It’s quite a strange experience to have your picture on the front of an MTA bus. Or rather, on the front of EVERY MTA bus. But that’s exactly the experience my “News at 10” co-anchor Kaity Tong and I have had for the past month.

The WPIX promotions department, in putting together its marketing and publicity plan for our newscasts, made a decision to go with buses. Not the side panels you see when you’re walking on the sidewalk and the bus passes by on the street. We’re talking the front of the bus, where you see our faces approaching, in a delightful and friendly way, as the bus is coming at you. Kaity and I were happy to hear about the plan. It’s always nice to have your newscast promoted out there in public. It might make more people watch, which, as you know, is pretty much the whole idea of this TV thing.

We’ve had promotional campaigns before. A few years ago, the 10 o’clock news team—me, Kaity, Sal Marciano, and Mr. G—had our mugs plastered all over subway stations throughout the city. I was a subway rider at the time, and there was one of these posters at my “home” station, at 96th and Central Park West. I admit, it was kind of a kick to be standing there, waiting for the train, glancing over my shoulder at a big, oversized photo of….. me! But the fun didn’t last long.

When I was in my teens and 20’s, filled with wanderlust, I used to look up whenever an airliner was passing overhead, and say to myself, “I don’t know where that plane is going, but I wish I was on it.”

Now I look up at passing airliners and say, “I don’t know where that plane is going, but I give thanks to all that is holy that I’m NOT on it.”

I imagine lots of people feel the same way, and everybody knows why: the crowds, the lines, the security checks, the packed-like-sardines seating, the sudden cancellations, the long delays, etc., etc. Flying is as fun as a root canal.

But that’s old news. Here’s the new news: On Monday, JetBlue announces a seven-dollar charge for a blanket and pillow for flights longer than two hours. Over the weekend, US Airways says it’s going to start charging for water and coffee. Other airlines have introduced surcharges for a second piece of luggage of between 15 and 20 dollars. One airline stopped showing in flight movies. (No big loss there. I’ve been on flights where the movie was so bad, people were walking out. Hello? Is this thing on?) And what do you want to bet airline executives are huddling as we speak to come up with still more cutbacks and new revenue streams to make up for rising fuel costs and slumping business? More after the jump.

If you didn’t see it on the news tonight, check out Paris Hilton’s video response to her appearance in a John McCain ad earlier this week. You’ll recall the McCain campaign put in an almost subliminal shot of Ms. Hilton and one of Britney Spears in the commercial, aimed at equating Barack Obama’s worldwide celebrity status with theirs. Or, I should say, their TYPE of worldwide celebrity status, where what they’re really famous for is simply being famous, despite their less than stellar resumes.

In my blog post about the McCain ad earlier this week, I said the ad itself was less than stellar, and wouldn’t get the Republican much traction, mostly because it knocked his democratic opponent for being well-known and charismatic, not necessarily big negatives in a candidate for national office. (It should be noted there have been other interpretations of the ad by some bloggers and columnists, who found the quick shots of the two “sexually available” starlets a not-so-subtle message to voters clinging to the racist canard that powerful black men want to sleep with white women) That interpretation is certainly debatable, as was my contention that the ad would flop. It certainly got a lot of attention, and I was surprised at how many people thought McCain scored some points with it.

I’ve been reading news accounts of the disaster that struck climbers on the Himalayan peak K2 last week. Falls and avalanches ended up taking the lives of eleven men, on a mountain that experts say is more difficult and dangerous to climb than Everest. My heart aches for those killed, and the families and friends they leave behind.

I try to understand why people would put themselves in such mortal danger to reach the top of a mountain, what aspect of their personality and character has them willingly enduring the torturous conditions and constant peril of such an endeavor. I’m sure I couldn’t do it. But, more to the point, I’m sure I WOULDN’T do it. Eleven people are dead because they needed to climb K2. I can’t think of a single thing I would CHOOSE to accomplish in this world, to be able to say “yeah, I did that,” that would have a chance of ending that way. Life is tough enough the way it is.

Like millions of others, I read “Into Thin Air,” Jon Krakauer’s stunning first person account of a disastrous expedition to climb Mount Everest in 1996 that took eight lives. Novice climbers and top experts were among the casualties. As I read the account, from the first page to the last, one question consumed me: why in the world would anyone subject themselves to such utter, constant misery and danger to do something like this? It’s not like climbers just head toward the peak, camping out for a few nights as they make their way up. Weeks at a time have to be spent at base camps, so their bodies can acclimate to the altitude and thin air. For two months—two months!—the K2 climbers had waited for the tiny window of opportunity the weather on the mountain allows in early August. Only to end, when the “opportunity” came, with the deaths of all those people—people who were fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands.

A Georgian woman holding her baby cries over her damaged home in Gori, Georgia, just outside the breakaway province of South Ossetia Aug. 10, 2008. (David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters)

Who in the world could have ever imagined that during the Beijing Olympics, China would become the SECOND-most watched and controversial nation on the globe? Russia’s invasion of Georgia has turned from a border incursion a few days ago into what appears to be an all-out war, and a very savage one, at that. There have been many civilian deaths. Russian troops and tanks are splitting the former Soviet Republic in two, and Monday a Georgian embassy official in Moscow said it appears Russia’s goal is nothing less than the “complete liquidation” of the Georgian government.

If you’ve been keeping up with the conflict, you know there’s a small portion of Georgia known as South Ossetia, where separatists have operated as an independent nation, ethnically and politically closer to Russia than the West-leaning government of Georgia. Both sides claim the other started this week’s hostilities. Whichever is true, initial skirmishes between Georgian forces and separatists brought Russia into the conflict, and the tanks began rolling. (For a superb summation of the causes of the conflict, as well as how natives of Georgia here in New York are reacting, check out this story from Friday night by CW11 reporter Chris Glorioso after the jump.)

Whenever a blogger or columnist writes a series of unconnected random thoughts, it usually means one thing: Couldn’t come up with a topic. Now that we’re clear about that, let us proceed.

• I don’t care about the Olympics. There. I said it.

• Anybody else out there getting tired of Coldplay?

Okay, that was a pretty negative start to my random musings. Let’s get a few positive ones in there.

• I was against the Jets going after Brett Favre. But once he arrived, he’s such a compelling, cool guy, who exudes such authority and leadership, now I’m glad he’s here.

• I predict the Jets will go 7 and 9.

That didn’t stay positive for long, did it?

• A new poll out Wednesday shows nearly 4 in 10 people haven’t decided who they’re going to vote for for President. Amazing, isn’t it? The media just gets completely overheated following the horse race, declaring Obama is ascendant one week, that McCain is the man to beat the next. And yet American voters just take their time, following the campaigns as they get closer to the actual election day, making considered choices, while everybody in the media/political complex is running around like chickens with their heads cut off. I love Americans.