Utterly apropos of nothing—I don’t even know what made me think of it—I want to write today about the always-rumored-but-never-really-confirmed notion that NYPD parking agents have a “quota” of tickets they have to hand out. Let me say first of all that I have no particular insight on this. I haven’t been doing any investigative reporting, haven’t videotaped any former parking enforcement officers in silhouette, telling the ugly, dark truth about the secret quota system. I don’t need to do all that to find the truth of this. Common sense leads one to the only possible conclusion:

Of course there are quotas. It’s madness to think otherwise. Furthermore, there NEED to be quotas. It ultimately serves citizens—and drivers/parkers—more than it hurts them.

“Thank you very much. I’m honored that a majority of New York City voters have given me another four years to serve as your mayor. I’m as surprised as the rest of you that it wasn’t a very big majority, and I want you to know that I’ve noticed that, and that I’m taking it very much to heart. It’s one of the reasons I’ve tried to tone down what was going to be our big victory party here at the Sheraton tonight. In fact, Jimmy Fallon was going to introduce me, but I decided to skip that. What tonight’s results show me is that New Yorkers have very serious things on their minds at this point in our history, and it wouldn’t be right to have a comedian and a big expensive light show kick things off.

It’s a case of a political narrative being repeated so many times, it becomes conventional wisdom, even if it’s not especially true. All day long—for weeks, actually—I’ve been hearing the cable newsers talking about how the New Jersey governor’s race is a “referendum” on how President Obama is doing. I’m writing this just as the polls in the Garden State are closing, so I don’t know whether Jon Corzine or Chris Christie is going to be the winner. But I am saying now that, either way, this never was Barack Obama’s race to lose, even though he threw his wholehearted support behind Corzine.

It’s been on for a few weeks now, but I find myself doing a double take each time I see the DirecTV commercial featuring the late comedian Chris Farley. Here it is, if you haven’t seen it. It’s one of a series of commercials by the satellite tv provider that takes scenes from old movies, with the original actors, but changes the dialog so that the characters are talking about DirecTV. It’s a novel idea, I guess—I saw one today with Dana Carvey and Kim Basinger, in an altered scene from “Wayne’s World”—but I just don’t know about using an actor who is, you know, dead, from semi-tragic causes (Farley, a hard, hard partier, died of a drug overdose in 1997).

Ladies and gentlemen, the Watkins family is now a cat family.

Meet Charlotte, the adorable kitten which arrived in our home a week ago. There was a pet adoption fair held in conjunction with our local church, and my wife and sons came away with a real winner, I think. Charlotte (when it came time to pick a name, one of my twin seven-year-olds, Jamie, just blurted out “Charlotte!” It seemed to arise out of him so instinctively, we figured that must be the name our new pet was meant to have) is around two months old, was abandoned somewhere in Westchester County before making her way to the adoption service, but seems by all indications to be sweet-tempered and playful, and—as you can readily see from the photo—just SICK CUTE!

I had a birthday this week. Didn’t really tell anybody about it. It’s become something I don’t announce anymore. So why am I bringing it up now? Because I’m trying to figure out if that’s weird behavior, or not.

When I was in seventh grade, going out for the junior high school football team, I remember running a drill that seemed designed to help coaches figure out who, as they put it, “likes to hit.” Basically two players would collide with each other at top speed. I put my head down and went helmet-to-helmet repeatedly, sometimes with guys much bigger than I was. I made the team. I also remember I had a bad headache for a few days.

In an incredibly brief amount of time, the story of the so-called Balloon Boy morphed from drama to farce. I'm not saying that just because it turned out the little boy, Falcon Heene, was never even on that runaway weather balloon the world was watching for two hours Thursday. What authorities in Colorado are saying now is that he accidentally let the balloon go, was worried he'd get punished, and hid in the house while the whole misunderstanding was unfolding on national TV. Weird story, but understandable... six-year-olds think that way. What is not understandable to me is the way his parents are exploiting him, and their other sons, on national television ever since it happened.

