Bwog has an email up from the Barnard Associate Director for Residential Life expressing her “great disappointment ” that one Barnard bathroom has been closed by the school due to various cleanliness issues. Apparently the girls of Hewitt Third Floor are guilty of “improper behavior” when it comes to cleaning up after themselves, as the email details the many disgusting issues present in the bathroom.

“Over the past few months, we have seen feces smeared on toilet seats and the floor, urine on the floor, clogged and overflowing toilets, paper towels clogging the sinks, and garbage strewn around the bathroom.”

How unladylike.

The best part of the email though is how the Resident Life director not so subtly accuses the perpetrators of being unbalanced and in need of serious help. They write,

“the responsible individual(s) may need the resources and support of the counseling center based on what we have witnessed in this bathroom.”

This is actually the second case of Ivy League bathroom shenanigans this semester, as back in February Yale had to address the cleanliness of one of its dorm bathrooms (poop on walls, chamber pots, using the sink as a tub).

Check out the full email to the Barnard girls below, courtesy of Bwog: Read the rest of this entry »

After a video of Columbia Physics Professor Emlyn Hughes’ unusual introduction to his Frontiers of Science lecture began circulating the web yesterday, The Spectator has reported that Columbia administrators will review the video to determine … something. According to Columbia’s statement, the university will judge “excerpts” from Hughes’ lecture — in which he stripped to his boxers, showed video of 9/11, and brought ninjas onstage, among other still unexplained actions — to see if he potentially crossed “academic freedom” and entered “things that have nothing to do with quantum mechanics.”

Frontiers of Science, or FroSci, is a mandatory part of Columbia’s Core Curriculum (freshmen are preregistered for the class). According to its website, the course’s goal is to “change the way students think about questions of science and about the world around them.” Columbia’s administrators should keep this in mind when watching Hughes take his clothes off to Lil Wayne’s remix of “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” because after Monday we doubt any FroSci student will be thinking of their professor the same way.

Below is a video Hughes’ FroSci introduction, courtesy of Bwog, and click through after for Columbia’s statement, courtesy of The Spectator.

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Earlier this week, we received an anonymous tip about a post on SpecSucks, a blog unhealthily obsessed with the Columbia Spectator. The post details a fairly ridiculous story of a group of Spectator editors breaking into the Columbia Provost’s office, using their connections in the Deans’ office to get out of trouble, and then calling in favors at Bwog to keep everything out of the headlines. Perhaps worth noting though, there’s now an update on the post that mentions “a dozen or two factual issues with [our] post.” So there’s that.

While we corresponded with several people who anonymously vouched for the veracity of various parts of the story, representatives from each accused organization have all denied involvement. This morning we reached out to Columbia Dean Terry Martinez, who was accused by SpecSucks of “sticking out her neck” to help the Spectator editors. Below is the university’s statement:

“While federal student privacy law prevents us from commenting on specific cases involving student discipline, we can say unequivocally that any claim of an improper relationship involving Dean Terry Martinez is completely false and without any factual basis. Moreover, Dean Martinez has no role in adjudicating these types of disciplinary matters. Reports made earlier today in this vein fail any standard of journalistic credibility and should be promptly retracted.”

“With respect to the Columbia Daily Spectator, it is important to note that like any news media organization, the student newspaper is completely independent from the University, and we have no comment on its handling of this matter.”

Last night Bwog published a marathon missed-connection missive by a tragic-sounding fellow named “Robert,” who is trying to reconnect with his Columbia classmate “Kristine,” who apparently stood him up. Some choice quotes:

I came here because I’d been stowed away in my room the other fourteen hours of the day, addicted to the internet like everybody else, and not getting nearly enough sunlight or, of course, actual in-person socialization. That’s why I’d come to 1020. To sit ”around” people for an hour or two. I don’t know why this is considered as weird as it is, but let’s be real, it still is (considered weird). People think people at bars alone are drunkards or else creeps and rapists. It’s not fair to people who just want to people watch for an hour to feel less alone.

