According to Bwog contributor Alex Weinberg, "One of the electronic construction signs on 110th between Amsterdam and Columbus has lost its mind." More photographic evidence after the jump.

The signs of spring are everywhere on campus: two students sitting on the lawn listening to a radio, absolutely no frisbees whatsoever, and the season's first whiff of insanity wafting up from Manhattanville. This afternoon's distinctive smell is caused by Anne Whitman, the owner of the former Sheffield Farms stable building. The University is still negotiating the terms of a purchase deal with Whitman, which Bwog supposes is why Ms. Whitman is now asking the university to move the building four blocks. [Emphasis added.]

Insanity! Back-of-the-envelope engineering! Poorly Photoshopped site maps! All after the jump.

A bit of late news that was recently brought to our attention: according to the ominously-titled website House of Bnai-Haman, September 24, 2007 will now permanently be referred to as "Columbia's Day of Shame," which the site asks to readers to make sure "is never forgotten." Granted, the blog was actively updated for a grand total of two weeks, so we're not sure how long people will remember such an appellation -- never mind the nifty bit of poetry in the left hand column. Hey, at least its's got those sister sites loaded and running (more or less, anyway).

He even makes up quotes from PrezBo himself! Here's one selection:

"Since Hitler is no longer available and Amadinejad has already spoken, I want our students to have the chance to hear from this scummy scoundrel," Bollinger said' in a news release.

Bollinger further promised that he'd give the nooseman a public dressing down before providing him an open forum to spout his message of hate.

While Professor Constantine told news outlets covering the story that she found the incident "very personal and very degrading," Bollinger said the feelings of all victims matter not. "What counts," Bollinger said, "is that in America, everyone from the corner grocer to the corner cannibal has his or her opportunity to besmirch the reputation of our campus."

Now that would require some serious sensitivity training.

Sick of hearing about Ahmadinejad? Of course you are! But watch this anyway.

And are you sick of real estate tycoons conspiring with major universitites in order to mind-control unsuspecting students using electromagnetic satellites? Then you, my paranoid friend, have something in common with a former SIPA student who has spent the past week spamming dozens of news outlets with a "Letter to President Bollinger."

Writes former American Prospect staffer and blogger David Maxwell Fine:

"In your introduction of the President of Iran you said, 'Lastly, in universities (sic), we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth.'

The truth happens to be that these satellite-broadcast advanced electromagnetic technologies that can control human anatomy and physiology are secretly influencing
our world in many ways today, up to the highest levels, and have been for decades."

The culprit? Why who else but New York real estate magnate Robert Tishman, the criminal mastermind behind these "advanced satellite electromagnetic technologies which can control human anatomy, physiology, and the brain."

Far be it for us to poke fun at this obviously-distressed (or, conversely, comedically ingenious) individual. We nevertheless note, in all seriousness, that this is probably the most cogent analysis of last week's events that Bwog has come across.

-ARR

A tipster sends the following anecdote:

Today I got off the subway at Columbus Circle to see a crowd gathering beneath the globe in front of the Trump tower. A man was on top of the globe, wearing rollerblades. More and more police came, and an ambulance with paramedics and a stretcher. After about ten minutes, the man reached in his messenger bag and started throwing confetti. He then climbed down from the globe and the police took it from there...

We like to keep track of the buzz on our bwogroll, and Six Silberman over at fiveplusone just gave us some good morning brain fodder: a Theory of the Bollinger in Manhattanville, attempting to explain the singularity of purpose with which he's pursued building up north. In a nutshell, Six says that the plan for expansion was formulated with incomplete information, and Bollinger is now a hostage to both the out-of-touch Trustees and the apparatus he's built to make the plan happen. And like many conjectures concocted by applied math majors in their spare time, this could either be completely whack or somewhat on point, in need of Bwog peer review.

- LBD

It's like news from a sinking ship: text messages, calls from borrowed cell phones, and internet cafe e-mails have been pouring in recently from those stranded in exotic spring break locales (including the ridiculous number congregating here). The nastiness outside in New York grounded over a thousand planes, foiling the homework plans and sinking the budgets of partiers scattered across the Carribean.

Perhaps most troublingly, it seems that key members of the student government are missing. The CCSC VP Funding is stuck in the Bahamas, the VP Communications is stuck in Fort Lauderdale, and the senior class president is somewhere between here and Jamaica. Thankfully, the VP Policy is safe at Columbia, and we can only presume that the President and VP Campus life are in secure, undisclosed locations.

