The four horses of the SSOL apocalypse are on their way! Hurry up and register for that class that you thought you didn’t want to take but turned out to be full of unknown knowledge (or just full of easy homework assignments), as it’s the last day to add courses. Also, if you just don’t get MusicHum, drop it quick, as it is the last day to drop Core classes. Don’t forget that amidst all of this dropping and adding, you still must be registerd for a minimum of 12 points and that today is your last chance to uncover a grade for a course taken Pass/D/Fail.

As you decide how much time to devote to sleeping this semester, keep our high stakes competition in mind!

Vintage SSOL via Wikimedia Commons

Rubik's Cube: intuitive for smart people

It may be counter-intuitive that a state’s Governor would file his taxes late. After all, public officials are role models, right? Not so in New Jersey, where Chris Christie will file late for the second year in a row. (WSJ)

It’s pretty intuitive that the words and phrases we use all have a history. This weekend, you’ll be prepared to expound on the etymology of a word whose history may surprise you. (Slate)

Legal concepts are often counter-intuitive. (corporation = person?) So it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Mother Nature is on her way to being granted rights. (Wired)

It’s very intuitive that people don’t spend much time reading signs on garbage cans. The MTA very smartly figured this out and decided to go with fewer words and bigger pictures on their “trash receptacles.” (NYT)

Columbia will begin construction on the Campbell Sports Center by the end of April. Advocates for Inwood Manhattan, a community group, are concerned by what they see as the rapid approach of construction. (Spec, DNAinfo)

Enigmatology via Wikimedia Commons

Which side would Adam Smith be on?

Undergrads apparently. The battle has begun to determine, once and for all, whether economists or politicians will rule the world IAB. The Economics Society and Political Science Students Association are going head to head right now in full out warfare, capture the flag style, fighting to the death in Riverside Park. The winner gets to take home an “amazingly ostentatious” trophy. Cute guys!

Stylin’ via Wikipedia

These goats are competitive.

Thanks to the Common App switch, Columbia may be the second most selective Ivy this year, after only Harvard. This has purportedly scared Harvard and Princeton into reinstating their early admissions plans. (Daily Beast, Harvard Crimson, Daily Princetonian)

Columbia students, representing the Student Global AIDS campaign, plan to protest House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s speech at Harvard. (WaPo)

A centrist Democratic president just announced that he’ll give the commencement address at a prominent university in New York City. Sorry POTUS project, it’s just Clinton and NYU. Also, Emma Watson is reportedly considering transferring to a prominent university in New—yeah, it’s NYU again! (NYULocal)

Construction is underway at 101st and Amsterdam, the new home of Warique Peruvian Kitchen, a restaurant specializing in Peruvian food. No sign of a menu, but traditional Peruvian dishes include “aji de gallina (a milky, spicy chicken stew), ceviche, and papa rellena (stuffed potatoes).” How will this affect Flor de Mayo? (The College Critic)

The continuing and brutal violence in Libya has been on everyone’s mind. One Columbia student spoke with NBC News about the terrifying experiences of his friends and family in Libya. (NYT, NBC)

Caprine competition from Wikimedia Commons.

Photo via Wikipedia

Barnard’s Director of Public Safety Dianna Pennetti informed the community this morning that Frightening Animals were spotted on Columbia’s campus this morning.

They weren’t hawks. They were coyotes. In front of Lewisohn. Who says we’re too urban?

Full email after the jump.
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Submissions to Bwog’s Costume Contest are rolling in. Before we pick a winner, check out our favorite entries so far, and rate them yourself in the comments.

Patrick Londen as the Hamburglar. Read more…

With Halloween being on a Saturday, it’s as if everyone got a do-over with their costumes tonight. So there’s no excuse: send us your best costumes to bwog@columbia.edu by midnight tomorrow, and hope for yet another piece of candy. 

Oh, and apparently Daylight Saving Time ends tonight? Not cool. Not cool at all. Never mind, we’re idiots; tonight’s the night when you get an extra hour (not when you lose an hour). Spend it wisely.

Oh sure, you may be a fan of Cribs or Pimp My Ride, but nothing really screams “pimp me” like a bookcart. At least, so say the runners of Unshelved.com, who have just concluded their third annual “Pimp My Bookcart” competition. Continuing our university’s fine winning streak, this year’s first place prize went to the employees of Butler’s Rare Books and Manuscript Library, who turned their bookcart into a hot dog cart. We’re hungry just looking at it, and so were the judges: “We rarely agree on anything as easily as we did in giving this cart first prize. Succeeds in all of our judging categories!”

You can see a rearview of the “hot book cart” here, and you can also see the ingenious designs it beat.

Hurry! From 6-9 tonight, the Blue Key Society hosts a competitive, campus wide Spelling Bee in the Wien Lounge.  ROAR, LION, ROAR! [Results after the jump!]

For almost every student, Spellcheck is an indispensable tool. Thanks to Bill Gates and his brainchild, Microsoft Word, the once tedious process of editing a paper for spelling errors has been reduced to a series of simple clicks. But then, there are those other students…

Yes, at Columbia,  there is a strange breed of students whose spelling capacities surpass those of that supercilious dancing paper-clip icon. These students spell with natural confidence and verbal intuition. Their vocabularies are so rich that while Spellcheck may flounder over obvious Greek derivatives, like, dialogism and phyllophyllin, Columbia’s superior strain of spellers can easily tackle any word.

