This is what happens when I don’t pay attention to my web stats: the New York Times’s “The Lede” blog linked to me on Thursday evening, bringing in a bunch of extra traffic — nearly a third of my last 4,000 hits have come via the NYT post — but I didn’t notice till just now. (The post references my coverage of the alleged Harry Potter spoiler, and links to my “That Which Must Not Be Blogged” post. The body of the NYT post doesn’t contain any Potter spoilers, but I can’t vouch for the comments or the other linked URLs.)

Anyway, it seems the New York Times has a serious problem with the spelling of my name. You may recall that my name was spelled “Brendon Loy” in the Times print edition on Sept. 6, 2005, in a correction to a rather more significant error in the previous day’s Times article about my Katrina coverage (the article had mixed up the first names of my wife and my dog). This resulted in the highly amusing spectacle of a correction-to-the-correction regarding the misspelling of my name. Well, now the Times has found a new way to misspell my name: Thursday’s blog post says I’m “Brenden Loy.”

I’m not terribly sensitive to misspellings and mispronounciations of my name — I’m accustomed to them, and will generally not bother to correct people who call me “Brandon” or the like, let alone get offended by their error — but for f***’s sake, the Times’s link goes to a domain called brendanloy.com, and the byline says the post in question is “by Brendan Loy.” In fact, my first name appears nine separate times on the linked page, spelled correctly in each instance. Is it that hard to copy-and-paste the correct spelling into your article?

P.S. Not related to the Times, but while I’m on the topic of misspellings, who could forget this:

Heh.

You know, when I was in journalism school at USC, I once got a zero on an assignment that I’d spent an entire week (and an enormous amount of emotional energy) working on — traveling all around the L.A. area, interviewing the wife of a murder victim, even attending the man’s funeral, all to write an article about the murder for Aaron Curtiss’s reporting class — because I misspelled a proper noun in the article. Just one proper noun. The name of a city or bridge or somesuch, as I recall. Because of that one mistake, all my effort was wasted. Methinks some New York Times (and MSNBC) journalists could use a little bit of Curtiss-style training.

Sometimes, understanding the law is hard. Other times, it requires only common sense. From the CrimLaw section of the BarBri multistate bar-review book, using an illustrative example to explain the limits of the necessity defense:

Throwing cargo overboard during a violent storm, if necessary to save the lives of the crew and other people on board a ship, would not constitute criminal damage to property. On the other hand, throwing some members of the crew overboard to save the cargo would never be justifiable.

Good to know! Heh.

The Notre Dame e-mail system has been inaccessible all day, which is driving me nuts, because I sent out a bunch of e-mails to friends and relatives last night about the baby, and I’m sure there are various replies out there in the ether, stuck in the Internets’ series of tubes with no way to reach me. I don’t believe the problem is that ND has deactivated my account already — though I do need to switch over soon — because I can’t even reach webmail.nd.edu. In other words, it isn’t just that I can’t log in; the site appears to be totally down. (Are others having the same issue?)

InsideND, OIT and ND News & Info are also apparently offline, though the university homepage is online, as is the law-school homepage.

Anyway, if you want to reach me, e-mail irishtrojan [at] gmail.com instead, at least for now.

UPDATE: According to someone on ND Nation, this is a “scheduled service outage.” (Hat tip: Lisa.) However, I’m skeptical. Usually, OIT (the Office of Information Technology) sends out e-mails informing us in advance of even comparatively minor outages. For example, on June 6, we got an e-mail saying that various services would be intermittently unavailable from “Sunday, June 10, 2007 5:00 a.m. until 10:00 a.m.” And I can recall being notified of planned shutdowns as brief as 1 or 2 hours. So I have a hard time believing they’d intentionally shut down all major web services — including their own website, where people would naturally go for status updates — for an entire day without informing us. But who knows, maybe they figure it’s summer so it doesn’t matter. Or maybe they were planning a 15-minute outage and something went drastically wrong. Or maybe it has something to do with the blasted Devron System again. :) Regardless, I’m mighty annoyed about it. Even if I’m technically not entitled to use my ND account anymore…

Boyfriend Bobby Cutts Jr. has been charged with two counts of murder in the disappearance of pregnant Ohio mother Jessie Davis, the Stark County Sheriffs office says.

Visit CNN for the latest.

Bobby Cutts Jr. has been arrested in the death of missing Ohio mother Jessie Davis, the Stark County Sheriffs office says.

Visit CNN for the latest.

Dear readers, it’s time for me to come clean. For almost two months now, I’ve been hacking away at my keyboard on a daily basis, typing blog post after blog post about random, miscellaneous topics — events in my life, stories in the news, etc. — without telling y’all about the one thing that’s really been on the top of my personal “breaking news” list, the one bit of information that I’ve wanted to shout from the rooftops from the moment I learned it, the one fact that’s been totally dominating my consciousness since April 30 at approximately 12:30 PM. Namely:

BECKY AND I ARE EXPECTING A BABY!!!

We’re at about 13 weeks. That means we’re almost into the second trimester. Yesterday, we went to see an OB/GYN for Becky’s first major check-up, and we now have an official due date: December 31. That’s right — New Year’s Eve. Heh. Woohoo!

Among other things, at yesterday’s appointment, we got to hear our baby’s heartbeat for the first time. That was, needless to say, very cool. In fact, “very cool” doesn’t even come close to describing it. Naturally, I whipped out my digital camera in the doctor’s office and used it to make an audio clip:

source file

That heartbeat, that’s our baby! I mean, I helped make that! And it’s inside Becky right now! How amazing is that?

(By the way, if you’re wondering — since everyone seems to ask this — yes, we do plan to learn the sex of the baby in advance. But it’s too early right now. We’ve got an ultrasound scheduled for August 13, so hopefully we’ll find out then.)

Much more after the jump.

(more…)

Good news on that ridiculous felony charge for videotaping a police officer on a public street from within one’s own car: the wrong has been righted, by a district attorney no less. Especially after the Nifong debacle, that’s good to see.

…there are exactly 500 days left until the November 4, 2008 presidential election.

And yet Fred Thompson will be considered a “late” entrant when he (maybe) announces his candidacy on Tuesday in Nashville. Heh.

I swear this picture isn’t a setup. We just walked into the living room and discovered Sasha like this:

Heh. Well, you know what they say. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a cat.

P.S. In keeping with the “lolcats” phenomenon, perhaps the caption should be: “IM ON UR MAC RITIN UR BLOGZ.”