Spotted by Chief of Ruggles Snuggles Andrew Kisch

Bwog received numerous tips today that a film crew from ABC7 was around campus getting footage and conducting interviews about the recent attempted robberies of iPhones. No footage has been posted to the local affiliate’s website yet, but we’re hoping that when it does, we can get sandwich man‘s take on all this.

Update, 3:00 am: The segment is now online. Check it out below:

Perry missed the part about "giving to the poor"

The New York Post, tone-deaf as ever, reports the story with the headline “Columbia Frat Honcho Jailed.” Walter Perry, the titular honcho, is accused of stealing $650,000 from Saint Anthony’s over six years, and has been sentenced to at least 24 months of jail time. It is not clear how the money was obtained, but apparently Perry spent it on “wine, women and song.” His defense was that all of the records which would exonerate him had “mysteriously vanished,” while according to Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Roger Hayes, prosecutors had “rock solid” evidence against Perry. Now the members of St. A’s can sleep a little more soundly within the walls of their “ornate” bedrooms.

Robin Hood via Wikimedia

Ahmadinejad at Columbia circa 2007

It began innocently enough. The Columbia International Relations Council and Association (CIRCA, formerly known as Model UN) announced to their members that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who gave a speech at Columbia in 2007), in town for the United Nations General Assembly, had invited them to a dinner on September 21st (the logistics of this invitation are unclear). Bwog has obtained a copy of the email sent to the CIRCA listerv. Here’s an excerpt:

II. DINNER WITH IRANIAN PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD
When: Wednesday, September 21
Time: 6:30 PM
Where: Midtown
Why: To learn about Iran from her president! Noting high demand for
this event, will be accepting names of interested CIRCA members on a
first-come-first-serve basis. We cannot guarantee spots. Please email
CIRCA Vice President of Academics, Tim Chan (timars.chan@gmail.com),
with your name, school, and class year. If you are a veteran CIRCA
member, please briefly list your involvements with the club.

Soon after, Spec wrote a story about the planned meeting, which did not make clear whether or not the meal was actually confirmed, or simply a possibility. Their article, like everything else relating to this situation, was not without controversy. The Spec article includes a quote from Tim Chan, CIRCA’s Vice-President of Academic Affairs. Rhonda Shafei, CIRCA’s president, tells Bwog that Chan tried to retract his comments before the story was published in the print edition of the paper (although the story had been published online for over a day), but Spec refused. Otherwise, CIRCA had no comment on the story.

Spec’s article brought the planned dinner to the attention of national media, including Fox News and The New York Post, who accused Columbia students of “dining with a madman” and being desperate for attention.
Read more…

This cat suffers many more borders than the CU engineers. Photo via Wikimedia.

Columbia’s Engineers Without Borders are one of three winners of the PBS Planet Forward Innovator contest. This means they’ll appear on the Planet Forward show on April 8. CU EWB came in second place overall, and had the highest number of YouTube views. You can check out their winning idea–implementing sustainable sanitation and water management in Ghana—as well as the video here. Congratulations EWB!

After years of just one Manhattan branch in Harlem, IHOP is finally coming to Times Square. Tourists rejoice! (Gothamist)

Two men are accused of attacking a Queens imam in a subway and shouting racist and anti-Muslim epithets. (NY Daily News)

Sarah Palin plans to visit Haiti—probably because she can’t see it from her house. (HuffPo)

These are ludicrous times at Columbia University. Bwog’s very own Eliza Shapiro tells it how it is. (Capital)

Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chinese dissident Liu Xiabo was not permitted to attend the prize ceremony. His medal was awarded to an empty chair. (NYT)

The Political Science Department has no comment on Professor David Epstein’s arrest, and the University is unable to comment on continuing police investigations.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The J-School and SEAS are joining forces to breed super-reporters. (Wired)

CU basketball head coach Joe Jones may or may not be moving to BC. (Spec)

Columbia, unite! There’ll be a flash mob at 1pm today to “reclaim” Low. (Gothamist)

The University and labor unions don’t really get along. (Spec)

Photo via Wikimedia

Photo courtesy of Electronic Arts, via NYT

Columbia professors get elected to things (Senate.gov)

Columbia’s core is the magic of video games (NYT)

Columbia’s architecture is blogworthy for Bloomberg (Bloomberg)

Columbia knows about the best diets (CNN)

Now that Obama’s popularity is declining, it turns out he never attended Columbia? (TransWorldNews)

What’s that smell taking over your dorm? Probably stink bugs. (Gothamist)

Where can you find information about the best ramen in Tokyo? Start by reading Ramenate!, started by a Columbia grad student. (NYT)

How can New Yorkers communicate without actually talking to each other? Through the use of Wi-Fi network names. (NYDaily)

Who impregnated Padma Lakshmi? Adam Dell, brother of Michael Dell and Columbia Business School adjunct professor. (Gawker)

Why was your course suddenly canceled? Who knows. (Spec)

Image via Flickr

Everyone’s favorite neighborhood BDSM club, Conversio Virium, attracted previous media attention in 2006, when Ann Coulter dissed them in an interview,  telling Fox News “[S]omeone who needs to join a club at college to find a way to have sex, probably not your lookers…probably something a little wrong about them.”CV got some revenge last spring, however, when they hosted speaker Kate Bornstein in Altschul Hall immediately after Coulter’s infamous “fisting kindergartners” speech. The topic of Bornstein’s lecture? What to do “when expressing yourself makes other people queasy.”

