It's time for a few of OTM's favorite things.

Sarah Abdurrahman: As I have mentioned before on our staff picks, I love looking at archival footage that brings to life topics that we normally only get to read about.  So this video from 1896 is right up my alley.  The Lumière Brothers hired cameramen to film the first moving pictures in Jerusalem.  The footage shows the Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy sites, as well as people walking around the bustling city, including an Armenian pope, an Orthodox Jew and a Sunni Muslim woman.  It’s incredible to be able to visualize life in that place and time:

Bob Garfield: I am happy, and though I do not wish to die, I am ready for death -- because I have seen an Air Swimmer helium-filled remote control shark.

This completes my bucket list: seeing Petra, grandchildren, a Phillies World Championship, torrid love affair with Salm_ H--ek and now, at last, operating a helium-filled remote control shark. Please note: the same company, William Mark Corporation, sells a helium-filled remote control clown fish. That is simply stupid. Why would anyone want a helium-filled remote control clown fish?

Brooke Gladstone: Umberto Eco’s new novel, The Prague Cemetary, purports to relate how that notoriously pernicious fraud, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” came to be penned. It’s a fact-based historical horror story,  contstructed around Eco’s imagined perpetrator - one of the very few fictional characters in his book - a compellingly cold-blooded psychopath whose life spans most of the 19th century and ranges from Turin to Prague to Paris. It’s impressive, enthralling history transmogrified into a stunningly effective thriller. Read.

Alex Goldman: This week, my staff pick is Roxy Music. Has any other band with an oboe player ever rocked this hard?

Katya Rogers: I spent the entire weekend rewatching “Shameless” – not the US version but the original Paul Abbot BBC series.  Its so good – and the manc accents are so bloody hard to understand.

Jamie York: So you’re a hotshot film director with maybe 6 months between making a movie about Manchester’s Factory Records and a dystopian science fiction love story.  How to fill your time?  Well in 2002, Michael Winterbottom made In This World about two cousins being smuggled from a refuge camp in Pakistan to what they hope will be a better life in England.  It sounds like a slog, or an earnest ‘message movie’ (or both).  It’s neither.  Filmed almost exclusively with non-actors it’s an amazing feat that felt timely and hugely compelling as I watched it 10 years later.

And two songs: Dolly Parton, circa 1965 singing what’s essentially a soul song.  Before she became a country/bluegrass icon she sang the hell out of songs like this.

And I can’t stop listening to Karen Dalton.  Dalton’s life, and the near-miss tragedy of it, is legendary.  But pay that no mind and just listen to her sing.