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.

It was a few years ago that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” hit the premium pay level of streaming new-release movies, and stayed there an inordinate amount of time. So long that when I checked months later, when the rental price should have dropped from $20 to $6, it was still at $20. Even after the Best Picture Oscar, they still expected me to pay the theater price for Alan and I to watch it from the couch.

So I forgot about it for…three years.

Then it appeared, as if summoned by the God of Stuff You Forgot About, on one of the streamers this weekend, free with the price of your subscription. Saturday night at home? Sure, let’s check out this best-in-all-the-land movie.

We turned it off at the two-thirds mark. I was yawning more or less continuously, had utterly lost the thread of the plot — such as it was — and could see the resolution coming like a marching band in a parade. Spoiler: Love is the answer. In between, it was just irritating. This has been Old Woman Considers the Oscars, with your host, me.

Should have watched “Nuremberg” instead. Something cheerier, you know.

Nevertheless! Sunday was a true spring-like day, temps over 50, so we put the bikes on the car rack and took them to Belle Isle for a lap. It was…windy. Sustained at 16 mph, gusting to maybe twice that. All I know is, the flag at the entrance was standing at full extension and it was hard pedaling on the back half of the loop, with the wind in our faces, but we made it. Just a shakedown for the first bike ride of 2026, but I’d call it a win. Still ice on the river in the slow parts:

But look at that sky.

Finally, ai-yi-yi, this war. I just don’t have the bandwidth to write about it on a day to day basis, although my jaw is perpetually in my lap every time I open a news site. I’ve started thinking about false-flag attacks, which would indicate I have not quite gone off the deep end, but I’m standing on the edge of the pool looking into it. I will sign up to work the elections this year, though; that might keep my head from exploding until November.

Breaking: Iran has replaced Ayatollah Khamenei with…Ayatollah Khamenei.

Let’s have a good week, all.

Had a phone catchup with an old buddy, and we were flinging outrages back and forth across the wires. “When did we decide Bibi Netanyahu was co-commander in chief?1” one of us said, and then the other replied, “And why do we have to find ourselves agreeing with Candace Owens when we say stuff like this?!”

It was a spirited discussion, as they say.

This war is not going to go well. It’ll end someday, they always do, and the people who started it will say we won, but nah, we aren’t going to win anything other than another Middle East tinderbox. I got into another spirited discussion with a group chat, which I started by asking when we might see retaliatory strikes in this country, by civilians. One or more targeted mass shootings at synagogues, perhaps. Or worse. One of our number said I was thinking too small, that it’d be another 9/11-scale event. Hijack a UPS or FedEx plane (smaller crew to overcome), then fly it into a packed stadium. There’s a cheery thought. Or truck bombs, detonated randomly around the country. They certainly won’t find it difficult to get guns, not in the freedom-loving United States.

Operation Epic Fury is perhaps the dumbest marketing tag for an American war I’ve yet heard, but there you are. It will soon be one of the most ironic details about this whole misadventure, I fear.

In the midst of this chaos, we went to see Bridget Everett last night. You might remember her HBO show, “Somebody Somewhere,” which is loosely based on Everett’s own life. She was as expected — loud, sloppy, sings great, very blue. The seats, in the first row of the balcony, were the most uncomfortable I’ve ever occupied. Think the tightest airline seat you’ve ever occupied, then subtract 20 percent. Also, the drunken WOOOOOs from the audience were annoying, but that’s the Bridget Everett fan base.

She was very entertaining. Not a bad way to do a Monday night.

I wish I had more to report, but alas, it’s one of those weeks.

We had a pretty good weekend. Got in a swim, went to see the Oscar-nominated shorts (animation and live action), had drinks with friends. All of this is good, because it is keeping my head from exploding over current events.

Of this new war we will say little, because what’s the use. But of events surrounding it? Like, for instance, the side-bet crypto gambling site Polymarket, where some incredibly suspicious bets were placed at the last minute on a U.S. invasion of Iran on Feb. 28. Gee, I wonder who might have that information. I wonder if they had to kick up to the boss.