Now, Conversio Virium is featured in Time Out New York’s Sex Issue 2009, in an article titled “The Perv’s Guide to NYC.” The article features write-ups of sex-related establishments in all 5 boroughs, in addition to what is quite possibly the creepiest picture Bwog has ever seen. “Columbia isn’t all stuffy academia,” the article claims, yet the blurb appears pitched to just that sort of crowd. Time Out notes that “sessions typically welcome a notable member of the kink and BDSM community” to talk about topics like “bondage, knife play, hypnotism and flogging.” And it’s not as if the field is without its academic treatises. “Modern day master/slave relationship,” indeed.

During summer, students may be slaving away at an unpaid resume bullet point internship, scrambling to find something after said internship failed to materialize, or lounging around on the couch (lucky…). Professors and fortunate grad students, though, are still releasing their reports in hopes of gaining a tiny bit of recognition from a conference, providing a useful link for future users of JSTOR, or building their resume to get a better job/their precious tenure. Mostly the last one. And while the newswires are mostly dead in the middle of July, most of Columbia’s headlines are coming from these projects.

• Sleeping light? According to Medical Center researchers, that makes you more likely to be fat.
• Researchers find that a coronary calcium scan might cause cancer in itself.
• Thought art history majors would be left out? Of course not:  a sociology doctoral student claims French modernists who bloomed later were also productive for longer.
• There’s no conclusion yet, but Columbia is partnering with the University of Michigan and Harvard (among others) to study suicide and mental health in the military.
• This last study is more than a month old, but there’s no time like the present for the obvious: abstinence-only education will stop contraceptives, but kids’ll keep on having sex.
  

Now go outside and feel enlightened!

CBS News’ latest Medical Correspondent comes with a working knowledge of Homer and the difficulties of swimming 75 yards. Jennifer Ashton, CC ’91 and College of Physicians and Surgeons ’00, will move to The Early Show this year after a three-year gig consulting for Fox News. She already has her own successful private gynecology practice in Englewood, New Jersey, so any of the forty-five billion Columbia students from the Garden State can easily scope her out.

Underclassmen in the throes of indecision will note that Ashton was an art history major before going medical. CBS News president Sean McManus cites her ability to “clearly communicate” as a prime asset, though in the wrong light that may smack of “can translate for the plebes.”

The Early Show is on from 7:00 am to 9:00 am Monday through Saturday. You might as well stay up that extra hour on Friday and catch some of it.

The Princeton Review’s venerated “College Hopes and Worries” survey has hit the e-news stands, and apparently Columbia is every student’s “dream school.”

That makes you feel a little better about your life and your lottery number, now doesn’t it? Bwog is proud – can we get a little ROAR?

Only Harvard and Stanford were voted higher on the students’ “Dream College List” (oh yeah, and Harvard was not #1). The survey also generated a list of parent’s dream schools, which starts with Harvard and Stanford in H-centric order, and Princeton in bronze.

Guess who’s not on the parent’s “Dream College” list? YOU. You, Columbia, are nowhere to be found in the top ten. Yes, parents would much rather send their kids to UCLA, USC, NYU (yeah, really), and the University of Notre Dame than send them here.

Perhaps the elders fear that their children will be irrevocably damaged by our pigeon punting antics, sarcastic tone, and 50 person protests. 

To exams: Who were you fooling with all of those hours you spent in Butler last week? Not the good people at Cramster.com, apparently — the cheatsheet site reports more traffic from Columbia than any other school. So this is how you were using those WiFi maps.

To global warming: Emitted in Texas, sequestered in Memphis? A new map shows where rocks can store excess carbon dioxide. Watch out, Sprayregen: Columbia’s moving into the storage business, too.

To fat kids: The closer the fast food, the fatter the students. Considering the nearest McDonald’s is about five blocks from campus, Columbia might be in the clear, but just think what obesity rates must be like at Hamburger University. 

To costly journalism: Attention, bankrupt media outlets! The J-School wants your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning for a paycheck. Provided they submit three clips and a cover letter, of course.

To low attendance: People do actually watch sports at Columbia. Particularly women’s basketball. If you don’t believe us, check out this nifty press release.

The venerated MTV/online (see, it�s like the internet, but on television) phenomenon CollegeHumor recently posted a music video titled �If I Were a Bro.� Think now — what�s the least likely college or university to appear in such a film?

And yet there Columbia is! When a girlfriend imagines what it would be like to be a bro (sadly forgetting about bro rape), her dreamscape mostly features scenes that could be found in any college environment — frat house, dorm rooms, disgusting couches, etc.

But then, at 2 minutes and 5 seconds into the video, some unmistakable gates and a hideous modern red brick building come into view behind the tailgating brofest.

Yes, Carman apparently represents typical collegeness, or at least the sort of collegeness appropriate for a video about an unemployed, unwashed, drunkenly bromantic bro. Carman also seems to be the only recognizable bit of Columbia in the video. Perhaps as you reminisce about your youthful days stumbling through those hallowed and low-ceilinged halls, you�ll understand why Carman, and no other building, could receive this brotastic cameo.

Finally, documented proof that Columbia can turn out attractive people. Page Six Magazine has named Vampire Weekend singer Ezra Koenig one of New York’s 50 Hottest Bachelors. Koenig beat out another Columbia affiliate, Keith Gessen, by several spots, but ranks lower than Devendra Banhart, presumably for failing to meet some sort of facial hair quota.

Regardless, you now have something to brag about besides the same old alum in the Oval Office, etc. Mail a copy to everyone you knew in high school!