Feeling melancholy this Sunday? Be daring and venture out of the confines of Butler into Morningside Park, the area's oft-dismissed sanctuary of tall trees and fresh breezes.

At the bottom of the 436,232 stone steps, Bwog had to flatten itself against a wall as hordes of screaming children raced around in circles, delighted at having finally finished their midterms. They informed us that, roughly translated from the language of Childbabble, the new playground had finally opened. This required an investigation.

The new playground has a pleasing blue-and-green color scheme that blends in nicely with the surrounding park. It's a more free-form style than some of the old themed playgrounds Bwog remembers. There's also a definite separation from the super-little equipment for toddlers and the more challenging slides and such for the older kids. The playground was completely overwhelmed with moms on cellphones not paying attention to their kids, busy running into poles and climbing everything within reach.

Photos and more after the jump.

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Last night, Culture Editor Tony Gong went to CCSC's massive multicultural event "Passport to Columbia," and returned a little more appreciative of diverse foods, arts, and Columbia, the nation. His account of the night follows.

Some people (naysayers and cynics, mainly) don't think you need a passport to go to Columbia. "Columbia is a university, not a country," they may argue. Well, last night, the CCSC Campus Life Committee finally showed us that Columbia is actually a country with over twenty smaller countries inside of it. Correspondingly, we've got a pretty kickass flag (see picture to the right). And yes, you do need a passport to enroll, naysayers. More proof and pictures after the jump.

Bwog's suburban diarist Madeline L. is spending the summer away from the city -- and she's enjoying it. Here, our diarist disects the nature of the suburban summer, and why it beats Morningside anyday.

Summer in the suburbs is built on a founding myth; an event within a circle of friends that becomes retold in different heights of enthusiasm, with different details added or subtracted. It becomes so recognizable that the difference of experience between people who lived it and those who heard about it is nonexistent. Collectiveness and camaraderie encapsulate the suburban summer -- that and a lot of weed.

For me, the summer of 2007 was the summer of getting thrown in a pool -- completely clothed, mascara trickling down my face, contacts mangled in the white of my eye, shirt pulled down. The boy who playfully threw me in the chlorine perils argued after the fact that it was my own fault. I made myself fall in, he reasoned. "You just have really shitty balance," he said.

With the pomp and circumstance of Class Day and graduation weeks behind us, Bwog was surprised and delighted when we were contacted last night by Maxim Pinkovskiy, the Columbia College valedictorian.

Wrote Pinkovskiy: "As the valedictorian of Columbia College does not give a speech on Class Day, I did not get to make a speech. However, some students asked me to write one on my own, so I am sending you what I composed a few weeks after graduation." Read on, nostalgic recent alums hoping to relive Class Day.

As we leave Columbia today, we are likely to ask ourselves: what has been the meaning of the past four years? Does our diploma indicate that we "have satisfied the onerous and nearly insuperable requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts," or does it mean something more, even if just to ourselves? What do these medieval maces and baroque berets mean in the age of I-Pods and internships? As Plato might have said, what is the form of a university education, and might it have changed irrevocably from the days of yore? Like a good Columbian, when faced with these questions, I turn to the classics. More than two thousand years ago, in a China in the flux of social and economic transformation, Confucius, like us today, was asking himself: what are the fundamentals of a proper education in this world? His response was, as usual, an aphorism:

"To study and in due season to practice what one has learned, is this not a pleasure?"

"To have friends coming from afar, is this not a delight?"

"To remain unembittered even though one is unrecognized, is that not to be noble?"

Confucius, Analects 1:1

Last night, as the prickly first winds of autumn blew across Morningside Heights, the loveliest dive bar in the neighborhood sang its swan song. Dozens of devoted patrons pressed into the warmth of the Night Café to drink, reminisce, and take part in the bar's weekly trivia competition. The mood was somber, because everyone knew that this night might be the last: The bar's owners have announced that it will close sometime in the next two weeks.

The Night Café has occupied a long, narrow storefront at 106^th Street and Amsterdam since the early 1990s. Nestled next to a bustling laundromat, its red neon sign is nearly concealed behind a curtain of scaffolding. Inside, it's usually warm and bustling. Lou Reed's voice might be wavering out of a dilapidated jute box stacked with rock and roll, and a posse of pool sharks will surely be crowded around a game on the rundown table in the back. The nighttime bartender, a wild, wiry man who seems to like swigging drinks as much as making them, greets every person like a friend. He's been known to perform pushups on the bar (and pour free cocktails for impressed strangers).

Minutemen, minutemen. What heady times those were. Stages were rushed, lives changed, definitions for "Kulawiking" determined. Indeed, it was only after many long and trying months of op-eds, town hall meetings and general soul-searching that we were finally able to go about the difficult business of trying to move on with our lives.

Or did we? Via Spec, at least one person is nostalgic for Minuteman-mania, and who can blame him? I think we'd all agree that Minuteman didn't receive get enough attention around here. It's not like it wasn't discussed ad nauseum for months on end, or covered top-to-bottom in the campus and national media. Hell, it's about time we were reminded of the mayhem that went down last year. Maybe Bill O'Reilly could do a one-year anniversary special this October 4th? Pretty please?

As for the invitee: he's kept himself busy the last six months trashing our dear president, appearing on Lou Dobbs, and taking on everything from Mexican trucking to his fellow Minutemen. Gilchrist might have been cast out of the Minutemen in disgrace, but Bwog suspects he's still got plenty of fans here at Columbia...

Bwog was partly saddened and partly relieved to see that the founding editors of Ivygate are handing the reins over to younger blood--nobody should really be running a college gossip rag when they're more than a year out of the game (and now they won't have to face defeat again). Besides, they're off doing much more exciting things: former Spec editor-in-chief Nick Summers has been assigned to cover the Hillary campaign for Newsweek, while B&W alum, V112 writer, and senatorial sexpert Chris Beam continues to illuminate at Slate. We'll miss their collegiate musings, momentary disloyalties aside.

Meanwhile, the new kids look promising--one of them ran the Daily Pennsylvanian's 34th Street magazine, which served as the inspiration for the one-year-old Eye (happy birthday!). And now they've got competition...but yeah, not really.

Cheers, guys!

- LBD

Most Columbia students remember gym class as a pre-pubescent nightmare characterized by itchy uniforms, bloody noses, changing in public, and balls flying into their groins. Steve Silverman says it doesn't have to be that way. Silverman runs the physical education program at Teacher's College (making him a gym teacher who teaches gym teachers how to teach gym) and studies PE for a living. Bwog sat down with the man behind the progressive curriculum last week to get his thoughts on dodgeball, Title 9, and lazy kids.

So why did you decide to become a gym teacher?

Well, I like to think of it as a physical educator more than a gym teacher...

Oh, ok, sorry...

I was interested in helping children learn about physical education in a way that would make them feel efficacious about movement. Children will only move and participate in physical activity if they're liking it.

Gym class at my school never motivated me.

Isn't that sad?

So how do you get kids to like PE and to keep in shape?

Well, that's the key question isn't it! A lot of the traditional methods that people have experienced are not the way. Children have to be in situations where they learn motor skills. Traditionally we've tailored PE to children who are higher skilled. For low skilled children in particular, the concentration on traditional sports does more to turn them off to physical education than it does to promote physical activity.