungry

Dear Hungry,

Food is very important to us here at Bwog, so we happily polled some neighborhood spots to see if they had rewards for those looking to test the limits of gluttony and good taste. Here’s what we found:

• Ben & Jerry’s on 104th and Broadway offers brave and lactose-loving patrons the mammoth Vermonster—20 scoops of ice cream with toppings, weighing in around 6,000 calories. If you and one teammate can finish the Vermonster in ten minutes, you get a coupon for… another one. Depending on how much you like ice cream, this could be either a reward or a vom-inducing punishment.
• Though it doesn’t involve food, earning a spot on the brew crew at Mel’s is another stomach-swelling feat. To gain a spot on the “crew”  you have to pick up a card and get it punched for forty different kinds of beer (the back of the card states that you are not allowed to do this in a single day, in case you’re feeling especially ambitious). Once the card is filled, your name is posted behind the bar and you’re eligible for nightly brew crew specials. You also get 20 ounces of beer for the price of 16.
• On the Amsterdam side of things, there is also the unofficial “Tour de Hamdel”, which involves eating all twenty-nine Hamdel sandwiches (not in one sitting, although we’re sure that counts for bonus points). This sandwich odyssey seems fairly unexciting but it has its devotees, as outlined by WikiCU.
• We also contacted Koronets to see if they reward the wasted motivated patrons who finish an entire Koronets pizza in front of witnesses. The employee that we spoke to seemed to feel that finishing the enormous pizza in one sitting was reward enough. Touché.
• If this isn’t enough action for you, here’s a comprehensive lineup of upcoming eating competitions and ongoing food challenges in greater New York.

Now that we’ve armed you with knowledge, go forth and stuff your face.

Sugary Triumph via Wikimedia Commons

Yawn

Bwog fell asleep at 8pm on Thanksgiving (and last night….oops), and was determined to find out why. Assuming those after-meal droopy eyes had something to do with science (the idea of a god of food comas was dismissed after much discussion), we set Bwogsleuth Zach Kagan on the trail. Here he presents a roundup of internet wisdom to reveal the cause of post-turkey sleep disorder.

It’s a familiar scene. You’re watching Thanksgiving day football, and your eyes start to droop. But it’s not just you—your whole family, aunts and cousins, that neighbor you only see three times a year—they’re all slouching in their chairs, lazily fighting the sweet embrace of sleep. Just then your Auntie Nora pipes up and says: “It’s the tryptophan! In the turkey!”

Ah! But you, seeker of truth, are just as much trapped in the cave as Auntie Nora, because the whole tryptophan in turkey causing drowsiness is but a myth. Pervasive myth at that: there’s even a Seinfeld episode where Jerry sedates his girlfriend with a big turkey dinner so he can play with her toys (it’s less creepy in context…well, on second thought it isn’t really). The truth is that that tryptophan is a mild sedative contained in turkey, but the story is a bit more complicated. It’s time to put your biochemistry caps on: tryptophan is an essential amino acid that you get from food. Your body needs it to make important stuff like boring ol’ vitamin B, but also fun neurotransmitters like serotonin and melatonin which calm you down and can make you drowsy. Case closed right? You eat lots of turkey, get ingest oodles of tryptophan, your brain goes into a serotonin producing overdrive, and you nod off to sleep halfway through Alcibiades’s speech.

If only it were that simple! There are a bunch of other amino acids in turkey as well, and tryptophan is one of the scarcer ones. Amino acids need to compete to get past the blood-brain barrier and on Thanksgiving there’s just too much competition and tryptophan gets drowned out. Really, the only way that tryptophan can make you drowsy is on an empty stomach, and how likely is that on turkey day? Turkey doesn’t even have a particularly high amount of tryptophan (both beef and soybeans contain more). So, what really makes you sleepy after Thanksgiving? The same thing that makes you sleepy after any meal.

Find out what after the jump!