Photo by Leah Greenstein

Bwog is checking out for summer (unless something marvelously big happens that we simply must tell you about) as it is officially June, but first we’d like to give you a round-up of what’s been going on in the CU world these last two weeks.  It has definitely been a memorable semester and we hope you have a relaxing/productive/magical/eye-opening/lazy summer.  Class of 2013: you were an awesome crop of kids and we can’t wait to see where you go.  Don’t forget about us when we’re no longer young and beautiful you’re famous.

• Bwog extends a huge congratulations to the Columbia baseball team who won a real nail-biter of an exciting game last night against New Mexico–Columbia’s first NCAA tournament win!  They came back from a 0-5 deficit in the 8th inning and will be playing against Arizona State today at 7 pm (catch it on ESPN3).  Also in baseball news, check out this NYTimes profile about Joey Falcone, who threw the first pitch at a Mets game last week. (ESPN, NYTimes, Go Columbia Lions)
• We got a tip amending our caption on the crowned Deantini picture from Commencement from graduate Gabriel Metzger:

I tried to toss Deantini my crown frisbee-style but the aerodynamics on a blow up piece of plastic aren’t great, so that was a fail. Instead, I walked around the barriers and actually placed the crown atop his head (yes, I crowned Deantini, it was epic).

You can see the picture of this magical moment at right, which was made into Deantini’s new Facebook prof pic.

• Ebonie Smith, BC’07, teamed up with the Barnard Center for Research on Women to found Gender Amplified, a movement to celebrate women in music production.  They’ve got an Indiegogo campaign and will be having the Gender Amplified Music Festival at Barnard in the fall.  Girl power! (Gender Amplified, Indiegogo)
• After way too long, CU Assassins has finally come to a conclusion.  The winning team was The Chinese Gymnastics Team (Alex Kalicki, Andrew Arredondo, Greg Duchard, Seun Omotunde), while Eleanor Stein and Dylan Smith tied for most kills.  You can see the full email from ESC here.
  
• A+ tipster Daniel Sims, SEAS’14, was listening to comedy show Keith and the Girl when Patrick Carlin, brother of George, talked about Columbia students getting scammed back in his day while looking for prostitutes.  You can listen to it here (contains NSFW language).  (Special thank you to Keith and the Girl for the audio file!)
• Another A+ tipster, James Boothe, thought his sandwich recipe was solid enough to warrant mention on Bwog.  Bwog agrees.  And here we present The SchapHero:

“From the bottom-up:
-12 inch sub bun, steamed over boiling pot of water
-About an inch of hot pastrami
-Light ground black pepper
-3 full-length dill pickle spears, laid parallel to the bun
-Another inch of hot pastrami
-More light ground black pepper
-Light mustard
-Close it up”

• Apartment hunting?  Bwog alum comedy group Local Empire has a video for you:

Update, 7/25: Some people, mostly juniors, have gotten off the waitlist. If you’re one of the lucky ones (or one of the unlucky ones who still have no idea where you’ll be living in 2 months) let us know in the comments.

Don’t panic! All through the summer, we’ll continue to answer your housing questions. Just send them along to housing@bwog.com.

Q: Hello Bwog, I’m a sophomore and (because of my poor lottery number) I was waitlisted. Do you happen to know when I will find out my housing for the fall?

A: Housing says only that “a Sophomore Wait List will be created, and students on this list will be contacted over the summer with their housing assignments for the following year.”

Fortunately (or not), Bwog has some personal experience with the horrors of the waitlist. An unlucky staffer reports that when he was waitlisted last year, he did not find out his room assignment until August 19th, a mere 10 days before he was due to move into his new dorm.

It’s possible that you’ll find out your assignment earlier in August or even (if you’re really lucky) in July, but be prepared—it could be a long wait.

 
• Remember when J.P. Morgan lost more than $2 billion of other people’s money by irresponsible trading? Well that’s caused a lot of people, including politicians, to urge Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of the company, to step down from his position on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—but not PrezBo. He’s been subject of controversy, because he supports Dimon. He went as far as to say Dimon’s critics are “foolish” and posses a “false understanding” of how the board works. (NYT, LA Times, Business Week)
• After Paul Krugman sarcastically insulted Estonia’s economy in a blog post, Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves rebutted him on Twitter. Not only did he disparage Krugman’s Nobel Prize, but he bitingly accused him of reducing the conflict to a “Princeton vs Columbia thing.” (NYT, Twitter)

History repeats itself, 2016. Prefrosh Facebook one another. Sometimes, they plan parties. This year, they’ve been inspired by Mean Girls, the 2004 teen comedy starring cute Lindsay Lohan.

Props for partying in honor of a movie you were ten years old for, 2016.

Those are pretty good quotes, to be fair, and these prefrosh clearly love the idea of Columbia. If only we could buy some of their enthusiasm on the street and then smoke it behind IAB.

;)

One more screenshot after the jump. Teaser quotes: “Oh goodie.. Condoms are on me! <—-that was a joke….unless….lol jk” and “wait..you’re not going to Columbia?”

ONE MORE SHOT. ONE MORE SHOT.

