Columbia, welcome to no man's land.

For the next two weeks, life will most likely not be fun. You are stuck in the in-between holiday purgatory, having just left home and not far from returning. You must somehow fit what now seems like a lifetime of paper-writing and furious studying into this short amount of time.

Bwog isn't really going to suggest you do anything during finals week except sigh loudly, complain with your friends and have occasional nervous breakdowns, but until the second week of December, we suggest that you punctuate your finals-induced misery with one or a few of the many lovely free mostly-holiday-themed events taking place in our fair city. A full listing after the jump.

Bwog passed the Carman gates at 114th Street and was happy to find representatives from Seattle eager to bequeath $5 Starbucks Cards as well as Tazo Tea and their replacement for adderall to students harried by midterms. All you have to do is put your "name" and your "address" onto a postcard that you are sending to your "parents." Enjoy!

If this Craigslisting is to be believed, it appears as though Cafe Fresh on 121st and Amsterdam -- the School of Social Work hangout known for its beautiful location and slow-as-molasses service -- could be up for sale.

UPDATE, 12:26pm: A call to Cafe Fresh reveals that it is not, in fact, selling itself. So the ad is either a prank, or there's another corner cafe that started 2.5 years ago selling coffee and American fare on Amsterdam avenue in the 120s.

The post says the place makes $550,000-$600,000 per year, but no word on how much they're asking. Hey, now seems like a good time to get into the restaurant business!

Also while knocking around on everyone's favorite internet marketplace, we found a benevolent reverend studying at Columbia advertising his (or her) marriage officiation services for FREE. So get off your ass and pop the question already; this offer may not be around forever

Yes, it's free money to buy food! According to two eager-to-email passersby, Starbucks representatives are giving away $5 gift cards in front of Lerner. Bwog remains perplexed, and skeptical of tipster Ben Isham's explanation that this "string-free free money" is "part of a promotion to 'educate' students about how their parents can reload them monthly." Regardless of stodgy-hearted Bwog's trepidations, undercaffeinated opportunists are encouraged to mob any Starbucksers who may remain on campus.

UPDATE 4:10 PM: On a somewhat related note, first ice cream truck of the season spotted on 112th! Photographic evidence after the jump.

Have you been wondering why the Lerner Box Office has been boarded up for weeks? Chad Miller, Events and Outreach Manager of the Columbia Arts Initiative, has all the answers - CUArts has been working with the Office of the Provost, Columbia College, and Student Services to create an all-new Ticket and Information Center, which opens tomorrow.

According to Chad, the TIC will be selling "tickets to on-campus productions and events, discounted tickets to Broadway, Off-Broadway, first-run films and events at major cultural and arts institutions as well as information on how to connect to the arts here and around town." Tickets can be purchased with cash or credit card, and www.tic.columbia.edu promises that students will be able to use flex to pay for tickets soon. As an added bonus, anyone who buys or reserves a ticket with the TIC by March 7 gets a FREE subscription to Time Out New York. Exciting!

Do you ever get nostalgia for your boarding/private school days? Cardigans? The old boys' club? The Varsity Show has set up a country club on Low plaza, complete with cucumber sandwiches, Arnold Palmer's, bubble gum cigars, and neon golf balls. Delicious!

In which Ashish Kundra, a veteran of one internet enterprise himself, leads us through a forest of free services on the web that may just save you some money on your way to tech geek nirvana (if they don't end up on the startup junkheap first).

Google on-demand

Google on your phone...no crackberry required. Text "Google" (466453) with any search query and Google will text back results. For example, a text with "Mexican restaurant 10025" will give you the closest Mexican restaurants. Be careful though, there isn't a friendly suggestion when you misspell something ("Did you mean blog?"). So spell correctly or make sure you have a lot of texts in your plan.

Cross-gadget communication (www.Teleflip.com)

Send a text to any phone by emailing the [phone number]@teleflip.com. For example, if I text 1231231234@teleflip.com, the email will be broken up and sent as a text to that person's phone. For student groups, you could make a list serv of phone numbers (entered as email addresses) to send out messages ASAP. The service is easy to use, but it can't completely replace an email/data plan. The email texts are confusing, too-- sometimes filled with a lot of white space.

