Part Four Best Pet Toys Pet Bowl ...

Part Four Best Pet Toys Pet Bowl 440 Amsterdam Ave. (81st St.) 595-4200 Cat's Pajamas. Pet toys, for the most part, can be an incredibly expensive and useless waste of time. Most pet toys, it seems, are designed more to amuse pet owners rather than their pets. Unless you happen to own an incredibly stupid and gullible pet. Most cats and dogs, we've found, just stare blankly at any official "pet toy" for a few moments?no matter how cute or fuzzy or alluring it is?before returning to the piece of furniture they were shredding or pissing on. If you do happen to own a gullible pet, however, Pet Bowl is worth the trip to the Upper West Side.

It's hard to miss Pet Bowl?the big, bright letters bouncing around the outside of the building, the mountains of carpeted cat and dog furniture (as uninteresting to most pets as the toys are, we've found) set up on the sidewalk. Inside, the huge picture windows keep the place bright; the floors are clean, the selection plentiful.

As the name implies, they offer plenty of bowls stacked along the back wall, and beds, too. Things for animals to climb on and hide in. Food of every variety. ID tags shaped like mice, and fire hydrants and bowties and police badges and bones. It's really quite a mind-boggling collection.

The thing that caught our eye was the enormous toy selection. It's like an FAO Schwarz for our beastly friends.

There's the "Cat Entertainment Center," full of moving parts and uselessly bright colors. Or maybe the "Cat Track"?a plastic ball locked into a circular plastic track; idea being, we guess, that the cat would spend hours knocking the ball around and around, wearing itself to such a frazzle that it wouldn't choose to start running laps at 3 a.m. Unfortunately, the tag line on the outside of the package reads, "Drive your cat crazy with this toy!" It's a nice sentiment, but we don't need to push them any further.

Over in the dog toy section, we found the particularly delightful "Gumadisc," as they call it, and what it is, again according to the package, is a "Naturally flavor-enhanced" flexible flying disc for dogs.

In other words, a meat-flavored rubber Frisbee.

And that's just from a first quick glance around. The selection is endless. And while these things don't come cheap, they're about as cheap at Pet Bowl as they are anyplace else in town. And even if these things hold no interest for your pet, they should at least amuse you for awhile. Worked for us.

Best Antique Glass Catherine 468 Broome St. (Greene St.) 925-6765 Sprucing Up the Homestead. This is actually a clothing store with lovely women's dresses and sweaters; very colorful and French-looking. However, don't miss the new and antique Venetian-blown glass vases. Great prices and beautiful merchandise; the owner has a collection that she pairs esthetically with the clothing line to make the shop cohesive. If you ask, they'll show pieces not on display.

Best Video Store Manager Dave Nighbert at Tower Video 1961 Broadway (66th St.) 799-2500 Video Star. If you're having trouble finding a title amidst Tower's video selection, find Dave Nighbert, who's on duty until about 6 p.m. He'll tell you why the movie isn't available, and what other establishment besides his own might procure you a copy. And, as if that weren't enough, he'll cross-reference three other movies that are better than the one you wanted to see.

Nighbert's a true professional who actually cares what his store looks like, and about whether it serves his customers' needs. Plus, he writes science fiction and detective novels on the side, speaks with a gentle Tennessee drawl and can name every movie Robert Mitchum ever made. A true gentleman in a profession defined by mean, stupid teenagers.

Best Free BDSM Online www.hogtied.com Post-Literate Smut. For all its scuzzy, chaotic, manipulative, credit-card-hustling ethos, online porn is actually pretty conventionally organized and predictable. Surf around for an hour or so and you'll learn all the tricks and recurrent conceits: the pop-up consoles, the redirects to other sites when you try to close windows or click "back" on your browser. And the bevy of tempting thumbnails, which have inspired quasi-portal sites dedicated to keeping track of where you can find the best smut, gratis.

