All day long, I keep seeing social-media reminders that I should be ashamed — the world is paying attention to Manti Te’o, and not to the Notre Dame St. Mary’s girl who said she was raped! This is terrible, etc. etc.

I won’t apologize. This story takes Crazy to a whole new level. An invented tragic girlfriend is one thing, but an almost entirely hoodwinked sports media is quite another, and truth be told, I’m getting more pleasure out of watching the spinning by august outlets like Sports Illustrated and ESPN. A friend of mine asked me today, how could this happen? For a couple of reasons, which I mentioned in comments yesterday. First, because once something is reported, the chances of it being re-reported fall pretty sharply. There are, simply put, a lot of hacks out there. There are also a lot of overworked reporters doing more with less. And let’s also remember: There’s less and less time. For everything. But there’s no doubt that many people who should have known better failed to follow up, and missed what was sitting in plain sight. Which makes it a good story with a creamy layer of good-second-story icing.

And also, a lot of great Twitter action:

Since he’s Mormon, it’s possible Te’o has multiple fake girlfriends.

— Mick Farrell (@StumpWoodley) January 17, 2013

If Manti Te’o is really that naive, they should invent a new word: naivete’o

— Ben Greenman (@bengreenman) January 17, 2013

If you think it’s impressive that AJ McCarron’s girlfriend was Miss Alabama 2012, Manti Te’o’s girlfriend was Miss Narnia 2009, 2010 & 2011.

— She Ratchet (@RatchetAfrican) January 17, 2013

And so I would like to close out this week and start primping for the Charity Preview. I went out and bought some department-store foundation, a splurge for me. But I cannot deny it — this Almay drugstore crap just doesn’t blend. Because tomorrow is payday, I also went for a new lipstick, because that’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull. And as it usually takes seven hours to make me presentable, I’d better sign off now. But first, some links:

Six theories to explain why Te’o did it. A nice little condensation.

OID: Necromancy in the Motor City, or how a 93-year-old corpse ended up in his son’s freezer.

As long as we’re harshing on national magazines, did anyone getta loada Esquire’s profile of Megan Fox? Vice did.

You know what really makes a man’s outfit? A fancy watch. The Rolex Romeos speak:

Mike, who earned $400,000 last year, including a $120,000 bonus, even admits to driving his Lexus LS around the Jersey Shore in the summer, the windows rolled down and his wrist hanging out, on display.

“[The girls] will cheer and wave when they see my big watch,” he laughs. “It’s right out of a rap video!”

Have a good weekend, all.

Only one story to talk about today, and it’s long but amazing: Manti Te’o, punked? Or in on it?

(I knew nothing of this, which is what you get for ignoring the sports section.)

National Soup Month started with a bang on New Year’s Day — lentil, enlivened with a couple hot Italian sausages from our boutique sausage outlet here. I used Mark Bittman’s recipe, doubling the lentils because I like a lentil soup you can stand a spoon in.

It was great. Really good, really flavorful and it had that wonderful lentil-soup benefit, which is to say, it was as pleasant leaving the body as it was entering it, and let’s speak no more of that, shall we?

But it’s hard to go wrong with lentils. I used the rest of the bag on a Madha Jaffrey lentil-and-Basmati-rice recipe, with lots of cardamom. Yum.

Pot No. 2 was tomato. Here’s the problem with tomato soup: You want it when the weather’s cold, but then you can’t get really good fresh tomatoes, and I’m sorry, but it’s taken me this long to admit that I’m not a canner and likely never will be. Fortunately, modern food processing has taken care of that, and I was able to make a very nice cream-of soup using the Cook’s Illustrated master recipe from one of my Christmas cookbooks. I believe I’ve mentioned before that my husband once worked at a northwestern Ohio factory run by the company that came up with the whole idea of National Soup Month. He saw too much there, and won’t touch anything made by them, and as their tomato is a mainstay, it means he doesn’t get too much tomato soup. He really liked this one. You can eat it with a grilled cheese sandwich, or just some cheesy croutons.

