'Tis the Season

The following news items are courtesy of MSNBC's Peculiar Postings section.

Fred Markoff's hot dog stand in suburban Chicago is selling a seasonal specialty - reindeer dogs. Just $8 buys you an Alaskan-made reindeer/pork/beef meat product on a bun with grilled onions and mustard. Is this the fate of the reindeer who do not become flyers for Team Santa?

Dillards South at the Great Lakes Mall in Mentor, Ohio was on fire last week - literallyand figuratively. It took 8 minutes to put out the electrical fire that burned circuits of a high-voltage electrical panel near a women's dressing room. Did that do any damage to that day's sales? Of course not. Holiday shoppers are a hardy bunch, and it will take more than a piddly electrical fire to chase them out of the store. The fire batallion chief said that they had to put people at the doors to keep more shoppers from coming in while they put the fire out. Does anyone else smell a fire sale?

A 12-year old boy was arrested on petty larceny charges in South Carolina. The rat-fink what sold him out? His mother. Apparently the boy had been rummaging through his great-grandmother's things when he found one of his Christmas presents - a Game Boy. He then "allegedly" took the toy from its hiding place and played it. Mom said, "It's not even about the Christmas present. I only want positive things out of it. ... There's no need for him to act this way. I'd rather call myself than someone else call for him doing something worse than this."