Still, the core problem with online porn is the core problem with analog porn: a disregard for esthetics. Or, more accurately, an excessive regard for kitschy, overdone scenarios, silicone maidens, dudes with love scepters like railroad spikes, chicks with talonish French manicures and sets crammed with distracting junk. Asian "action" porn (usually of the straight variety) offers a counterpoint?25 views of the same fuck, on a white-sheeted futon in a white-walled room?but for the true freebie connoisseur who disdains visual distraction, the elegant Hogtied site provides yet another alternative. Admittedly, you've got to have a thing for slightly hardcore BDSM. But only slightly. This isn't gruesome black-and-white dungeon/ slave-girl/testicle-tormenting/whip-scarred BDSM, but an altogether more austere variation. No brick-walled subbasements, no excessive devotion to fetish gear, no omnipresent nightmarish gloom. No unholy contraptions. Instead, a cast of about half a dozen regulars who rotate every couple of weeks through the generous homepage samples. Everything takes place in what appears to be a studio apartment somewhere in a major American city. The free stuff involves far more women than men (if you want a lot of bound boys, you have to pay). The elements are Zenlike in their simplicity: flesh, chains, floor (though lingerie and the inevitable high heels are often present, as well). The contortions are alluringly framed, mannerist. The bodies are pleasant. Overt expressions of pain are limited, we suspect because everyone is professionally clued-in to the artifice. All appears cordial and collaborative. As body art online goes, this site gives away what we've come to appreciate as some of the most compelling.

Which is not to say that it isn't raunchy as hell, at a base level: pussy ropes and nipple clamps and dripping wax and ball gags and riding crops abound. But it just goes to show you that filth can remain filth?threatening, disturbing filth?and still maintain an esthetic integrity. And really, we want both.

Best Corporate Electronics Service Department Sony Service Center 550 Madison Ave. (55th St.) 1-800-222-7669 Yippie-Kie-Yay. We're not so hot on Sony as an electronics manufacturer just now, but we have to say we're impressed with their service. Got a fancy new surround-sound DVD-playing home entertainment system as a gift recently. It included a Sony receiver (model STR-DE835, if you're in the market). We spent a weekend hooking everything up, toying with the room placement of the half-dozen little speakers and subwoofer for max home theater sound quality, watched ourselves a DVD or two. Liked it fine, went to work the next day as usual.

After only two weeks, we come home from work one night and find the system mysteriously dead; the receiver will only keep flashing us a message: "PROTECTOR." Sony fuck-up #1: Need we note that the word PROTECTOR appears nowhere in the owner's manual? We read it twice. But it does list the 800 number, which we call, and find out that the receiver's surge protector has inexplicably been activated. Why? She doesn't know. Sony fuck-up #2: There's no way the owner can switch it back. All you can do is unplug the box, wait a couple hours for it maybe to reset itself, plug it back in and see. We do this a few times. Doesn't work. Nice person on the 800 line tells us there's nothing we can do but box it up and haul it to the nearest service center. All right. That Saturday we unhook the rat's nest of wires we'd just spent a whole weekend hooking up, box the thing, haul it downstairs, get a cab uptown to the Sony Service Center. It's at Madison and 55th, in the Sony tower there, which looks very much like the faceless black granite Japanese corporate office monolith in Die Hard. We square our shoulders and steel our nerves, determined not to be outfaced by some humorless corporate drone who's going to try to convince us that it is somehow our fault that the two-week-old machine doesn't work. You know the routine.

Well, buckle our shoes if the middle-aged guy behind the Sony Service Center counter doesn't turn out to be an extremely polite, soothing, nonthreatening, downright therapeutic character. Before we can hardly get a word out, he says, "Let me guess?it went into permanent PROTECTOR mode." Seems he's been seeing it a lot, some internal engineering flaw in this new DE835 model. He whisks the box away, prints out a receipt, lets us know we'll get it UPSed back at no cost within 10 working days, smiles and wishes us a nice weekend. We...smile back and wish him the same. And many, many happy returns to you, sir.

