Monitor picks

This week's picks include the new Onion website and a coffee table book called 'Home.'

Catch a wave

Crack a few crabs' legs and settle in for the next round of the salt-sprayed, working-stiffs series that makes us happy to work from office chairs. The third season of The Deadliest Catch airs Tuesday night on Discovery Channel, with new crews and camera placements (including submersibles) to drop you into the cold and rolling Bering Sea. (Watch out for that 800-lb. crab pot!)

Hybrid helper

If you bought a hybrid vehicle in 2006, then you're probably eligible for a tax credit – as opposed to a deduction – on that Form 1040 you're thinking about finally filing one of these weekends. For updates on important IRS changes, go to cars.com; the site just added a Tax Credits and Cars link from a homepage already stacked with automotive tutorials.

Happy feat

In The Pursuit of Happyness, now on DVD, the thrill isn't in the chase; not with obstacles this perversely Dickensian. Chris Gardner, a salesman whose ambition is to become a stockbroker, is broke, his wife has left him to fend for their young son, and the landlord is preparing to evict him. The kicker: It's a true story. Yet Gardner (Oscar-nominated Will Smith) maintains his inner dignity and dogged perseverance.

News to amuse

Last week TheOnion.com brought their fake-news shtick to Internet video, launching a cable-styled news service that's billed as "faster, harder, scarier, all-knowing." The short faux-reports are perfectly timed to get a laugh and get on with it. Their current spoof: a roundtable on President Bush calling up Civil War reenactors for duty in Iraq.

Home sweet home

Presidential aspirant John Edwards has assembled a lovely little coffee-table book called Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives. In its 164 pages you'll get a glimpse of the childhood homes that incubated famous folks such as Steven Spielberg, Bob Dole, Vera Wang, and over 50 others. The affectionate stories they tell, and the memories accrued between those four walls, paint a moving portrait of the American family.