Miracles, Marcus the Magn(et)ificent Levine, answers why your headphone-covered ears ring when you walk through the Butler detectors? ”>

Typical Butler denizen

In the latest installment of SocketHop, Minister of Miracles, Marcus the Magn(et)ificent Levine, answers why your headphone-covered ears ring when you walk through the Butler detectors? 

Don’t let the tranquil, seldom broken silence of the reading rooms fool you—Butler is a very loud place. Not just Butler, but practically everywhere in the modern world is saturated with the silent noise of electromagnetic radiation. As normally functioning human beings, we usually only come into contact with visible and infrared light. Still, innumerable other frequencies of electromagnetic radiation beyond our perception, from radio to ultraviolet, permeate the air.

While you’re strolling through the Butler book theft detectors lookin’ fly with your doughnut sized headphones, you may experience a strange sharp ringing noise. The 3M security gates operate using magnetic EAS (Electronic Article Surveillance) technology, and the way the system works can directly interfere with your musical experience, and perhaps drive you to question your sanity.

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So we told you what it is, but here’s what it looks like. DUN DUN DUN!

B&W editor and Bwog tipster Mariela Quintana poses a question that even we can’t answer: Who took the baby that the stork dropped off in front of Tomo?

Hark! Bwog stumbled upon something new outside of everyone’s favorite place to wait online on Sunday mornings, Community Food & Juice: a new “stroller parking” section, which can be found outside the entrance along a metal bar of scaffolding. That’s right, here in New York City’s more family-friendly crevices, we don’t have parking for cars, but toddlers. Will Community provide meters to make a little extra cash as the brunch crowd waits for its blueberry pancakes? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, be careful not to trip over the line of BabyBjorns outside next weekend on your way in.

It was three years ago today (and a short time after Bwog’s birth) that an intrepid photographer captured the mythical Snow Baby Starfish on film for the first (and, tragically, only) time while the creature posed on College Walk in the newly fallen snow.  We’d like to take this opportunity to share the pink-cheeked love with a whole new crop of readers.  Enjoy!

Hey jobless alumni, why so glum? With your Columbia degree, the world is at your fingertips: first phone sex operating (“executive stress relief”), and now digital entrepreneurship. Bwog caught up with Kareem Shaya, former Fed editor-in-chief and inventor of famous website Send Barack Your Baby, which lately has gotten all sorts of attention from the rest of the internet, namely Gawker and CNN.

The website provides an opportunity for parents to ship their children in boxes to Illinois so that they might be kissed by a certain other Columbia grad. Except it doesn’t actually, which is why the slideshow of Obama-supporting babies features no baby-in-box pictures, to remind us it’s only a joke and that babies can’t even vote. 

One newsanchor in the CNN video also cautions us not to send an actual infant but “if you do, be sure to use bubble wrap.” At which point she suffocates a doll with bubble wrap and sticks it in a carboard box. Mazel Tov Kareem!

Bwogger Katie Reedy overheard the phone conversation of a dorm security guard…



“I know. I know, I was like ‘oh damn’ too… Yea, and so I asked her, I said, ‘Girl, how do you know it’s mine.’ And she said, ‘I didn’t ever do it with anyone else.’ And I was like, ‘What?! Girl, I need to know this is for real – I need to know that this is not just some Maury shit.’ I said, ‘I am not a statistic!!’”

Just make sure that at Thanksgiving dinner 20 years from now, you don’t let him know he was an accident. Bwog knows that hurts.

Bwog came across this flyer on a lamppost on Broadway near 113^th today, and immediately melted from cuteness-overload.  Our heart goes out to this poor child—the loss of a favored toy is a tragic event, indeed.  Like the Good Samaritans we are, Bwog will do anything in its power to reunite blue giraffe with his rightful owner—so if you have any leads, email bwgossip@columbia.edu and we’ll give you the phone number from the poster. Tally Ho!

 More stuff you shouldn’t have saved on a public computer.

However, only the artists know the intentions that lie behind these choices. Since they are dead, we will never know but can guess.

These artists seem almost the equivalent of psychologists in that rather than telling us what is important, they depict it through the use of geometry, color, light, contour lines, and the placement of figures, and they devise many ways for our eyes to be guided to a single place, the Madonna and the child. Some questions remain.

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