Best Used CD Store NYCD 426 Amsterdam Ave. (betw. 80th & 81st Sts.) 724-4466 Used, Not Abused. There's a subtle change going on among the used CD stores of NYC. The inventory is slowly becoming more generic at all the stores cluttered together in the East Village. You'll find that it's increasingly hard to find those weird little obscurities, as the different shops hold out for whatever current chart hits are brought in by disappointed consumers. The good news is that this means the interesting CDs are being shuffled off to the $1 racks. The bad news is that the $1 racks aren't being replenished. You used to walk past a used CD store and wonder what's inside. Now you wonder what they're refusing to buy from the desperate poor music fans with great taste.

Those who do lean toward obscurity tend to up the price and have a lousy attitude about it. We recently had a real nightmare experience over at Norman's Sound and Vision. We brought in some really cool CDs for trade after seeing some albums Norm had in stock. Norm gave us his usual doing-us-a-favor attitude, but at least he appreciated the obscurity. But when we went to the register with the expensive albums we picked up in trade, he made a comment about how we were grabbing all the rare stuff. Yeah, as opposed to all the crappy ultra-rare Japanese imports we had just handed over to the guy?

NYCD is a great store at an obscure location. They've got an incredible selection of imports, a wide selection of "imports," and both the used and new CD racks in NYCD are also full of all kinds of interesting curios. NYCD actually takes chances at what sells in exchange for ensuring that the racks are actually interesting to all kinds of consumers.

The only store that comes close to a similar stock is the grossly overpriced Smash Compact Discs on St. Marks. Which reminds us of another nice feature of NYCD. The Internet, to be honest, can now undercut the store on the cost of a lot of the imports. But you'll actually enjoy dealing with the people at NYCD. They're an exceptionally helpful and nice bunch of music fans who somehow resist the urge to spend all day pontificating loudly about music.

Above all, NYCD takes the unique measure of making sure that there're always a few great finds in the cheap bins. They routinely take a few of those $30 imports that don't sell, and slash them down to $5 or $2. Every weekend, they put boxes of the cheap stuff out on a card table in front of the store. That spindly display stands alone as one of the most interesting record stores in town. Not that the sidewalk traffic on Amsterdam notices, but now you might.

Best Aromatherapy 5S 98 Prince St. (betw. Mercer & Greene Sts.) 925-7880 Odorama. What is aromatherapy anyway? Who's to say it works? It's pretty damn subjective when what smells great to one person can induce nausea in the next.

Aromatherapy has some good points. Nice-smelling things are pleasant, and research has shown scents to be the deepest memory triggers. Incense definitely helps set an atmosphere in a space and a woman's perfume is as much a mark of her as her kiss. But aromatherapy, taken to the mass-market level, can often smack of hucksterism?everyone's bought at least one "scented candle" that smells like...wax.

If it really works, 5S has it down to a science. Combining aromatherapy with color therapy (what's with the "therapy" tag anyway? Are we all so fucked up?), 5S sells 10 "approaches" to better health through colored potions. There's a "mind approach" and a "body approach." The "mind approach" solution is all about the scent of the product, like chamomile in "Rebirth." It's pretty and pink and supposed to make you feel fresh and innocent. The "body" approaches actually have ingredients that are supposed to do something, like peony in the "Mattify" formula. If you ask us, it's the supporting materials that are doing most of the work: vibrant, mouth-open models cavorting about in electric blue sarongs hawking "Empowering," or meditative-looking models in pink and lavender standing in a field of lilacs pushing "Quiet."

Don't look for oils. 5S takes the once-hippieish pastime of making self-love with scented oils and cleans it up for Prince St. All 5S solutions, right down to the talcum powder, have a clean and silky tactile quality that takes aromatherapy out of a parking lot bazaar at a Dead show and straight into the 21st century.

Best Personal Trainer Lowell Boyers 868-2837 It's Not Rocket Science. But it is physical science. And that's what Lowell Boyers?who trains clients according to the "super-slow" technique in his Chelsea loft?knows. Move the muscle in the full range of motion. Do it real slow so you work harder, so you don't get the added help of the momentum bounce (you all do it, that little jerk when you start to bring the weight up. That's not your muscle, that's Isaac Newton). You get rid of the bounce by going slowly. That's the way to increase muscle mass. And more muscle mass means, in addition to more strength, higher metabolism. Higher metabolism means more energy (duh, calories) expended.

