Dooce outdoes herself -- Everyone's favorite accidental, drunken, ex-Mormon mommyblogger is celebrating the 5th year of her site by asking for comments on moms who work, either outside the home or in the trenches with the kiddies. Did your mom have a paying job? How did it affect you (and her) back in the day, and does it color your thinking about what you (will) do with your own kids today (or in the future)? Judging by the *nearly 1200* comments so far, this is a topic many women wish to expound upon. Read it and weep (and/or smile, as often happens with Dooce)...

Portrait of Nick Wilder by David Hockney -- and there's more where that came from over at the MFA Hockney Portraits show. Unfortunately it's $22 admission, but art is art, right?

"Budge up, ye brimstone beast!" -- Well I've finished watching the Bleak House miniseries on PBS and have dived headlong into the 986-page novel itself, viva Dickens! Talk about absorbing...something really resonates when you have to wait week by week to find out what happens to the characters, and of course Dickens wrote the novel in monthly installments so I suppose that's how he wanted the story to be told, sloooowwly. Lost and The Sopranos operate on the same theory, but (so far) they are missing the delicious conclusion that ties everything together. The final two hours of BH had many more twists, turns, and dead bodies than I expected, plus a dusting of a happy ending. Watch for it on DVD, people...

"Just Big Bang: That's What Jesus Calls It, Too." -- The inimitable Sarah Vowell continues to shake up the NYTimes op-ed page in her substitute stint. I've stashed away this installment from the Times Select content for your free reading pleasure, shhhhhhhh...

Four delicious words, people -- New Bill Bryson Book! Coming this fall, a memoir about growing up in Des Moines in the 50's, entitled "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid." Woop!