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.

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.)