Boyers doesn't want scrawny supermodels, he wants strong, lean clients. Work those muscles to fatigue, that's when they gain strength. The beauty is that you do that and you're done for the day. No three sets of 15, no do it 30 times and move on. Work to momentary fatigue, anywhere from six-12 repetitions (hell, it can be four on a bad day) and you've applied the science.

You don't have to spend an hour going nowhere on an exercise bike. In fact, if you do, you're expending muscle, not fat. You may get skinny but you'll never get tough. Do what Boyers say, eat well, take a walk and be strong. Why do you think we're the ones changing the watercooler bottles at work?

Best Men's Haircut (West Village) Red Salon 323 W. 11th St. (betw. Greenwich & Washington Sts.) 924-1444 Where the Boys Are. They certainly make it friendly for you here. We hit the door of this luxuriously appointed establishment?a series of little warrens and baroque nooks strung along backwards into the storefront's bowels, full of secret spaces and heavy with crimson touches?and it's like we're a Gambino walking into Rao's: we're pressing flesh, getting offered coffee and seltzer, all the way back to the washroom. Then a shampoo and a soothing scalp massage, during which oils evocative of Oriental handjobs get worked into our skulls?we're told they strip away the shampoo residue, these jojobas and essential reductions?and within a minute of settling in for the cut itself we're lulled into a salon-coma, drowsily monitoring the progress of our stylist, who'll strike you as that rarest of humans if, like us, you've spent the last 10 years getting your head butchered by Armenians in septic Upper West Side barber-holes or by Jean-Louis David ninnies: he's someone who actually knows what he's about. Our man moves with the efficient movements of a master sculptor working clay; he wields razors and other instruments of great incisive elegance. Call us rubes, but the Red Salon's probably the first place in which we've actually trusted our cutter to do right by us in almost three decades' worth of having hair.

Then, after a half hour's worth of his craftsman's diligence?we tend to nod off?there's the usual application of pomades, modeling clays, elixirs. Then a handshake, the deployment of about $80, tips included; and finally we're out the door, blinking in the west side light.

Sure, we at first resemble something from a Belle & Sebastian concert. Why not? We've just received a high-end chop-job from a West Village tonsor. And certainly we've got to muss our head thoroughly as soon as we're out of the sight of the storefront?just to rub the queerness out of it. But the cut's deep structure is all integrity: underneath all the sticky crap, we've got a haircut that's an expression of loving skill, one that'll grow in gracefully and that'll look the way we'll want it to without our having to fuck around with it all morning, and that?and this is perhaps the finest compliment we could pay a haircutter's subtlety and skill?no one will even know we got.

Best Reason To Be a Shut-In Kozmo.com Home Theater. We hate leaving our apartment, pretty much for any reason. We don't care for crowds, we don't enjoy shopping and we hate feeling pressured to make decisions. We love renting movies, buying books, playing video games and listening to music. Thanks to Kozmo.com, we never have to leave our apartment to do any of these things again.

Kozmo.com is the home delivery service for new releases and favorite titles on both VHS and DVD, to buy or rent (nothing too exotic, but their customer service department is working on that). It's like a Blockbuster that delivers. Plus the latest CDs, magazines and books, first-rate video games and, best of all for agoraphobes, snacks. Just log on, browse their menus, click what you want, type in your address and credit card number (it's a secure site, for those who worry) and in less than one hour it'll be at your Manhattan door. (They also inform us they hope to expand to the boroughs.) As George Tabb says, it's quicker than Chinese food.

For example, we were able to rent Rushmore the week it came out on video and keep it for two nights for $4?our local video store charges $4.50 for one night. We ordered the Lauryn Hill CD for about the same price we'd have paid at Tower, and a pint of Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey for $3.25. Delivery was free, and on the hottest day in July got to our apartment before the ice cream had a chance to soften?46 minutes from laptop to door. They have drop-off boxes all over the city, but for an extra dollar they'll pick up the tapes or DVDs from you or your doorman.