And:

When I got there, I took out my ipod, put on the twenty-minute audiobook I have on there called “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace, and spent the next five hours or so contemplatively pacing, or sitting. This became slightly problematic when I needed to pee, as I couldn’t leave the steps in case she came, but fortunately I’d brought along my empty watter-bottle from before so I peed in that twice during the night. As I paced back and forth on the step in front of Alma Mater, I thought about fish, and water, and about how every time I’d asked a girl to take a chance, to try to take a leap of faith across that mental block that the real world is exactly as it seems, every single time, they hadn’t showed. I’d waited on this step or some version a hundred times before. But I’d never waited past when I wanted to stop waiting.

It goes on and on and on, ending with this “warning”: “If you do show, we’re doing a dramatic Notebook in the rain style first kiss. I’m not kidding around. Don’t come if you’re not up for that.”

Creepy? Sincere? Creepy because sincere? All of the above? Decide for yourself.

A member of the South Korean boy band U-KISS—which stands for “Ubiquitous Korean International idol Super Star”—plans to endure many terrifying Core-induced nightmares this autumn, according to Bwog:

According to tipsters, AJ, one-seventh of the Korean boy band U-KISS, will be officially joining the Columbia student body this fall. In fact, he “safely arrived at the Columbia University a few days ago” “and was busy to finish some works prior to the beginning of the semester!”

Also, a few U-KISS fans discovered Bwog’s coverage:

withJSK · 2 1 · 15 August 2012 at 2:52 pm
what’ major’s he study???
Ahn · 2 1 · 15 August 2012 at 3:51 pm
I believe his major is Psychology! ^^ whoever wants to see him! go on and grab him! lol
vina · 0 1 · 15 August 2012 at 5:32 pm
Wanna know about AJ? better u ask to every account twitter called KISSme(s).. we’ll answer everything.. :D .. AJ do your best on your study..?!!

It gets better:

Anonymous · 2 5 · 15 August 2012 at 7:07 pm
I was so surprised you posted the MV saying that “We are not sure which one is AJ”
Don’t you think he will be sad when he sees this article???
Jacque · 1 1 · 15 August 2012 at 7:32 pm
This is a little funny to me… I hope Jaeseops treated well at the college. -hates using his English name omg its so boring-  Read the rest of this entry »

Igloo (n): an Eskimo house usually made of sod, wood, or stone when permanent or of blocks of snow or ice in the shape of a dome when built for temporary purposes. Yes, the Merriam Webster Dictionary is not politically correct and chooses to ignore the “proper” expression of Inuit. (Although, technically this ignores the Yukip and Aleut groups.)

Anyway, these icy forts have been popping up on snow Ivy campuses for years. Maybe its due to the fact that a simple snowman won’t cut it for the Ivy League – we must apply all our ethnic studies and physics skills to the shaping of snow. (While we’re at it why don’t we write an essay on whether man conquers snow or snow conquers man while we’re chilling in our igloo?)

A tipster sent us a link to the Blog Daily Herald’s students who do cool things at Brown. A few students who made an igloo on their main green got full in-depth coverage featuring them building the igloo and a picture of the whole crew.

However, Bwog’s coverage of Columbia’s igloo from last year featured just a mere picture of snow art lumped along others. Also the identities of the igloo mastery were only revealed in the comment section.

Since blogs tend to create unnecessary battles between schools, judge which school has the best igloo in the comments.

Bwog’s Columbia photo:

Blog Daily Herald’s Brown photo:

When it comes to Ivy League pride, sometimes the classic, hideously overpriced school sweatshirt just doesn’t cut it. Every eighth grade valedictorian and Japanese tourist on earth owns a Harvard sweatshirt–even that freaky homeless guy at the bus stop has one from Cornell. God, how are we supposed to show our school spirit and simultaneously let the rest of the world know that we’re genuine, certified Ivy League snots?

Praise be to New Balance, purveyor of all things douchey, for giving us the answer: fugly Ivy footwear.

According to EUKicks, a blog for sneaker fans (hey, it takes all kinds), the company will be releasing a line of Ivy-League-themed hiking shoes this January. The shoes, which are riffs on an existing model of New Balance sneaker, will come in hues “inspired” by each university’s colors, and will feature an interpretation of each school’s crest on the tongue.

