Mad Dog's Budget Holiday Gift Guide
by Mad Dog

   First on the list is a pet. A cheap, low-maintenance pet that glows in the dark. You know, like the GloFish Fluorescent Zebra Fish. Originally bred to help detect environmental pollutants — the few that don’t glow on their own — the fish light up because scientists inject a fluorescence gene into their parents. The fish’s parents, not the scientists’. GloFish make a great gift for several reasons. For one, studies show that having a pet is good for a person’s mental health. They give companionship, show unconditional love, and you can complain to them all you want without them telling you to “Get over it.” Also, while dogs, cats, hamsters, and Carrot Top all make good pets, they don’t give off light, which can help stave off SAD, which is a cute acronym for Seasonal Affective Disorder, or what doctors usually refer to as “What you get for living in Seattle in the winter.”

   While regular zebra fish can be bought for as little as 60 cents, glo-in-the-dark fish have been selling for as much as $17 in Taiwan, where children have been using them for several years to guide them to school in the morning during the winter. Just kidding. Actually they use them to make festive holiday sushi, eliminating the need for candles on the dinner table.

   The fossilized crustacean, which will be marketed under its nickname Magic Johnson if they can find more of them, is once-living proof you don’t need to reply to Internet spam to be well endowed. Nor have Milton Berle’s dominant genes. True the entire crustacean is only two-tenths of an inch long, but remember, it’s relative size that matters. Right, and there will be a Richard Simmons, Jr. on the way any day now.

   If you don’t have time to wait for scientists to locate a few more Colymbosathon ecplecticos, maybe you should consider an Irradiated Mutant Worm instead. While their sex organs haven’t been supersized, they do use them more than the average worm. Of course the average worm only uses theirs 5 percent of the time, preferring to reproduce asexually, something I’ve been told to do any number of times but haven’t figured out a way to do it, advanced yoga positions notwithstanding. It turns out that worms which live in the irradiated soil around the Chernobyl nuclear plant are, well, more highly sexed. A full quarter of them go out of their way to find partners and reproduce sexually, which is an even higher success rate than you’d have at the Sex Addicts Anonymous Christmas party.

   You see, Souder wants Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s image on the dime to be replaced by one of former president Reagan. He’s doing this in reaction to the airing of The Reagans, the creatively titled TV miniseries that ran on Showtime (motto: “CBS’ leftovers, all the time”). Apparently he didn’t like it. He said in his letter to fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives that it was appropriate to honor Reagan on the 10-cent coin since he “was wounded under the left arm by a bullet that had ricocheted and flattened to the size of a dime.” It’s a good thing the bullet hadn’t flattened to the size of a Bible or Souder would want to replace God with Reagan in the next edition.

   If none of these gifts do the trick, you might consider the Michael Jackson holiday album, Almost White Christmas, the Special Collector’s DVD of the Democratic candidates’ debates entitled Bush: The Grinch Who Stole The Election, or if you can raise your budget a few million dollars, you could buy someone you love the job as governor of California.

©2003 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read them while hoping you don't get caught smuggling GloFish.