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.

I got a phone call from Susan Sarandon just before the primaries (date some women once and they never leave you alone) and I was disappointed to find it was just a recording. Turns out she was endorsing Jonathan Tasini over Hillary Clinton in the US Senate race because Hillary had supported the invasion of Iraq and still did not want to bring the soldiers home — unlike Tasini who was ready to start loading the troop transports in Baghdad tomorrow.

I have a lot of reasons to distrust Hillary — she seems only too willing to fudge or pull a complete reversal on any number of positions, from a woman’s right to choose to a consumer’s right to declare bankruptcy, if it’s politically expedient or there is money for her future presidential race involved. And if nominated she will surely cost us the election again, given the Satan-like associations she has for many — though the simple fact that so many hate her that she is doomed from the start does not seem to be enough to stop her from becoming her party’s first presidential nominee, an honor she doubtless thinks of as her birthright.

But though I can’t forgive her and the rest of the Senate their decision to give Bush a blank check going into Iraq, I believe she sincerely thought Saddam posed some kind of global risk. And as wrong as she and Colin Powell and Tony Blair and millions of others were on that score, and as much as I hope the Vulcans who drove this bus are punished in international courts if not eternal hellfire for their pursuit of this policy, I don’t see how we can just pull out of Iraq. What do we say to the people whose nation we have destroyed? “Sorry about that”? Even if the idea of dividing Iraq into three sovereign states (Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurd) is a non-starter as many Iraq-watchers believe, the US has no choice but to stick around and do some nation rebuilding.

We cannot magically turn our soldiers into peace-keeping troops because there is no peace to keep. We cannot unscrew this pooch, even once the Vulcans are out of power. (And as they head for the exits, look for more blame to be shifted to past presidents, the press, anyone but the people who got us into this mess.) But we cannot walk away from a disaster of our creating. We have to reinvent our role in this war. Start by restoring electricity.

So sorry Susan et al. This position puts me deeply in the purple category in this very blue city — but I always hated that division anyway. I lost a lot of friends on the left coast since 9.11, specifically in the uber-blue Bay Area, people so blue they think it’s unfair to the other colors to characterize blue as liberal or Democratic, people who want to show solidarity with colors on the other end of the spectrum — and who decided to make blue and red primary colors, anyway? Periwinke has rights, too. These were people who thought even going after Al Qaeda was unfair. (A typical comment before the Iraq war: “Who is this majority in the polls who support this invasion? I don’t know a single person who is for the war!” Having not been outside of Alameda, Marin or SF county in 20 years…)

So don’t look for me at the peace rally, shouting “Troops out now!” I’m going to take my purple crayon and write right here.

I was stuck in the house all day, working on the Rushing book and measuring the occasional showers. Before the sun set I thought it was sufficiently dry to take the dog for a walk. As we perambulated up Lafayette to Washington, over to DeKalb and down to Clermont, I was posed three questions, after having been asked nothing all day.

“What’s Bonerama?” a man said, reading my T-shirt. (A New Orleans band composed of four trombones with a sousaphone for a bass, I told him, and he looked suitably amazed. You should hear their covers of “Crosstown Traffic” and “The Whiffenpoof Song.”)

“A gas station attendant pushed me when I asked him for money and I punched him in the mouth,” a homeless man told me. “Can I be arrested for that?” (If he walked away, I said, he probably won’t press charges. But stay away from that gas station, just in case.)

“What’s the desperation?” a man on DeKalb asked as a woman barrelled past, running for the bus. “If she is that desperate, why not take a cab?” (Maybe she doesn’t have the money, I said. Besides, have you ever tried finding a cab on DeKalb?)

Glad to be of service, folks. Now it’s back to work.

“Gentlemen songsters off on a spree/Doomed from here to eternity…”

That was a plot device in Wim Wenders’ 1991 film Until the End of the World, a rather amorphous future-noir in which a bunch of disciples of Max von Sydow’s use a machine he has invented to record their dreams. Unfortunately this proves more habit formng than Tylenol PM, and soon no one is doing anything but sitting around watching instant replays of last night’s circus of the subconscious, barely rousing themselves to sing a valedictorian version of “Days” at the creator’s cremation…

I was reminded of that dream-recorder last night when I got around to watching a week’s worth of shows I had recorded. I don’t know about you but if it wasn’t for Tivo I would probably not see anything but cable news (“Everywhere is war”) and a few baseball games (subway series?). First I sampled the pilot of Studio 360 on the Sunset Strip (our friend David Handelman is on the roster of writers serving Aaron Sorkin) and found it as entertaining as advertised. Then I watched some short films that TCM had shown last week, including a couple early shorts by David Lynch.

It was great seeing TCM’s genial host, Bob Osborne, who is more comfortable introducing films starring Gregory Peck or Grace Kelly, grimace his way through the Lynch set-up. He looked like he was selling gum surgery. And indeed “The Grandmother” (1970), the longer of the two films, was the most horrifying thing I’ve seen coming out of my Sony since Bush addressed the UN. If I hadn’t been so tired I might have gotten up off the couch to get rid of the images of the vampirish little boy (half Brian Ferry, half Eddie Munster) who grows a monster grandmother to rescue him from the animal parents who alternately abuse and neglect him.

It wouldn’t be quite fair to say I have never seen anything like it; it’s a preview of coming Lynch attractions, most obviously Eraserhead. In the director’s subconscious, so close to his film world, the birthing process is monstrous, children are monstrous and the only thing more monstrous is the world they are born into. Eraserhead was the first film of his I saw; it played at midnight at the Roxie in San Francisco for months. I remember being so impressed that I took a girl I was seeing at the time to a screening. It was the beginning of the end of our relationship.

I erased “The Grandmother” and the equally horrifying but shorter “Alphabet” from my Tivo but I can’t delete them from my dreams.