Whether to work an internship, catch up on credits, or avoid family, a significant portion of Columbia stays in NYC between academic years. A summer in the ‘hood allows students to see a different side of the city, one in which papers aren’t due tomorrow morning and a happy hour margarita at The Heights might actually serve to cool and not only inebriate. If you’re the type who fantasizes about stepping off of the subway onto a steamy campus where the frisbee stays afloat and the sundress/wayfarer combo runs rampant, securing a job or enrolling for summer term is the first step towards turning your dream into a reality. The next step is finding a place to live. While apartment-hunting won’t require a cover letter, there are many decisions and considerations to be made. Bwog is here to give you a comprehensive guide to living a summer in the city.

Stay In Columbia Housing

Columbia in the summer is like a Twilight Zone episode in which the protagonist visits an alternate universe. Everything is the same, but slightly off. No need to check The Weather Channel for potential snow. No need to cut short naps on the lawn. No need to start the weekend on Thursday. In fact, you are living in an eternal weekend. Everyday is a Thursday. Whoa.

Website: Continuing Students Housing

Dorms Available: Broadway, Shapiro, Harmony, and 600 W.113th

Cost:

$2665 (double) / $3280 (single) for whole summer (May 20th – August 10th)

$1300 (double) / $1600 (single) for one session (May 20th – June 29th or July 1st – August 10th)

$935 (singles only) for fall interim (August 10th – September 1st)

$340 (singles only) for spring interim (May 12, 2012 – May 20, 2012)

$65 (double) / $80 (single)  for summer interim (June 29 – July 1)

Good If:

• You can’t get enough of your Shapiro single
• You are trying to discover Harmony’s location
• You like Thursdays

Check out the rest of your options after the break

Tea Magic wishes you a happy summer, no matter how dissimilar this season is with the last.

Love is in the air! Just look around you—sometimes you have to squint a little, but there’s magic in the minutiae.

Awww

On  116th and Broadway:
Girl: So do you love me or not?
Guy: Right now I just have to take a massive dump.

Coming out of a girls’ bathroom:
Guy: I don’t understand what they’re for.
Girl: What? Wings?
Guy: Yes…

Thinkin’ about the future:
Girl: I could see myself getting married there. Butler is just so beautiful!
Guy [nodding head in agreement]: Yeah, definitely.

Unorthodox pick-up lines:
Guy: “I like your sandals”
Girl: “Thanks!”
Guy: “You look Native American.”
Girl: “…Thanks?”

Goofy flirtation via Wikimedia

The Barnard Pre-College Program asks: What are you most looking forward to this summer?

The Barnard Pre-College students respond:

Photo by HSG

The Return of Cooking with Bwog – no cooking involved!

The end is of summer is imminent (Monday, officially), which happens to nearly coincide with tomorrow’s Morningside Heights Farmers Market. 

So, to celebrate the season’s end, Bwog recommends a no-cooking-involved summer salad. It also keeps well in your mini-fridge, so you’ll have ample opportunity to savor the season after it’s past.  The preparation is fun: Bwog recommends indulging in the the imagined bucolic nostalgia of shucking corn and the aggressive release of dicing vegetables. Or, alternatively, invite some friends over and make it a cooking party. 

(more…)

How to lose friends and alienate people

Oh Sarah Palin, is there anything to which you are not tangentially relevant?

The first of a two-part series on truck-based dessert foods.

Reading doesn’t count unless someone sees you doing it.

Why try to forget about all the fun stuff you missed out on when you could relive the disappointment?

eyePod!

Bwog’s suburban diarist Madeline L. is spending the summer away from the city — and she’s enjoying it. Here, our diarist disects the nature of the suburban summer, and why it beats Morningside anyday.

Summer in the suburbs is built on a founding myth; an event within a circle of friends that becomes retold in different heights of enthusiasm, with different details added or subtracted. It becomes so recognizable that the difference of experience between people who lived it and those who heard about it is nonexistent. Collectiveness and camaraderie encapsulate the suburban summer — that and a lot of weed. 

For me, the summer of 2007 was the summer of getting thrown in a pool — completely clothed, mascara trickling down my face, contacts mangled in the white of my eye, shirt pulled down. The boy who playfully threw me in the chlorine perils argued after the fact that it was my own fault. I made myself fall in, he reasoned. “You just have really shitty balance,” he said.

(more…)

Gather round Columbia, it’s time to re-welcome IvyGate into our browsers and into our hearts. Naturally, it has returned dressed to the nines, with a new WordPress redesign and fresh-faced summer editors. Bwogger Justin Vlasits favors the mouse over chalk-underlines in the new masthead (see above), while a Yalie friend of Bwog noticed that clicking on the chalky names re-directs readers to posts about that school.

Now let’s meet the man and woman behind the summer incarnation of IvyGate 2.0. Why look, it’s hometown favorite Nina Shield (BC ’07), and some rising sophomore from Harvard.  After introducing herself, Shield puts together a nice little wrap-up of all Vag-related happenings. She is the first Columbian to helm the good ship IvyGate since the legendary days of Chris Beam and Nick Summers. (Oh, and Andrew Nusca, a former summer editor, was a J-Schooler.) Go Lions. 

Dear Readers,

You may have noticed that posts have become less frequent and more remote of late. With only a few staff at and around Columbia, news and gossip is harder to come by. For the remaining months of the summer, Bwog will be in hibernation, rousing itself when it finds something too juicy to pass up. As always, tips are appreciated, and can be sent to bwgossip@columbia.edu.

Meanwhile, we hope you all enjoy your travels, adventures, and internships.

Love,

Bwog