The New York Times' City Room has a profile on the famous Dizzy Gillespie Chair and WKCR's current fundraising efforts. It seems that WKCR is poor--more so than most Columbia organizations, apparently--and if you want the marathon fundraising broadcast to stop, send cash.

An unrelated bizarre Columbia tidbit, artist/druggie/photographer/hipster Dash Snow (punk polaroids of youth culture, grunge art) is the grandson of Robert Thurman (Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies, B&W's October Conversation), which means Dash Snow is also related to Uma Thurman!

Bwog Music Critic Bryan Mochizuki catches up with former boss Will Welch, CC '03. Settle in, it's a long one.

Will Welch isn't the sort of alumnus you hear about a lot—he doesn't donate eight figures in scholarship money or own the Pats or herd sheep with Heath Ledger. But he's the Deputy Editor of a magazine called The Fader, so chances are he's at least had something to do with your iTunes library. Welch co-wrote Kanye West's first-ever cover story, and as an editor, helped break artists like M.I.A., Lady Sovereign, Lupe Fiasco, Baby Cham, Mavado, Love Is All, Rick Ross, and Bloc Party, to name a few. I got to know him when I interned for The Fader a year ago. A few weeks back, we grabbed Indian food.

So when you were at Columbia, you worked at WKCR right?

Not really, I was an intern there for my friend Hank Shteamer who now works for Time Out NY writing about music and who writes for us occasionally. He graduated in 2002 but I did a couple semesters of just casually working with him, he was just teaching me shit. The idea of working with someone like that is to eventually get your own show. But I kind of bagged it before that. It was an awesome experience — the show was Daybreak Express - but the jazz I was listening to wasn't really aligned with the program, and I didn't want to fake it. I wasn't really immersed in Charlie Parker and stuff like that. So I ended up not following through with it.

Yesterday was a perfect day in our ever-more perfect union for a perfect sport: kickball. Emma Jacobs writes in that WKCR crushed WBAR in the semi-annual Station Game, held in Central Park. The final score was 13-2, 'KCR. Unfortunately WBAR members forgot to bring the trophy. They did, however, remember their vintage boombox.

Which station's programming reigns supreme? You be the decider. Or the commander guy.

More skinny jeans and kickin' kicks after the jump!

Bits and pieces gathered from the musical universe by Bwog music critic Bryan Mochizuki:

• The new Norah Jones comes out today, and her two parallel existences continue. One is the more popular Norah "always a safe bet for Mom" Jones, or Snorah for naysayers. The other is her insanely cred-garnering alter-ego, the one who covered Dylan and Townes Van Zandt, sang out-of-this-world duets with Andre 3000 and Ryan Adams, and does a better version of "Bessie Smith" than The Band (besides getting Garth Hudson to play accordion on her second album). On this record, Bizarro-Norah has a song called "Sinkin' Soon" with troubadour du jour M. Ward. It's a lead-footed pub-jaunt filled out by a trombone solo and little piano-roll here and there, and after a few listens it starts sounding pretty darn political ("a captain who's too proud to say that he dropped the oar"). This is normal fare for someone like Tom Waits, but so far not Ms. "Come Away With Me"—which is why she's still so exciting. The Bizarro-Norah doesn't get much press, but would the regular one be nearly as relevant if she cut that side of her persona entirely?

• In the 90's, our own WKCR carried a late-night show hosted by DJ Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia. It ran for a little under a decade, at the end of which Source Magazine called it — pretty inarguably - the "Best Hip Hop Radio Show of All Time." There's a lot of folklore to the show's history — Jay-Z, Nas, and Wu-Tang all got their first breaks there — and a lot of it is explained in this video, passed along by WKCR DJ Martin Kostov. The best part? Stretch now has a blog with old shows, and a few are gems.

Read on for more musical morsels...