Boy, it just begins earlier and earlier every year, the celebration of the holiday. At least it seems that way. Months ahead of time, you see the displays in the stores, you get the commercials on TV, the kids start thinking about nothing else; sure isn't the way I remember it.

I'm talking, of course, about Halloween.

It was just six months ago, but seems longer than that; I was at the first Mets game in their new stadium Citi Field, and, man, it was electric. For sports fans both crazed and casual, a new stadium opening up is a huge event, one that happens maybe once or twice in a lifetime for a fan of any particular team (or in the case of Red Sox and Cubs followers, never in a lifetime). It’s a cliché how the start of any new baseball season is like the first breath of a new life; add a new home to the equation, along with a team with some terrifically talented ballplayers, and Mets fans packed in to the rafters were doing some sweet dreaming on that April night at that first home game.

When I heard the details today about the David Letterman/sex/extortion story, I had three immediate reactions, in this order:

1) That was one sorry blackmail plot.
2) Employers shouldn’t sleep with their subordinates.
3) That was one sorry blackmail plot.

When my seven-year-old twin boys started clamoring to get the video game “Guitar Hero” earlier this year, I always had a good answer: we have REAL guitars in the house, I would say; learn to play them instead of some fake video thing that teaches you nothing about music. And I stuck to that, right up to the time they convinced me to at least try “Guitar Hero” at a video arcade during our vacation. When they asked me after that if we could get it for our home, I’m, like. “uh, yahhh.” (Hey, it takes a big man to admit to his children that he was wrong about something.)

I really wanted all of you to see something from an event I emceed Wednesday night. Some of it aired on our 10 PM newscast, but the rest of the video deserves to be seen.

I had a bit of a revelation a couple of days ago, about the nature of national television news as it stands today, at least as it concerns political/public policy stories. Lots of you have probably had this revelation already, but, hey, I work in the media, and sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees.

What a fascinating political sideshow it’s been the past few days, this dust up involving the White House and New York Governor David Paterson. President Obama reportedly sent word to Paterson, via an aide, that he shouldn’t run for election to a full term in 2010, because… well, because nobody likes him, respects him, or thinks he’s doing a remotely acceptable job. Okay, “nobody” is a strong word; but polls show Paterson has a roughly 20% approval rating, which is political terms is equal to.. nothing.

Years ago, as I was starting out my TV news career in Kingsport, Tennessee, I was interviewing the district’s veteran congressman, Rep. James “Jimmy” Quillen. (Quite the character was he; he served 17-terms, and yet managed to sponsor only three pieces of original legislation. Once when I was interviewing him about the Eqypt/Israeli peace agreement, he repeatedly referred to citizens of the former as “e-GYP-ians.” Near the end of his career, one fellow Republican in Congress was quoted as saying, "Jimmy's one helluva nice guy, ... but let's face it. He couldn't organize a one-car funeral." But I digress. Here’s a link if you’d like to continue your own exploration of Congressman Quillen’s storied career).

Next week is a big one for PIX News and all of our viewers. We’ve got a very new kind of newscast launching on Monday. I wanted to write a little here to get you thinking about it and excited about it.

I’ve finally sorted through my feelings about last night’s heckling of President Obama during last night’s health care speech to Congress and the nation. South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, as you’ve no doubt heard by now, shouted out “you lie” when the president said his bill would not “insure illegal immigrants.”

Do you like that title? I’ve been reading a lot of articles and posts today about the release of all the new Beatles stuff, and all of them use Beatle song titles and lyrics to seem hip and knowledgeable, so I thought I’d better do the same.

Well, they were right, all those folks who said President Obama’s education speech would be an exercise in mass indoctrination if not downright mass hypnosis of our nation’s children. They warned us that this was step one in creating legions of liberal zombies—Ozomabies—ready to do the nefarious bidding of our radical chief executive, be it rolling grandma’s wheelchair to the senior extermination center, or doing community organizing.