The semester’s last issue of The Fed is out online!

Advice for when you go home

Chanukkah vs. Christmas

Some vacation possibilities

Courses you do not want to take

Always remember, kids: when you ask the Blue and White‘s blog to link to you, leave out that you’ve made fun of us

And congratulations to the Fed’s new masthead!

E-I-C: Rachel Paige Katz

Publisher: Benjamin Ehrlich

Managing Editor: Nina Pedrad

Head Submissions Editors: Aarti Iyer and Jeffrey Scharfstein.

Hey jobless alumni, why so glum? With your Columbia degree, the world is at your fingertips: first phone sex operating (“executive stress relief”), and now digital entrepreneurship. Bwog caught up with Kareem Shaya, former Fed editor-in-chief and inventor of famous website Send Barack Your Baby, which lately has gotten all sorts of attention from the rest of the internet, namely Gawker and CNN.

The website provides an opportunity for parents to ship their children in boxes to Illinois so that they might be kissed by a certain other Columbia grad. Except it doesn’t actually, which is why the slideshow of Obama-supporting babies features no baby-in-box pictures, to remind us it’s only a joke and that babies can’t even vote. 

One newsanchor in the CNN video also cautions us not to send an actual infant but “if you do, be sure to use bubble wrap.” At which point she suffocates a doll with bubble wrap and sticks it in a carboard box. Mazel Tov Kareem!

Breaking CCSC/ESC/GSSC/SGA news in the form of new dark horse candidate Chas Carey, CC ’08. Carey, running on the “Federalist Party” platform has decided to simultaneously run for presidency in all class councils. According to candidate Carey, his campaign is one of unification: “Class councils have long been powerless against the overwhelming might of Low Library, but if we yoke them together, we can scale the steps and crowthe people with Bollinger’s wig,” the statement read. You can read the full declaration of candidacy after the jump, including what will no doubt become a legendary campaign speech entitled “The Future Is Now; No, Now; No, Right Then; I Mean, Wait, Fuck”

Read more…

Happening right now, on the Lerner Ramps, the Fed’s erotic bake sale. Plates of homemade chocolate chip and sugar cookies shaped like breasts, penises, and other anatomical delicacies are overflowing on blue plates.

Bwog noticed a conspicuous lack of male genitalia, to which Fedster Sophie replied, “We both go to Barnard, so there’s a bias,” referring to fellow chef/saleswoman Hannah.

In true Columbia fashion, both vanilla and chocolate frosting were used in creating the very multi-ethnic buffet. “That was my idea,” said Sophie.

All treats are going for a quarter, “though the twats might be worth more per size.” Appetizing! And though the money isn’t going towards any charitable ends, the bake sale is less a fundraiser and more of a Fedbash-awareness street performance. “Just come to Fedbash!” the three Fed editors manning the table yelled at Bwog.

Bwog asked how to spell “come” for this article and we were told it was up to our “editorial discretion.”

So come to Fedbash, this weekend in Lerner Party Space. There will be burlesque dancers and perhaps leftovers.

- JNW

Because they’re sooooo similar, not in terms of theme and content mind you, but because we so love them both. Hugs all around.

Firstly, Jester (with a cool new website!):

“Constant, murderous raping” (page 8)

Children: they’re not that special! (page 9)

The most useful thing Jester has ever published (page 14)

National stereotyping, with guns! (page 20)

Morton Williams ad not very funny (page 25)

Y’know, I was wondering that myself. I mean, they really shouldn’t be able to, should they? But then again, they wouldn’t really be exploiting or causing pain to another living creature–quite the opposite, in most situations. What say you, vegans? (page 26)

And lastly:

It’s the OxyClean that does it for me

White people: a field guide

The most useful thing the Fed has ever published

Guns!

Escorts!

And enough general hilarity to brighten up a morbidly gray, late November afternoon!

Diamond Already Pushing For Four More Years (actually two and a half more)

B.C. May Go Back to Stone Age

Columbia Not Only Organization Ruining Housing, Having Horribly Slow Paperwork

NY Has Share of Has-Beens Besides Yankees

And then we remembered that we use Macs.

Feditor new wise man of protest

Point-Counterpoint On CULPA

Also, there’s no arts section today. Hm.

PLUS:

Shoop Focuses on Defense

Sophisticated New York Magazine Reviews Unsophisticated New-York-originated Chat Site Chain

Parody QuickBwog satirizes us and you, Bwog readers, alike. And now we’re QuickFedding it. How meta is that?

Thankfully, it wasn’t difficult to come up with a “ridiculously forced theme” for the rest of the issue:

Mock Bored@Butler

Mock GoAskAlice

Mock IMDB

Mock Bush Iraq Strategy, including cartoons inexplicably anthropomorphizing bunnies and carrots

Mock…er, real interview with Gulati?