The VP Communications sends these observations from Fort Lauderdale:

Man on Phone: "It's so fucked up. It's so fucked up, Steph."
Woman, probably wife, on other end: "..."
Man: "What the fuck do you want me to do? Grow wings and fly? I don't feel good."
Woman: "..."
Man: "Why don't I try to rebook it? What the fuck do you think I've been doing for the last 30 minutes? Can't you just call them from home and pretend that you're me?"
Wife: "..."
Man: "OK! You're a woman! Not a good plan. I need to go. I need to eat. I'm getting dizzy."

More after the jump...

Howard Bloom blew off our first interview because his stepson had just been caught dressing up like Hitler. The administrators at Leon Goldstein High School had dismissed Walter Petryk for wearing a Hitler Halloween costume to class, and neither Bloom nor Petryk's mother were speaking to the press. Walter, on the other hand, seemed to be having a good time with the whole crisis—so much so that he wore the costume a second time to talk to reporters and angry citizens.

Joel Levy of the New York Anti-Defamation League said the Hitler costume "is not only anti-Semitic—it's anti-American, and anti- the values of Western democracy."

So when no one came to answer the door at Bloom's Park Slope brownstone, we thought maybe the guy was lying low until the heat died down. Or maybe he was at the Tea Lounge, the coffee shop/bar where we were told he spends most of his time. But Bloom wasn't there either, so we asked around. Almost everyone in the joint knew who Bloom was—knew that he spent a lot of time there with his laptop, that is, but not much else. No one knew what he did.

"He's a scientist of some kind," one of the bartenders told us. "I think."

At that point, his guess was as good as ours. Bloom's website, Howardbloom.net, is a patchwork of words and images. There are excerpts from his writings about science, with titles like "Reality is a Mass Hallucination" and "Isolation: The Ultimate Poison"; a gallery of Bloom's photography; "Thou Shalt Bloom," a blog where Howard comments mainly on foreign policy; "Postcards from Planet Bloom," which are literally postcards; and a link to a site where you can determine whether or not your car will run on bio-fuel. Bloom also has his own entry on Wikipedia, further complicating matters. Here, the dedicated Bloom-ologist will learn that he spent years working as publicist for people like Bob Marley and Bette Midler, that he invented two new fields of scientific study, and that, according to the title of one of his books, he accidentally started "The Sixties."

Something must be wrong here. And, naturally, it is. At Howardbloom.net, you'll read glowing quotes from The New Yorker like the following: "For those who worry that our ingenuity has upset nature's equilibrium, Bloom has a message that is both reassuring and sobering." But the magazine's archives offer nothing about the guy.

According to Wikipedia, Bloom is currently a "visiting scholar in the Graduate Psychology Department at NYU." We called NYU: Bloom has never worked there.

Yet we knew that this man couldn't be a complete fraud—he's written two books put out by legitimate publishers. We initially became interested in Bloom after reading The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History, a sprawling account of world history which concludes that evil is biological. On the cover are the words of novelist Leon Uris: "An astonishing act of intellectual courage." The back features laudatory quotes from scientists. But when we dug deeper, that Howard Bloom strangeness reared its head.

Contact with Bloom can only be made through an intermediary, a mysterious fellow who goes by "JZ." At our first successful meeting, we met a nondescript thirty-something man in track pants and a baggy sweatshirt who jogged down the stairs of Bloom's brownstone and ushered us into the foyer. Did he live with Bloom? JZ was at a loss to explain his job, and didn't seem particularly interested in developing an articulate definition. "I'm Bloom's, uh, multi-man," he told us.

JZ walked us up to the third-story landing, where we finally met Bloom himself. He was short, with uncombed remnants of curly brown hair. His pants were extremely tight. He wore a Howardbloom.net T-shirt and carried a backpack containing his beloved laptop. It was 8:00 PM, and he was roaring to go, displaying an absurd amount of energy and an intimate knowledge of our own journalistic output. He smiled broadly. "How did you find me? I'm quite an obscure individual, you know."

