Just when you think all civility has vanished from air travel, something comes along to change your mind.

On Saturday I was flying from LaGuardia to Toronto. As usual, the departure from NY was late and a lot of passengers on the Air Canada flight were on impossibly tight connections as a result.

The flight attendants made an announcement explaining the situation. They made a simple request: "If you don't have another flight to catch in the next hour, please remain in your seat when we arrive at the gate."

I've seen this happen before. But it didn't work. People just ignored the request and got up anyway.

Maybe it was the Christmas spirit. Maybe it was because it was a planeful of polite Canadians. But this time everybody listened and the people at the back of the train who had 27 minutes to make a flight to Australia actually had a chance of making it.

Labels: Air Canada, Christmas travel

We're expecting our first substantial snowfall of the season in New York. I just finished doing a live interview with NY1 reporter Vivian Lee, who's at a Home Depot store where people are stocking up on snow removal supplies.

Which brings me to a long-standing beef about a frequent snow removal practice here in New York: some people are addicted to salt.

When the snow starts to fall, they break out bag after bag of salt (or other de-icers) and just keep piling it on, trying to melt the snow faster than it falls. There have been many times when I've seen this happening and wondered why there's an aversion to the trusty snow shovel.

Sure, salt has a place in preventing an ice buildup on the sidewalk. But sometimes a little hard work with a shovel is the only answer to a big snowstorm.

Labels: salt, shovel, snow

There's not much consensus among the papers for a lead story this morning. Probably the most consistent front page item is the announcement by Chrysler that it's closing all of its plants for 30 days. Quite simply -- they can't keep filling up dealer lots with cars if nobody's buying.

We're making the rounds and pulling together today's report. I'll be back around 11 am ET with the final picks for the day.

Actually, the headline would be "no pop for you" if I was writing in Canada. And parts of the US. But since I'm writing in New York I'll bow to the local preference. In any case, the topic at hand is the tax on non-diet soft drinks as proposed by New York governor David Paterson. He proposes a 15 percent surchage - in part to raise revenue and in part to encourage people to find something else to drink.

Labels: David Paterson, Diet, Pop, Soda, tax

Among the stories we’re looking at today:

- Someone in Saudi Arabia has reportedly offered $10 million dollars to buy the shoe that was thrown at President Bush on Sunday.

- Madonna has come to a divorce agreement with her husband Guy Ritchie. The New York Post says the buyout could cost as much as $92 million, making it “one of the costliest breakups in entertainment history.”

- Caroline Kennedy has officially asked New York’s governor to choose her as the appointed replacement for Hillary Clinton when she becomes Secretary of State.

- Early indications, according to the New York Times, are that Bernard Madoff acted without the aid of family members in the fraud that has taken some $50 billion from investors.

Expect the full video report to be online at about 11 am ET.

Labels: George Bush Iraq Shoe

The New York Post has a classic front page headline -- "Lame Duck." Although, really, when you look at the video of George Bush's encounter with a shoe thrown by an Iraqi reporter, he actually reacted pretty quickly. Video from two angles below.

There's another angle in the MSNBC clip.

I have to admit the Bernard Madoff story didn't get onto my radar as fast as it should have.

Yes, it was included prominently on Pat's Papers this morning, but I really hadn't sat down until this weekend to dig into the story.

My strong response now is: How do they let this happen? And by "they" I do mean the regulators. I understand how Bear Stearns got over-leveraged. I understand how Countrywide got into trouble with bad mortgages. I understand why nobody could understand the credit default swaps that AIG insured.

But I'm having trouble understanding how nothing emerged to flag the fact that billions of assets were on deposit with NO ONE. We've all shed a few tears lately opening up our quarterly or monthly brokerage and mutual fund statements. But even with all the paper losses I still have a high degree of confidence that somewhere there's an asset with my name on it.

I can't quite figure out how this one got past everybody for so long.

Labels: Bernard Madoff

I have to assume that our home qualifies in a category of frequent online shopper. It's so easy when you live in an apartment with a doorman, because you never have to play the "sorry we missed you" game with UPS or FedEx.

Tonight's task was to get a pair of shoes. I've bought from Zappos.com before and went there looking for my shoe tonight. Generally, it's a solid Web site, but I must have done something wrong on checkout. I saw the prices for expedited shipping but never actually saw the page where I was invited to upgrade to 2 oe 3 day service.

So I called. They answered the phone quickly. And when I asked to upgrade to the 3-day service they didn't stop there. They bumped me to overnight service just to be sure we have everything we need for Christmas. Surprise is always good.

I've been a little bit obsessive over the past few days in my monitoring of the traffic patterns at PatsPapers.com. The key to the success of the Web site, obviously, is to generate enough traffic that we can afford to do this each day. I was surprised yesterday afternoon by a big spike in visits at about 4 pm.

Turns out Gothamist and New York magazine both discovered Pat's Papers yesterday, and posted prominent items online. Apparently they have a lot of readers, many of whom are also regular viewers of NY1.

Some of the new visitors to Pat's Papers sent inquiries about what time the report is going to be updated each day. The answer is: probably not as early as you'd like. Two hangups: one is the overall availability of the newspapers we review. The other is the production process. Neither happens as quickly as I'd like. The goal for now is to have the report live, with complete production, at about 11 am.

I'm toying with a way to create an "early edition." This would be an audio only version and it may be possible to have it online two hours ahead of the video report. That still puts us somewhere around a 9 am debut, which is later than I would like it to be up. The national report is just a much larger undertaking than the NY1 "In the Papers" segment. (The NY1 report is faithfully on TV at 7:42 each morning, and is online a short time later.)

Labels: Early Edition, Gothamist, In the Papers, NY1, NYmag.com

First off today -- apologies for those who tried to access the report early. We've been moving the "live" time earlier each day this week as we refine the system for getting through the content and getting the edit done. I thought we would hit the 11 am ET milestone today, but then YouTube decided it didn't like the clip I uploaded.

If you had a chance to check out "Millionaire" yesterday, I got off to a good start. The question was "Which city is known as Venice of the East?" I correctly (though somewhat indecisively) led Bryan to the correct answer. (Bangkok.)

More "Millionaire" today and throughout the week.

Labels: deadline, Millionaire, YouTube

Yes, I have a vanity search set up in Google.

It's really a handy thing when you're occasionally mentioned in media reports for things you do. So I just have Google News on the lookout for "Pat Kiernan." When it finds it, I get a little report.

So this morning, it turned up in Michelle Greppi's column for TV Week. Writing about the premiere of an HBO documentary I saw last week, Michelle wrote:

Tru TV’s Ashleigh Banfield having a long animated conversation with Pat Kiernan, the NY1 fixture who does not go for animated as an early-morning anchor.

The little known fact (in New York) that should be added to Michelle's observation, is that Ashleigh and I worked together almost two decades ago. She was the weekend anchor and I was an even greener reporter at CFRN Television, the CTV-network station in Edmonton.

Labels: Ashleigh Banfield, Le Cirque, Maccioni

It was a fun week bringing Pat's Papers online for the first time. The biggest challenge will be getting the report online early. We also learned a lot about the speediest way to upload a clip to YouTube. It's a little frustrating having content ready to go "live" and watching that 0 to 100 percent Status Bar crawling across the screen in slow motion.

The West Coast papers are a particular challenge, because many of them are online so much later than the eastern papers. We're going to be adding a section to allow readers to suggest stories that should be included in the report. Until that's online, just use the Contact Pat link and send your suggestions there.

See you Monday.