OTM's weekly round up of our favorite things. This week we're shooting for something more like the Coltrane version of 'My Favorite Things" than the Julie Andrews version. Not that there's anything wrong with Julie Andrews.

OTM's weekly round up of our favorite things. If you're interested in what OTM producers like, this is the post for you.

OTM's weekly round up of our favorite things. It's getting colder in New York, but that won't stop us from having favorite things.

OTM's weekly round up of our favorite things. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens not included.

This election season has everyone dwelling on the untrue, the misleading, and the tedious. Here are our staff picks, a palate cleansing cocktail of uncomplicated goodness sure to brighten your day.

We have lives outside media/tech/first-amendment/privacy coverage. We hope these staff picks provide some proof of that.

In Foreign Policy, political commentator Sultan Al Qassemi made the case that Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya are, for political reasons, misrepresenting the reality on the ground in Syria. Bob speaks with Qassemi, who outlines what he sees as the problems with the coverage of the region's most important news sources.

Here's a hyper-linked version of those note card recommendations at little independent bookstores. You know the ones.

In January, two Reuters reporters, Andy Sullivan and Greg Roumeliotis published a piece about Bain’s takeover and subsequent management of GS Technologies – a steel mill in Kansas City. The piece is a long, nuanced piece of business journalism. The plant failed under Bain’s stewardship, but the piece points out that, overall, Bain has an excellent track record and that larger economic forces were at work in the plant's failure. It also points out that despite that failure, which was probably caused at least in part by the debt Bain loaded unto the company, Bain made $12 million on their $8 million dollar investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees.

Interest in Romney’s time at Bain made the piece notable when it was published (it was cited by Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry) but it didn’t really start making its way in the world until Priorities USA Action (a SuperPac closely, really closely, aligned with President Obama) made it the backbone of a series of ads against Romney.

Here are some of our favorites things. (For this week, at least).

Last week, Bob spoke with former Onion headline writer Joe Garden about the phenomenon of real headlines that sound like Onion headlines. In the interview, Bob asked you all to send us some you find in the media wild. We've gotten some great entries. Entries like these:

London 2012: China has no interest in it and that gives us a chance - (via Cameron McKay)

The staff of OTM choose a few of our favorite things.  Please, please leave us comments below and enjoy.

On the show this week Bob talks with Slate contributor Jim Pagels about the good and bad of binge-watching TV. As you'll hear in the show, Bob just ripped off 33 episodes of Breaking Bad in three days. Just some back-of-the-envelope math here – that’s 1551 minutes of watching Breaking Bad and away from his family and professional responsibilities.

The staff of OTM choose a few of our favorite things - media related and otherwise. Please, please leave us comments below and enjoy.

As Dylan Byers noted on Politico earlier in the week, complex legal opinions about byzantine legislation aren't the ideal topic for instant TV news analysis. The pundits and legal analysts you hear later today will have to wing-it early on but if you feel like asserting your intellectual independence (and are able to take a longish lunch) there is a way you can reasonably do a little analysis of your own.

Before The Simpsons and Futurama, there was Matt Groening's simple, caustic comic strip Life in Hell. Last week, after 35 years,  Groening decided to stop drawing the comic. Here's a few examples of its bleak humor. It's dark and dry and and gives you a little insight into where the Simpsons got it's edge. (Remember, The Simpsons was edgy when the series began airing). There were also moments of guarded hope in Life in Hell.

The end of Life in Hell is a reminder that someday, eventually, by the laws of nature, The Simpsons will come to an end. The series has never gotten back to the greatness of seasons, say, 2-8* but it has stayed on the air for 23 seasons. And there have been some good moments in the last, say, decade. The Simpsons is a collaborative effort, Life in Hell was, from what I've read, Groening's baby entirely. The Simpsons couldn't just end in one day. There will be an earth-shaking announcement and gnashing of teeth. That's too bad. There was something nice about Groening just pulling the plug without the culture-shaking, preening send-off The Simpsons will probably get.

*reasonable people can disagree on how long the golden age of The Simpsons lasted.

Between 2009 and 2010 the number of children who died as result of abuse or neglect in Florida dropped from 197 to 136. That's a big drop from year-to-year. It turns out, however, that children might not actually be much safer in Florida since, according to the Miami Herald, the drop can be attributed the Department of Children and Family Services narrowing the definition of what is considered abuse and neglect.

A few weeks back we spoke with Justin Elliott, who highlighted ProPublica's Free the Files project. The idea there was to get ProPublica readers and journalism students to go to local TV stations and pick-up the station's 'public file,' which contains information about, among other things, who's buying political ads and for how much. The FCC recently ruled that some stations would have to put their files online. Not having those public files online and in a searchable, digital format is why the files had to be physically freed from stations in the first place. (Note: it turns out they may remain 'unfree' for a while meaning Free The Files remains an important project.)

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.