Severe weather in midweek caused cancellation of several outdoor sporting events. Cedar Ridge and Orange both cancelled soccer and tennis matches scheduled for Aug. 27. None of them have been rescheduled, yet.
Wednesday, funnel clouds were reported in northern Chatham County and eastern Alamance County, as were strong storms in Orange County. There were no reports of significant damage before 4 p.m.
Some school parking lots in Orange were flooded Wednesday, and Highway 62 in neighboring Alamance was closed to traffic briefly because of flooding across the road near Burlington Municipal Airport.

"I'm kind of obsessively over the top when it comes to Carrboro, and I know that. But somebody has to be."

-- Alderwoman Jacquie Gist

On Wednesday, Durham defense attorney James D. "Butch" Williams reminded Orange-Chatham Superior Court Judge Carl Fox to include his middle initial in any documents related to his client Kenneth White, accused of murdering his pregnant girlfriend.

"If anybody pulls the record up, some people might assume it's the real James Williams," said Butch Williams, referring to James E. Williams, the chief Public Defender for the Orange-Chatham judicial district.

"I'm afraid that some people might believe that you are the real James Williams, Mr. Williams," Fox responded.

In a recent court appearance, Fox chided James E. Williams for forgetting to wear his suit jacket into the courtroom. Decked out in a bowtie and navy suit with wide white pinstripes, Butch Williams had no such problem Wednesday. But he did get a talking-to for not having a business card with an e-mail address where the judge could send a draft of a court order.

Real or not real, the James Williamses have to stay on their toes when Fox is behind the bench.

Tonight's big hearing on the 300 East Main Street project in Carrboro comes too late to get in tomorrow's Chapel Hill News (look for a report at www.newsobserver.com). Here are some stories that will be in Wednesday's paper.

WHOSE AUTHORITY? Orange County had tried to get state lawmakers to wait on letting UNC establish an airport authority to replace Horace Williams Airport. They didn't. Read why Orange County Commissioner Barry Jacobs says the county was blindsided.

PERDUE DISAPPOINTS: The lieutenant governor's stand on education and illegal immigrants is a political move, says My View columnist Maria Palmer, who served with the candidate for governor on the state Board of Education. Read Palmer's essay for a behind-the-scenes anecdote that shows how politics sometimes plays out.

FENCED IN: Remember that 8-foot barbed wire fence that went up this summer along Estes Park Apartments. Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton thought he'd found a way to force management to open the fence at least part of the day. Not gonna happen...

We've got a lot more. Associate Editor Dave Hart covered Sunday night's Rock Paper Scissors tournament at The Case. Police correspondent Daniel Becton says the returning students brought a rash of break-ins with them (and one injured squirrel, for last Sunday's letter writer who praised Daniel's obssession with the animal calls). And Leah Friedman (returning next week to fill in for papa-to-be staffer Matt Dees) tells you about the Chatham County woman speaking at the Democratic National Convention tonight.

Thanks for reading,

Mark

Northwood High, often better known for the success of its football team, has won its third straight girls tennis match, and its first conference match of the season, with a 7-2 victory over Durham School of the Arts. That brings the Chargers' early season record to 3-0 under coach Susie Shachtman.
"It’s pretty exciting," Shachtman says. "We’re really happy with our win over (Siler City’s) Jordan-Matthews. We’d never beaten them before."
Catherine Shachtman, Claire Pauley, Katie Watkins and Kelsey Mays won their singles matches in straight sets Aug. 25 over DSA, and then helped the Chargers sweep the doubles. Jennifer Devinney-and-Pauley, Shachtman-and- Watkins, and Wilhelmina Cole-and-Mays all won their doubles matches, giving up just four games total among them.
Individually, Shachtman, Pauley, Watkins and Mays have each won their first three singles matches this season.
-- William Elliott Warnock/ CHN Sports

In case you missed our story Sunday about the iPod Touches that might be handed out to all Culbreth Middle School students, here it is.

It's sparked quite the discussion about the merits of this experiment. Feel free to weigh in.

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools board of education is slated to take up the proposed program at its Sept. 4 meeting.

The Carrboro boys soccer team opened its Mid-State 2-A Conference schedule with a 3-2 win Monday night at Graham.
First-half goals from Scott Weathers and Keith Dell took the Jags into halftime with a 2-1 lead. Robert Kenny's game-winning goal late in the second half could have been the nail in the Red Devils’ collective coffin … until Graham was awarded a penalty kick with five minutes remaining in regulation and converted it to get back within one goal. But Carrboro’s defense resisted the Devils the rest of the way.
Weathers and Kenny are the only Jags to score in both of Carrboro’s first two games.
Coach James Mundia’s 2-0 Jaguars return to practice all this week before taking on Orange High School Sept. 2 in another conference match away from home.

Chapel Hill Town Councilwoman Sally Greene has an interesting post on her blog, Greenespace, about a Sundance documentary about slavery coming to Hillsborough Sept. 6.

The documentary, Traces of the Trade," was made by a descendant of the DeWolf family of Rhode
Island, "the largest slave trading family in U.S. history" according to
the film. The documentary follows the steps of the filmmaker Katrina
Browne and a handful of other descendants as they retrace the paths
over which this trading took place: from Bristol, Rhode Island to Ghana
to the Caribbean. See the trailer here.

Because the family included a good number of Episcopal priests, it
has been taken up by the Episcopal Church nationally as part of the
church's ongoing work of reconciliation with its complicity with slavery and racism, Greene writes. On Sept. 6, as part of a conversation sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina at St. Matthew's
church in Hillsborough, the film will be shown. After the film, Greene will be
part of a panel discussion -- in which she'll be bringing Hillsborough's own Thomas
Ruffin to the table.

Time to stop tinkering with the script and start shooting — the deadline for submissions to the third annual Carrboro Film Festival is Friday. Aug. 29.

Actually, that's what organizers call the "first" deadline; submission fee if you get your film in by then is $15. The "late" deadline is Sept. 22, but it'll cost you $30 to enter a film during the late period.

The only requirements are that the filmmaker at one time in life had a brush with Orange County and that the film is 20 minutes or less.

Submission forms and information are at www.carrborofilmfestival.com.

The film festival will be held on Sunday, November 23rd at the Century Center in Carrboro, NC.

East Chapel Hill soccer seems to have found new life for its offense. Just how lively it is will soon be put to the test.
The anticipated match between East Chapel Hill (1-0-1) and No. 3 Apex (1-0-1) has been moved up to 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at ECH’s Wildcat Stadium. A JV match at 4:30 p.m. will precede the undefeated varsities.
ECH finished 13-8-3 last fall, good enough for third place in the PAC 6 Conference and a playoff spot, and out-scored opponents 69-30. But the Wildcats were outscored 1-13 in their biggest matches: against three top-15 opponents and in two matches against arch-rival Chapel Hill.
While the 2008 fall season barely has begun, the signs look good for East. The Wildcats opened their regular season with a 3-1 win on the road against Greenville Rose. The Rampant (one of the great, quirky names in N.C. sports) are coming off a 16-4-2 season in 2007, in which they gave up only 27 goals in 22 games.
The Wildcats followed that first win with a 1-1 tie at Raleigh Wakefield. Not the best of results, but hardly the worst, either, and coming on the road in the heart of the Cap 7 Conference. (A visitor getting anything out of the Cap 7 in soccer is a bit like taking a road win along Tobacco Road in basketball.)
The Wildcats’ early scoring has gotten a boost from two players who’ve been teammates since their Rainbow Soccer preschool league — Dallas Cederberg and Cristo Briceño. Cederberg scored twice against Rose, with an assist from Briceño, and Briceño assisted Aug. 25 on Kent Rockhill’s goal at Wakefield.
No. 3 Apex, which gave up just 10 goals in all of 2007, will provide the best test yet for the Wildcats' scoring abilities. The Cougars are the first of six games for East Chapel Hill against Top-15 opponents this season. That schedule includes a Sept. 15 visit to No. 1 Raleigh Broughton.
Apex will play at No. 10 Chapel Hill (2-0-0) on Sept. 4.
CHHS is scheduled to play at Ravenscroft Aug. 27 and then host Person next week before the showdown with Apex.

 -- William Elliott Warnock/The Chapel Hill News