Bwog’s already raising its eyebrows at the Columbia version, whose two tones of blue aren’t “Columbia blue,” apparently. That’s a bit fussy of them, seeing as how the Princeton shoe is a random stinky beige and Dartmouth’s is inexplicably black.

New Balance has decided it will only manufacture six flavors of Ivy League sneaker. Cornell and Yale, you’re out of luck. No doubt Yalies have enough idiotic hipster footwear to tide them over for the next eight centuries, but it’s a shame about Cornell–this could really have put them on the map, you know?

In theory, this sneaker gimmick suggests that anyone who’d like to walk all over the Ivy League can now purchase the means to do so. But in practice, we can’t help but think that the primary consumers of these hideous foot turds will be the same jerks who play squash at the Yale Club or wear their Princeton tie pins on job interviews. In the highly unlikely event that New Balance makes a profit on their Ivy League line, it’ll be because our navel-gazing has gotten so intense that it now includes the entire lower halves of our bodies. Either that, or because the vast population of goth kids at Dartmouth decides to start wearing them ironically.

Then again, they’re also going to be sold by Mita, a Japanese company. We might have to eat our words about out-Ivying all those Japanese tourists.

We knew there was a reason Columbia was in the Ivy League. According to Bwog, some anonymous loner genius noticed yesterday that all the passwords for the Columbia Social Experiment were chilling in plain sight on the open-source hosting website GitHub. Sadly for all of Columbia’s savvy MMOPRGers, Bwog notified the Office of Residential Programs, which promptly had a panic attack and took the files down.

Damn you, Bwog, for alerting the authorities. Wouldn’t it have been spectacularly beautiful if all the project’s winners were googly-eyed nerdbags straight out of Comicon? Who could possibly appreciate a gift basket from The Body Shop more than a dude wearing an “All your base are belong to us” T-shirt? Such a missed opportunity.

Still, the nerd brigade may not have lost the war just yet. We just tried to log into the Social Experiment website, and it keeps freezing. No password prompts popping up yet. REVENGE IS NIGH. Go, Pointdexters, go!

Update: Apparently the Social Experiment has also failed to tear Columbia kids away from their cellphones. A Columbia student’s Facebook status declared:

“Good job Res Life, “The Social Experiment” has gotten us ridiculed by everyone. Moreover, it’s a huge failure because everybody just texts/emails/facebooks the passwords.”

Well none of us really believed that would change anyway, so it’s a wash.

Word has it that Columbia’s undergraduate magazine, the Blue and White, plans to run a story on graduating Spectator editor Melissa Repko. That’d be standard enough, if maybe a little weird, had Blue and White and Spec online outlets not recently been bickering all over the internet. Says the writer of the Repko profile-to-be, in an email circulating among Spec writers:

I’m wondering whether you might be willing to share with me some of your thoughts, opinions and experiences with Melissa both in the more professional context as EIC of Spec and also in the more casual context as friend, peer, mentor – whatever!

We can only wonder whether this represents a rapprochement of Bwog/Spectrum tensions — or just the calm before whatever the next storm is in this small, silly campus media world.

“Two houses, both alike in aggregation,

in fair Columbia where we lay our scene.

From ancient grudge break new mutiny,

Where civil link makes civil comments unclean.”

Okay SO! Some weird stuff, and a debate about the borderlines of both censorship and advertising, is going on in the Bwog comments thread for the article “Freaking Out? Free Roti?.” Someone — maybe a Spec staffer? — posted links to the new blog Spectrum, which were quietly expunged from the site. At 1:40am, a commenter wrote: “why are you deleting comments of most of the things people say about spectrum like that’s weird.” At 2:00am, site Co-Editor Anish Bramhandkar wrote: “Bwog routinely removes comments that advertise other web sites.”

And then it was ON! Bramhandkar started outing commenters’ IP addresses to reveal they were posting multiply at 2:18am. At 2:50am Bwog’s Webmaster Hans Hyttinen commented “Again, we are only removing comments that do not add to the discussion in any way, such as a comment which was, in its entirety, ‘spectrum’.” So I guess we know what the comment said! Their true feelings on the subject may be revealed in the first comment in the thread — “Spectrum: MORE LIKE RECT’UM.” [sic] What a great conversation this is, on all sides! [Spec, you are not immune.]

Read the rest of this entry »