A few issues of Spectator remain to be released, but Speccies celebrated the end of their year Tuesday night in considerable style. For the annual Spec Dinner, our campus broadsheet (whose facebook group, incidentally, has 175 more members than The Blue and White’s) rented out the private rooms of 420, a swanky bar on 80th and Amsterdam. Two open bars dispensed drinks to increasingly loopy journalists, who couldn’t even get through the platters of roasted peppers, pita and hummus, olives, and stuffed grape leaves—rumored to have cost the paper a cool $1,000.

You don’t get paid for pouring your heart and soul into Columbia’s paper of record. But getting royally feted twice a year makes it easier to justify the effort.