It's Monday and time again for a few of our favorite things.  Please post comments below and enjoy!

Sarah Abdurrahman: My pick for this week is yet another video in the series of “Sh*t People Say,” but this one is about journalists.  Some of it is so dead on—like having to call people repeatedly about stories—but I did find the scene in the clothes closet to be a wild mischaracterization.  No journalist can afford a closet that nice.

Brooke Gladstone: Last night I had a very delicious dessert. It was in a restaurant that specializes in French Canadian cuisine, and yet, upon further research, I discovered that syllabub is actually a traditional English concoction, dating back to the 16^th century. It was a very light layered thing; kind of a parfait of berries, champagne gelatin (in the version I had) and very frothy crème fraiche. I felt culturally and spiritually enriched after consuming it, without a tinge of regret. So now you know about syllabub.

Alex Goldman: Fellow OTM producer PJ Vogt has been very discouraging about my staff pick this week, going so far as to tell me that people were going to laugh at me about it. But I refuse to let him scare me into posting a pick that might be less niche or “interesting to other people.” So this week I’m choosing the FX Doctor Super 8-Bit Fuzz guitar pedal. It makes a guitar sound like a broken Nintendo, and it even has a “glitch” knob. Imagine the possibilities. Please don’t laugh at me.

PJ Vogt: My staff pick this week is Sam Cooke punching his fist.

I was reading an interview with somebody, somewhere, and they were saying that if you listen to live Sam Cooke tracks carefully, you can hear the sound of him punching his fist into his hand during the emotional parts of the songs. There’s one of these at 1:17 in this version of Bring it on Home to Me. I don’t know why this thing is so good, except for that it makes you see the room that he’s singing in, maybe. Anyway. Enjoy.

Jamie York: When you’ve got neither a car nor a driveway in sight the equivalent of a ‘driveway moment’ is being so engrossed in something that you miss your subway stop.  I did this for the first time (maybe ever) reading Outside Magazine last week. Consider:

As you dive past 30 feet, you feel the pressure on your body double, compressing your lungs to about half their normal size. You suddenly feel weightless, your body suspended in a gravityless state called neutral buoyancy. Then something amazing happens: as you keep diving, the ocean no longer pushes your body toward the surface but instead pulls you relentlessly toward the seafloor below. You place your arms at your sides in a skydiver pose and effortlessly go deeper.

At 100 feet, the pressure has quadrupled, the ocean’s surface is barely visible, and you close your eyes and prepare for the deep water’s tightening clutch. 

Further still, at 150 feet, you enter a dream state caused by the high levels of carbon dioxide and nitrogen gas in your bloodstream: for a moment, you can forget where you are and why. At 300 feet, the pressure is so extreme that your lungs shrink to the size of oranges and your heart beats at less than half its normal rate to conserve oxygen. You lose some motor control. Most of the blood in your arms and legs has flooded to your body’s core as the vessels in your extremities constrict. Vessels in your lungs swell to several times their normal size so they won’t be crushed by the incredible pressure.

It’s one of many visceral descriptions in a piece about the sport of free diving – going as deep as possible on one enormous breath of air.  The sport is fighting for legitimacy and yet as the reporter watches a competition things go from bad to worse to even worse than that.  It’s a whopping good read.