You decide! Spotted in the Columbia bookstore:

Note FDR watching over the wasteland of Columbia and Jersey Shore merchandise

The moment we’ve all been waiting for has finally come.

Spotted outside Cardomat

Maybe Destiny’s Child will sing about your new T-Shirt—but only if it’s really cool.

Image via HardCoreBikes.ca

College Walk is certainly a versatile place, and, this morning, the sometime soap-box and occasional amphitheater and will add a new title to its resume:  Biketrial playground.  Congregate in front of Low at 10 AM sharp to see professional biketrial whiz Thomas Oehler perform various exciting tricks all over the Academic Acropolis.

This past weekend was the New York Comic Convention, a massive gathering of everything comic books. New Bwog correspondent and former Marvel Comics intern Shaina Rubin writes a dispatch about meeting the writers behind the heroes. (She’s even illustrated the scene with her very own comic.)

On first entering the New York Comic Convention, known colloquially as “Comic Con,” video games and movie trailers dominated the scene.  But, comics remained the focus of the attendees, who surveyed Iron Man trailers boosting interest in the Iron Man comics, huge posters of DC Comics leading people to Superman and Batman.

      Most people crowded the panels discussing shows or comics, wanting to see and hear their real-life heroes. Though it wasn’t the most popular, the Mighty Marvel Kids panel showed an inside peak at the world of the cartoonist-behind-the-comics. Having worked at Marvel Comics as an editorial intern, I’d enjoyed the comics, but I’d only met a few of the writers.

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Too much to sift through on YouTube?  Life’s hard.  Bwog’s here to help.

There’s nothing as bad as being in Butler on a Saturday night.  But, instead of wasting your study break tonight on another disappointing episode of SNL, Bwog suggests checking out Sarah Dooley’s (BC ’11) delightful YouTube series, AndSarah. 

Sarah’s face may be familiar to you, but her acting and writing will surprise you.  In each of the series’ three episodes, Sarah offers clever and carefully crafted portraits of the life and times of college freshman.  Her character is a caricature of herself, awkwardly idiosyncratic and simultaneously accessible to all undergraduates.   

Her self-conscious fidgets and sputters are well-timed and reinforce her ridiculous, and often poignant, blunders. Although it takes a couple of minutes to get used to Sarah’s mannerisms in the first episode,  it’s impossible to resist her lessons in people watching on College Walk and lunching alone in Hewitt.
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Bwog now supports the emailing of posts! Please feel free to use the Email buttons at the bottom of each one to send them to friends, family, strangers and enemies who you feel deserve extremely witty spam. We’ll have tracking of most emailed posts once we’ve been doing it for awhile.

Enjoy!

Bwog likes to report the occasional celestial phenomenon, so Stephanie Quan sends along this tip:

Professor Karl Kroeber is restless of mind, the sort of academic who likes pioneering new fields and then abandoning them. The loquacious and sagacious fellow, brother to Ursula Kroeber Le Guin [see right], currently teaches the ever-popular children’s lit course. He talked to us about growing up, “the business of imagining,” why he hates Disney, coming to terms with cancer, the Navy, and just about everything else.

BW:  You keep your robes on your coat-rack?

Kroeber: You never know when I might have to rush out and prove I’m an academic.

Can you tell us how you ended up here?

My father… was an academic in the 19th century. And I came to Columbia- I grew up in California- at the end of the second war. I was in the Navy.

I was [also] a radio announcer; I came to New York, went to a little school and got a job out in Iowa. I got pretty good at it, and I came back to New York because this is where you had to go (this is about ’49-’50). I got into an interesting situation, a very lucky situation. Being a radio announcer is not hard work; it’s very easy if you’re glib like I am and have a California accent and most of the people [in the business] are drunks and I could go ahead… But, I said, “there’s nothing in this life for me.”

Congratulations on the semi-centennial of your PhD. [This year marks the 50th anniversary of Kroeber's doctorate.]

