Growing up, I called it a 'clicker.' Most everyone else, I was sternly told in college, called it a 'remote control.' 'Remote control' still sounds too clinical for something that's been such a big part of your life. On Sunday the inventor of the remote control, Eugene Polley, died. I not sure that the remote control was as crucial to the development of television as the mouse was to computers, but both inventions made two of the most important screens in our lives more malleable, more useful. Channels 13 thru 755 owe a great debt to Polley.

Mike McGrady, a decorated newspaper reporter at Newsday, died over the weekend. According to The New York Times, he went to Yale and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. He even won an Overseas Press Club Award for a series of columns about Vietnam from the front.

The reason why he's got a substantial obit in the Times today is not for any of that however, but for being the driving force behind an astonishingly successful literary hoax.

Yesterday, OTM producer Chris Neary read this Wired.com article about a bill called The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law that leaker Bradley Manning is charged with having violated numerous times. Since Chris had some questions about the story and I'm kind of a nerd about hacking stuff, we thought it might be useful to have our conversation about the CFAA on the blog. Please feel free to contribute in the comments below.

It began with a single tweet. Last Friday, at 11:33 A.M. the AARP tweeted "We Miss You, Biggie." Yes, the American Association of Retired Persons tweeted a succinct, moving elegy to a giant of the rap world. Biggie Smalls, aka the Notorious B.I.G., aka Big Poppa, aka Christopher Wallace. Wallace had a brief but phenomenal career writing songs about his rise from poverty to wealth (lyric: I made the change from a common thief / to Up Close and Personal with Robin Leach) and his violent past (lyric: I never thought it could happen, this rappin' stuff / I was too used to packin' gats and stuff). You know, stuff every AARP member can relate to. [Editors note: 'gats' means guns].

It's Superbowl weekend, and for non-football fans who've been coerced into watching the game by social pressure of geological magnitude, there's always the ads to look forward to. (Although advertisers are ruining the fun by leaking their ads ahead of time.)

There's almost no chance any of those ...

If you're staring down a couple of days off this afternoon, have a look at Longform.org's picks for the best (long form) pieces of the year. The lists are helpfully broken down by topic: crime, money, politics -- and topics of interest to the On The Media devotee, media and technology.

This week we re-ran a 2010 interview between Bob and B.R. Myers about the near omnipotence of North Korea's propaganda machine. Citizens, according to Myers, had little access to international news under Kim Jong-il. Unsurprisingly, the tradition continues under his son -- but here's a case where government censorship appears pointless and reflexive.

[THIS BLOG POST IS FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY]

Last week, we ran a piece about bleeping out obscenities on TV. We didn't have time to include the perspective of an OTM staff member who has extensive experience in removing obscenties from radio songs. So, at the risk of pulling back the curtain too much here at OTM, I'd like to introduce Jen Munson (the show's technical director) to the blog. Jen mixes individual segments of the show as well as mixing the final product. What is mixing, exactly? It's complicated, but I like to think of the difference between a mixed show and an unmixed show as the difference between the food you make at home and the food you get in a (good) restaurant. The two meals might have the same ingredients -- but it just somehow tastes better at the restaurant. Jen makes our show restaurant quality.

But long before she took to improving public radio shows she worked in the music business.  Jen used to take obscenities out of pop songs. She was, in fact, a pre-eminent de-f**kalizer. I talked with Jen about how she got into that line of work.

A short follow-up on this week's story about the Satellite Sentinel Project.

This web audio extra features an interview between Bob and Dr. Susan Linn, the director of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. Last May, the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood began a letter-writing campaign that quickly culminated in the publisher Scholastic halting distribution of a set of academic materials called "The United States of Energy." The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood contends the materials exclusively highlighted the positives of coal as an energy source and provided no information about the environmental negatives. Scholastic has pledged to vet new corporate partners with a new review board and to strengthen the editorial review of subsequent sponsored supplemental materials.

Here's the (prompt) statement Scholastic released.

This week has been hack week here at On The Media. We've written about the Paleolithic history of hacking: the jargon file and phone phreaking – but to round out the week, it’s time for some up-to-the-minute hacking news.

After British comedian ‘Jonnie Marbles’ threw a pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face about two weeks ago, Brooke talked with Yes Men member Andy Bichlbaum about what he thought it meant to throw a pie in someone’s face.

We now know that throwing a pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face means ...

The U.S. Women's National Soccer team will play for the World Cup title this weekend. How many people will be watching depends on how many people actually know it's going on.