Judith Miller said goodbye to the readers of the New York Times today — on the letters page, of all places, with the heading “To the Editor,” though clearly he knew she was leaving. I guess at that point the management figured she was a civilian and could use the same public forum everyone else does when airing her complaints about the paper and its treatment of her. Better that than have her parading around the entrance with a sandwich board and a bullhorn, screaming about a conspiracy.

Though I imagine her swan song was more judiciously edited than, say, her reporting on WMD in Iraq, it still sounded more like Edith Piaf (“Non, je ne rerette rien”) than Terrell Owens’ now-what-am-gonna-do-for-work apology. I was struck by this line in the third graf: “I am honored to have been part of this extraordinary newspaper and proud of my accomplishments here – a Pulitzer, a DuPont, an Emmy and other awards – but sad to leave my professional home.”

Golly, Judy, didn’t you read the excerpt from Maureen Dowd’s book in the Times magazine a few weeks back? Men don’t like it when you go bragging about your awards! This was echoed in Ariel Levy’s slavish, star-struck profile of Dowd in New York magazine when Mo’s good friend Michi Kakutani calls, after winning her own Pulitzer, to moan, “Now I’ll never get a date!”

Maybe Miller stopped reading Dowd after the latter slagged her in print a few weeks back, and maybe they weren’t all that close in the first place. Still, I think there must be a hilarious sitcom in there somewhere: Mo, Michi and Allessandra as three footloose girls in the city who just can’t get a date on Saturday night because of all those awards and honors and stuff, and Judy could be the old maid who lives downstairs who’s always calling to tell them to keep it down. Call it Paper Girls, or something. Roll it out on the WB and see what happens.

Personally, I like the idea of term limits for all the Times’s writers.

My daughter has been plagued by lice this year, something I thought was confined to the lower school. Seems lice don’t care what age you are, and if you have long lustrous hair as she does, they love you all the more. After several visits to the pharmacy and several treatments with lice shampoo, the little buggers returned, driving her to to tears and her parents to distraction. I had heard of a nitpicker in Brooklyn, a Hasidic woman who combed through your child’s hair the old-fashioned way and removed the little buggers and their eggs one by one. I was beginning to think of her as our last hope.

Wednesday night Franny and I drove out to an Orthodox section of Brooklyn to visit Abigail Rosenfeld, nitpicker of note. She lives in a house in what she called Flatbush, though technically it’s closer to Ditmas Park. She had been seeing people since nine that morning, including a whole family that drove in from New Jersey. They were all infested.

“In eighteen years of doing this it’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” she said, coming through my daughter’s hair. “An epidemic.” She eschews the ineffective lice shampoo and instead uses regular conditioner and a very sharp fine toothed comb to go through the hair, strand by strand. She showed me her catch, lice and nits that I had missed in my own grooming of Franny, all the while putting my daughter at ease. “Such beautiful hair,” she cooed while her kids played underfoot. She has ten (eleven on the way); the oldest was in the kitchen, studying to be a lifeguard, while the youngest was in diapers. Two small sons — Shlomo? Avika? — took turns changing him.

“When people ask me, ‘Why did I get lice?’ I tell them, ‘Cause God wanted you to,'” she said before she sent us off into the night with one of her fine-toothed combs and a promise to return for a check-up. Franny felt taken care of and I have to admit, when the lady ran the comb through my own inch-long hair and came up clean, I did too. Mazel tov, Abigail.

Just got back from London, my first visit there in almost 25 years, and yes it’s true: the food sure is a lot better. Of course the last time I was there I wasn’t exactly flush (I remember being in Hyde Park, literally sitting on my last pound) and could not have afforded a good meal if there was one to be had. But there wasn’t. This time my wife and I had at least one great meal at an Asian fusion place in Piccadilly called Cocoon that looked and sounded like someting out of Layer Cake: all youth and electronica, complete with girls getting completely hammered and guys trooping off to the men’s room to do coke — what year is it, anyway?

I arrived in time to enjoy the news of the Libby indictment, which was almost as big a deal there as it was here. All the papers put it on the front page Saturday and only the drumbeat about “nannystate” — the proposals to ban smoking in pubs and drinking on the tube — drove it off. People there hate Bush almost as much as we do.

I can’t make generalizations about anyplace I visited for a weekend but I can say that where the last time I felt at times that I was in a third world country, that this time I felt like the poor relation. The dollar is so weak that taking cabs there was absurdly expensive and if you tried to do anything — shop, eat, even browse — while doing the math you would drive yourself insane. (My friend Jess said that she and her family got through a recent visit there by simply pretending that the numbers meant dollars, not pounds. Then it just seems like New York.) Best to just act like an American and avoid thinking about tomorrow.

Or whenever it is the bills arrive.

