CANNED BEER: check out this history of the official container of real college’s official drink. (The Daily)

This stuff is pretty great too

VINTAGE CHAMPAGNE AND SKYLINE VIEWS: Bwog knows it’s never too early to start thinking about Valentine’s Day plans (or to start repressing these same thoughts), so why not a private dinner and rooftop pool swim at the Peninsula for $1500? Gothamist recommends White Castle for “real players,” but Columbians can always do one better. (Gothamist)

POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM: a new Mitt ad makes Tom Brokaw uncomfortable, and he’s not ok with that. (Gawker)

FACEBOOK: neurotic New Yorkers share real life “defriending” strategies. Digital rejection is always easier to palate than the real thing, as these high school seniors will tell you after Vassar accidentally accepted them before rejecting them an hour later. (NYT)

SWITZERLAND: live from Davos at the World Economic Forum, the blog of econ department luminary Joseph Stiglitz’s wife, Anya Schriffin. Protip: wait till Zurich for a “decent cup of hot chocolate.” (Reuters)

Sliced bread via Wikimedia Commons.

Things are coming to a close

Facebook is moving ever closer to its long-awaited IPO, rumored to value the company at over $100 billion. (WSJ)

It has recently been announced that Lana Peters, Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, died of colon cancer in Wisconsin on November 22, 2011. (BBC)

The AMR corporation, the parent company of American Airlines, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (DealBook)

On Monday, Fitch Ratings placed the US government’s AAA credit rating on a “negative outlook,” meaning there’s over a 50% chance that the nation’s credit will be downgraded within the next two years. (Politico)

Times are tough for Violet, Hawkma’s NYU cousin. She’s been limping since May, and having baby Pip to look after isn’t making things any easier. (City Room)

Setting sun via Wikimedia Commons

Wasn’t it a beautiful night?

Panorama by Robert Colgan

Photo by Hans Hyttinen

Photo by Matt Horwitz

Today is the greatest day in the world—the day the noble Prince William marries his college sweetheart, the “commoner” Kate Middleton. It’s a story of love triumphing over society that has captured the hearts of Brits, admirers of royalty, and of course the media, from British tabloids and American gossip mags to the New York Times. It’s the perfect Lifetime movie. Seriously.

Of course, most Columbians can’t really relate to the happy couple. Sure, we can purchase a fake royal engagement ring and get a fake British noble name and title (or even buy your way into the real Scottish nobility), but it’s just not the same. Just because we get married at St. Paul’s instead of Westminster Abbey, though, doesn’t mean we can’t have our own storybook romances.

Last night, on college walk, a man proposed to his fiancée, accompanied by the Columbia University Marching Band! Taking a break from their usual snark, the Band joined forces with the groom-to-be to give him and his fiancée a sweet and special concert! Why call the Band in the first place? Apparently the couple first met at a bike ride last year, while listening to the Marching Band. Watch the video below to get the full story. All together now: Aww!

Photo from http://urbanhawks.blogs.com

Our four-legged friends took a field trip to Central Park yesterday, and wound up all over the internet. (Urban Hawks)

The Royal Shakespeare Company will ply the bard’s trade during a month-long residency at Lincoln Center in the summer of 2011. (NYT)

The MTA figured out that the F train was slow, so, naturally, it will be miserably shut down in parts of Brooklyn for seven weekends this year. (Daily Intel)

New York isn’t quite as romantic as all those movies led us to believe, huh? (Gothamist)

It’ll definitely (probably/maybe/perhaps) snow tomorrow night and into Wednesday. Take that, D.C.! (Daily Intel)

Picking out a date movie can be tough, and with Valentine’s Day weekend here already, you don’t have too much time left to select something the two of you will both enjoy.

Bwog knows as well as you do that the right movie can make all the difference, and since she has no date this year, there’s been plenty of time for Bwog to comb through the Netflix “Watch Instantly” catalog hunting for titles to help you out.

The following three films are tested and approved for couples’ movie-watching, and perhaps best of all, they’re free to watch if you’re a Netflix subscriber. (Save your money for that expensive candlelight dinner — speaking of which, did we mention it’s still Restaurant Week?) 

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We’ve received several photos over the last half an hour of the now infamous John Jay Dinner Date. There are reports of a “table cloth, doilies, roses, and candles” currently being enjoyed by Columbia’s most romantic couple.

Faces have been hidden to protect the adorable.

UPDATE 7:28 PM: Our couple has given us permission to unmask their faces. Their identities will be revealed after the jump.

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We received only a few responses to the Missed Connections post, but this didn’t sadden us, Columbia. You see, the fewer Missed Connections, the more connected you must be, and we celebrate your happiness in love. But we continue to fight for those still seeking romance, so with that in mind, the following are the responses we did receive. If you think any apply to you, let us know (bwog@columbia.edu), and we’ll forward along the email of your would-be paramour.

• you wear cute glasses. i wish i could work up the nerve to actually talk to you in class.

• A couple of months ago on the 1 train you sat down next to me. After a few minutes I looked up from my reading and you asked me if it was Nietzsche, but it was Nora. We chatted for a little while, and from 116th I walked you to the Barnard gate and after a still moment during which anything could have happened, said good bye.

