This past weekend, Inside New York threw a party to celebrate the release of its 2008-2009 edition. The party took place inside the new Village Pourhouse, the uptown counterpart to the popular original location, which caters to the villianous downtown adversaries of New York University. Bwog took along our camera and a notepad.

What we're cautiously optimistic about:

• It's huge, and by Columbia bar standards -- see: claustrophibia-inducing Heights and misanthropy-inducing 1020 -- it's the biggest place around. There's a smaller bar area with several TVs, and this area opens up into a larger room with a dance floor and many spacious booths.
• It's sportsy. Athletic types and their acolytes have about 1,000 fairly large TVs to enjoy, all of which were invariably tuned to games, matches, races, etc. This is also a nice change of pace if you're sick of watching 1020's stready rotation of whimsical kids movies and bizarre vintage pornography.
  
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Welcome to the Columbia Olympics. Through this series, Bwog hopes to prepare you for at least some of the events that you will participate in at Columbia. Unlike the real Olympics, no one's too young, too old, too juiced, or too angry to participate. Since everything must be judged, though, we have included gold medal outcomes at the end of each post.

Bwog believes in timely advice. For Sunday mornings, timely advice means tips on how to lessen a hangover. Hangovers (aka "nature's way of telling you you possibly did something dumb last night") are annoying regardless, but the length and strength of the hangover can make a big difference in how productive and enjoyable your day will be. Here's some ideas from the Bwog and Blue & White staff. Use the comments to add your own advice.

Also, as a magazine and blog of mostly humanities majors, Bwog takes no responsibility for the scientific veracity of these "cures."

• Winning the hangover battle is all about preemption.
• The night before, eat a heavy meal if you're planning on drinking a lot. It will slow withdrawal, settle your stomach, and leave you fed.
• Even a snack afterwards can help if you drink more than you thought.
  
  
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The presidents of 100 universities and colleges (including Duke, Dartmouth and Syracuse) have signed a petition demanding that lawmakers consider lowering the drinking age to 18.

Your PrezBo is not on this list, because he too has seen the invitation for "Stephan's Party" (right) and he is simply terrified of what would happen if that open bar really did serve alcohol.

Gawker is linking to Vanity Fair's just released "All Access Summer Guide," which features the city's best beaches, bars, restaurants, and pools. Second on VF's list of the Best Bars for Drinking Under the Stars? None other than everyone's favorite backup for when 1020 is just too crowded, the Heights. "Columbia students drink their cares away at this second story Morningside Heights bar," the guide truthfully (we guess?) points out.

So be on the lookout for an influx of hip forty-somethings with an inexplicable desire to drink their cares away with a bunch of "twenty-one-year-olds" under the stars.

Bwog noticed the following in room 210 of Butler:

Bwog is pleased to present the following tidbit from 40 Days:

Student: Well, I'm a 3-2 at Barnard and SEAS, so I'm a Barnard senior but a SEAS junior.

Official: You're not on the list.

Student: But I'm a senior.

Official: So, come back with a copy of your transcript.

Student: I need a transcript for this?

Official: Or a letter from your advising dean.

Prospective student (gesturing at the assembled students drinking): What's this?

Tour guide: Um, this is Low Library. You'll never go in there.

A photo essay by Bwog shutterbug Kate Linthicum will appear later today after the jump.

Here's an addition to the list of fun prophylactics that currently includes bar scanners, NSOP party shut-downs, stricter RA rules, and chastising frats (more on that later)-- Bwog hears the Lion's Head pub underwent a police raid and fake ID roundup late last night. Will it never end?

James DeWille's guide to nightlife was so awesome that it broke Bwog yesterday. Regardless, we're going to repost it - happy clubbing.

So you've arrived to Columbia fresh from Michigan, Delaware, or wherever your shiny new fake I.D. tells you, and you're ready to take on the town. Here´s a week's worth of the best (and the not-so-best-that-you-should- still-probably-make-an-appearance-at) parties. Basically, just be sure to skip Meatpacking´s over-hyped, over-priced, and well, over scene and get to know your dear friend, the 2nd Ave F, your two-dollar ticket to the Lower East Side. Who´s got time for Homer when you need to claw, gnaw, drink and dance your way downtown, past the rope, and in the club? Before you know it, you´ll be splattered across the internet, cheek kissing entire roomfuls of pretty Brooklynites, and sucking down free drank. Good God. Good luck.

For anyone who's spent any time at Columbia beyond Days on Campus or a guided tour, this article says nothing new. The Arkansas kid who claims that Adderall users are "nonstinky," however, has clearly not been in an environment (read: Butler) where a thousand souls are pulling their second all-nighters with the aid of their favorite speed-like substance. As we know, those kids get funky.

But wait! Columbia kids also use happy little pills for another noble purpose: to combat the unpleasant warning-sign side-effects of drinking! Here we find OTC methods to deal with "the Asian sensation, Asian explosion, Asian flush and Asian blush." And a posh snap-shot of Calvin Sun.

As you desperately attempt to fill your brain with the Art Hum knowledge you've been neglecting all term, know that there is a light at the end of this exam-ridden tunnel - the print issue, which drops Monday. Herein, Addison Anderson performs a textual analysis of your drunken bullshit.

Great Minds Drink Alike

Abstract:

My target of analysis is the ex post facto retelling of a drunken adventure. What first comes to mind is just how many different narratives are possible for the population of an urban, pedestrian campus. No drunk driving means less dying, and Manhattan's bounty offers thousands of ways to have an awesome night. Now, a look at semantics.