My daughter Franny and I drove our cat to a hospice in Hershey, Pennsylvania yesterday. Muffin isn’t that old — she’s only two — but somewhere along the line she got it in her little cat brain that our furniture was her litter box. For over a year we tried diffferent remedies for various problems: special food for the crystals the vet found in her urine, antibiotics for urinary infections, new litter box, new litter, a cat door so she could come and go as she pleased… But after reupholstering some old furniture and finally getting new furniture all together we decided that Muffin has a will of her own and reasons for doing what she was doing that no human could fathom. (My sister April, who does pet rescue in Texas, said it was one of the biggest problems they had with cats.)

For the last two weeks Muffin had been sitting at the vet’s office, on death row basically, while we have looked for a home for her. As cute as she is, people tended to lose interest when we mentioned the little peeing problem. Even BARK, the Brooklyn animal rescue place endorsed by the Beastie Boys and other living things, told me that it was unlikely I would find a home for her. “The best thing to do at this point is just to euthanize her,” said the fellow I spoke to. When the animal rescue guy says it’s time to kill your cat, you know you’re in trouble.

But then our friend Nancy Castle told us about a place she took a mixed-up cat of hers. Called The Best Little Cat House in Pennsylvania this 25-year-old institute of last resort caters to cats that are terminally ill, generally with feline AIDS and leukemia, and anti-social creatures such as Muffin. After a couple of conversations with Lynn Stitt, the woman who runs the place, we made a date to take our kitty there. And though Franny tried to avoid the onerous, six-hour round trip the night before, I made a fatherly call.

“She was your cat,” I reminded her, even as she turned on the water works. “This is part of the responsibility of having a pet. Besides, don’t you want to know what Muffin’s new home is going to look like?”

By Sunday morning Franny had rallied and even passed on my half-hearted offer to take her to Hershey Park afterwards. She wanted to get home and do her homework — I think in time to watch the Real World but whatever. Muffin cried the whole way, pausing long enough to catch her breath, and we alternately chatted and tuned her out. It was a beautiful fall day and the leaves were just starting to change. The last time I drove to this part of PA was when I was doing volunteer work for Kerry last year. At least I didn’t have any illusions about the cat’s prospects.

The house itself is like cat heaven — providing they like other cats. The main dome room is devoted to the terminally ill, weak bony little babies some of whom are dying to be held (as well as dying). Franny cuddled one for a few minutes before we went to the well-cat room. There was a blind cat curled up on the floor. A cat with what looked like cerebral palsy came walking up to us sideways. Outside on the fenced in porches were cats on every conceivable perch, watching the activity outdoors (cows lowing in the field next door, the odd deer). Some were feral — one-eyed, six-fingered — including one gang of misfits the women called The Bikers. Muffin hissed at them all in greeting and then we were on our way.

Pulling out onto the country lane Franny began to cry. I stopped the car to say that Muffin was going to be fine, that she would have a long and happy life there. “It’s not her,” my big-hearted girl sobbed, “it’s those other cats who are going to die. It just makes me feel so sad.” But within five minutes she was on the phone, reporting about the experience to her friends.

Just like I’m doing now.

It may be the best reviewed movie of the year (which is the kind of line they use to promote a film the critics have loved but audiences have resisted) but David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence did not have Wallace and Gromit looking over their shoulder this weekend. Cameron Diaz is not sweating either. For all its entertainment value — and HOV is often enormously entertaining — the film does not set out to please. Opposite, in fact. It does not give you what you want, ultimately. But like Dylan’s debutante it may give you what you need.

Canadian Cronenberg may have grown up in a different wing of the same mental institution that housed David Lynch. Like Lynch, he has enjoyed some actual box office success (with Ringers and Dead Zone) but has also made films that even hardcore fans have had trouble with (Crash, not the race relations film of the same name but the sex-and-car-accident flick, gave a whole new twist to auto eroticism. Twisted metal, that is.) And like Lynch he is often playing above his audience’s heads. Just as many people walked out of Mulholland Drive convinced that Lynch had dropped the ball at the end, not realizing that the first 4/5 of the film was a fantasy and the last sordid bit the truth, so people have complained about Violence.

“Worst movie I’ve ever seen,” said one fellow behind me at a matinee last week and I think he was jarred by the film’s shifts in tone. Some scenes are hyper-realistic — the sound of the cereal being poured into bowls in the morning is deafening; the scrape on the back of Maria Bello after rough sex with her husband, played by Viggo Mortenson, hurts just to look at. When we want escape Cronenberg provides it: unbelievable violence, triumph of good over evil, comic book villains. But there is no release, no catharsis. The violence begets more violence and the escape is the illusion. Here Cronenberg may owe a debt to Scorsese whose best films — Taxi Driver, Raging Bull — are in part about the futility of violence, even as he lovingly recreates it.

This may not be what people want on a Saturday night. They can get that any day of the week just by picking up the paper and reading the latest from Bali, or Baghdad, or Belfast. It’s like Stephen Crane’s poem “The Heart”, in which he finds a beast eating its own heart and he asks him if it’s good.

“It is bitter — bitter,” he answered.
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

Now try it with melted butter.