For the chronic oversleeper (Snoozester.com)

Snoozester lets you set up an alarm clock calendar. At your preset wake up times, Snoozester will call your phone and ask you to confirm that you are awake by pressing a digit. It's free for the first 10 wake up calls, then 4 bucks a month after that. Works nicely, but when they start charging you might as well stick with your alarm.

It's that time of the year again when New Jersey transit tickets are free with your school ID (and this coupon)! Now you really have no excuse not to go home for Yom Kippur.

Train conductor hat tip to Tao Tan for pointing this out.

On the semester's first Friday the activities fair bestowed unto Bwog the following:

• One plastic Japanese fan (which was very useful in the foul heat)
• One pocketful of melted chocolate
• At least four varieties of baked goods
• Condoms-a-plenty
• the Holy Bible
  
• One bright yellow gym sack brandished with advertising from Columbia Community Outreach
• A nice little dry erase board embellished, in blue, with our beloved mascot
• An upcoming surplus of organizational spam
  

Also, were you aware that there is such thing as a Figure Skating Club at Columbia? Or that there's an organization devoted to aeronautics? Neither were we -- but we were tempted to make a run with the Society of Automotive Engineers' race car parked in the middle of college walk.

We know it's hot, but you have about 45 minutes to decide which of those esoteric organizations are going to take over your life for the rest of your college career. Get to it, kids!

...kind of.

In what could be a cynically necessary (or unprecedentedly desperate) attempt to motivate Columbia's legions of indifferent secular Jews, Aish is offering to shell out $250 to anyone willing to take their online course in general Judaism. While Bwog can't help but question Aish's methodology (even more in-your-face than a year and a half ago) its Columbia chapter head, freshly-ordained Rabbi Yehuda Zachter, is enthusiastic and quite approachable--the rookie organization has an office at Earl Hall, and Bwog is interested in seeing whether it is successful in carving out (buying itself?) a place in Columbia's Jewish scene.

We rushed to get the Orientation Issue of The Blue and White to you this week, only to have the print release held up by red tape. But we'll still be dangling bits of it in front of you for the next few days while we get the issue online. Today: navigating the cutthroat world of Shakespeare in the Park (which runs until September 8th!), by Anna Phillips.

In late June of this year, within several days of each other, The New York Times and the New Yorker both came out with rave reviews of Shakespeare in the Park's production of Romeo and Juliet. The water! The moonlight! Lauren Ambrose! Critics squealed in delight, and everyone in the city with a literal interpretation of the printed word immediately made plans to attend.

Shakespeare in the Park, as one Times reporter put it, "is one of those grand New York traditions that really works well, that everyone loves, like dog walkers or bagels and schmear." But it's a little different in that, unlike paid help or food, it's free entertainment.

Free Culture at Columbia--the group that showed you how to hide from CUIT--is now handing out another 250 of its high-price-defying flash drives loaded with public domain versions of all the Lit Hum and CC texts.

You're not going to miss this this one, 2011--thousands of dollars saved and a movement joined (although it's up to you whether or not to risk your teacher's ire for getting different translations). Get them Tuesday at 2:30 PM in Butler 203.

Meanwhile, anyone been studying up for Lit Hum final?

Bwog's Jessica Cohen guest hosts this week's almost all-free guide.

Monday, July 30, 2007
Bryant Park Monday Movie
5:00pm (FREE)
All The King's Men (1949) is on tonight. Don't confuse it with this one, please.

Whole Foods Market - Salami Tasting, Gourmand Conversation
7:00pm ($15)
You're secretly or not-obsessed with salami and want moral support. For real - the people at this Whole Foods know what they're talking about. Also, an alternative dating locale?

Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Reading and Discussion at The Strand Bookstore
7:00-8:30pm (FREE)
Wrap your head around the Dover, PA trial on teaching intelligent design in schools with Gordy Slack, Matthew Chapman and Laurie Goodstein. It's another Summer for the Gods.