Seven ideas for enriching your man cave

For most guys, there is one obvious piece that's going in their man cave: a flat screen television, preferably about a yard wide and no more than a few inches thick, ideally mounted securely on a wall. After that, it's kind of a crapshoot. The male brain isn't wired to make sure the couch matches the curtains, it's more concerned with making sure the grill marks form a discernible crosshatch pattern. If you've got the television picked out but are all hung up about what to do with the rest of the room, here are seven ideas to set you on the right path.

1. Concert posters. For music lovers, concert posters will make a great addition to your man cave. If you can find one from a show you actually attended, or at least from the same tour, you'll have a conversation starter should you run out of Tim McCarver jokes this October (that won't happen). I ordered a Green Day poster for myself and a John Mayer Trio concert poster for my brother from Lonestar Posters before and can vouch for both the poster quality and the company's service. Plus at around $25-$30 each, you can easily take care of a whole wall for about $100. Former featured profiler Carl had some cool posters in his man cave if you want to check them out.

2. Album cover art. Sticking with the music theme, surely you have a favorite album cover. Chances are, the artist who created the cover has done other work and if you search hard enough you can find some pretty stellar pieces of art to hang on your wall. For instance, I really like the cover of Green Day's Insomniac, which is a collage by Winston Smith who has a ton of prints for sale over on his website, some of which I like better than the Insomniac cover. Another example is the cover to Weezer's highly underrated Pinkerton album, which is a painting done by a 19th century Japanese artist named Hiroshige called "Night Snow In Kambara." A poster of that painting can be found on several websites along with other paintings by Hiroshige.

3. Dead animals. If you're a hunter, you can mount some antlers on the wall or maybe toss a bearskin rug on the floor and call it a day. For the more imaginative, there's Custom Creature Taxidermy, a unique company that will combine the carcasses of several dead animals to create the creature of your choice. My favorite is the flying monkey.

4. Sports memorabilia. Just think back to when you were a kid and cut out the full page pictures from your dad's Sports Illustrated before he got the chance to read it and taped them up all over your wall. It was a great feeling to go to sleep at night knowing Bo Jackson or Nolan Ryan or Magic Johnson were going to scare away the ghosts, right? And who could forget those little league trophies? Well you can still litter your man cave with sports items, only now you can afford better stuff than the latest Walter Iioss shot. Anything from jerseys to vintage pennants can be found online, and a lot of stadiums will auction off stadium seats and other items from time to time. If your team wins a title, a lot of newspapers will sell glossy prints of the next day's sports section front page. I have one from when Syracuse won the 2003 NCAA national championship against Kansas.

5. Neon bar signs. I'm keeping a weathered eye on the horizon for what I consider the holy grail of neon bar signs, Moosehead Brewery's "Live Big" masterpiece. I saw it at a bar in Boston once and it's been on eBay a couple times, but never in my price range as they can get pretty expensive. One of these days though, probably when you all least expect it, I'm just going to post a picture of it hanging in my man cave. You won't even see it coming.

6. Arcade games. Lock me in a room with a month's supply of food, Area 51, and a pinball machine and then come back in a month and tell me I'm not a better man because of it. Or if you have the time, you can build your own since they're also not cheap. Also, every first rate man cave needs to have at least one out of the following: an air hockey, foosball, ping pong, or pool table, and without question a dart board. Man law.

7. Kegerator. It's like college all over again except you don't have to plop the keg into one of those 30 gallon garbage cans and cover it with a few bags of Happy Ice. If you've got a buddy that's getting married soon, have everyone chip in $50 or so and buy him the one thing will make him happier than lifelong matrimony. You can even customize the handle.

The best part about having a man cave is that you can do whatever you want to it. There are no rules except your own and if your wife criticizes the decor, it's not your problem. If your buddies criticize the decor, kick them out. Your man cave, your rules, and that's the beauty of it all.