Man, this may be my last year lifeguarding. Even for an early riser, a 5 a.m. alarm four days a week* is…a lot, as the kids say. My certification is good through next spring, so we’ll see, but I’m tired of being tired.

Spring break is in a few more weeks. We’ll see how I feel then.

* On the fifth weekday, the alarm goes off at 4:20 a.m.

Anyway, there’s more than the usual bloggage, presented with some guilt feelings, because paywalls. Here’s a column I wrote for the Freep this week, but it’s definitely paywalled and few of you are Freep subscribers, or even live in the state of Michigan. It’s about my feelings on the anthropomorphizing of animals, especially pets, and that link goes to the un-paywalled version.

And here’s another Freep column, not by me, that simply enraged me. Why? Getta loada this:

When a colleague and I arrived at the North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan, on Feb. 24 to visit a potential client in U.S. Customs and Immigration detention, we were completely unprepared for the indignity that awaited: Being told that we had to take off our bras.

Yes, this is a lawyer writing, and it goes on:

Things got even weirder when I tried to make it through a metal detector. After removing my coat and shoes, the machine beeped for a third time as I tried to pass through. That’s when the screener asked if I was wearing an underwire bra. When I said “yes,” she informed me that my bra was the problem, and that I could not get in without passing the screening.

“I can give you scissors to cut the wire out,” she said coldly. Given the price of bras, that wasn’t happening. I headed to the car and angrily flung my bra off. My colleague, also wearing an underwire bra, did the same. Braless, we were finally allowed in.

I’d have flung it in the screener’s face, personally, or maybe wrapped it around her neck.

The cruelty is the point, as we say.

Finally, a fabulous piece from the London Review of Books, looking at two of them (books, that is), one on Randy Andy and his grifting family, the other Virginia Giuffre’s memoir of being trafficked to him, and many others, by Jeffrey Epstein. The cheek of these people:

Years ago, before it was fashionable, some of the youngsters in the family were calling Andrew ‘the Nonce’, and there was general dismay at the Yorks’ reckless avarice. The British royal fantasy has a few sustaining mythologies, and one of them is dignity, a quality defined, after Andy and Fergie, more by its absence. The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the Yorks, however, enjoyment was everything, and the notion of royal sacrifice, arguably a red herring in the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was finally obliterated by their actions.

…The Yorks charged Hello! magazine a quarter of a million quid for pics of their ‘homelife’. They took £126,000 from the Daily Express for an interview. She charged £50,000 for her vague involvement in a film, Young Victoria, and signed on to start the second leg of the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race in Montevideo, demanding £38,000 worth of first-class air tickets to get there. While other poor buggers in the family were opening jumble sales in Inverness, Andy and Fergie were sniffing out freebies in the dodgiest corners of the world, as confirmed in Lownie’s remarkable catalogue of half-hidden truths.

Spoiler: The Andy-sired princesses are no better.

OK, then. Wednesday is my 4:20 alarm, so I’m going to wrap this, pour another glass of wine and go to bed early. Really early. Happy midweek, all.