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

Alex Goldman:  Every time I think about ODB’s untimely death I get really sad. A lot of people think he was a joke, but he was both uniquely talented and very troubled, both of which come through in his music. As such, I think that it would be a good idea for you to listen to ODB’s first (and by far best) solo album Return to the 36 Chambers. 

Chris Neary:  My staff pick this week is a simpler time. A simpler time for political TV ads. If YouTube is any guide, there was a time when a serious politician could put out an animated campaign ad set to a jaunty jingle.

Eisenhower:

and

Adlai Stevenson (this is more storyboarded than animated).

Bob Garfield: We asked listeners this weekend for ripped-from-the-headlines material that resembles content from The Onion.  Well, I submit the following:

Former reality star Heidi Montag says her persona on MTV’s “The Hills” and the infamy she earned from getting ten plastic surgery procedures in one day have made her a prisoner to her fame.

In an interview with Celebuzz.com, Montag says she and husband Spencer Pratt did not realize what they were doing when they were chasing fame on the MTV reality show.

“I’ll never be able to be Heidi Montag, a normal person, again,” she told Celebuzz, “What [I've] done is something that you can’t undo and that’s what I didn’t realize. It’s a very different life. It’s like a lifelong sentence.”

PJ Vogt: The Place, which is an outdoor BBQ place just off of 95 in Guilford, Connecticut. I ate there last night under a big red and white tent during a biblical thunderstorm. Barring something unforeseeable, it'll be the best meal of the summer. Really delicious barbecue chicken, lobster (!) and corn on the cob that makes Mexican corn on the cob seem like boring diet food. It's also about five minutes off of 95, so it's a really easy stop. If you're up there, you ought to go. 

Sarah Abdurrahman: This weekend I went to the Queens Museum of Art, a building that was originally constructed for the 1939 World’s Fair and then used again as the New York City Pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair (and in between temporarily housed the United Nations). And it was at this museum that I saw my pick for this week: the Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,335 square foot exact replica of every building in all 5 boroughs of New York City (a total of 895,000 structures).  The architectural model, which took 100 people 3 years to build, was made for the ’64 World’s Fair, and has been updated to reflect the city as it looked in 1992.  It’s hard to imagine just how large and detailed the model is from pictures, but this  might give a better idea of the scale.

Jamie York: Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling has all the pacing of pulp and much of the subject matter too – pool hustling and prison, desperation and the thrill of violence. But, printed and quickly out-of-print in the 70’s, it was 30 years too late for the heyday of noir.  Instead Carpenter splits the difference, an heir to Cain, Chandler and Willeford and a predictor of the working class-realism of Denis Johnson and Richard Ford; Carpenter deploys the crackle and pop of slang and crime but with a lyricism that’s deeply literary. It’s a great read and a fine antidote for the languid days of summer.