Up the creaky stairway to the fourth floor of the building, where Bloom's décor revealed the inspired madness we expected. The room, large and attic-like, was dominated by piles of old computers and printers, propped up with dog-eared copies of books on neurology, religion, and new-age spirituality, which seemed to have spilled over from the over-stuffed bookshelves. Add a few dressers dividing the room in half and a huge bed, and we could barely walk through the space.

He invited us to lie on the bed and then served us orange juice in wine glasses. Bloom stayed seated in the chair next to us for the whole time, punctuating his statements by hunching forward and leaning back, playing with his hands and rubbing his knees.

Before we could begin, there was the meta-interview. "Are you going to take notes or record me?" We had a recorder. Bloom disapproved with an odd, analytical joy. Citing his experience as a reporter, he claimed, "Writing it down forces you to process the information. So, you actually get more by taking notes."

We politely dissented, triggering a disquisition on how growing up in different technological settings activates different cells in our brains. As a result, Bloom's hour-long monologue barely got beyond his childhood in Buffalo, New York—everyone thought he was retarded, but he loved science, had read through the entire library, and decided that he wanted to dedicate his life to the study of everything, or as Bloom would have it, omnology.

Omnology is one of the two sciences Bloom alleges to have created. As a young science-enthusiast, Bloom observed researchers devoting the labors of a lifetime to the study of a single, tiny organism, filling countless volumes with obscure minutiae unreadable even by fellow scientists. This was not for Bloom.

So, he founded omnology. What exactly constitutes omnology is unclear, but perhaps that is the point. "Omnology is a science, but one dedicated to the biggest picture conceivable by the minds of its practitioners," Bloom writes in his cheery Omnologist Manifesto. "Omnology will use every conceptual tool available—and some not yet invented, but inventible—to leapfrog over disciplinary barriers, stitching together the patchwork quilt of science and all the rest that humans have yet to know. If one omnologist is able to perceive the relationship between pop songs, ancient Egyptian graffiti, Shirley MacLaine's mysticism, neurobiology, and the origins of the cosmos, so be it. If another uses mathematics to probe traffic patterns, the behavior of insect colonies, and the manner in which galaxies cluster in swarms, wonderful. And if another uses introspection to uncover hidden passions and relate them to research in chemistry, anthropology, psychology, history, and the arts, she, too, has a treasured place on the wild frontiers of scientific truth—the terra incognita in the heartland of omnology." If not exactly a lucid map of the future of science, this tract seems to articulate the guiding principles of Bloom's life.

He supplemented the interview by e-mailing us his current book, How I Accidentally Started the Sixties. The advance copy included a gushing quote, supposedly from Timothy Leary: "The comparisons to James Joyce are inevitable and undeniable. Finnegans's Wake wanders through the rock 'n roll sixties. Wow! Whew! Wild! Wonderful!"

"Rumor in my grammar school had it," Bloom wrote, "that I was hatched from an egg, and not even an earthling egg at that. Those in the know implied that a batch of inept Martians had misread a road map as they rushed to an obstetrical facility and had landed on the wrong planet. Without competent medical guidance, they'd barely hauled me out of my shell."

Buffalo was not hospitable to Bloom, but Reed College wasn't much better. He spent his first semester sleeping on a wooden board at odd hours in odd places, never carrying more than what he considered essential for survival. He dropped out after less than a year and moved in with a Seattle anthropologist and a transvestite.

The rest is hazy, but we know that Bloom forayed into the music world. He probably didn't, as his Wikipedia entry claims, start the careers of Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, and Bette Midler. But he did edit the rock magazine Circus, where, among other things, he profiled David Bowie in 1973.

Apparently the stress of the industry took its toll, and Bloom had an epic nervous breakdown. He lay in bed—incidentally, the bed on which we were sipping orange juice—for fifteen years. The product of that period was The Lucifer Principle. We're not entirely sure if Bloom has really recovered--he spends almost all of his time at home or in the Tea Lounge--but maybe that's just how he wants to live his life.

And therein lies the problem: it's impossible to determine how Bloom wants to live, or is living, his life. These disparate facts lack a unified narrative. In a second interview we told Bloom as much, but he didn't seem concerned.

"One of the secrets of whatever is going on here is beyond multi-tasking: it's living multiple lives," he said. "It's observational science—Darwin couldn't give you a p-factor and yet we consider it legitimate science. That's what I've spent my whole fucking life doing."

In reality, he's spent his life dropping out of school, working in the music business, writing science books, and creating websites.