Gawker, whose staff apparently checks all the Columbia news websites every ten minutes for changes, is muscling onto Bwog's turf a little bit this afternoon. Namely, catching Spec with its pants down with the following correction tucked at the bottom of yesterday's caustic anti-Tibet editorial:

CORRECTION: This submission misstates that one Dalai Lama admitted to having sex with hundreds of men and women while knowing that he had AIDS. Additionally, the submission misstates that many monks participated in the dismemberment of female bodies. In fact, there is no factual evidence to substantiate either of these claims. Spectator regrets the error.

Well, yes, that's amazing. Good enough for Gawker to walk its fancy self above 96th Street (and to note that relevance, the current Dalai Lama has held his position for fifty years, which means the number of Dalai Lamas an editor has to look up to verify that claim is approximately one). We won't even mention that Spec tagged the article "ignorance."

Anyway, we applaud Gawker on their nice catch. However, stealing our headline from earlier today? Man. Clearly, somebody should be paying us. We're looking in the general direction of your faux-loft penthouse, Denton.

Bwog is a simple website. We like hawks and free coffee and pictures of babies in snow. But this morning Bwog was thrust into the unflattering spotlight of the New York media thanks to a fact-checking-averse ex-Speccie with a Gawker byline. You can read the post here.

The story has inexplicably gained some momentum, and Bwog was later contacted by Media Bistro regarding our response to Gawker, which you can read here.

We'd chalk it up to a slow news day, but then again Governor Spitzer was just implicated in a prostitution ring, so we're stumped.

Que sera sera.

• The strike is not the only thing that has put Columbia in the news lately. According to Bwog reader James Downie, the rugby team's planned visit to Trinidad and Tobago is also newsworthy, or at least for this Tobago publication. The writer even refers to our athletes as "the prestigious Ivy League team, Columbus."
  
  There must be a journalistic lesson in this for all of us.
  

• In the latest exceptional CCSC '09 email, class president George Krebs gives college sophomores the first heads-up: Flex Off Campus may actually happen, starting in Spring 2008. "After years of epic struggle with the administration to move the simplicity of Flex to the more delicious realm of the area of establishments, we've finally made great headway," he writes. The idea of a late-night HamDel fix via ID swipe is enticing! Nevertheless, we'll believe it once we see it.
  
  Krebs also notes that in the nearer future, we'll be able to make do the community some good with our Columbia Cards too. Thanks to CCSC '09 efforts, within the next two weeks students will be able to donate change--or any amount--in Dining Dollars/Flex charges to the Jackie Robinson Youth Center in West Harlem. Charities receiving the proceeds will rotate each semester.
  
  Naturally, Krebs closes his email in bureaucratically trendy Youtube style — or, perhaps more appropriately, "Big Willy Style."
  
  
• Do you know who set off that fire alarm in the middle of your English class yesterday? According to the previously QuickSpec'd article on the protest, the group behind it has quite the name:
  
  "As the strike began, fire alarms went off in Butler Library, Lerner Hall, Hamilton Hall, and Kent Hall, forcing an evacuation of the buildings and an investigation by the New York Fire Department. Later, a group calling itself the Union of Students Advocating for the Preservation of Tedious Paperwork claimed responsibility for the fire alarms in a statement delivered anonymously to Spectator, which called the protest "symbolic, harmless, [and] permissible" and called the strike's organizers "aspiring bureaucrats."
  
  "We pulled fire alarms on campus to disrupt the scripting of both activism and student life," the statement said. "No one should be willing to sit idly in the face of war, nor should they be willing to act as mere extras in a farcical theatre of resistance."
  
  At this point, further commentary seems unnecessary.

- MIP