Common Phrases:

1. "Soooo," "waaaasted," "druuunk," etc., as in "I was soooo druuunk last night. I stole some cop's gun and waaaasted him."

Such words are very common in drunk stories. The speaker expresses the extent of something in the story, usually his/her/his own blood alcohol content or how ho(ooo)t someone looked, using vowel lengthening to express this quantity in sound. I call this "quansonance," and I find it not only in stories about drunkenness, but also in the real-time speech of actual drunks. Thus:

Inquirer: I see you're drinking rum. How much have you had?

Drunk: Ruuuum.

Inquirer: Ah, four.

Oh those chemists! Oh those grad students who aspire to be chemists!

Stephanie Quan writes in with an account of the chem department's winter show, a Varsity Show-type extravaganza featuring off-key musical tributes to favorite professors sung by second-year grad students with department secretaries on keyboard.

But in the esteemed words of R. Kelly, "after the party show, it's the after party." Stephanie says the fun really started with five hours of chemically induced revelry in the lounge. The ethanol flowed from twelve standard kegs and a massive punch dispenser, photographed here next to Stephanie's friend Terrence.

Just remember guys, "don't drink and derive."

While you're in Butler cramming — or simply shitfaced at 1020 — your university is actively engaging with that frightening specter beyond the 116th Street Gates: the wide, weird world. Below, Bwog presents some of the most recent (yet unheralded!) findings and goings on from the realm of science and technology to have occurred at Columbia over the last few days.

Seismic Shi(f)t Happens

When some seisometers placed by Lamont-Doherty researchers along the sea floor of the Pacific near the Mexican coast found themselves stuck in fresh lava flows 8,000 feet below underwater, the university's bursars were surely shaking their heads in disbelief that they had surrendered any funds to a project advocated by the curious novelty of an "Earth Observatory" again. That is, until Lamont scientists Maya Tolstoy and Felix Waldhauser discovered that the seisometers were still transmitting, and became the first to closely record micro-earthquakes resulting from underwater eruptions. Good news, especially if it means Columbia research vessels won't be returning to the area to install new devices— and making enough noise to kill whales again.

Gateway Lab con Stile?

Italian artists Eva and Franco Mattes have two obsessions in life: Andy Warhol is one, the other is the virtual online community Second Life. Bwog has no doubt that if cultural critics had the time, the patience, or the lack of lives these two must in order to have endured a year in this hyper-aestheticised neighborhood of cyberspace, they would fall into paroxysms of glee before scribing fascinating tomes on this binarially-circumscribed subculture. Instead, we're left with Warholesque portraits of the artists' favorite virtual avatars. Oh, and they're going on display at Casa Italiana. We get the Italian connection, but wonder if the location has more to do with Mudd being too crowded with Halo fans?

In which S. Alex Kudroff tells us what makes B&W staffer Will Snider's play different from all other plays...

"Everything Different" is college compressed into 85 minutes. Will Snider manages to capture the essence of a night of drunken mayhem in a dorm suite where conversations roam from love to sex, depression, drugs, revolution, and of course, sports.

The play begins with the gay liberal-revolutionary reading the newspaper and saying "fuck" to the world. The rest of the play follows in this cynical tone, only with more alcohol. Throw in the guy who believes in love and hopes to stop hooking up with random girls, the girl who only believes in the practical form of love (anyone up for a Symposium?), the guy who is madly in love with a girl from high school who doesn't actually care about him, the athlete who just wants some drugs, and of course, the drug dealer who supposedly wears sunglasses indoors (though he doesn't actually on stage).

Ok. Bwog wants desperately to elevate the conversation about the Minutemen Mania-- and we hope you've gotten that impression from our coverage thus far. But sometimes, bwgossip bears such delicious and tempting fruit, that we just can't help eating from the Tree. We hope new viewers to the site don't call us terrorists for posting this, but...

A worthy Bwog fan sent us a drinking game, to enliven your Friday night in front of the tube watching Fox News.

Drink every time O'Reilly mentions his book "Culture Warrior," "far left loonies.""SPs", or the "no spin zone."

Drink every time someone starts a comment with "Let me interrupt you there," "You're missing the point," "Well," or "Ok, but."

Drink every time Columbia is accused of being "Ivory Tower,"far left" or "out of control."

Drink every time someone inappropriately references the Nazis, the fascists, the terrorists, "a million Mogadishus," or the President of Iran.

Drink every time Avi flails, stutters, winces, gesticulates, pantomimes, or mumbles.

Drink every time Avi stops a given sentence and starts over. Drink again if O'Reilly doesn't interrupt him.

And finish your drink if anyone mentions Mark Foley, a loofah, or Nicholas Murray Butler.

Man oh man, food and drink are awesome! We present you with the following.

Overheard outside Tasti D-Lite:

Boy: So, what exactly is "O'Tasti?"
Employee: I don't fucking know.
Boy: I'll take a large!

And, in Ruggles:

Person 1: Why do wine coolers even exist?
Person 2: So people over 40 can get drunk while pretending to be classy.
Person 1: What about beer?
Person 2: Pretending to be CLASSY.
Person 1: What about wine?
Person 2: PRETENDING to be classy.

Thanks to Grace Duffy and Steven Thomas for the tips.