Get yourselves on Friendship Drive! Photo via Wikimedia

Holy smokes 2014, you’re going to college tomorrow! Let Bwog help you pack. International and West Coast kids are already on campus– take advantage of your Bed, Bath and Beyond trip!

Making friends is stressful. Exhale, friends. With a few simple tchotchkes, your classmates and your floormates will flock to your room, you can talk about what TV shows you all like, and soon you’ll be more in style than an umbrella at graduation. Some ideas:

Popcorn Popper

Having screenings for your friends of movies you downloaded illegally is cool and all, but think of how much cooler it would be if you could serve hot, fresh popcorn while you watched (none of that JiffyPop shit). College students LOVE free food, and they will love you if you give it to them.

Electroman Power Strip

You’re going to need a power strip at college, so why not make it a cute power strip? Peers with electronic devices will be drawn to your room (more specifically, to your wall outlet) like moths to a flame. Now no one can turn down your room invitation with “I can’t, I have to go charge my phone.”

iPhone Karaoke Software

The best way to make floormates into long-term friends is to coerce them into singing bad music in front of a large crowd of people. Then you can make a Facebook album before your high school friends make one of their new college friends.

Sno-Cone Machine

Everyone loves summer, and nothing says summer quite like a Sno-Cone. Bring everyone back into summer mode with your own special Sno-Cone machine—Charlie Brown-themed, no less. Maybe hide during fire drills.

Miniature Air Hockey Table

Your room will be the party room once it has an air hockey table. This table is small, so it doesn’t take up too much space, but it’s still cool enough that all of your athlete friends will want to come over and play. And athletes are always popular, so by extension, you’ll become popular, too.

Desktop Ping-Pong Set

Transform your desk into a ping-pong table and have a championship without even leaving your room. Your desk isn’t really good for anything else, is it? Special bonus feature: the ping-pong ball can double as a beer pong ball. The best reassuring news you’ll hear all week: beer pong never goes out of style. DIY points: you can also always just unscrew your closet door.

Not a cute implement, but a useful one: the Power Sentry has 5 outlets instead of 4.

Two years ago, we at Bwog lost the U.S. News and World Report‘s “Paper Trail” blog’s Best [Campus] Alternative Media Outlet poll to Wesleyan after some crotchety commenters lampooned their granola-eating ways and they retaliated en masse. We lost last year, too.

This year, we have another foe: Yale. That’s right, now you have the chance to reject them.

What makes this battle even more worth fighting is that the Yale blog is based out of one single residential college. That’s like a blog for Wien (albeit a beautiful, wonderful Wien with its own library and cafeteria) winning this whole contest. Egregious. And while we lower our lances at Yale, we also set our sights at Penn State. You may have an undergrad population of six million, but we have the fervor to best you.

Vote now, vote on multiple computers, whatever it takes. You have until midnight on February 17th. Do it for Bwog, because we’d do it for you.

E-weeks (re-christened Zvi-Weeks in honor of SEAS’ imminently departing leader) are ending today with an, er, bang: a Mr. and Ms. SEAS contest, complete with trivia and a talent portion. Four young gentlemen and lady engineers will compete for their respective titles, under the watchful eye of a cardboard Zvi Galil (seems he’s been elevated into an object of idol-worship already), followed by a Battle of the Bands between John Coombs and Band, The Folk, The Shake, Pray for Mojo, and DJ Tanner.

Big prizes to the winners, and food for you if you show up at 8:00 PM in Roone to cheer on your favorite beauty queen/king.