Let’s bring back that great tradition from my column days, eh? The items roundup!

I do not have a Ring doorbell, or any other kind of doorbell that tells me who is standing on my doorstep. Of course, I live in a safe suburb, and honestly have no need for one, although I gather I’m in a shrinking minority. Just judging by my social-media scans, posts about Ring doorbells have gone from “this scoundrel stole my Amazon package” to “this scoundrel came onto my porch at 9 p.m. and I don’t know him” to “this woman walked past my house; anyone recognize her?”

I wish I were kidding.

The Ring rewards paranoia, which makes it the perfect product for a paranoid age. Fear and anger stalk the land, and you never know who will be waiting on the other side of the door. Someone selling vinyl siding, or a right-winger in a latex mask and fake cop uniform bent on shooting you dead.

That said, we choose not to live that way. We have a small window in our front door, which gives me a pretty good idea who is outside. It does mean shooing away the vinyl-siding salespeople, but interacting with other humans is a life skill, and I like to stay in practice. Alan offered to buy Kate one for her house, and she said, “No, I hate that surveillance-state crap.” Girl was raised right.

Anyway, Hamilton Nolan sums up my feelings about Ring perfectly:

Crime. “Crime.” “Crime!” It is a conceptual delivery system for an unhappy life of fear. Reject it as a category of being. Reject it as an intellectually coherent object. Reject it as a lens with which to view the world. Life is a series of surprising events, some bad and some delightful. The unfolding of these events makes up the wondrous parade of life itself. Defining this entire parade by the theoretical possibility of a small handful of negative outliers does not guarantee you peace of mind. Rather, it guarantees the opposite: an unceasing focus on the worst, a needless hypervigilance bleeding into anxiety. Thrown into this disordered state, you find yourself easy prey for those who would invent solutions to this imagined problem that they themselves have conjured. The mask of safety hides the sallow face of the predator.

You want to point a freaking camera at every postal worker and cookie-selling Girl Scout and dinner party attendee that approaches your door? What is this, a house, or a prison? It is plainly crazy. It is far afield from reasonable. Its normalization is evidence of a latent societal sickness. We don’t point cameras at our friends. We don’t leer suspiciously at our neighbors. We don’t assail humanity with an accusatory spotlight. These things are not okay.

I continue to be over-interested in the Epstein story. This week’s revelations include that Epstein had an Ohio State medicine-employed gynecologist on retainer, sending him something like $25,000 a quarter for some time. How conveeeeeenient. The doctor’s explanation: ”I did not provide any clinical care for Jeffrey Epstein or any of his victims. I was a paid consultant for the New York Strategy Group regarding potential biotech investments from 2001 to 2005. I had no knowledge of any criminal activities; I find them reprehensible and I feel terrible for Epstein’s victims.” I feel so much better now.

Don’t ever change, Jeanine Pirro:

Washington’s US Attorney Jeanine Pirro tapped a dance photographer who worked for her decades ago as one of the prosecutors who tried—and failed—to convince a grand jury to indict six Democratic lawmakers Tuesday, said two people familiar with the situation.

Steven Vandervelden maintained an active photography studio when presenting federal charges to the grand jury against the six members of Congress for creating a video reminding military service members of their rights to refuse unlawful orders.

…Vandervelden—who had a long career as a local prosecutor in Westchester County, N.Y. where Pirro was district attorney —declined to comment on the investigation into the lawmakers, calling it a potentially open case. In a brief phone interview Wednesday, he confirmed he is the same Vandervelden who posted an update to his studio’s Instagram account several hours earlier.

Anyone who pays attention to federal courts knows how unusual it is for a grand jury to decline to indict; a grand jury is a prosecutor’s show, the scales so absurdly tilted in their direction that it’s where we got the famous ham-sandwich line. For some reason, that last sentence in the excerpt above made me cackle.

Speaking of federal incompetence, am I alone in wondering why it is taking so long to find an 84-year-old woman, dead or alive? I am simply flummoxed by the Nancy Guthrie case. Can anyone explain where it is now? I’m not paying super-close attention, and am wondering if I missed something important. For the last week it’s something about a video, Bitcoin, “we will pay” and utter radio silence from law enforcement. Is this a local failure or Kash Patel’s hollowed-out FBI?

Finally, it was just yesterday that one of my group chats was discussing Nicole Curtis, who hosts a show called “Rehab Addict” on one of those cable channels I don’t get anymore. She’s had ownership of a particular house in Detroit for years now. I wrote about it for Deadline Detroit in 2021, and happened to ride past it maybe last summer. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in the intervening years. But yesterday, on that group chat, someone mentioned that she was finally doing work on it, with the camera crew, of course.

But! RECORD SCRATCH! It appears the house will not be the star of the next season, as Curtis dropped an N-bomb in the course of taping this week, and faster than you can hit your thumb with a hammer, she was fired, the show cancelled, all evidence of it wiped from the corporate website, AND the clip itself leaked to the celebrity-gossip media.

What a dumb way to lay waste to your career, but I have no doubt she’ll land on her feet. Pretty blondes tend to do that.

As I told my friend last night, the celebrity-gossip media hustle the way the regular media did back when the cotton was high. I realize they often pay cash for leaks; maybe we should try doing that.

And that’s it, folks! The weekend awaits! Let’s enjoy it together.