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Hurricane John roars ashore near Cabo del Este, Mexico, on the southeast coast of Baja California as a Category 2 hurricane. Visit CNN for the latest.

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Protests by lawmakers inside the Mexican Congress force President Vicente Fox to abandon his annual state-of-the-nation speech. Visit CNN for the latest.

I feel this sudden, overwhelming urge to eat cheese…

I suppose I should clarify, since I never actually corrected my “Hotlanta, here I come” post — and since several readers have e-mailed me to ask — that Becky and I are not actually in Atlanta this weekend. We decided that, all things considered, going to the Georgia Tech game was impractical, especially since we were going to be in Buffalo the previous weekend for Shannon’s baby shower (pictures of which are forthcoming, BTW, honest!) So I traded our ND-GT tickets to an Irish fan down in Georgia (in exchange for two home tickets to North Carolina and two to Army) and decided to stick around this weekend. Well, not exactly “stick around”… instead of Atlanta, we’re headed for Milwaukee, for the Sugarland/Brooks & Dunn concert and, tomorrow, a tour of the Lakefront Brewery. (Can’t go to Milwaukee without touring a brewery!) We plan to be back in South Bend tomorrow evening in time to watch the Irish and Trojan games on TV.

Speaking of the Irish and the Trojans, I probably never would have bought tickets to the concert if I’d known that there’s an ND-USC game in South Bend tonight! That’s right, the #1-ranked Notre Dame women’s soccer team is hosting the #17-ranked Women of Troy! An Irish-Trojan game, and the Irish Trojan won’t be there?! Oh, the humanity!! :) It better be a good concert…

Ok, so maybe not. Turns out in the hardcover printings of book six, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, it is mentioned that Hermione Granger had 11 top exam results. But in book 5 Hermione only took 10 tests!

The shock!

The horror!

But apparently this minor arithmetic mistake was enough to merit some news coverage and by proxy (and some boredom) a blog post!

The article makes the following hilarious claim : It is believed to be the first blunder in the Potter series

I am not a detailed enough reader to recall any other mistakes, but i’m sure Mike will be glad to point out any in the comments section :)

It looks like When the Levees Broke must have just aired again, because I’m getting a ton of traffic right now, mostly direct hits to irishtrojan.com. (Between 3:55:25 and 3:55:59, I got 42 hits in 34 seconds!)

Well, welcome to my website, Spike Lee viewers! Click here for a bit of background info, explaining why the heck I was in the film.

P.S. To read my reactions to the movie, check out these posts:
Thoughts on Spike Lee’s movie so far
What Spike Lee didn’t tell us
Fair and balanced — not

As you’ve probably noticed, comments are not working properly. I’m not sure what the heck is going on, but I’m working on it.

UPDATE: Fixed now, for now.

UPDATE 2: And I do mean “for now.” Jonny at WestHost writes: “Alright, the more I look into this the uglier it is getting. I think you’ve got a bad stick of RAM in your server, or possibly a failing hard drive.” Cripes. What caused the error with comments was a spontaneous typo which changed the MySQL field “comment_content” to “cnmment_content.” The same thing is happening in my photo galleries, which is why they are completely broken at the moment. Who knows how much longer the blog will even be online at all?

Another tech from WestHost will be contacting me shortly to figure out how to deal with this. The server will probably have to be taken down at some point.

UPDATE, 1:35 PM: WestHost just called. They are taking the server offline momentarily to do a diagnostic on the RAM. It will probably be offline for at least 4 hours, possibly longer if there is in fact a problem with the RAM.

UPDATE, 4:30 PM: The site came back online quicker than expected, at 3:50 PM — just in time for the Spike spike! — and the problem has apparently been fixed: “Your dedicated server is back online. A bad memory module was found and replaced,” according to a WestHost admin. The photo galleries are working again! Hopefully the blog will stop randomly crashing now. :)

[NOTE: Post originally published at 10:13 AM; bumped up at 11:50 AM. -ed.]

The San Francisco Chronicle’s “Betting Fool” has had enough of the Stanford Tree:

Until further notice, and I guarantee you it will not come from me, nothing the Stanford band has ever done is newsworthy and no amount of idiotic stuff the band members do to their “Shak” on the Farm is worth noting.

Further (note absence of the word “notice”), nothing the Stanford “Tree” mascot does, in or out of uniform, is worth mentioning in any form of media not named “Stanford Band/Tree Weekly Blog-o-Rama.”

Not even if a dog urinates on that stupid green thing during a game. It’s still not news. Sorry.

Here, Tree, here’s a towel — clean yourself up, you smell bad. Now get outta here.

Heh.

The National Hurricane Center has issued its final advisory on Ernesto, which is now a tropical depression. But the discussion notes:

THE COMBINATION OF TROPICAL DEPRESSION ERNESTO AND A STRONG HIGH PRESSURE SYSTEM TO THE NORTH IS PRODUCING A LARGE AREA OF GALE FORCE WINDS WELL TO THE NORTH AND NORTHEAST INTO THE ATLANTIC. GALE WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT FOR A LARGE PORTION OF THE COAST.

Andrew Leyden has video of Ernesto’s effects on the Chesapeake Bay. Another reader, Lee Ann, sends along this report from Georgetown, South Carolina, where she and her family were last night:

We got to Georgetown at 5:15. Rain began about fifteen minutes before–there was lots of wind, probably sustained 25 mph for short periods, bigger gusts, but really not much.

NPR was saying it was going to go in at Georgetown and be a CAT 1, and we started to wonder if we really should be on the ocean–but the weather channel sure looked like it was going further north, and wasn’t too much of anything, so we went out to dinner. Oysters and haddock at our favorite seafood place.

Partly sunny right now, surfboards due to arrive soon.

Here’s the latest radar.

The center of Tropical Storm Ernesto has made landfall near Long Beach, North Carolina, the National Hurricane Center reports. Visit CNN for the latest.