Or Kash Patel’s girlfriend getting an FBI security detail to get her hair done. (When former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick broke a million rules to get his wife a red Lincoln Navigator on a city-paid lease, there were women who cut him slack because they thought it was sweet that he was looking out for his woman. I suspect the same attitude will be prevalent in MAGA land.)

Also, we gotta get this war done quick-like, because we’re running out of munitions. (WSJ story, no sub so no gift link.)

I just saw the president announcing the first American casualties and added, “There will probably be more. That’s the way it is. Likely be more.” Thank you, Cadet Bone Spurs. The Israelis thank you, too.

I think I better call this a failed effort and wrap it up. Face the week ahead, put away the clean socks, and wait to see what March brings us.

Now that the who-screwed-who discussion of the Epstein files has died down, is it permissible to look at the other…problematic issues that are being exposed? Like, say, this:

In 2018, an elite group of academics and scientists planned to gather for an exclusive retreat at a luxury farm in the woods of Connecticut. The guests had been hand-picked by prominent New York literary agent John Brockman, who frequently hosted similar salons for luminaries in science, technology and media.

The problem? Brockman had included two women on the list, and his staunch supporter and biggest funder wanted them out.

“John, the old conferences did not care about diversity. I suggest you not either,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in response to an email about the programming. “The women are all weak, and a distraction sorry.”

The story goes on to quote some of these hand-picked geniuses and their feelings about women:

Take Roger Schank, an AI researcher and theorist who died in 2023. He suggested in one email that “intelligence comes about in part from real focus” and that it is rare for a woman to not be “first and foremost focused on what others are thinking and feeling about her.”

“Hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you or why you don’t own a kelly bag,” he wrote. To which Epstein responded: “It’s the tail of distribution , no really smart women – none.”

This site went on to note they left Epstein and his friends’ punctuation and spelling errors intact. Ha ha ha.

It was the “why you don’t own a Kelly bag” that really chapped my ass. My sample size of female scientists is admittedly small, but in both my professional and personal lives I’ve met a few, and I can’t think of a single group of women less interested in Kelly bags. If one were given such a pricey luxury, they’d be more likely to sell it to fund their labs than actually use it.

One group whose luxury lust I can find believable? Teenagers and Eastern European sex workers, i.e. the sort of females Epstein chose to surround himself with.

Epstein also had problems with people who weren’t white. He had interest in race “science” and is fond of dropping slurs here and there; at one point he refers to black people as chimps. So of course he was besties with the current president.

We now return to my current interest: Finding the craziest groups on Reddit. Hulu is running that stupid JFK Jr./Carolyn Bessette “love story” series, and it has reawakened interest in Bessette, the famous blonde who didn’t want to be famous, but was achingly beautiful, and died with her similarly beautiful husband, leaving behind their story and a lot of pictures. They’d never grow old, never get divorced, never see their bodies change or hair fall out. And they have the nuttiest fans on the internet. I had to step away when I realized there are people out there who can identify Bessette’s hair color by month and year. They’re my current nominees.

Finally, I leave you with a photo of Baldilocks and Beelzeboobs, the chairs of this year’s Met Gala.

The Met Gala is an event that exists solely to generate photos, and I can’t wait to see what Beelzeboobs wears. You could look at this photo all day and not get to the bottom of its weirdness. This is the biggest self-inflicted reputation bazooka in recent memory. And who is advising them in this behavior? They can afford the best PR agency on the planet, and yet.

In the olden days of journalism, this photo would have been pinned to an out-of-the-public’s-eye bulletin board, and captions welcome. Feel free.

In the meantime, I have some stuff to get ready for, so gotta go. Good weekends, all.

Monday was cold and windy and I was sluggish and dull-witted, so I took the keys off the hook and ran a meaningless errand. And then I decided to look for the east side beavers. I didn’t find them, but did discover evidence of their work in a riverfront park:

A picture of this tree popped up on Reddit earlier in the month, and I wanted to see it before their work was done. And so I did.

It must be confusing to be an urban beaver. They can’t really dam anything. That tree will die for nothing, but it’s interesting to see the remarkable consistency to their work as they move around the trunk. And the grooves their teeth make. It illuminated a very dull winter day.