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Mad nostalgia for the mid-90s is standard by now, and unsurprisingly many Bwoggers have devolved back to their 9-year-old selves, reveling in the joys of Nintendo 64 and Mario Kart in particular. Though our early Karting experience was largely a tale of character-building losses to nimbler-fingered cousins, we have trained a bit among ourselves and have stoked a more robust sense of competition (future adversaries at Blue Key Society’s spelling bee should be wary). Bwog hereby invites all fellow nostalgics for a Mario Kart tournament next Friday, April 4th, on Ruggles 6. If you have deluded yourself into thinking you’re game for the challenge – or if you just want a sweet photo of yourself in video gaming action, accompanied by a putatively funny/punny caption, published on Bwog – email bwgossip@columbia.edu. Suite number and time details will follow.

Competitive cooking came to Columbia this afternoon.  Read on to see who proved their culinary capacity and who fell short.

Coinciding with the premiere of season four of Bravo’s Top Chef, the Hartley-Wallach Living and Learning Center hosted their own cooking competition this afternoon.  The first Annual LLC Iron Chef Competition pitted fellow Hartley-Wallach residents against each other.  Thirteen teams of two faced off to decide who could whip together the most sophisticated and savory dishes.

At the commencement of today’s events, the LLC Iron Chef Committee unveiled the secret ingredient: Rice Krispies. The organizing committee of the LLC Iron Chef incorporated a special ingredient into the competition’s parameters both as an homage to their titular predecessor, Iron Chef, and also to unify the different teams’ dishes with common ingredient.  The teams were then given twenty dollars and three hours to come up with an entrée and dessert of their own creation.

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In preparation for the storming of NYU, a few Bwog editors and other interested parties will be gathering tonight at La Negrita on 109th and Columbus to sharpen our skills before going big time. Trivia goes from 8:00 – 10:00 with a two-drink minimum. Swing by at around 7:45 if you want to get in on the action.

In which the Battle of the Spicies comes to a satisfactory conclusion, as narrated by Armin Rosen.

I was drunk as fuck the first time I encountered the Spicy Special at 109 Gourmet Deli–but then again, who isn’t drunk as fuck when they first encounter the 109 Spicy Special? Plenty of establishments cater to a more sober, discerning clientele, but the shitfaced among us will always settle for the 109’s signature stomach-churner: a disgustingly delicious combination of cajun turkey and pepper jack cheese, at any hour of the day (between 2 and 5 in the morning), and in any state of mind (drunk). The Special loses a bit of its mystique during the temperate daylight hours, although if you crave for liquefied cheese atop an anemic slice of tomato and some oddly-spiced deli meat on a Wednesday afternoon then I guess you could eat one sober just for curiosity’s sake.

The deli itself is nothing special (although I’m told it’ll deliver cigarettes right to your dorm, which pretty much gives you an idea of what kind of a place this is), but the Spicy Special— the culinary embodiment of many a wasted Thursday, Friday and Saturday night—certainly is.

Which is why I experienced a feeling similar to that of a die-hard Cat Stevens fan upon hearing the Flaming Lips’ blatant rip-off of “Father and Son” when I saw that another of my favorite corner delis had started serving a spicy special of its own. Read more…

Although it probably seems like much too early in the year to begin thinking about these things, the Housing Selection season officially began today with the release of next year’s LLC Applications.  Current upperclassmen will surely remember that traditionally, admittance into the preciously named Living-Learning Center has been highly competitive.  The number of applicants  rises higher with each passing year varies from year to year—in the past, there have been about 650 for 203 available positions, although last year applications dropped to 350 (thanks to our commenters for the correction!).  Bwog wouldn’t be surprised, however, if many of this year’s potential applicants were put off by the fact that the process seems significantly more daunting than it has been in the past.  The ten page application requires an astonishing five essays—which, if we remember correctly, is more than we had to write to get into Columbia in the first place.

Nevertheless, if past years are any indication, the process should be highly entertaining to observe.  If you have any tales to tell about the lengths to which students will go to get in, or if you hear of any particularly amusing programming ideas being pitched by applicants—less “take the floor to the Met” and more “lock my suitemates into the walk-in freezer in John Jay and make them use teamwork find a way out”—we encourage you to let us know by emailing bwgossip@columbia.edu.  And good luck, applicants!  

Paul Sonne, Editor in Chief of CPR and Rhodes finalist, almost ended Columbia’s six year losing streak on the Rhodes scholarship this year, (even NYU and Duke scored awards—as if basketball and US News rankings weren’t enough). Luckily, he had already landed the Marshall and its free ride to Oxford, where he’ll be getting a Master of Philosophy in Russian and Eastern European studies. Bwog interrupted his celebrations to ask him how the whole thing works.

What did you first do when you heard about the Marshall?

I kind of flipped out, and called my parents. They were obviously thrilled, not only because I won, but because they won’t have to pay for me for the next two years.

What were the application processes like?

They’re really, really intense. There’s just a lot of recommendations, a lot of thinking and reflecting about yourself. We’re at a point in our lives where I think very few of us know what we’re going to do, and to be able to sell yourself as going to be x or going to be y is very tough. But it was actually really not as painful as I thought it was going to be.

What was it like competing with some of the top students in the country?

Everyone was so fascinating, and I felt like to have gotten this far, no one was faking it, it wasn’t like people had been spending their entire lives to win these awards. These are kids who are really dedicated to what they were doing, and whether or not they ended up winning the award, they were going to be successful. Read more…