(I have to say at this point that other than the stockpot, the kitchen utensil that gets used more than anything else during National Soup Month is my immersion blender. It really is one of those things where once you get it, you wonder how you lived without it. Also, you drink way more smoothies.)

Pot No. 3 was a cream of cauliflower, only with no cream. Milk of cauliflower doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it? I used this recipe, because it allowed me to throw a couple of potatoes in there, and I’m always looking for a way to use up the last couple of potatoes in a bag. It came out nice and thick and rich-tasting, but like many great soups, wasn’t particularly rich. It was, however, a bit farty. Not enough to not make it worth eating, but, y’know, be advised.

The final pot of the fortnight was spicy sweet potato, and the closest thing to a disappointment so far. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as good as I was hoping for. The Russell Street Deli here in Detroit makes a sweet potato bisque that makes you want to lick the bowl. I once asked the waiter what the secret was, and he said, “Oh, those North African spices,” but couldn’t really elaborate. I will continue my search for its equal.

Tonight, at the fulcrum of the month, it’s chili. And I’m open to suggestions for the second half.

I’ve been unaware of the so-called Sandy Hook Truthers in all but the vaguest sense of the term. I mean, of course there are people who believe that Evil President Muslim somehow ordered the execution of 28 people so HE COULD TAKE OUR GUNS!!!!!!, but you know, I’ve made my peace with that. Crazy is just part of the landscape, and while I’m sorry this is happening, I get it.

This, however, is another kettle of fish. Maybe J.C. or Basset will weigh in on this new wrinkle in local news — the local lunatic who feeds the Crazy under the nominal cloak of respectability. In many ways, l.l. Charlie LeDuff does the same thing here, only without the paranoia, only the egomania. Is this a new Fox consultant thing? I’m a little baffled. (This breed — the super-conservative TV reporter — is quite common otherwise, in my experience. So much for the liberal media.)

We need a palate-cleanser to close out Hump Day. The Martin Luther insult generator, hell yeah. I bet even Tim Goeglein would approve.

Happy Wednesday, all.

This wasn’t a Lansing day, but it started that way, which is to say, early — up at 5 a.m., out the door at 6:30, back home 15 minutes later, when a mysterious sound from the undercarriage led me to believe it would be foolish to continue on a 100-mile morning rush-hour commute.

Turned back around and began a long and sorta-productive day. The good news: The car problem was simple and fixed free of charge (loose underbody pan). But it seemed to require lots of driving, packing and unpacking the computer, this and that. Frankly, I’m whipped, and Alan — who was out of the house even earlier and still isn’t home — must be even more so. Auto show, of course. If y’all don’t mind, I’m going to phone it in today.

As a discussion topic, though, let me throw out this: Is the Aaron Swartz suicide that important? Because a lot of the commentary so far suggests the government drove this kid to suicide, and I’m not buying that. Overzealous prosecution I can handle, but suicide is a pretty personal choice, and people going through far rougher ordeals make it through. So there’s that. But I’m curious what y’all think. Supplemental reading here and here, along with Swartz’s own site.

Let’s hope for a quieter Tuesday.

So, this weekend it was “Zero Dark Thirty,” at an actual cineplex. It became evident very quickly that I wouldn’t “enjoy” this film in the are-you-not-entertained sense of things, so I settled in to watch it with a certain detachment, trying to appreciate what was there to be appreciated. These things include:

Kathryn Bigelow’s always-arresting cinematography, which must have more to do with her than her directors of photography, because she seems to work with different ones on every film, but they all share a certain look. That is to say, very beautiful, with at least one shot or sequence you remember for a long time after — like the opening sequence of “The Hurt Locker,” or, in this film, the raid on the bin Laden compound, seen almost entirely in either underlit moonglow or in the green of the soldiers’ night-vision glasses.