(Laughs) I’ve been around a long time. I had a job out in Wisconsin, at Madison, for 15 years. Lovely place, swell place to bring up kids and all that. We had a beautiful house in Madison. Next to [University of California at] Berkeley, it was the place that had the most trouble in the 60s. This was a school that admitted four thousand freshmen a year and they eliminated freshman composition. You couldn’t teach there. I had to come back here, and I had three kids. We didn’t want to live in the suburbs. My wife’s a sculptor- you can’t sculpt in an apartment. We bought a brownstone in Brooklyn for a few thousand dollars. Best investment I think I ever made.

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Say goodbye to the days of Columbia as a jumbled, impossible-to-navigate bureaucracy.  We love you, librarians of Columbia.  Thank you for being our friends. 

Their “Ask Us Now” feature may be down as of this writing, but check it out: our librarians can be contacted during office hours through AIM, G-chat, Windows Live and the Yahoo one, too.  It’s also easy to forget that through Interlibrary Loan, you can obtain almost any book on your wish-list from libraries around the country in just a few days. 

According to CLIO’s site, there are 130 librarians and another 185 staff members working for the But and his pals.  How’s that for a librarian to student ratio?

“Bwog.NET?” readers ask themselves. “Isn’t that domain suffix for second-rate websites? All my favorite websites are .com!” While .net is stereotypically associated with lower-quality websites than .com, .org, .edu, and .cx, Bwog analyst David Iscoe set out, in the pursuit of truth and self-preservation, to prove that many .net websites were indeed worthy of your attention and valuable time. Through an innovative search technique that required following Google and Wikipedia search results for “net” and “dot net” as deep as 25 pages, Bwog found ten websites that disprove such boorish criticism.

1. Sourceforge.net

A great site for 1337 hax0rz, SourceForge is the best known of many “source code repositories”.  With hundreds of thousands of programs, SourceForge makes the source code of programs available to the public for troubleshooting or modification. For Columbia students well versed in programming, it has two uses: a source (haha!) for very conspicuously plagiarizing computer science projects, and an easy way to make a sophisticated, polished program which displays the words “penus” and “vajina”. While Sourceforge.net is a great website, Sourceforge.com is its much less useful corporate counterpart, featuring what appears to be a picture of people protesting outside the Pentagon: 

2. BoingBoing.net

Perhaps the best .net precedent for Bwog, BoingBoing (which also starts with a B and ends with a G) started as a “zine” later becoming a “group blog”. Billed as a “directory of wonderful things,” its recent posts included items about hot sauce sold in miniature coffins, a directory of the complete works of Charles Darwin, and a gallery of Italian pulp science fiction magazine covers. The site sports a professional look, well-written but brief articles, and excellent editing; they also are so prolific in that giant round amalgamated mass of blogs known as the “blogosphere” that they forgo the comment section after each post for links to blogs that reference the article. In Soviet Russia, blog comments on you!

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In which freshman Bwog contributor extraordinaire Dan D’Addario gives you a guide to being, at least superficially, a cool kid.

Columbia is full of those of us (myself included) who listened to Sufjan Stevens in high school and thus considered ourselves far too cool for those who listened to Dave Matthews Band. Well, karma has struck in the form of a school riddled with actually cool people who know a lot about music – and your well-worn copy of the Arcade Fire’s Funeral is yesterday’s news. What follows is a guide to making yourself part of the in-crowd in four steps. Think of it as one-third of the twelve-step program for Lameaholics Anonymous.

Disclaimer: I love hipsters, and I am the lamest person I know (I could present my most-played-songs list off iTunes as proof), so no malice is intended towards either group.



1. Get rid of any music from a major label.

It’s an empirical fact that music produced on a major label is inferior to true indie music.* Note that Transatlanticism was beloved by every cool person you know, but Plans was universally ignored. (Death Cab’s appearance on “The O.C.” certainly didn’t help matters). I
don’t know any cool music, either; I suggest asking the person on your floor with the loudest stereo and the thickest horn-rim glasses what he or she is listening to, then going on www.pandora.com and finding anything tangentially related to it. Or just buy the first five records you see on Pitchfork. (I know. I secretly love Lindsay Lohan’s first album too. If we’re strong, we can get through this process together. On to step two…) Read more…