The activities fair may be over, but you've still got a while to find your niche in Columbia's extracurricular scene. To help you sift through the alphabet soup, our series of club crib sheets continues with groups that hand out money and groups that may eventually make lots of money.

Governing Boards and Councils (a.k.a. The Man)

Activities Board at Columbia (ABC) - This oversight organization funds publications, cultural groups, competition groups--basically everything SGB doesn't pay for. Every club competes to have its friends on the board of representatives in hopes of upping their allocations.

Engineering Student Council (ESC) - ESC may be elected undemocratically—the executive board, which composes a much larger percentage of the total student body than any of the other councils, selects the president--but they do come up with the most wonderful web applications.

Tonight, the CQA, Columbia's Queer Alliance, celebrates LGBT rights and fights for everyone's right to party with the First Friday Dance. On Saturday.

Nothing sets the atmosphere for a dance party better than torrential rain, right? How lucky we are to celebrate the First Friday Dance of the semester on this diluvial Saturday! If you're not a fan of going out in hurricane weather and are considering taking a rain check on "the hottest dance on the Upper Westside," according to the CQA, live va Queer Prom last spring to see all the Kate Perry pumped fun you'll be missing.

More love in the club after the jump.

Bwog's rogue adventurer, Jon Hill braves midtown in search of Sake and soy-infused delights. Read on, Japanophiles.

You could easily miss the Sake Bar Hagi on 49th Street if you weren't looking for it.

Only a single sign announces its presence, and to make matters worse, the sign is posted several doors down from the actual entrance to the Japanese pub. Still, if you pass those two tests, a third obstacle awaits you — a steeply descending staircase that hides the front door from sidewalk view.

Such subterfuge might be necessary, though. The evening crowd packing the noisy subterranean booths and tables of Sake Bar Hagi is almost too large for the staff to handle, and wait-times for seats can exceed an hour-and-a-half. Admittedly, customers have good reasons to stick around: the food is cheap, the atmosphere is charming, and the menu seems practically airlifted from the streets of Tokyo.

At this time of year, newness comes in all forms, from the obvious (your new dorm, your new classes, your new books, your new backpack) to the unanticipated (your replacement macBook charger, your subscription to Netflix to replace Kim's.) And while the novelty of these items is, well, novel, the polish of your purchases and the glow of your post-consumption satisfaction wears off as soon as your credit card bill comes at the end of the month.

In addition, New York City is notoriously pricey, your Morningside Heights being no exception. So when it comes to the question of making the most of their money, our heady first-years are pretty hard-pressed.

Just because you have homework doesn't mean the TV watching has to stop -- really 12s, it's true! Rob Trump's weekly web series fun continues with Mark Erickson's Infinite Solutions.

Well, my original plan for the first week of school was, having done Jake and Amir, to quickly knock off a review of the other major CollegeHumor webseries, The Michael Showalter Showalter. But while I was watching some other CollegeHumor stuff, specifically their awesome "Minesweeper: The Movie Trailer", I discovered something magical that made me abort my original plan. It was Infinite Solutions with Mark Erickson. Specifically, it was this:

Not only is Hamilton Terrace relatively nearby, but just about every blog in the city has also posted this PSA.

Current-founder Bari Weiss, CC '07, writes in the (possibly ill-fated) New York Sun today about the 19 incoming Columbia GS first-years who had previously served in the Armed Forces.

(According to Weiss, GS was created in 1947 partly as a response to the high number of ex-soldiers returning from WWII.)

Weiss spoke to a number of the 19 first-years about the differences between military life and academic life, and reactions range from confident about success ("You sit down next to these girls who are 18 years old and they've got plastic jewelry from Claire's and they're trying to understand the rise and fall of the USSR. They can do it; but we've seen dictators rise and fall") to thankful for the ability to appreciate the civilian life: "I'm just happy to be alive. I'm ecstatic here."

You still have an hour and a half left in the activities fair! Hurry up before all the snacks run out (SGB is still serving samoosas and chicken wings, for those out to ruin their diets). Feel free to refer to the following extremely approximate cartogram for locations, and see highlights after the jump.

Bwog hauled herself out of bed at an ungodly hour this morning to lie in wait for PrezBo as he ran, preceded by two Amazonian bodyguards, in the midst of hundreds all looking around for their leader. It looks like he may have had as rough a night as anyone there.

More photos after the jump!

Political clubs pay attention to politics!

Lauren Salz...she's everywhere!

The Hawkmadinejads will take care of this

JShap rides off into the sunset to bright new career as a lounge singer

Political science becomes even less of a real field

Last night (tonight?) at the intersection of Broadway and West End, friends of the Kitchen Cabinet, Raul, and the Ceiling packed into a room scarcely larger than a Carman double to witness an unlikely succession of bluegrass and rock that satisfied every taste and craving. Perched on a table, Bwog tapped her toe to the lyrical stylings of campus character Ashraya Gupta and covered her ears to the cacophony of the former Wizards of the Coast.

So college, and yet so glorious.