Bwogger Lydia DePillis noticed that attempting to reach the Spec's website now brings one to the following message:

Ruh-roh. Has Spec not been footing the bill's for its web presence? Or perhaps it simply went the way of the Barnard Bulletin, whose foray into the world of the Internet was all too brief.

Bwog ventured into the dark heart of Butler to snap some photos of the most lived-in cubicles, desks, and chairs. Columbia, what we saw, it frightened us: A Red Bull bottle converted into a flower vase for a single dying rose, sheets and sheets of notebook paper used to spit out old gum onto, more of 212's salads than we'd ever cared to smell—we thought we had seen it all. But then a boy, having noticed our camera, went up Bwog and informed us that somewhere on the fourth floor, a creature was dwelling who had taped pictures of her family on the walls. While we weren't able to locate this girl, we encourage you to email us (bwog@columbia.edu) artifacts from your own Butler safari or photos of your workspace.

More photos after the jump.

A Bwog daily editor reports on a distressing development in the world of tunneling:

A year ago, your correspondent made a bid for tunneling immortality. With sharpie in hand, I went in search of the Columbia tunnel system's holy grail--a Manhattan Project-era cyclotron rumored to be somewhere in the upper campus tunnel system.

It turns out that while the 'tron was in fact accessible from the tunnels (by way of an unnecessarily complicated although perhaps more adventurous process where you have to follow a tunnel under Mudd and hop over a wall...there was a great description on the old CU tunnels Wiki, which has mysteriously been taken offline), the thing itself resided on the first floor of Pupin--which is totally locked, unless you feel like going to the Pupin 1 men's room and negotiating the crawlspace between this heating duct and the ceiling.

So negotiate it I did. And what I found, readers, after squeezing myself between a couple of water conduits and dropping into a dank and long-abandoned janitor's closet, was a dungeon-like hallway of empty offices and industrial apparata--interesting, but hardly worth the Mission Impossible-like maneuver it took to get there. But an early-decade cleanup of rooms that had gone virtually untouched since the Manhattan project thankfully spared the building's main attraction (for tunnelers, at least): a single room containing a scattered mess of papers and scientific instruments, in the back left-hand corner of which sat a true piece of Columbia lore: the hulking, oblong outer shell of the cyclotron.

But this adventure is now all but impossible. On a recent visit to Pupin 1 (to use the men's room, actually), I found that a construction company had moved into the once-abandoned hallway; painting over the generations of tunneler grafitto, and occupying an empty office adjacent to the cyclotron room. It's hard to say if this is a short-term headquarters for the new science building at 120th and Broadway, or if the first floor is to be completely gutted and converted into usable space. From the looks of it, Turner hasn't moved in on the cyclotron's territory, but that's likely not important to adventurous Columbians: with people now working in Pupin 1, it looks like the 'tron is off-limits, and that a uniquely Columbian tradition will have to be put on hold.

Too old for fairly tales, eh? The Columbia Musical Theatre Society presents Into the Woods' long, jaunty ride through Mother Goose's canon. Bwog's theatre correspondent Ginia Sweeney reviews the play and wonders how much shorter it could've been.

I'm going to try to keep this review short because I've just had to sit through an absurdly long musical and I don't want to subject you to the same tedium. Someone should have told Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine that a mash-up of classic fairytales with a few extra plot twists can only sustain an audience's attention for so long. I'm not sure how long that is, but it's something less that two hours and forty-five minutes.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh. The Columbia Musical Theatre Society has pulled together a rather impressive and large scale production of Into the Woods, and Thursday night's performance will be followed by two more—at 3 and 8 p.m.—on Friday, in Roone Arledge Auditorium. I have few complaints besides the sheer length of the show.

October 2, 2007 @ 1:10 PM | 1 comments | Post a comment | | | Email this post | Share on Facebook