We use Kozmo every weekend. They even have porn, which, as a woman, we have to tell you is a lot easier to rent when you don't have to stand at the video store shelves with a bunch of strangers perusing your choices. Let the tourists have the city?you may never leave your apartment again.

Best Place to Buy a Ukulele 30th Street Guitars 236 W. 30th St. (betw. 7th & 8th Aves.) 868-2660 Uke Talkin' ta Me? 30th Street Guitars is a cavernous, surprisingly quiet place, its walls covered with not only guitars aplenty?every make and model you could hope for and dream about?but strange, tiny electric stringed instruments as well. Things we couldn't recognize, but which sure did look cool. It was our girlfriend's birthday, and she'd been wanting a ukulele, so we figured this was as good a place as any to start looking. We'd only been in the store a minute, gaping at all the instruments in wonderment, when what appeared to be a big, longhaired biker-type approached and asked?very politely?if we needed any help. "Tell you what we're looking for," we said with some hesitation, not exactly sure what to expect. "What's that?" he asked. "We're looking for a...ukulele." He paused, a smirk working across his face, and then said, "Yeah, I think we have one." He turned and headed up a flight of carpeted stairs, and we followed, still not sure what we were getting ourselves into. Upstairs was still another showroom, with still more guitars. Our biker friend headed to the back, behind a counter, and pulled the one uke they carried off the wall. He plucked at the strings, then handed it over. "Here it is," he said, "though I'm not really sure how to tune it." "That's okay," we told him. "This is your only one?" "Yeah, that's it." We asked how much, and the price he quoted was actually much less than what we'd been expecting, after checking out various prices on the Internet earlier in the day. "We'll take it, then," we told him, and he seemed happy. He headed back downstairs, and we followed, carrying the ukulele gently. On the way to the front counter, another salesman stopped in front of us, looked at what we were carrying and smiled broadly. "Hey, hey!" he exclaimed, "Look at what you got!" We had been hoping to avoid any scenes like this, and felt the blood rush to our face. "It's...it's not for us," we stammered. "It's for our girlfriend." "Right, right," he said, still grinning. "It's for your girlfriend." This wasn't going well at all. "Don't worry," he continued, "I think ukuleles are great." "Yes, fine," we said, stepping around him and continuing to the counter, where we plunked the instrument down and pulled out our wallet. We just wanted to get it over with. As the biker was ringing things up, our new friend appeared in front of us again. "You know," he said, "I'm thinking of starting a support group for people who are ashamed to admit that they're buying a ukulele for themselves." "Yeah? Very good. This is for our girlfriend." "Yeah, for your girlfriend." He laughed, but in such a good-natured way that we didn't feel so bad about it anymore. We paid, grabbed our purchase and headed for the door, not much looking forward to the prospect of walking the streets of Manhattan, carrying a ukulele.

Best Place to Get Work Done on Your Horn Roberto's 146 W. 46th St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.) 391-1315 Good for Blow Jobs. Why bother with recently Sam Ash-ified Manny's when cheaper, friendlier Roberto's is just two blocks away? We've (literally) bumped into James Carter in this tiny second-floor shop and we hear that Sonny Rollins and Michael Brecker are customers, too.

Owner Roberto Romeo specializes in saxes, clarinets and flutes and has a good selection of used horns. This summer he even had a bass sax. You'll find all the reeds (cane and plastic), mouthpieces and assorted musical paraphernalia you need here plus, of course, the fairest prices in the city for repairs.

Best Internet Deal Bell Atlantic's DSL Service Faster, Mouse, Faster. With Digital Subscriber Line, New York City finally has an affordable high-speed Internet service, catching up to Southern Florida, northeastern New Jersey and other vanguards of the nation's high-tech market. For 50 bucks a month, you get a perfect network connection that is always on, at speeds more than 12 times faster than a 56K modem. Comparable to cable access, DSL is a service installed on an existing telephone line that makes ingenious use of all of the phone's many bundled wires, carrying multiple digital signals at the same time, both "downstream" (into your phone/ computer/fax/etc.) and up- (the other way). This means that you can do lots of things?like use the computer's modem and talk on the phone or send a fax?at the same time, without any disruption or drop in the rate of data transfer (as people with ISDN, cable modems or even crowded T1 lines have to deal with). It's a digital line that's dedicated to your home, so the speed never decreases. Just think of the possibilities: Now you can look at 10 times more pornography on the Web while having phone sex or sending a fax of your butt?and only pay twice as much as AOL!

