Some encouragement for the bring-home-the-bacon-cook-it-up-in-the-pan set:

Women who juggle work, motherhood and marriage might be stressed now but chances are they'll end up healthier and happier than stay-at-home mums.

Research suggests women who combine all three roles live more balanced lives that in the long run leave them trimmer and healthier.

The British study found middle-aged women who had been in long-term relationships, were parents and had worked since they were 26 were less likely to report ill-health.

Co-ordinator of the Australian longitudinal study on women's health, Prof Christina Lee, said her team's research had produced similar results in 2003.

She said women found juggling multiple roles stressful but very rewarding.

"We think that women learn skills in juggling roles and one of the important things about having multiple roles is you have multiple sources of satisfaction."

... The Australian study is following groups of young, middle-aged and older women. It surveys their health every three years.

The British study was based on interviews with 1000 women born in 1946. Their health and weight were studied at 26, 36, 43 and 54.

And in the "give us a break" department, a prominent Cambodian scholar has intimated that Pol Pot's reign of terror that took almost two million lives could have been caused by a fractured love affair.

Keng Vansak told RFA’s Khmer service in a recent interview that Pol Pot, known by the name Salot Sar before his rise to power, had married a woman five years older than he after another woman left him for a political rival.

“He married Professor Khieu Ponnary, an older sister of Khieu Thirith who is [Khmer Rouge cadre] Ieng Sary’s wife. His friends and acquaintances seemed surprised that such a thing had happened because this couple was not a usual one. Ms. Ponnary was at least five years older than Salot Sar, and their relationship was like [that] between relatives,” Keng Vansak said.

“I saw that he wanted nothing to do with the broken heart he suffered after Suon Somaly left him,” said Keng, a former political mentor of Pol Pot who attempted to show him the merits of democratic politics.

“In 1960, he came back and told me that he could not do anything. He was stuck with everything. With arrests, killings, and tortures on the rise, nothing could be done.

... “The reason I have brought in the love story in Pol Pot’s life is because it is a factor in the politics of the then Democratic Kampuchea becoming violent, with lots of killing and bloodshed, and it was also hard to understand the source of this violence,” Keng told RFA’s Khmer service in a recent series of interviews.

“I brought this heart-breaking love and the eternal love of a woman until death, who went to another man, a rival of his. This is just one of the factors, and there are other issues related to his pure politics,” he added.

And now ... the silly:

When a company sells life insurance, it in effect is betting that the person will live a long life; the person bets on dying prematurely. That's fine for a company insuring large numbers of people, but what happened when a certain lawyer "bet" on the early demise of a Frenchwoman named Jeanne Calment?

In the mid-1960s he struck a deal with her that seemed mutually advantageous - he bought her apartment for a low monthly payment, no money down, providing her with a small pension for her later years, with the understanding that he would not move in until her death, says Bart Holland in What Are the Chances?

Calment was a native of Arles and had met Van Gogh when she was 13. By the time Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in 1927, she was 52. So the deal-striking woman was already near 90. The lawyer made payments to her regularly, and after doing so for 30+ years, he died at age 77. His family inherited the agreement, continuing payments until she died at age 122, the oldest on record at the time and 45 years older than the lawyer had been at his death!

Th... th... that's all folks!

(About enough, I'd say...)