• I was reading Plato on Low steps. You swooped in from the sky and disemboweled a pigeon no more than two meters before my feet.

  I knew at once that it was love, but I haven’t caught so much as a glimpse of you since. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, you plunge at that pigeon with all the swiftness and grace of your noble rank.

  Please come back to me. I miss you.

After so many hours locked up in Butler, Bwog couldn’t help but notice a few smoldering glances flying from person to person across the brutally well-lit study spaces. It got us thinking, and we decided to start a feature that we’d been considering for a long time:

Missed Connections.

Oh, my, yes. While some of you have already moved out of the dorms, there’s still a few days left to catch the eye of whoever’s been sitting next to you in CC missing your incisive comments about Kant. You can just do it on the Internet.

Here’s how it works: add a comment on this post with a description of the object of your desire, and some way to get in touch with you, like an email address. (The comments are hidden.) We’ll repost these, without the identifying emails, and gather the replies, then make the appropriate matches. It’ll be great. We await your responses with bated breath.

UPDATE: Since time is fleeting, you have one hour (til 1:30 PM today) to post a missed connection. At that point, we’ll be posting the comments. It’s the last day of school, so like every teen movie tells you, now’s the last chance to talk to the girl/boy of your dreams.

For the last minute planner, Bwog correspondent George Olive offers a well-educated selection of options for the elite diner in search of a romantic night out.

Restaurants

Porcão Churrascaria

Though unconventional, a top churrascaria may be the perfect place to take your lover. At Porcão and similar establishments, diners pay a fixed price and then sit back as well-dressed waiters canvass the dining room with everything from bacon-wrapped filets to pork sausage to prime rib. The meat at Porcão is clearly the main attraction, and it delivers. The space itself is wholly recessed—as if you designed a dining room and then pushed all the walls back.

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Caralyn Spector writes in that if you email cuarts@columbia.edu by 5PM, you’ll get free tickets to the Mozart and Bruckner extravaganza happening tonight at Carnegie Hall. The show starts at 8PM, with a pre-concert lecture starting at 7PM. This is highly recommended for Music Hum students, as well as anyone who’s never heard a Bruckner symphony before (they’re playing the 5th).

Along with many high hopes freshmen carry to their first weeks of college, one of the most promising seems to be the possibility of a new love life. Nonsense, you say—I was canoodling quite successfully in 5^th grade! This is silly. Freshmen don’t know how to do anything, much less mate. Fortunately, Bwog sexpert Andrea Gallardo has collected wisdom from many corners (ie: members of the Blue and White e-mail alias) to breathe hope into this jungle of hormonal dissonance.

Slow down. In this infamously nit-picky city where narcissism thrives, many prefer being single over being caught “settling.” One respondent cautions: “You will hate / ignore your orientation friends within a month. Don’t lie – you’re just using them as seat-fillers at dinner so that you don’t have to confront that nagging feeling of isolation. Therefore, it is in your best interest not to tell them any big secrets or to conceive any of their children.”

Dump the sweetheart. If we can be sure of anything, it’s that retaining a long-distance flame is always more work than it’s worth. Lack of times and physical intimacy inhibit including someone far away into your immediate life. Writes one contributor: “It doesn’t matter that your significant other at home is markedly more attractive than anyone you’ve yet seen at Columbia. Dump them.” Read more…

Flyer found in John Jay and Broadway this evening. We kid you not:

Update: The fridge has an icemaker.

Bwog Correspondent Mark Holden reports:

The Big Kiss II went down last Saturday, this time at the Whitney Museum. Apparently, an art professor thought it would be hilarious if a bunch of college kids started smooching in the middle of his exhibition. Which is exactly what happened.

This Big Kiss didn’t achieve the Low Steps version’s turnout, attracting only 20 participants. But these were the real deal: no second rate saliva-swapping this time around. As before, a whistle signaled the beginning and end of the Kiss. A sizable crowd of bystanders accumulated as the Kiss progressed, reacting with everything from disgust to benign amusement to fascinated excitement. One kid got really worked up, taking oodles of photos with his camera phone and exclaiming that “his friends would never believe it!” He also seemed rather titillated by the girl-on-girl action.

One older (i.e. late 30s) couple was standing on the bridge when the kissers skipped up and set to work. Their faces betrayed their amusement, however, and the two even hazarded a few pecks themselves. When the whistle sounded to end the kissing, the couples skipped off the bridge to amusement and scattered applause from the onlookers.

Anna Corke reports on today’s Low Steps face sucking.

Despite rainy weather, about 30-40 people showed up for The Big Kiss. The event was well-documented: two participants brought personal cameras, 3 campus news groups showed up (CTV, Bwog, Spec). One boy told me that he was planning to “make out with his camera.”

First the group gathered around the statue of Pan on the lawn in front of Lewisohn. Conversation ranged from hangovers to class schedules to Shakespeare, with the periodic exclamation: “Does anyone not have a partner!?” Matches were made. Five or six people partook in the complementary honeydew melon slices supplied by the organizers for those without partners. One boy admitted that he “came for the melon.” Others frantically searched their purses for mints.
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