Hurry! From 6-9 tonight, the Blue Key Society hosts a competitive, campus wide Spelling Bee in the Wien Lounge. ROAR, LION, ROAR! [Results after the jump!]

For almost every student, Spellcheck is an indispensable tool. Thanks to Bill Gates and his brainchild, Microsoft Word, the once tedious process of editing a paper for spelling errors has been reduced to a series of simple clicks. But then, there are those other students...

Yes, at Columbia, there is a strange breed of students whose spelling capacities surpass those of that supercilious dancing paper-clip icon. These students spell with natural confidence and verbal intuition. Their vocabularies are so rich that while Spellcheck may flounder over obvious Greek derivatives, like, dialogism and phyllophyllin, Columbia's superior strain of spellers can easily tackle any word.

Mad nostalgia for the mid-90s is standard by now, and unsurprisingly many Bwoggers have devolved back to their 9-year-old selves, reveling in the joys of Nintendo 64 and Mario Kart in particular. Though our early Karting experience was largely a tale of character-building losses to nimbler-fingered cousins, we have trained a bit among ourselves and have stoked a more robust sense of competition (future adversaries at Blue Key Society's spelling bee should be wary). Bwog hereby invites all fellow nostalgics for a Mario Kart tournament next Friday, April 4th, on Ruggles 6. If you have deluded yourself into thinking you're game for the challenge - or if you just want a sweet photo of yourself in video gaming action, accompanied by a putatively funny/punny caption, published on Bwog - email bwgossip@columbia.edu. Suite number and time details will follow.

Competitive cooking came to Columbia this afternoon. Read on to see who proved their culinary capacity and who fell short.

Coinciding with the premiere of season four of Bravo's Top Chef, the Hartley-Wallach Living and Learning Center hosted their own cooking competition this afternoon. The first Annual LLC Iron Chef Competition pitted fellow Hartley-Wallach residents against each other. Thirteen teams of two faced off to decide who could whip together the most sophisticated and savory dishes.

At the commencement of today's events, the LLC Iron Chef Committee unveiled the secret ingredient: Rice Krispies. The organizing committee of the LLC Iron Chef incorporated a special ingredient into the competition's parameters both as an homage to their titular predecessor, Iron Chef, and also to unify the different teams' dishes with common ingredient. The teams were then given twenty dollars and three hours to come up with an entrée and dessert of their own creation.

Although it probably seems like much too early in the year to begin thinking about these things, the Housing Selection season officially began today with the release of next year's LLC Applications. Current upperclassmen will surely remember that traditionally, admittance into the preciously named Living-Learning Center has been highly competitive. The number of applicants rises higher with each passing year varies from year to year—in the past, there have been about 650 for 203 available positions, although last year applications dropped to 350 (thanks to our commenters for the correction!). Bwog wouldn't be surprised, however, if many of this year's potential applicants were put off by the fact that the process seems significantly more daunting than it has been in the past. The ten page application requires an astonishing five essays—which, if we remember correctly, is more than we had to write to get into Columbia in the first place.

Nevertheless, if past years are any indication, the process should be highly entertaining to observe. If you have any tales to tell about the lengths to which students will go to get in, or if you hear of any particularly amusing programming ideas being pitched by applicants—less "take the floor to the Met" and more "lock my suitemates into the walk-in freezer in John Jay and make them use teamwork find a way out"—we encourage you to let us know by emailing bwgossip@columbia.edu. And good luck, applicants!

You know it's true: your professors are hot. Well, maybe not all of them. But, if like most of the rest of us, you've ever been sitting in class and were suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to have Molly Murray or Anders Stephanson come out from behind the lectern and give you a private tour of her/his office, whispering sweet bits of poetry and foreign policy in your ear, here's your chance to let the world know. IvyGate, everyone's favorite pan-ivy gossip blog, is running a contest to find our esteemed league's hottest profs. Who will it be? Bwog certainly hopes that the eventual honors will go to a Columbia intellect; with Simon Schama, Janaki Bakhle, Elizabeth Amann, and myriad others on our side, surely we have enough "talent" to clinch the title.