• Plans for Obamacain: Rest assured: there will be a jumbotron. In addition, the thousands of you who won't get lucky in The Lottery (to be overseen by two student representatives to ensure fairness) can still see what CCSC hopes will be an all-star speaker lineup: the council has requested one or two from a list including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Angelina Jolie, Usher, and Kenneth Cole. The service fair, detailed below, is very much like the activities fair. It will also include a photo montage, augmented by inspirational music to rally the student population, as well as an open mic for students to "speak about their own personal experiences with community service as part of the Columbia community." The whole shebang starts around 6pm.
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With the dual force of Obamacain four days from striking campus, student groups and councils are scrambling to inject themselves into the festivities. On Saturday, representatives from almost every governing council, as well as CPU, the College Democrats, and the College Republicans, met to plan programming for the run-up. They plan to send their outline to Columbia administration tomorrow morning.

The plan consists of two parts: speakers and service opportunites. Highlights will apparently include a voter registration drive led by CPU, the Dems, and the Republicans. Governing boards and individual community service groups will also put on a "service fair," highlighting service opportunities on campus. Finally, there will be a canned food drive led by the four student councils.

As for speakers, the ad-hoc coalition plans to bring in live speakers from 6-7 P.M., before the beginning of the forum. The speakers will focus on both service and September 11th. The pre-forum programming will close with a moment of silence for 9/11 victims. The councils hope to get a famous speaker (possibly a celebrity like Angelina Jolie) as part of the program. Bwog will bring you more specifics and reaction as they come in.

UPDATE 11:31 PM: The full plan to be presented to the deans is below the jump

For a three-day week, it sure felt a lot longer. Maybe it was the newness, maybe it was the heat (or Hanna). Either way, let's relive this auspicious beginning to the semester.

Your professors began class in off-putting and amusing ways

A mysterious antagonist offended one violent feminist in EC 

We discovered our beloved bird of prey was a plural

To little fanfare, tacos were substituted for stir-fry in Ferris Booth 

It was announced Obama and McCain would soon descend upon Roone

At which point, every single person in the world immediately tried to secure tickets. These attempts were rebuffed by fickle and cruel technology. 

The activities fair may be over, but you've still got a while to find your niche in Columbia's extracurricular scene. To help you sift through the alphabet soup, our series of club crib sheets continues with groups that hand out money and groups that may eventually make lots of money.

Governing Boards and Councils (a.k.a. The Man)

Activities Board at Columbia (ABC) - This oversight organization funds publications, cultural groups, competition groups--basically everything SGB doesn't pay for. Every club competes to have its friends on the board of representatives in hopes of upping their allocations.

Engineering Student Council (ESC) - ESC may be elected undemocratically—the executive board, which composes a much larger percentage of the total student body than any of the other councils, selects the president--but they do come up with the most wonderful web applications.

Student Government Association - Barnard College's student council, this year headed by Sarah Besnoff. SGA mostly stays on the west side of Broadway, but frequently cosponsors events with the other undergraduate councils.

General Studies Student Council (GSSC) - Now with a cute owl logo and a website that's at least helpful and up to date, GSSC is one of the more constituency-conscious councils out there. Bwog can only hope current president Brody Berg will be as entertaining as ex-leader Nico Cunningham.

Tonight, the CQA, Columbia's Queer Alliance, celebrates LGBT rights and fights for everyone's right to party with the First Friday Dance. On Saturday.

Nothing sets the atmosphere for a dance party better than torrential rain, right? How lucky we are to celebrate the First Friday Dance of the semester on this diluvial Saturday! If you're not a fan of going out in hurricane weather and are considering taking a rain check on "the hottest dance on the Upper Westside," according to the CQA, live va Queer Prom last spring to see all the Kate Perry pumped fun you'll be missing.

More love in the club after the jump.

Bwog's rogue adventurer, Jon Hill braves midtown in search of Sake and soy-infused delights. Read on, Japanophiles.

You could easily miss the Sake Bar Hagi on 49th Street if you weren't looking for it.

Only a single sign announces its presence, and to make matters worse, the sign is posted several doors down from the actual entrance to the Japanese pub. Still, if you pass those two tests, a third obstacle awaits you — a steeply descending staircase that hides the front door from sidewalk view.

Such subterfuge might be necessary, though. The evening crowd packing the noisy subterranean booths and tables of Sake Bar Hagi is almost too large for the staff to handle, and wait-times for seats can exceed an hour-and-a-half. Admittedly, customers have good reasons to stick around: the food is cheap, the atmosphere is charming, and the menu seems practically airlifted from the streets of Tokyo.

At this time of year, newness comes in all forms, from the obvious (your new dorm, your new classes, your new books, your new backpack) to the unanticipated (your replacement macBook charger, your subscription to Netflix to replace Kim's.) And while the novelty of these items is, well, novel, the polish of your purchases and the glow of your post-consumption satisfaction wears off as soon as your credit card bill comes at the end of the month.

In addition, New York City is notoriously pricey, your Morningside Heights being no exception. So when it comes to the question of making the most of their money, our heady first-years are pretty hard-pressed.

Just because you have homework doesn't mean the TV watching has to stop -- really 12s, it's true! Rob Trump's weekly web series fun continues with Mark Erickson's Infinite Solutions.

Well, my original plan for the first week of school was, having done Jake and Amir, to quickly knock off a review of the other major CollegeHumor webseries, The Michael Showalter Showalter. But while I was watching some other CollegeHumor stuff, specifically their awesome "Minesweeper: The Movie Trailer", I discovered something magical that made me abort my original plan. It was Infinite Solutions with Mark Erickson. Specifically, it was this:

Not only is Hamilton Terrace relatively nearby, but just about every blog in the city has also posted this PSA.

Current-founder Bari Weiss, CC '07, writes in the (possibly ill-fated) New York Sun today about the 19 incoming Columbia GS first-years who had previously served in the Armed Forces.

(According to Weiss, GS was created in 1947 partly as a response to the high number of ex-soldiers returning from WWII.)

Weiss spoke to a number of the 19 first-years about the differences between military life and academic life, and reactions range from confident about success ("You sit down next to these girls who are 18 years old and they've got plastic jewelry from Claire's and they're trying to understand the rise and fall of the USSR. They can do it; but we've seen dictators rise and fall") to thankful for the ability to appreciate the civilian life: "I'm just happy to be alive. I'm ecstatic here."

You still have an hour and a half left in the activities fair! Hurry up before all the snacks run out (SGB is still serving samoosas and chicken wings, for those out to ruin their diets). Feel free to refer to the following extremely approximate cartogram for locations, and see highlights after the jump.