The latest senseless school shooting in Pennsylvania in what is invariably described as “a rash of school shootings,” as if calamine lotion were the solution, reminded me of another rash of school shootings, back in the late 1980s. This was long before Columbine, the mother of all school shootings that made us forget previous guns-and-playground episodes. In 1989 Patrick Edward Purdy, one of a rash of three-named-drifters-cum-mass-murderers, went to a shoolyard in Stockton, CA and opened fire on the kids playing there. Five died, and 29 more were injured.

Speculation at the time centered around the race of the victims, many of whom were Cambodian immigrants. Rumors did not fly as quickly in the days before the internet but I remember people saying Purdy was a vet, or had lost his job to some Asian. (Even in this instant media age, disinformation is the norm. Last week, one day after a drifter killed and molested some girls at a school in Colorado, a father told me he had heard the man found the kids on MySpace — completely false but an instant urban legend!)

Purdy was neither a vet nor disgruntled former employee; he was a moron with drug and alcohol problems and a car trunk full of automatic weapons. (He had inscribed the words “Hezbollah” and “freedom” on his rifle, while his jacket read “Death to the Great Satin,” presumably one of the Five Satins.) But he had also attended that school as a child and lord knows how that experience got twisted in his brain. Many of the schoolyard shooters had bad experiences at school; the Columbine killers seemed to put an exclamation mark on the new trend of kids who don’t wait twenty years to let their wounds fester.

Look for lots of Op-Eds and everything from permissive parenting to video games to be blamed again. School security will be increased, again, and the NRA will go into its default defensive posture before it goes back to handing out guns at roadside stands in North Carolina. President Bush has even threatened to get involved, though given his track record in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans you may want to tell your kids to duck.

The heartbreaking aspect of the Pennsylvania shootings, of course, is that those girls were Amish. It was a one-room schoolhouse, the kind Tom and Becky held hands in. Most amazingly, the Amish community has taken up money for the families of the victims — as well as the family of the man who did the killing. What Jesus had on tap is still stronger than dirt.

The story of Republican representative Mark Foley of Florida and the emails he sent to a congressional page is growing and changing faster than a Sea Monkey in water, or one of those dinosaurs in a capsule my son loved when he was little, probably for the same reason. Contents under pressure, dying to come out (so to speak). (I’ll leave others to handle the closeted-Washington angle, though I think it’s fair to say that the gays I have met in DC are more flamboyant after hours, as it were, than their NY counterparts because they have to save it up. You can do Dorothy all day in the West Village and no one bats a lacquered eyelash.)

Now we’re on to the what-did-they-know-and-when-did-they-know-it part of the cycle, with the GOP sweating on getting their story straight on the question of whether or not they looked the other way when presented with evidence that one of theirs assigned to the job of protecting exploited children might have been the wrong man for the job. Did Hastert et al do a Sgt. Schultz when confronted with Foley’s overly friendly email to the 16-year-old because they were worried about losing another seat in the House?

If so, they may wish to revist the cover-up strategy in the future. True, Foley asking the kid what he wants for his birthday and requesting a recent pic smacks of Peter Graves in the cockpit of Airplane! (“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”), but I guarantee that what is to follow is worse. Rumors of more explicit IM’s beg the question: what was Foley thinking? Just as Jeanine Pirro might have imagined Bernie Kerik was under surveilance when she asked him for help bugging her husband’s love boat (see below), I think everyone should assume that not only is no email or even instant message private (ask the folks at Enron, the live ones anyway), it will live forever. Imagine not just that anything you write will be read by others but that it will be broadcast from the jumbo screens in Times Square, just like Madama Butterfly.

So what fun is email if you can’t say something suggestive? None whatsoever. What I suggest is that you adapt a disclaimer, similar to your signature line, on everything you write. “Any reference in the above material to floggings, nipple-clamps or patent leather is intended to be purely ironic.” If you work in academia you may want to try the “queer theory” approach: “Sexual deviance is a social and political statement and the reader should not assume that the writer engages in any of the practices mentioned in this email but stands in solidarity with those who do.” Or there is always the Pete Townshend defense: “In an effort to better understand the sexual tendencies of others the writer of this email may express an interest in certain activities purely for research purposes.” Just assume there is no privacy. Alberto Gonzalez does.

The New York Times, typically, tip-toed around the question of who the other woman was in the Pirro love-boat-bugging triangle (while the Daily News had no such qualms, giving us pictures and practically the address of the hottie), preferring instead to put Pirro’s plight in the light of her history with the husband-from-hell and linking it — natch — to the saga of that other Westchester wannabe, Tammy Wynette Clinton. (Unmentioned in all this is the specter of Geraldine Ferraro, who hovers over the scandal like one of those ghosts from Tony Soprano’s dreams.)

But the Times should have looked a little closer to home — like right there on the same front page, where former Hewlett-Packard chairwoman Patricia Dunn is pictured looking on stoically while a pair of identical bald lawyers whisper behind her as she testifies before a House panel. Like Pirro, Dunn (synonomous with finished) played with fire, or wire, when she bugged board members she suspected of leaking info to the press. Pirro simply talked to Bernie Kerik about bugging her husband’s boat to confirm her suspicions regarding the other woman. When Kerik, captured on tape, said he couldn’t find anyone to do the actual bugging, scared as they were of doing something extralegal for a former prosecutor and possible future attorney general, she asked, rhetorically I suppose, “What am I supposed to do, Bernie? Watch him fuck her every night?”

