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.

I’ll be off next week, so before leaving I wanted to do something of a brain dump; you know, clear out all those random thoughts and undeveloped concepts from the old noggin, so I can return after Labor Day renewed, refreshed, and recharged. So allow me, gentle reader, a few moments of rumination, a word I actually just looked up. I found these definitions:

• 1) Rumination – a calm, lengthy, intent consideration
• 2) Rumination – chewing cud
• 3) Rumination – regurgitation of small amounts of food

When someone famous dies, we like to say on the news that the nation or the world or music fans or whatever is relevant to the decedent -- are “mourning” the loss. Like so much else expressed in the language of “news-ese,” it’s an unwieldy generalization that either exaggerates or minimizes the truth of the situation. In my view, you “mourn” a celebrity death based on some emotional, feeling-based connection you made with that person, either from a moment you had meeting them personally, or from having their work or their art touch you and shape your life in some way. It’s when a death is felt, not just noted. Not to sound cold about it, but the vast majority of famous people deaths I’ve reported on the news, I was just noting.

As I promised in my post yesterday, I was going to continue looking for other points of view on Scotland’s release of the Libyan man convicted in the Lockerbie Pan Am bombing. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi returned home to Libya to a hero’s welcome, after being freed on “compassionate” grounds because he has terminal cancer. I wrote about the difficulty I and most Americans have understanding Scotland’s mindset in granting the release, when it seems to so clear to us that someone convicted of killing 270 innocent people deserves just as much compassion as he showed his numerous victims; that is, exactly none.

I came across this good piece on “The Daily Beast” by a prominent BBC reporter. She describes how, contrary to the majority American point of view, most people in Scotland--the country where the mass murder took place--actually supported al-Megrahi’s release: