Sometimes it's hard to be a cat person. Consider the horrors of hairballs, litterboxes--and gifts from those who assume that you'll love anything decorated with a feline image, no matter how cheesy. It's a mixed bag, the inventory of products that celebrate small, furry creatures that purr--not unlike the magazine Cat Fancy itself.

For me and my fellow astronomy tenderfoots, Night Sky is the best primer available on newsstands today. Though it occasionally stumbles from a design perspective--and could seriously use a paper-stock upgrade so as to render its images more lifelike--the mag rarely misfires tonally.

In an age of dumbed-down men's magazines, GQ has managed not to lose a point of its IQ. While Hachette Filipacchi's new men's pub, Shock, seeks to do just that with pictures of car crashes and the like, Conde Nast's GQ takes the classy route, with sharp cultural and political coverage among its fashion/lifestyle pages.

The spine of the March issue entices us with ''Details/Pass the Nuts.' And make mine mixed, because after all these years, I've finally found a magazine with the pitch-perfect neurotic voice for me.

With next Friday's double hit of St. Patrick's Day and the first round of the NCAA Tournament a mere 188 hours away--not to mention two family weddings looming in the months that follow--clearly need to bone up on my binge drinking. Newsstand on the corner, whadda you got for me?

When ESPN The Magazine debuted several years ago, it contained enough loud colors and graphic whirligigs to induce seizures in small children. Perusing it made my eyes twitch and my nasal passages constrict; I'd sooner have devoted my leisure minutes to reading product manuals. But as I've paged through recent issues, I've had to backtrack on this opinion.

I consider myself fairly knowledgeable when it comes to Major League Baseball: I've read the book Moneyball, I own "Field of Dreams," I'm in a fantasy baseball league. Most importantly, I'm a long-suffering Mets fan. This is our year. Really.

It's easy to understand why Country Living kicks the dickens out of its similarly knickknack-obsessed competition... in a WWE steel cage accessorized with kneehole desks and tole trays, no doubt. Simply put, the magazine is a marvel of organization, with each section ("Out & About," "Home Almanac") remaining almost militantly on point.

Confession: I am not a regular Elle reader. In fact, it's entirely possible that I am not the magazine's target reader--a glamorous, trend-setting, fashion-forward, globe-trotting, accessorizing stylemonger who doesn't merely keep up with fashion, but pushes its boundaries.