A Tale of Two Kitties
If you like to display or even flaunt your love of cats, and you can tolerate intense cuteness, A Tale of Two Kitties could be for you. It's a well-organized, easy-to-view catalog of stuff for feline fans - tote bags, T shirts, caps, and of course, computer accessories (you need a cat mouse pad, don't you?). Heavy on the pastels and cutesy copy, the products are clearly described and priced, and ordering is easy (fax, e-mail, mail, and phone). Not only can you outfit your entire house and body in cat-related goods, there are even a couple of products for your own tabby (more to come, no doubt).-KW

B-

EMusic
Here's a music site that offers some reasonably smart searching (by song, title, year, artist, genre, label) for a 100,000-item catalog. As with a number of other music sites, though, EMusic has only a thin veneer atop an ugly text database, and within moments you'll be peering at small type to decipher your finds. There are some nice features including links to new titles and concert dates (under construction at this writing), top 40 charts, top sellers by year, and a way to review both your current and previous orders. Eventually, with some of its links smoothed out and a more readable storehouse of titles, EMusic could be a good stop for music lovers, instead of just an adequate one.-KW

B-

Long Grove Confectionery Company
Forget Mom's birthday? Want to send that special someone from the chat room a chocolate computer? Never fear, Long Grove is ready to meet your needs 24 hours a day, and with a wide and quirky variety of mouthwatering chocolates to chose from, you should be able to find the perfect gift to bring a smile to any chocoholics face. You can order all their delicacies from a form, have them gift wrapped and delivered, and get a free box of chocolates for yourself. Despite all this, since the only payment option Long Grove gives you is plastic, and it's forms are insecure, I probably won't be ordering any luscious chocolate tackle boxes.-BB

B+

Sound Spectrum
If you don't need instant gratification, music is an easy shopping goal on the Net. You can often search your chosen site by title or artist, sometimes by genre, and order up a storm. Sound Spectrum claims 120,000 titles (30,000 of them classical), orders filled within 24 hours, online or fax ordering, and US orders to you within 3-7 days. These are good things. What's not so good is the less-than-smart search mechanism that doesn't tell you it needs last-name-first to deliver the titles you seek, and the plain-text database that doesn't provide release dates, labels, or genre clues. It's ok, but there's better.-KW

C+

The Great Fax Cover Sheet Co.
Hankering for a remote control holder? How about fax cover sheet cartoons or funny fax post-its for your outgoing communiques? Or can we interest you in a pair of rolling scissors for ease of cutting? If you want any of these things, stop on by and order them here. You can e-mail your order, call the office, or send your request to a BBS. (Naturally, you can also fax.) The items are adequately described, but this would be a more useful site if it offered more products. As it is, it's not bookmark quality - nor is there a compelling reason to visit.-KW

C-

X-Large Inte(r)network
For today's young suburban fashion plate, X-large brings it's entire clothing catalog to the web. Unfortunately, it just scanned in the catalog, viewable one bandwidth-eating page at a time. The site is much more than a catalog, though, developing an image of the company as a propagator of irreverent, angst-ridden, youth culture. From video game manuals to an essay praising the merits of liquor, X-Large runs down what's hip in sound bite sized chunks. It has a small archive of sounds and video, and a very active open forum which is mostly a discussion of Hip-Hop. The site is very cool, definitely worth a visit even if you are not interested in their catalog.-BB

A-