Like Jessica Simpson picking up a philosophy textbook by mistake: That's the way I felt when I, the occasional yoga-doer, first checked out Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. I just wasn't expecting so much, well, intellectual content from a magazine placed on the "Healthy Living" shelf at Barnes and Noble, next to pubs whose cover lines say things like "ABSolutely Best Abs Exercises!"

I write for and about magazines for a living. Like I'm going to pass up the chance to jibber-jabber about the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

Some months ago, I received a press release touting gaming publications. Using some kind of convoluted statistical barometer it claimed that the gaming-mag category boasts more readers and more desirable demographics than any other. An exhaustive three-minute Google session failed to locate the release, meaning that I likely hallucinated it. Nonetheless, the misremembered memory prompted me to mosey on down to the local magazine emporium and pluck Play off the rack.

Martha, Oprah, watch your backs. With her four Food Network shows and a passel of best-selling cookbooks, the annoyingly perky Rachael Ray has become the newest lifestyle goddess/TV It Girl. Then there's Every Day With Rachael Ray, launched with the October/November issue.

There are precisely two prerequisites for being a Magazine Rack columnist: one, the ability to read; and two, some minimal competence in arranging nouns and verbs in coherent working order. You can pretty much fake the rest. Nonetheless, every so often we (and by "we," I mean "I") decide to venture into areas of personal expertise, and it's Guitar World Acoustic's profound misfortune to catch me on one such afternoon.

These days, Oprah sure isn't feeling the love for her former favorite memoirist, James Frey. But that's okay, since the February edition of her O Magazine is full-to-bursting with it. Love, I mean.

If my body is indeed a temple, I spent most of Super Bowl Sunday defiling its interior sanctums and bowing before its false idols (chicken fingers, Yuengling, etc.). So as I contemplate with abject fear the prospect of a carrots-and-cottage-cheese lunch, I figure it can't hurt to turn, as I frequently do in times of emotional despair, to the warm embrace of the printed word. Hence today's quick romp through Natural Health.

I'm the type of person who absolutely loves random tidbits of knowledge, whether it's useless information or actual content I can use in my everyday life. The January/February issue of mental_floss featured myriad tidbits giving me sufficient conversational ammo to spew at countless parties.

Here's the thing: while Best Life might not break any new topical ground, it transcends just about every men's-publication cliché. The publication does most everything better than its category peers, which makes for an engaging read.

Let's say you're a niche publication. You've accepted that your mission in life is to serve a certain select audience and that audience alone. So the obvious choice for the cover of your first 2006 issue is... Angelina Jolie?