A winter I am throughly sick of.

Did you get up early to watch the gold-medal hockey game on Sunday? I did not, but I gather that for hockey fans, it was a barn-burner. Secretly I was hoping Canada would win, just because it would piss off you-know-who. But the U.S. prevailed, in overtime, so yay team. The rest of it you have probably already heard — Kash Patel pushing his way into the locker room, the women’s-team snub, all of it. Honestly, I’m putting myself in Patel’s shoes and imagining being a spectator at a game, my team wins, and somehow, I end up in the locker room. Where would I be? Where would any reasonable person be? Standing back along the wall, allowing the people who won the medal to celebrate amongst themselves. It’s their medal, not mine. Be happy for them? Certainly. Grab a bottle of champagne and start dousing others? Hell no.

It’s just manners.

Afterward, I texted with Kate, who graduated with one of the U.S. team members. Did you know him? I asked. Was he in any of your AP classes? She replied:

He never gave me the time of day and he was definitely not in my AP classes but I remember him calling Will a fag

I like the “definitely” there. He now plays for the Columbus Blue Jackets. I told him if she ever sees him again (un-bloody-likely), she should say, “Hey, I saw ‘Heated Rivalry.’ I don’t know much about hockey, but are there a lot of fags in the NHL?”

Finally, in this endless winter, I made the time to watch “Downfall,” also known as the movie that generated the Hitler-rants scene that’s been meme’d to death. It’s about the last 10 or 12 days of the war, as the top German command whiles away their days in the bunker. It’s very good, although unrelentingly grim as the Russians close in. Probably not a good choice for seasonal depression, but I’m glad I saw it. Bruno Ganz is amazing. Alan’s review: “The guy who played Goebbels bears a strange resemblance to Stephen Miller.”

It’s free on Amazon Prime.

OK, then. I have work commitments tomorrow, so I will be a beaver, too. Hope your Wednesday is fine.

It’s been about five years since I debuted my theories about hobo tropes in pop music in this space. Dare I quote myself? I dare:

I was born in the late ‘50s, at which point the Depression was still fresh enough in the popular imagination that many of its tropes were fairly widespread. (I should say here that this post is not about the stock market or economic collapse. It’s about pop music.) Among them was the hobo — the man who rambled from town to town, riding the rails, carrying his belongings in a bandanna on a stick. While they were seen as down on their luck, often drunk, just as often they were portrayed as free spirits that society never got its claws into. …All of which is the long way around to notice that every so often a song will pop up in an oldies mix to remind me of how hard this archetype was sold, especially with regards to women.

The songs I cited in support of my argument were Glen Campbell’s “Gentle on My Mind” and Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia.” To a lesser extent, the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man” and Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.” And this week I listened to another oldie, and realized there’s another one out there, the Marshall Tucker Band’s “Heard it in a Love Song.” To wit:

I’m the kind of man who likes to get away
Like to start dreaming about tomorrow, today
Never said that I love you, even though it’s so
Where’s that duffle bag of mine? It’s time to go

…I’m gonna be leaving at the break of dawn
Wish you could come, but I don’t need no woman tagging along
Always something greener on the other side of that hill
I was born a wrangler and a rounder, and I guess I always will

As we used to say in the features department, three makes a trend. I am now ready to write my masters thesis, “Hobo Tropes in Pop Music and Their Role in Early Third-Wave Feminism.”

Hobos. You never hear about them much anymore. Someone presents with no fixed address and no desire for one, and we think: Fentanyl. Untreated mental illness. Trafficking. Addiction. Supportive housing. SERIAL KILLER. And yet, when I was a kid, the raggedy man who picks up cigar butts to grab a few more puffs out of them (Roger Miller: I smoke old stogies I have found / Short, but not too big around) was almost a comic figure. Kids dressed as hobos for Halloween, with fake dirt rubbed into their cheeks and that aforementioned bandanna on a stick. They must have been commonplace, although I can’t remember ever seeing one, except maybe loitering around an SRO in Columbus way, way back in the day.

Times change.

