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).

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.

“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.

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.

For my first blog post in a week (sorry, gentle readers), I want to pick up where I left off: the matter of parking enforcement in New York City.

In our news today we're reporting on the City Council passing legislation calling for a "grace period" of five minutes. That means a parking enforcement agent can't hand out a citation until at least five-minutes after time has run out for a vehicle (this only applies to muni-meters, those blue terminals with which drivers pay for a certain amount of parking time, then display the time-stamped receipt on the dashboard. Standard parking meters which use quarters aren't included in the new law, because there's no way of telling exactly when the time expired.)

I had such a wonderful response from all you cat lovers out there when I first posted about our new kitten, I had to check back in with an update. Charlotte has been with us for about four weeks now, and we all just love her! She’s been a delightful addition to our household, and so I thought I’d just share a few of our experiences, and once again solicit your comments:

We had a segment on “PIX News at 6:30” tonight about the increasing number of foods designated as “gluten-free,” and what it means to be on a gluten-free diet. I wanted to cover this for our audience, because I’ve become interested in this kind of diet, and have been following it for the last three or four months. How that got started for me in a moment, but first, some definitions:

“FDA is proposing to define the term "gluten" to mean the proteins that naturally occur in a prohibited grain and that may cause adverse health effects in persons with celiac disease. FDA is proposing to define the term "prohibited grain" to mean any one of the following grains:

• Wheat
• Rye
• Barley
• Crossbred hybrids of wheat, rye or barley

That’s from the FDA website, and believe me, it gets lots more complicated than that. I try and keep it very simple trying to avoid food with wheat; in my case, that means no pizza, pasta, and bread.