Yeah, baby.

Leaving aside the wisdom of seeking counsel from Kerik in this matter (this is a man who missed the chance to be director of Homeland Security when it was revealed that, among other things, he used a city-owned apartment to cheat on not just his wife but his mistress), Pirro and Dunn could have saved themselves a lot of time, not to mention a couple of pretty good jobs, if they had just assumed the worst. Yes, your husband is cheating on you, your board member has the Silicon Valley beat reporter on his speed dial — all of your worst fears are confirmed. Now what? By trying to prove what you already knew you just screwed yourself, so to speak. Nixon, forever dangling in history in a spider web of wire and tape, bugged the Democrats in 1972 when they were already headed for a self-created defeat. He proved to himself that John Lennon hated the US government when he could have just bought an album. Assume the worst and you’ll never be disappointed, someone said. Just have the upholstery cleaned before you get on that boat.

JUDGMENT DAY: To all you readers within the sound of my voice — that is, my neighbors in downtown Brooklyn — today is the last day to comment on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement created to give us an idea of what life will be like after the Atlantic Yards is built. If you like sunshine and being able to park, and think schools are quite crowded enough and traffic is plenty snarled already; if you love Brooklyn for its low-rise quality-of-life, your neighborhood for its neighborhood feel; if you think a community should have some say when an outside, Cleveland-born, Upper-East-Side residing developer decides to change the face of your city because he is well-connected and stands to make a billion dollars on the deal, speak now. Today. Before 5:30 pm. You can read up on the DEIS on the Develop Don’t Destory Brooklyn website or (if you’ve heard quite enough) email atlanticyards@empire.state.ny.us and let your voice be heard. Someone actually reads these things, and as union members who live in other places and housing advocates who have been hoodwinked or paid to believe Ratner is going to build them a workers’ paradise are sure to flood the zone with their own cookie-cutter responses, your concerned complaint will register. Go ahead, take five minutes. It’s your community, too.

I heard a story on the BBC World Service this morning about people in the UK borrowing more than their European counterparts and it was definitely of the been-there-borrowed-that sort to these American ears. There was the testimony of several debtors who complained they found themselves thousands of pounds in the hole thanks to the sort of zero-percent credit card offers with which we are regularly deluged. Capital One is probably crossing the pond as we speak.

Then for counterpoint there was a spokesman from the credit industry who took the hard line. You could not blame the banks for their spendthrift ways, he argued. Personal responsibility and all that. They only had themselves to blame.

It occurred to me that the same conservatives, here or there, who argue you can’t blame banks for the growing number of debtors just because they make it ridiculously easy to borrow (just as you can’t blame McDonald’s for making people fat, or tobacco companies for giving people cancer) are the same people who love to blame Hollywood for encouraging wanton sexual behavior by giving us images of Brad Pitt shagging Angelina Jolie.

Banks and credit card companies have tried to deflect criticism by offering courses in getting out of debt and managing your finances, just as Philip Morris or whatever they’re calling themselves now have a whole cottage industry devoted to keeping kids from smoking. (Goodbye, Joe Camel.) But Hollywood has yet to find a way to make us stop thinking about Angelina’s lips.

I’d like to see them try.

Fall must be lice season in New York because kids are being sent home in droves to have their heads checked and deloused in record numbers, it seems. Record since last year, anyway. My daughter was caught up in the latest purge and I tried to assure her she was not alone: our neighbor, my shrink, the man in the moon. All their kids were itchng and scratching.

So Franny and I paid a repeat visit to Abigail Rosenfeld, Brooklyn’s premier nit-picker (for all those who have asked, her number is 718/435-2592). Abigail lives on an Orthodox block in Flatbush and I would say that she has so many children she doesn’t know what to do, but that’s not true. Clearly the answer is “have more” since there was a new baby since we saw her last fall (Shlamme? she translated it as “Sammy” and he was about the cutest thing either my daughter or I had ever seen) and another one on the way. She had been hit with so many requests in recent weeks that she was sending people down the block to other Orthodox moms who did the same thing.

Who knew? Turns out there is competition for this timeless, tiring, time-consuming job (you need a ocean of Pantene, a fine-tooth comb and endless patience) which revealed itself as she quizzed Franny about the people who had come to her school to help the nurse check heads. “Lice Advice?” she said. “I gave that woman her start. I was hoping another friend of mine would get that job.” She wished her competitor no ill, she assured me. But clearly she had favorites.

Franny was clean, btw. A few nits. Now we’re on to the endless washing and drying of everything in her room. I offered to do a Freaky-Friday role-reversal with my wife once — I would run her magazine while she did the domestic scientist/writer/teacher bit — and she passed. She couldn’t handle the scene at Abby’s, I bet, what with beleagured parents shlepping their kids in from Hastings and toddlers running amok on the floor (one of them asked me if I wanted to kiss the Torah, which smelled distinctly of Doritos). But she didn’t get to see that baby.