Otherwise, visually, the film seems to consist of 90 percent closeups, usually on Jessica Chastain’s clenching jawline. I’m indebted to David Edelstein for this observation:

There has been speculation that Maya was inspired by the same (covert) CIA agent as Claire Danes’s bipolar Carrie in Homeland. As Mr. Spock would say, “Fascinating.” The parts and actresses could hardly be more different. Danes is a skin actor. She’s soft: You read her pores. Chastain is a muscle and tendons actor: You read the tension in her body.

That’s exactly right. She doesn’t have a lot of lines in this script; you spend many moments watching her eyes scan computer screens or watch a colleague torture detainees. But you never doubt where her head is at, and despite her lack of blah-blah, you can see the change in her from 2003-2011, and it rests almost entirely in her body. Great acting.

The torture. Yes, it’s hard to watch, but it’s presented in such a way that what goes on in these dirty rooms — the Middle East we see resembles a hotter, sun-blasted, better-populated but essentially desert version of Detroit — is just part of what has to happen. Again, Edelstein:

The torture is efficient and gets results. The outcry alluded to over abuses at Abu Ghraib screws up intelligence-gathering. The anti-torture stance of President Obama — who made the hunt for bin Laden a priority after Rumsfeld’s military let him slip out of Tora Bora, and gave the go-ahead to proceed with a mission that could have brought him down the way the catastrophic Iran rescue mission felled Jimmy Carter — is presented (via a TV interview) as an impediment. Dan the ace torturer tells Maya, “You don’t want to be the last one holding a dog collar when the oversight committee comes.” Crap: There go the dog collars.

The best you can do, going in, is be aware you’re being manipulated. This isn’t journalism.

Finally, I liked the way Bigelow avoided the easy audience-pleaser of letting us watch Osama bin Laden take the bullet that splatters his life on the wall. We follow the soldiers into the Abbottabad compound as though we’re the fourth man through the door — the camera jumps, the light is never where we want it, the kids are howling, the women are howling, the shots don’t go blam-blam-blam but pop-pop-pop. In the end, the best we get is an incomplete view of a Semitic nose and a gray beard, and Chastain’s face as she looks at what’s in the body bag. She doesn’t exult; she doesn’t even smile. Like many of us, she seems to know that even though this particular mission is accomplished, the war goes on and on and on.

It occurs to me that this is the second movie I’ve seen in about a year — the other one being “Contagion” — that manages to make problem-solving by smart people interesting and even exciting. The reality-based community shall prevail!

And now, it’s on to pot No. 4 of National Soup Month — roasted sweet potato.

And just one piece of bloggage today. How many of you live in a neighborhood or subdivision with a homeowners’ association? And how many of those homeowners’ associations have been taken over by petty tyrants? If so, you should enjoy this piece by the Evansville Courier, but you should especially enjoy the embedded audio clip of a telephone rant by said tyrant, who wants you to know that if the paper runs this story, there will be a legal lawsuit against them, and he wants to speak to the legal department right now, and rant some more, too.

May the Monday be with you, but not too much so.

This little speaker, no bigger than a salt shaker, was a party favor at a holiday gathering, and looked so cheap I considered consigning it directly to the garage-sale stash, but decided today to charge it up and listen first.

Man. It rocks the llama’s ass. Not a whole hell of a lot of bottom end, but an amazingly rich sound — enough that I didn’t miss much during an extended session with the Miles Davis Pandora station today. It runs off Bluetooth, too, but I kept it hard-wired today, as I’m already running one Bluetooth accessory with the phone. Every so often I stop to consider this age of miracles we live in, and I can only shake my head.

Oh, and speaking of garage sales, ask me when we last had one. Yeah, a long damn time. Long enough that in the next one, you can pick up two end-table-size Kenwood speakers, at least 30 years old. It’s like selling a TV with a tube in it.

Oh, I have such good linkage for you kittens today. The story everyone’s talking about today, and for good reason: A dispatch from a deep embed on the set of “The Canyons.” And what is that? Why, that’s the new film starting Lindsay Lohan and a porn star, directed by a man who should know better (Paul Schrader), costing practically nothing ($225,000). And even though you think you don’t care about shitty movies (which this certainly will be) or Hollywood in general, you should read this story. Because it’s fabulous and hilarious and appalling and you will learn something.

