We were on the air an hour early with our snow coverage on NY1.  Here are a few pictures from my commute.  There was well over a foot on the roof at my building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I came across a great analysis while pouring over coverage of last night’s State of the Union address. The BBC took the text from every presidential address since 1790 and ran them through a word counter. Then they looked at which “nouns and adjectives (and one pronoun)” showed up the most frequently over the past 221 years. ‘We’ was the hands-down winner.

My fantastic co-anchor from my CNNfn days spoke about her new book last night at an event I attended. “Smart is the New Rich” is a common-sense, plain-language guide to money and investing. And the key message is to live within your means.

Even if stripping down naked doesn’t get your point across, at least it gets people looking at you. That seems to be the logic of the latest Chinese viral sensation, a man named Chen Weiwei. Unable to get a train ticket home after waiting in line for 14 hours, Chen decided to strip down to his skivvies and complain to the station master. Enter the Running Naked Man.

The premise for this fun video parody: A 7-year-old boy name Jimmy has lost his cat. He wants an advertising agency to help him get that message out.

Today I’m launching a new partnership with TrivWorks, a New York-based trivia event company. I included a few details about the project on my blog a couple of weeks ago, but now all the information is in about the events we’ll produce together.

Sometimes when you look outside on a cold, sunny day you can be lulled into thinking that it’s really not so bad outside. But the huge plumes of smoke and steam from every building today are a pretty good clue that it’s really cold.

One feature of our January 3-9 “Pat’s Papers SOS Week” was the giveaway of an iPad to one lucky reader. Today, we chose a name at random and Jenn Sittig of New York City is the winner.

The new “American Idol” judges made their debut last night. Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler both settled in nicely, but it was clear that neither is going to take over Simon Cowell’s role as the bearer of honest feedback for those who need it.