You've finally scored the house of your dreams (at a steal! thanks, subprime fiasco). How is your mutt going to feel if you stick him in a common old dog house? LIke a poor relative, that's how.

Luckily, you can extend your aestethic to your hound's home, too, by having a custom mutt mansion built. Both La Petite Maison and Jimbo's House Houses (how's that for contrasting brand images?) can design and build a dogacile that will set your tail wagging.

Jimbo's offers unlimited design flexibility, with a choice of flooring (carpet, marble, linoleum and more), electricity, AC, heating, and double-pane windows. Most of its promotional models have a rustic charm that would fit well in a heavily wooded retreat.

La Petite Maison features more upscale models such as the trendy Georgian, chalets and chateaus. It also offers model reproductions of your house in doggy size, an interesting concept which could be fun when also extended to birdhouses, mailboxes and tree houses.

The same structures can be also used indoors as doggy time-out rooms. With one of these beauties, husbands that end up in the dog house might retain a shred of their dignity.

Have you ever found yourself in an impromptu 'my kid is cuter than your kid' photo-sharing session without a snapshot of your own children handy? Thanks to the miracle of modern dentistry, you need never face this horror again.

ToothArtist.com can paint a portrait of your loved one(s) on your tooth crown, so that you're never more than a smile away from showing off your pride and joy to the world. The scrimshaw-like pictures are as permanent as your teeth, and range in price from $75 to $500 (art only; crown extra).

Of course, your tooth art is not limited to family portraiture. Why not show off your love of Elvis, or the Bears, or Budweiser, or Radiohead? Nothing says class like logos on your front teeth. Maybe you can even get a company to sponsor new crowns for your front teeth in return for the marketing exposure. The National Hockey League would be a natural.

Are you stuck in the northern climes, glued to the tube watching Tiger win one tournament after another on sun-drenched southern courses? Before you snap and find yourself sneaking onto your closed local course garbed in seven layers of sweaters and hip boots, consider investing in the world's best golf simulator, by Full Swing Golf.
I use the word 'invest' because this system will set you back $40-50,000, about the cost of a weekend at Pebble Beach.

But your money will bring you as close to the real course as you'll find in the virtual world. Full Swing Golf includes a enclosure with a hi-def projector, 680 infra-red ball tracking sensors and a touch screen game controller to register the distance and direction of your ball strike. Different surfaces are available to simulate the tee boxes, bent grass fairways, and rough (not the knee-length gorse of the U.S. Open, though; reasonable rough.) Players can choose among 50 championship courses that have been digitized in exacting detail.

The entire system can be internet-connected to allow you to play against other live opponents and compete in on-line tournaments. Practice features allow you to record and work on the weak parts of your game ( in my case, that would be everything).

The system still doesn't quite capture the full flavor of a round of golf, though. For that, they'd need to include a foursome of glacial-paced golfers preceding you that refuse tot wave you through, a sprinkler that decides to start halfway through your back swing, a swarm of mosquitoes in the tee box, and blisters that appear on your heels halfway through your first round wearing your new $300 shoes.

Come to think of it, this game may be better than real golf. Especially if my wife would put on a bikini and bring me a beer every few holes.

hr:, a magazine heretofore devoted to mechanical timepieces, is attempting to reinvent itself with a new focus on the broader category of luxury goods. The bi-monthly slick promises to deliver a readership that is 35-55, with an annual income above $650,000 and a net worth of $1 million plus, which makes sense if you've priced the cost of having your Rolex or Patek Phillipe cleaned lately.

The new focus will feature those lifestyle elements most likely to advertise heavily in the magazine; fashion, luxury cars, yachts, vacation spots and, of course, watches. As the public abandons the wearing of watches in deference to the time readout on their cell phones, the accoutrement increasing has become a jewelry choice, one acceptable within the conservative 'man code'.

Expect hr: to join the rank of quasi-catalogues of luxury gifts, somewhere between Harper's Bazaar and Condé Nast Travel, where the lines between articles and advertising is as faint as the blush on a model's cheek.

Abercrombie & Fitch, the company that has embraced porn as an advertising tool, is now employing that tack to launch a new faux-person and chain of retail stores. In the footsteps of Aunt Jemima and Betty Crocker comes Gilly Hicks, apparently an Australian supermodel with a penchant for the beach and an allergy to clothing above her waist.

Gilly Hicks Sydney (as in Australia, although there is no Gilly Hicks store there) is the name of A&F's new line of stores offering undergarments, in direct competition with Victoria's Secret. Ironically, at one time both A&F and Victoria's Secret were owned by Limited Brands.

The company is launching this chain with its trademark soft porn marketing, this time by offering a spicy video of underwear-challenged models on its web site. Viewers must be 18, as proven by their entry of a valid birth date. Of course, if a young'n was to lie about his/her age, he would have no problem accessing the video, but no teenage would lie about his age to see half-naked models frolic in the surf, would he? I'm sure Abercrombie & Fitch hopes so not.