And in Chicago, the Sun-Times is using the 35th anniversary of its great, great series on the Mirage Tavern to revisit the whole thing on its blog. As usual, scroll to the bottom and come back up. For those of you who don’t know this chapter in journalism history, it was made out of pure Awesome: To show how corrupt the city’s regulatory agencies were, the paper bought and opened a bar. Called the Mirage. Equipped with hidden cameras. And city inspectors, state liquor agents and more came to call with their hands out. It was really audacious. Relive the fun.

Finally, the story of a single striking news photo, and what came after.

What comes after this? The weekend. Have a good one.

Man, I hope I don’t get this flu that’s going around. We all got flu shots, but late in the season, Kate just about 10 days ago. Now she’s lying on the couch under a blanket pile with what sounds like a migraine. Which isn’t the flu, I know, but it could be an early rumble.

I’m so glad headaches aren’t in the frequent-miseries file in my DNA. That’s the inheritance from dad’s side. I just buy the Tylenol.

Apparently a beautiful day conducted itself outside my window all damn day, while I sat inside, listened to the wind blow through the bare branches and made a million phone calls. Forty-seven degrees? When did I move to North Carolina? You’ve heard, of course, that 2012 is now in the record books as the hottest ever. Oh, how I hope this passes. A January thaw is one thing, but another year like this one? Don’t know if I can do that.

And now it’s evening, and I’m watching “The Abolitionists.” Not enjoying it much, I’m sorry to say; I hate these cheesy dramatizations. Especially low-budget ones.

So let’s go to the bloggage:

First, a hilarious story about a blogger who made an offhand remark about Richard Marx — the top-40 pop-singin’ guy — and provoked an unusual response. Marx read it, and responded. Angrily:

No explanation for why you write that I’m “shameless?” You act pretty tough sitting alone in your little room behind your laptop.

If you’d written you hated my music, that’s cool. Like I could give a shit. But saying I’m “shameless” calls into question my character and integrity.

This is my hometown…where my kids live…where my mother lives…and this will not stand with me.

Would you say that to my face? Let’s find out. I’ll meet you anywhere in the city, any time. I don’t travel again until the end of the week. Let’s hash this out like men.

Never heard of you in my life before, but between various columnist/radio friends and an array of people at NBC, I now know plenty about you. You don’t know anything about me. But you’re about to.

This isn’t going away.

Richard Marx

I include this one because I know Basset follows city-planning news, and this week the mother of all city-planning efforts was revealed — the new Detroit, a place of neighborhoods as urban villages, surrounded by green space, forests, farms, ponds. Well, that’s the drawing-board version, anyway. But the Kresge Foundation said they’re giving one! hundred! fifty! million! dollars! to make it work, so who knows.

Finally, one of my own, the reason I was in Dearborn last month — three charter schools serving almost entirely Arab-American populations, and poor ones at that, landed on Bridge’s list of the best schools in the state. An impressive bunch of people, almost all women, run the shows. And they gave me hummus, which practically counts as a bribe. So. (Link will go live after 8 a.m.)

Oh, this week feels so very, very long. Damn you, holidays — why must you end?

Sometimes I hate Facebook. One of my friends is at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. Another one just got back from skiing in Park City. One is eating spinach lasagna. Another is finishing a bathroom reno.

We ordered a pizza tonight. My life is pretty boring.

[Stares at screen for five minutes.]

Yup.

So in light of that, how about some good bloggage, again?

Soul Cycle, our own Charlotte’s baby cousin’s business, mentioned yesterday in The Hottest Comment Section on the Internets ™, gets a big piece in New York magazine. Although I will say, without a gift certificate, I won’t be joining in — $32 per class? Lordy, the skinny really are different from you and me.

The Atlantic photo blog, In Focus, looks at National Geographic’s best photos of 2012. A good balance of the beauty of nature (there MUST be a God!) with the degradation of humanity (there CAN’T be a God!).