Best Place to Get 5-Pound Bags of Pistachio Nuts Kalustyan's Orient Export Trading Corp. 123 Lexington Ave. (betw. 28th & 29th Sts.) 685-3451 Nuts & Nutser. Kalustyan is one of the several Indo-Pak groceries on this "Curry Row" stretch of lower Lexington. You can get pistachios in red or plain, and the salt content varies, but the main thing is that the packs are far greater in nut-numbers than you ever thought plausible (except maybe when you were little). There are other mouth-exotica also available in these groceries, and a few minutes' tour will begin to give you some sense of the architecture of the Indo-Pak food you can order in the neighborhood restaurants.

Best Selection of Imported Waters Dean & DeLuca 560 Broadway (Prince St.) 431-1691 Best Totally Decadent Category. Down with the hepatitis?that was us last year around Labor Day. Jaundiced. Nauseated. Sick as a dog. Achy and appetiteless. Vomiting bile. Pissing real yellow. We won't even tell you about the semen. (Does the descriptor "butterscotch pudding" quash your interest?) But it was merely hep A, so our embattled liver eventually made a full and relatively swift recovery and we were able to stop wearing sunglasses day and night (to hide our viral condition).

However, there was to be no booze of any sort during the months of recuperation. So we abandoned our habit of two glasses of wine per day and ascended to a higher elemental plane of beverage connoisseurship. We became water snobs. And as this is Manhattan in the flush late 90s, we had no trouble at all setting out on our imbiber's odyssey. Ground zero was Dean & DeLuca, where in the coolers just to the right of the fish counter they stock enough imported H2O to keep even the most persnickety aquaphile preoccupied for a month or so. Grotesquely overexposed (and overrated) Evian is here in abundance, but so is Volvic, a superior French still water that pretty much kicks Evian's ass. As with much else in this gourmet mecca, D&D also offers its own spin on high-end hydrology, imported from France. Rounding out the still category is Vittel, another Frog libation. The sparkling front is even better: Pellegrino, of course, but in addition Pellegrino's more bitter sister from the Italian Alps, Lurisia.

From here, it's an international liquid smorgasbord: Gerolsteiner from Germany, Fiuggi (from Italy, and the winner of the "Best Label Design" award), Ramlosa (Sweden, coolest bottle), and?just so the Anglo-Saxons won't feel left out?Ty Nant, from Wales. (Did Dylan Thomas use it to cut his hooch? Probably not.) When it's a wholesome gustatory minimalism we seek, a purification, this is our first stop.

Best Way to Avoid Getting the Flu Instant Hand Sanitizer Howard? Need a Kleenex? As the flu season approaches again, we're starting to see more and more items in the news about vaccinations, vitamins, all that kind of crap. But we know better. We know that a painful needle in the arm, or jars and jars of oversized pills, isn't gonna do shit when everyone starts hacking and coughing up lung cookies all over the street, subway or office.

That's why we carry instant hand sanitizer. Whether it's Purell, Dial or even a generic brand like Duane Reade, we know that with its ability to kill 99.99 percent of germs without water or towels, we can be safe wherever our travels may take us. The active ingredient is ethyl alcohol. We just rub this gloppy fluid on our hands when necessary, and voila, dead microscopic critters by the millions, like people croaking from an H-bomb.

But it's not only hands we find ourselves applying this new-age wonder upon. We have also rubbed it on the part of the telephone you speak into, other people's remote controls and the biggest germ-bank of them all, the metal subway strap. Just the thought of the thousands of bacteria-infected hands that come into contact with these every day gives us shivers.

We have also formed the opinion that using the instant hand sanitizer after having to shake lots of hands really does decrease the chance of colds. Then again, we also found that when applied to the genital area to avoid germs down there, all we ended up with was a burning sensation.