Tidbits from tonight's CCSC meeting:

- First, the first Lerner Pub is this Thursday from 10-12 (as the rest of us try, and fail, to get into East Campus).

- Excitingly, Flex off Campus, per junior class President George Krebs, is "well underway," with a timeline put together by the administration in place. Said timeline would result in Flex dollars accepted at off-campus eateries before 2008 graduation.

- Not to mention, President Krebs' first e-mail, which is so wonderfully bizarre (the class of 2009 is WHAT?) that we reprinted it after the jump.

- Tentatively, there's a sophomore semiformal in the works for the spring. Sophomores can hope (though their livers might disagree) that it's a replay of last year's Winter Wonderland.

- Finally, five parties have expressed an interest in running in - wait for it - the Freshman Elections! Oh, pray that they're every as ludicrous as the ten-party 2010 freshman elections were. More coverage on all these stories as they develop.

-DPD

Student Services Vice President Lisa Hogarty just let you know in an e-mail that we'll all be getting nifty new ID cards come fall (that Rita Hollander is one impressive woman). Two bits that matter.

One: the cards will NOT use our social security numbers. Bwog hopes this means that neighborhood flex points a la NYU are coming down the pike--SSN security has always been the holdup.

And two: the cards will allow for "more convenient building access while maintaining safe environments." Could that mean that...Barnard has opened its doors, at long last?

WAIT AND SEE!

City Council: Freshmen belong at Columbia Cottage, not 1020.

Separate, but equal?

OFFCAMPUSFLEX OFFCAMPUSFLEX OFFCAMPUSFLEX!

Because you can't dress in drag for Yom Kippur...

• 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

Blue and White Managing Editor James Williams submits this Overheard:

"My parents think Flex is a New York State tax."

And with a new Democratic Governor, perhaps that "tax" can increase?