If there’s anything that could make the Lance Armstrong story worse, it’s this: Oprah. Awk.

Wednesday, it is? Coulda fooled me. Have a good one, all.

The watchword for fitness this year is variety. I’m putting my gym on 30-day notice. If I can’t find enough different things to do there in a month, I’m giving up my membership and going back to messing around outdoors, dropping into yoga studios here and there and maybe taking a weekly weights class. But I have to give them a full month of chances, which is how I ended up in a 5:45 a.m. spinning class, my second in three days. Saturday’s was so grueling — ghastly music, a sadistic instructor — that I couldn’t let the taste linger. I like spinning; the hour goes by fast. So I came back yesterday morning for a palate-cleanser with a different instructor.

The music was, if anything, worse than Saturday’s speed-metal. The pace wasn’t quite as brutal, but I get really irritated with what spin teachers claim is sprinting on a stationary bike. I try to ride like an actual cyclist, and folks, we don’t go so fast our legs blur; if you’re trying to go fast, you go up a gear or three. But adding resistance on a stationery bike is just like adding a 30 mph headwind. It just sucks.

And if you’re going to make me sit through “Beat It” during one of these ordeals, at least make it the original Michael Jackson version, not some soundalike.

In my spinning class at that hour, I’d play Beyoncé and the Pretenders. But no one asked me.

And have I bored you to death yet? Sorry.

The punchline of this whole story was that I slipped on black ice in the parking lot on the way back to my car, falling directly on my knee. I’m starting to feel like Joe Namath.

Fortunately, though, I have good bloggage for you today, and you can read it without having to listen to “Blame it on the Boom Boom.” You’re welcome.

From Roy’s Tumblr, a letter from Alec Guinness to a friend, discussing a part he’d been offered, “fairy-tale rubbish but could be interesting, perhaps.” Three months later, he’s on about the “rubbish dialogue.” Bet you can’t guess what crapfest he was working in.

I love a story like this, which illustrates something most of us never think about, in this case, the ghetto economy. It’s about the valuable street substance that is craved, stolen and traded — Tide laundry detergent.

I can’t bear myself to read the Elizabeth Wurtzel essay this essay is about, but I’ll read this essay. Huh?

It’s true: Jack and Rose could have both survived the Titanic sinking, but noooo.

Finally, the best column I’ve read about Lance Armstrong in a good long time:

He cannot say he’s sorry for using performance-enhancing drugs. If he wants to confess, as reported on Friday by The New York Times, he has to leave it at that. The trained-seal routine for celebrities caught in a scandal won’t work here.

He doesn’t want forgiveness for his pharmaceutical adventures.

He wants his old life back. He wants to compete in sanctioned triathlons. He wants to return to the leadership of his cancer foundation. He wants to matter again.

Tuesday. And so the week is underway.

You know what there is to do in January at this latitude? Not bloody much. Or a whole bloody lot, if you like to cook and just got a big-ass new TV. The third pot of National Soup Month soup (cream of cauliflower) is in progress on the stove, and I’ve been watching movies.

The soup report comes later. For now, two flicks that I enjoyed.

First, “The Queen of Versailles,” which is absolutely worth a use of your Netflix or iTunes account (or DVD rental, for you geezers). The story of David and Jackie Siegel, two of the nouveau-est of the nouveau riche, how they made it and how they lost it (although they still retain quite a bit) arouses my favorite movie emotion — mixed feelings.

The story begins as the account of how this couple set out to build the largest private home (under one roof, a qualification everyone seems to make, so I’ll make it here) in the country, in superclassy Orlando. They took as their inspiration the French palace of Louis XIV, although David Siegel is pretty upfront that the real design grandaddy was “the top three floors of the Paris,” i.e., the hotel in Las Vegas. Vegas is also where the Siegel wealth is undergoing an aggressive expansion, the latest of his time-share resorts “in a beautiful tower of blue glass.” I will credit the Siegels for affording the filmmakers a great deal of access to the sausage-making, not only of their family life but also of their business empire — we see rubes pulled in from their Strip-strolling to hear the pitch for their own little fraction of a piece of Vegas suite life. We also see the sales-staff whoop-it-up meeting, where sellers are told they are “saving lives” by peddling vacations.

