According to an article in the business section of the May 26 New York Times (what did you do with your Memorial Day?), Guitar World magazine has shaken things up by finding a way to sell DVDs on magazine racks. Basically, the publisher wraps a DVD, a cardboard insert and an instructional booklet in plastic, so the whole thing looks like a magazine, except it costs $10. It's in this spirit of innovation and the dumbing down of America that I introduce DVDs to Magazine Rack. Who knows, maybe next week I'll review a bar fight.

Hint: when you see the words "Maui" and "luxe" on a magazine cover, don't ask price. If you do, as J.P. Morgan famously noted, you can't afford it. Should you fall into this category, think of Ocean Home as real-estate porn. Every home is shapely, and if it could talk, would scream pleasure palace. I could see Anderson Cooper in one of the Ke Kailani digs in Hawaii, hair carefully brushed, floating in the infinity pool and miraculously, never getting wet. I know he loves to tout his Third World adventures, but where does he get his Ralph Lauren chinos …

The frenulum, the raphe, the ticki-bicki -- one of these is NOT an area on a man's body that can be stimulated for extra-credit "erotic excitement," according to the June issue of Cosmopolitan. Can you guess which it is?

When the Kardashian-Jenner family got chickens on an episode of the E! reality show "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," I watched with fascination. After reading about Martha Stewart's well-heeled Bantams and their marvelous chicken coop, it's always been a secret fantasy of mine to keep chickens. Things didn't go so well for the Kardashians, but they might have been a little more prepared if Kris had picked up a copy of MaryJanesFarm.

There are few things on Earth I love more than my dog. But for all my puppy love, I have never picked up a copy of Dog Fancy. Yes, Dog Fancy, the canine equivalent to that ubiquitous publishing punchline, Cat Fancy. Personally, I never knew it existed, and a wildly informal survey of other magazine-reading people reveals that neither has anyone else. Turns out the two launched just five years apart -- Cat Fancy in 1965 and Dog Fancy in 1970 -- so why is one so well-known and the other obscure? I have my theories....

The homes in Cottage Living are not rugged lean-tos. They are bona fide primary digs, slick enough and sometimes expensive enough to foster envy in us all. This issue had a special "Green Life" section. Green is the color du jour of the eco-conscious, which counts reasonable people everywhere. Hello! Living simply does not mean owning five homes and four SUVs. Why do urbanites drive these monsters? The Upper East Side is not the Rockies; since when do you need a car to scale mountains of social indifference?

Seems like gossip rags now exist primarily as a market for the paparazzi -- a theory suggested by the many remarkably similar photos in the May 12 issues of Us and In Touch. Both mags show Natalie Portman walking with her surgical-cone-wearing dog, before- and during-pregnancy head shots of Nicole Kidman, and -- hey, you can't have too many pix of Danny DeVito shopping for new eyeglasses, can you?

Even though I'm a longtime dedicated urban gardener, I must confess to not being a regular subscriber to most of the genre's many magazines. While they supply brilliant eye candy, the truth is I'd rather spend my wee bit of free time digging in the dirt rather than reading about it. I do read about gardening online when I have a problem or a specific question, and often find myself on the wonderfully informative Organic Gardening Web site. So when the magazine paired with my favorite organic yogurt company (Stonyfield Farm) earlier this year and offered a free subscription, I …

There are few creatures on earth more easily exploited than the aspiring writer. And I'm not talking here about the genuine article, the budding scribe just out of college with a useless degree but the talent to make a career of it. I'm talking about your social worker friend who's perpetually twelve pages into a novella about her cat, the people you'd feel bad for laughing at if there were a literary version of "American Idol." But instead of Paula Abdul, aspiring writers have Writer's Digest to provide their unqualified encouragement. You too can be a published author! This is …

If, like Northwest's readers, you yearn for "land, give me land, under starry skies above," you've come to the right place. The bimonthly is divided into various sections, including "Vine & Brew," "Nature," "Plant Life" and "NW Appetite." Here's a little known factoid: Chili peppers are three times richer in vitamin C than oranges. These and other nature insights are a Northwest specialty, which puts a premium on outdoor life in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia, Alaska and Montana. Though the stories aren't compelling nature writing, but they are informative.