How was everyone’s weekend? Mine has been amazingly unproductive, and that is fine. Blew most of Saturday on an extended lunch with friends, with drinks, that concluded close to sundown. As we left our last stop, TWO different and unrelated parties of barflies hailed us to praise our jukebox choices. What can I say? Sometimes barroom golf TVs just need a Fleetwood Mac soundtrack.

Today? I’m a teensy bit hungover, and should at least sweep and dust at some point, which I probably should do now. Let’s have a good week, shall we?

Lordy, what a whirl of news this week has been, and me, feeling the crush of unending winter, i.e., mild seasonal depression. This week I’ve been tiring by…10 a.m., lying down to scroll/read/doze for two hours, then rising to have mildly productive afternoons. A strange circadian rhythm, but it is mine.

I hadn’t even had my second cup of coffee this morning when I read that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had been arrested — or do they say “clapped in irons” there? — for charges related to guess-what, his appearance in the notorious Epstein files. Randy Andy was said to be detained on “suspicions of misconduct in public office after accusations that he shared confidential information with Jeffrey Epstein while serving as a British trade envoy.” So that was his job; I hadn’t known. The problem with royalty is modernity, at a time when most Americans are raised on fairy tales about kings, queens, princes and princesses. We’ve had it pounded into our heads for years that “patronage” is the main job of the core family, i.e. showing up in appropriate clothing to cut ribbons, smile, wave and give short, inoffensive speeches. Even if it doesn’t involve heavy lifting, it can be a grind, so perhaps when no one wants them on boards or at ribbon-cuttings, they get do-nothing job titles like “trade envoy.” No need to negotiate agreements — that’s for the professionals — but maybe mix ‘n’ mingle in places like Davos.

Or at Epstein’s place in New York. And Palm Beach in winter.

Because I am rapidly reaching a saturation point with Andrew — he really hasn’t aged well, nor has his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson — I’m amusing myself imagining him in a holding cell at the Wayne County jail. Maybe requesting a special meal of steak and kidney pie and mushy peas and “dare I ask for spotted dick for dessert?” The jokes, they write themselves.

But a few things are worth noting. One, the Brits are taking this scandal far more seriously than we are. NYT again:

Police in Britain have arrested the king’s brother and are investigating a one-time ambassador to the United States. The prime minister has fired his chief of staff and his communications director. Members of Parliament have demanded answers.

The response from the authorities in Britain to the Jeffrey Epstein files has been far more aggressive than it has been in the United States, where there has been little police action after the Justice Department released three million pages of correspondence involving the sex offender.

A country with a functional judicial system. What a concept.

There was at least some action around Epstein’s former friend Leslie Wexner, now 88 years old and living out his days in his vast exurban mansion outside of Columbus. In what appears to be a comment on his physical frailty or perhaps his fortress of money, the House Oversight Committee came to him, rather than the other way around. Dunno what he told them. His opening statement rehashed what he’s said many times before: Used to know the guy, entrusted him with my money, finally figured out he stole from me, fired him and we never spoke again, and also, I SOLD him that house in New York, I didn’t GIVE it to him.

Of all the odd relationships in this web, Epstein and Wexner is probably the oddest. All I can think is, if Wexner’s account is true, it must be extremely complicated to be a billionaire. There you are, running your retail and real-estate empires, and you still have to think about the quotidian details of your lavish life, like that you want a yacht, but don’t want to mess around with crap like upholstery swatches or the location of the dolphin cam belowdecks. Or a British estate, so your wife, who loves to fire her shotgun in the manner of the gentry, can have a nice place to do it. I always figured the answer was to do a lot of delegating. You have a yacht person. You have a British real-estate person. Your wife can handle some of this, but she’s raising your four children. Inevitably, the wrong person worms their way into the mix. And you remain linked to him for years and years. Doing “gang stuff.”

Wexner has spent millions and millions on philanthropy, mostly in Columbus. His name and his wife’s name are on multiple buildings there, especially at Ohio State University, his alma mater. (His children all matriculated in the Ivies, if Wikipedia is to be believed.)