But mostly we see the Siegels — he, a septuagenarian by turns smiling-and-indulgent and crabby-and-grouchy, and she, a long-legged former beauty queen (of the Mrs. Florida, not Miss, variety) with one of the most preposterous set of fake knockers you’ll see outside of a strip club. (She loves to serve them up in strapless and peek-a-boo styles, like cheese balls.) Oh, and their eight children and multiple dogs — one of the latter running around the house, two former ones preserved through taxidermy.

Now. Any household with eight children is going to have a default setting of Chaos, even with the squadron of staff the couple employs to help them live their lives, but good lord, these people make the Nall/Derringer house look like Downton Abbey. Piles of crap are everywhere, the dog poops on the carpet, the meals arrive in bags emblazoned with the Golden Arches. They have so much stuff — and an inability to part with much of it, even as Jackie admit she shops a little compulsively and doesn’t really know what, exactly, she has at any moment — they have already filled their 25,000 square foot house. Versailles, as planned, will come close to 100,000. So, you know (and I loved this part, because I’ve heard some version of it so many times in my own life), they need that bigger house.

Well, you can guess what happens. The financial crisis happens and the subprime timeshare crap they’re peddling goes into the toilet, down the sewer and out to sea, taking with it most of the Siegels’ fortune. The cash flow necessary to keep everything oiled is suddenly gone, work on Versailles is abandoned and the compulsive spenders learn how just regular old rich people live; they keep their big existing house, but have to lay off a few of the Filipino nannies and housekeepers, start flying commercial and enroll their children in public schools.

It’s hard to dislike Jackie Siegel, cheese-ball boobs and all. She seems brighter than she lets on, and she does have an inner toughness that keeps her smiling through her financial calamities. She’s not so bright that she doesn’t see the preposterousness in her pout that “the bank got us hooked on cheap money and then took it away,” as though the entire Siegel empire isn’t predicated on doing the exact same thing to those Vegas tourists. Her spending does extend to a childhood friend, whom she sends $5,000 in a fruitless attempt to keep her house out of foreclosure, and they support lots of charities. When she gets one of those chemical peels that leaves her skin looking like she witnessed a nuclear blast, and her husband tells her to get out of his office because he doesn’t want to look at it, she frankly states she’s worried about being traded in for a newer model. But the story ends, as they so often do, without a firm resolution. They’re still married, they’re still rich and they don’t seem to have learned much. Just like real life.

Dave Wiegel saw it, and recommends it, too. Link includes the trailer.

Joe Nocera points out some timeline problems, and the Siegels’ lawsuit, in the NYT.

The other was a much darker ride — “Big Fan,” starring Patton Oswalt as the world’s No. 1 New York Giants fan, with all that implies. At 35, he works the night shift in a parking garage, writing the script for his daily call to a sports-talk radio station, where he taunts a Philadelphia Eagles superfan. He apparently wants nothing more than this life of meaningless work and sports obsession. When he and his only friend, Sal, see a star Giants running back filling up his SUV on Staten Island one night, they impulsively follow him, and stuff happens.

If you only think of Patton Oswalt as the voice of Remy the rat in “Ratatouille,” prepare for a different side. Really well-acted and written.

Which, I suppose, brings me to today’s question for the room: Who should I root for — nay, for whom shall I root in tonight’s BCS game? How do you pick a lesser evil among the good ol’ boys of the SEC and that uniquely irritating brand of fan known as the Domer? Southern football worship vs. all that Ronald Reagan touchdown Jesus crap? I’ll leave it up to you.

From last week, but worth the read: Kevin Drum on environmental lead as a crime-rate driver. Don’t be put off by the fact it’s in Mother Jones — it’s interesting and worth your time.

And so the first full week of the year begins. It will feel very long, I fear. Let’s survive it together.