As per custom, Bwog unveils its list of the most outrageous and laughable comments made by professors at their first class meetings of the year. Be sure to email us with all of the inspiring, hilarious, and insane things your professors say today to bwgossip@columbia.edu to keep our tradition alive, and please check back as we continuously update the list.

Christina Hunter, Art Hum

"This is a very easy class to fall asleep in, especially if you're an athlete and have already ran 5000 laps. I suggest you sit in the uncomfortable chair in the front to stay awake."

Self-described "quirky" Political Science Professor Mona El-Ghobashy, in Intro to Comparative Politics

(Explaining her thoughts on cell phones): "I'm probably one of five people in New York who doesn't own a cell phone. I'm a cell phone hater, not a congratulator."

(Answering why none of her works are on the syllabus): "You can look me up on Google!"

Perpetual Bwog favorite Richard Bulliet has once again treated the students of Islamo-Christian Civilization to a semester of quotable quotations. Read and learn: this is the wit that lured Ahmadinejad to campus.

Too Much Information

It's like getting a contact high when everyone around you is smoking dope but you don't do that--you're still sharing a bit of the blessing.

But let's not mention Lyndon LaRouche because he's kind of crazy. I wouldn't have brought him up at all if my brother-in-law hadn't devoted half his life to his cause.

Life Advice

I'm a dentist. If you want to lose weight, drink Raspberry Zinger tea. I'm a pharmacist. When I play baseball, I use Spalding balls.

Vladivostok: the southernmost city in Russia. There's a little factoid for your next television appearance.

You'll find the most beautiful tilework in the world there. And you should definitely think of visiting it...the next time you're in Uzbekistan.

Bnai Haman is going to have the most quasi-topical Purim ever. But first, some background: Bnai Haman is an activist group formed as a response to Bollinger, Bulliet, and Coatworth's invitation of Iranian President Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia—an invitation which in their opinion never should have been extended. Purim is the Jewish holiday celebrating the Jews' escape from Haman's plot (yes, as in "Bnai Haman") to slaughter all Jews living in the Persian Empire.

Which brings us to Bnai Haman's Purim celebration, which will be Ahmadinejad-themed this year. Says a Bnai Haman spokeswoman: "And just as Haman found those in ancient Persia who would listen to his incitements, so too did Columbia University provide a platform for Ahmadinejad to espouse Israel's destruction to a global media audience."

Party-goers will dress as Bollinger, Bulliet, Ahmadinejad and Coatsworth. Perhaps the role of Esther can be re-interpreted as a certain nasally female translator?

Remember Richard Bulliet? Remember the whole Ahmadinejad fiasco? Well history professor Bulliet was the one who extended the invite. Though for most people the drama has died down, some grudges remain. The site Richard W. Bulliet -- Ratfink pretty much says it all. It's even listed on Wikipedia as the "Unauthorized Richard W. Bulliet Homepage," emphasis on the unauthorized.

Bulliet better be careful, someone actually spent money on a domain name to slander him. That means business.

Although he didn't get in the news much, the man who orchestrated the Ahmadinejad visit was none other than domestic animal and ancient wheel expert (and Iranian history specialist) Richard W. Bulliet. Bwog sat down in his posh office in the Middle East Institute to ask him about his reactions to the speech and his reactions to the reactions to the speech. He had a lot to say in between writing an op-ed for The Washington Post and getting ready for a Ramadan iftar with the president of Turkey and Hillary Clinton. Bulliet being Bulliet, his comments used up our tape. Here's what he said-- in the first hour, anyways.

So, you told the Spectator that you think journalism is a "lapsed profession." What did you mean by that?

Yeah. Well it's been interesting to look a little bit at the responses to the talk yesterday. The more respected news [media] was accurate. They tended to put the stress on President Bollinger, but it was generally accurately reported, but it was also selective-- No one actually covered Ahmadinejad's speech. They covered his responses to the Q&A. You know, here's a person who sought an American public forum, and who, even knowing that there was going to be some static, persisted in wanting this forum to happen. And then he chose to give the speech that he did, which was sophomoric and soporific and totally forgettable. It makes you ask the question, why did he do this? What was he thinking? One of my Iran informants said, well, you know, that's who he is. He's a religious man, he has a respect for knowledge, and he wanted to sort of say who he was. But from the press point of view, they already knew who he was. He was a Holocaust denying, Jew-hating, atom bomb-throwing evil, evil man. So the fact that his effort to present himself was just totally ignored by the press-- well, that's sort of suggestive of the way in which the press doesn't distort, necessarily, except by selection.

The second installment of Bwog's ongoing documentation of Professor Richard Bulliet's best lecture quips is here! Below, the venerable Middle East history don's most amusing offhand remarks from the second half of this semester's trial run of Islamo-Christian Civilization. The first part can be found here.

On course requirements:

"For the record, no one in this class is required to watch an al-Qaeda recruitment video, or go off and pursue jihad."

"Graduate students might want to write something substantially longer [than undergrads] - that is to say, doorstop size. I don't want to be able to lift three of them."

On the International Islamic University in Pakistan:

"They had 740 acres...enough to make Lee Bollinger drool with envy. Of course, they had to level several villages."

"It was not a great big giant madrassa. No one was doing calisthenics with kalashnikovs. It was kinda disappointing."

On European perceptions of Islamic conversion in Indonesia:

"You might have thought that Indonesia was a less sophisticated society and that Islam represented a kind of Windows Upgrade complete with all the patches and things that still don't work right."

His lectures might include elaborate graphs one day, a cavalcade of Arabic vocabulary the next. Occasionally, he'll admit they were thought up only fifteen minutes before class. Yet Professor Richard Bulliet manages to synthesize so much disparate information into his Islamo-Christian Civilization course that, however many of his own books are on the syllabus, few could say students aren't learning anything. As the first half of the semester comes to a close, however, Bwog realizes that it has taken far fewer notes on Sufism or the Crusades as on Bulliet's more amusing anecdotes and witticisms...

On Religion

"People with individual spiritual philosophies are so strange, I think it's better not to have one at all."

"I've never been visited by the Holy Spirit, and I tend to ridicule it, partly because my cousin Martha is frequently visited by it."

After reading a religion scholar's exegesis on Jewish and Muslim meat regulations: "He said that if a pig drank from some water, Muslim couldn't drink from it. But an orthodox Jew could french-kiss the pig. I think that's the first and only time french-kissing pigs will come up in a scholarly dissertation."

On heresy: "Once someone is burned at the stake, it's sort of a buzzkill for everyone else."

Paraphrasing some ascetics: "Tell you what, let's have a constipation-in! We'll sit and eat and see who will be the last to go to the bathroom."

On Sufi chanting: "Pretty soon everyone is pretty stoned...um, on God."

After the jump: on Writing, Scholarship, and Leaving Class Early to be on TV...