OK, I’ll stop now, as more is to be revealed. Two pieces of bloggage:

This is, I think, the best NYT piece on Epstein so far, because it takes into account the biggest scandal of all — not this girl or that girl, this big name or that big name, but the silence. The complicity:

Secrecy encircled all of this talk, a dynamic that Peter Attia, the longevity influencer, described in his recent apology for joining Epstein’s misogynist banter. In 2016, Attia wrote a fawning email to Epstein. “The life you lead is so outrageous and yet I cannot tell a soul,” he wrote, while also joking that “pussy is, indeed, low carb.” Now he calls that message “juvenile,” and defends himself as having been naïve and sucked into a world that felt strange and exciting.

“He lived in the largest home in all of Manhattan, owned a Boeing 727,” Attia wrote. “I treated that access as something to be quiet about rather than discussed freely with others.”

And to end on a comic note, the peerless Monica Hesse on the weirdest news in this wild week, the Bobby Kennedy / Kid Rock workout video:

It’s time to stop whatever you are doing, put on your stiffest blue jeans and go to the gym. You are a Kennedy. Kid Rock is already there doing push-ups. Make sure you bring your whole milk. We will be drinking it, as is customary, in the hot tub.

Keep up, betas. This is “Secretary Kennedy and Kid Rock’s Rock Out Work Out,” 90 seconds posted to social media Monday by the secretary of health and human services. It is a manly video. Unless you think it’s dumb, and then it was never supposed to be manly, it was always supposed to be a joke, and you’re a blue pill for not getting the joke. #MAHA and also, make sure you are wearing a leather business belt. If you are going to ride an exercise bike in a sauna, it is very important you wear a leather business-type of belt with your jeans.

Kennedy even hits the cold plunge in those jeans, which made me think the whole video was a setup for an extended gay porn loop, the activity that happens when those jeans have to spend 45 minutes in KR’s dryer.

OK, gift links to those. Happy rest-of-the-week to all. Off to the gym in hopes of elevating my mood.

The Detroit News, now fully owned by Gannett, ran one of my least-favorite non-news stories yesterday, i.e. Group you’ve never heard of expresses outrage over something stupid.

Headline: Health group calls on RFK Jr. to resign after cocaine admission

Lede:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s shocking admission that he snorted “cocaine off toilet seats” amid his past struggle with drug addiction has led to detractors, including a prominent health care advocacy group, calling for his resignation.

Protect Our Care, a nonprofit advocating for better and more affordable health care, issued a statement after Kennedy’s confession on comedian Theo Von’s podcast “This Past Weekend,” which aired on Feb. 12.

Shocking! Shocking? The guy was a heroin addict. Cocaine was everywhere in the ’80s, and it was largely a bathroom drug. (Flashback to Jeff Borden’s keen insight, probably made in a line for the bathroom at a party, after three or four people emerged as a group: “I miss marijuana. That was social. You lit a joint and passed it through the party. Cocaine is exclusionary. You pick a few cool people to invite to the bathroom with you. That’s not good.”) So what if he snorted it off a toilet seat, which by the way I don’t believe. Why?

First of all, you didn’t need a toilet seat if the back of someone’s hand was available. Second, toilet seats slant toward the water, and you wouldn’t chop coke on a slanted surface. Toilet lid? Toilet tank? The back of the TP dispenser, provided it was flat? That I would believe. But Bobby is a natural-born liar, like his boss and all his colleagues, and “toilet seat” sounded spicy, so that’s what he said.

Also, please: “A prominent health care advocacy group” clutching its pearls? This is Schumering at its highest level. Try sending a strongly worded letter! That always does it.

Some people don’t have what it takes for the struggle we’re in. Nut up or shut up, folks — this battle is for America.

OK then. No blog overnight because we went to Ann Arbor for a show and didn’t get back until 30 minutes past mental exhaustion. We saw Terence Blanchard and Ravi Coltrane in a Miles Davis/John Coltrane tribute. It was nice to be in the old town again, and on a fine late-winter day to boot — there were lots of students on the street, and it just felt like there’s more oxygen in the air over there. (Because there is.)

And because I’m running late, that’s all there is for now, but rest assured: Fresh outrages are coming any minute now, no doubt. Let’s have a good week.

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.