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In This Issue

• Columbia Expands, Gentrifies Outer Space
• Spectator Artist Plagiarizes Fed's Ben Schwartz
• Farewell from Feditrix Kate
• Media Decency Campaign Attacks Stern
• EC Fire Alarms Pester, Endanger Students
• Don't Get Impregnated By Young Republicans
• Letters to the Feditor
• Sci-Fi Poo Theory
• Sports Beer: Not Good For Sports
• Butler: The Engineering Frontier
• Unarians Help You Go To Space Life
• Totally Fab New Planet Suggestions
• Bush and Cheney's Excellent Adventure
• Fed Student's Guide To Meningitis
• Columbia Girls LOVE Barnard Prez Schapiro
• Funny Comic #543: Adventures of Ice Bitch
• Able & Baker: Monkeys in Space
• Honoring Jesse Strouth- A Highly Derivative Cartoon
• They Watch

So you're in class, and you're giving an oral presentation. You've just given a brilliant Marxist analysis of early Renaissance poetry, and your sexy Socialist professor, finally seduced by your genius, leaps up on the seminar table and tears open his/her dress and says seductively, "EHHH! EHHH! EHHH!"

"Huh? Professor? What's going on?!"

"EHHH! EHHH! EHHH!" he/she replies.

Oh no, shit! You were dreaming, and it's a fire alarm! You leap out of bed in your undies and start searching for your flip-flops in the dark. You glance at the clock. It's 5am. Those bastards have done it again.
Going out into the hall, you meet the pre-frosh that your suitemate is hosting running around barefoot and panicked, with no idea where the stairs are. Since said suitemate is nowhere to be found, you lead the helpless prospies to safety. The population of the building empties out into the night, a crisp thirty-two degrees, to wait for an hour or so until the guard lets everyone back in. Inevitably, there is at least one fat kid wearing only briefs and t-shirt.

If you live in Columbia housing, this is a familiar scene to you. It's so reliable, I even plan my exercise schedule around it: once a week, walk all the way from EC to Koronet's and back, and once a week I run down eighteen flights of stairs at 5am. I call it the the Columbia program. Hopefully someday Columbia brochures will make me famous for it, like the Subway commercials made that Jared guy famous.

From my experience, constant fire alarms are a feature of all Columbia dorm life, but I've noticed some variations. For example, when I was a freshman, they were all false alarms. This is because first-years are like bulls: when they see red, they charge. It's actually a proven fact that, in a building with red fire alarm levers on each floor, if B = beer, F = first-years, and A = fire alarms, then B x F = A. That means every time a first-year drinks a beer, there's a fire alarm in Carman, and an angel gets its wings.

Upperclasspersons are less like bulls and more like very stupid humans, though. This is demonstrated by the fact that Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, not to bulls. It follows that since upperclasspersons have fire, they are humans. This is unfortunate. You see, while upperclasspersons no longer pull fire alarms, they do start lots and lots of actual fires. I imagine that in real apartment buildings, occupied by fully-grown humans, a real fire is actually a rather rare and frightening occurence. Tonight alone, however, there have been three fire alarms in East Campus. After the third, no one even bothered to leave anymore. We've gotten to the point where we'd rather be burned alive than walk down those stairs one more freaking time. This has gone too far.

I am constantly getting e-mails, however, that say things like, "Dear EC Resident, the fire last night was caused by careless cooking suite 1510, so if you're looking for someone to kill, that's where you should go." Or else, "Dear EC Resident, the fire this morning was caused by careless lighting of a candle on a bed in suite 1706." So the lesson learned here is always be careful when lighting candles on your bed. But seriously, that only happened a couple of times. I know the real source of all this trouble: whatever idiot decided it was a good idea to give gas stoves to college students.

Now, I'm not saying that I shouldn't have a gas stove. My gas stove is good. Instead of starting fires, it cooks spaghetti, an admirable service. The gas stoves that are a problem are the ones that spontaneously turn on at 5am and start spitting flames across the room. As I know how to exorcize stove demons, I don't have this problem, but Columbia would never deign to teach such pedestrian life skills as appliance exorcism, and most students just don't understand.

So as a public service, mostly aimed at benefiting me, I would like to offer a few tips on how to prevent fires and rid your kitchen of stove demons.

Tip #1: Do not leave your stovetop popcorn popping overnight. I know that hot fresh popcorn is the perfect breakfast on the run, but just buy the microwave kind for Christ's sake. Overnight cooking angers stove demons, and they're likely to just consume your popcorn in fire anyway. Then what are you gonna do?

Tip #2: Lighting candles on the bed is not an effective way of exorcizing stove demons. This is an insidious superstition that is still sadly prevelant. Lighting candles in the oven does not exorcize stove demons either.

Tip #3: When you realize your candles aren't working, do not discard them in the trash can. Extinguish all candles in cold water, and for good measure, leave them submerged for a while. 5am is the witching hour for fire demons of all sorts, and you don't want any of those trick candle demons waking up and causing trouble.

Tip #4: A gas stove is not a camp fire. Do not poke the flame with sticks, not even sticks of beef jerky. I know you all had electric stoves at home, and those wierd flamey things look a lot like the camp fires you've seen in movies, but just trust me on this one.

Tip #5: Prayer and fasting are trusted methods of exorcism. Instead of using your stove to cook food, fast and sit on your kitchen floor praying. This method is 99.9% guarenteed.

Finally, to take some advice from Smokey the Bear, if you're a smoker, make sure there's a 3 foot clearing around you when you smoke; don't use your stove inside of a tent, and always leave the kitchen site as natural as possible. Remember, kids, only you can prevent dorm fires.