Finally: presses must have been stopped to insert this timely THEY Watch reference to Facebook gifts. The Fed = just one step behind Mark Zuckerberg, who clearly = THEY!

So instead of adding punchlines to punchlines, we’re going to give you the funniest lines from the Fed articles we like. Peruse at your own risk/leisure.

ABC is a cabal of Scientologists—wait, no, I’m confusing them with The Eye again.

Impress them further by showing up at their parties with the most beautiful goat in all of Delphi on a leash.

The alleged murderer, also male, but not white, was apprehended two hours later in a Hamilton classroom, in the midst of a Lit Hum seminar where he was seen in a Bacchanalian frenzy, tearing a copy of The Garden Party to shreds and screaming, “Fourteen fucking dollars!” 

For example, “the part of Tiny Tim will be symbolically replaced by the proletariat.  The audience will play the part of the proletariat.  It is their job to shout, ‘God bless us, each and every one!’ after Bollinger is mauled to death.

Squirrel peace activists, however, have been demonstrating for weeks in front of the statue of Neptune, chanting, “No blood for nuts”

With a speed that defied her years, she came over to me and lifted my hair, exposing what I had sought most desperately to hide—my horns.

Item! Somewhere in between stifling the urge to can the Supreme Court and accusing reporters of treason, President Bush has tapped the Business School’s resident inflation dove, Frederic Mishkin, to fill a spot on the Fed’s seven-member board of governors.

Why does this matter, besides saving the students who made that music video commiserating with Glenn Hubbard, the B-School dean who didn’t get to be Fed Chairman, the trouble of making another one? Our anonymous tipster opines that Mishkin’s selection signals a fundamental shift in Fed policy: from stomping out inflation before it has a chance to spawn to allowing it to reach tadpole size and continue swimming unmolested. Which is odd, considering the GOP has traditionally been the party of inflation hawks, and doesn’t typically move towards policies already embraced by Canadian and European central banks.

But enough about monetary theory. Bwog is still waiting for its Stiglitz-Bernanke death match!

In the beginning, there were three: a libertarian, a conservative, and a socialist who (according to Fed lore) started the Federalist Paper in 1986. Now one of the founding fathers, Neil M. Gorsuch, CC ’88 and FiJi frat boy (not the socialist, Bwog surmises) has been nominated to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. If he’s confirmed, he’d be the youngest member in the federal circuit court system at 39–only about 18 years removed from Columbia’s conservative voicebox turned humor rag.

Bwog wonders if the nominators are party to Mr. Gorsuch’s senior yearbook quote:

“The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little
longer.” – Henry Kissinger, August 29, 1967

In today’s (admittedly bad-ass) Spec “University Space” supplement, an article on the lack of student group space pointed out:

[T]he Science Fiction Society, for example, keeps its library of 20,000 novels in the Student Government Office on the fifth floor of Lerner.

To recap: Ad Hoc, The Columbia Current, The Columbia Political Review, The Columbia Review, Tablet, The Columbia Citadel (that’s the conservative magazine), The Birch, Helvidius, and The Blue and White do not have a computer to their name, much less a cubicle or an office. There’s no space, apparently. Maybe that’s because we need to maintain our library of 20,000 science fiction novels.

The article also notes that, other than the Spectator, “the only two groups with a physical office are the Fed and the yearbook.”

First, insert a cheap joke about the Fed. Then, raise your hand if you knew about — or know anyone who bought — the yearbook.

Plus, their offices in Lerner are pretty swanky.

(Writer gnashes teeth, ends rant, braces for vulgar taunting in next issue of the Fed.)

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Seen on a Student Government Office computer during the weekly Fed meeting: The Wikipedia entry for “Slash Fiction.“

What is Slash Fiction?

Slash fiction is a type of fan fiction in which one or more media characters are involved in a homosexual relationship as a primary plot element. These gay pairings are often described in explicit detail, and largely occur outside the canon of the source. …

Read more…

Bwog staffer Brendan Ballou sat down with Columbia junior Jamie, a writer for the Fed, the former singer for the F-Holes, and current Suicide Girl to discuss knitting, pornography, and why the Blue and White is too pretentious.

Don’t I know you from somewhere?
Well, I’m naked on the Internet. I feel that it’s something not a lot of Columbia people get paid to do. Most of the modeling I do is for money. And it is work, and it’s a job like any other job. It can be boring. It can be hard. It can be creepy.

What is Suicide Girls?
It’s a cool website full of pin-up style photography and alternative looking women who don’t fit the normal notions of beauty—although some of them are skinny and white and have big boobs—but not all of them, and that’s a common misconception. But it’s fun for me. It’s a community, and a lot of my friends are Suicide Girls.
Read more…