Plastic octopi and other surprises

Sometime during the holiday season my stepfather's clone from Opposite Planet crashed his spacecraft in our backyard, killed my real stepfather, studied our culture for a few days, and realized that he'd better begin the violent tradition known as Christmas shopping if he wanted to blend in with the rest of us.

How do I know it was a clone? He bought us an aquarium. Plus it's hard to ignore the smoldering piece of wreckage still in our backyard.

He brought it out after we opened everything else and set it down in the middle of the living room, which, by that point, looked as though a cargo plane carrying nothing but wrapping paper had crashed through our roof, but before it hit, collided with another airliner that was actually made out of wrapping paper.

The latter plane was going to crash anyway, however, after engineers failed to realize wrapping paper was banned from airplane construction half a century ago due to the fact that wrapping paper, when used in airplane construction, is completely useless.

As we sat and stared at the mysterious box, we all made guesses as to what it could be instead of actually opening it.

Was it a new microwave? That would have been the most reasonable guess , seeing as how we've had the same microwave since before I was born and quite possibly could have been used to reheat leftovers from The Last Supper.

Oddly enough it still works; although I'm pretty sure it alters our food with high amounts of radiation exposure. This could explain why my piece of pizza mutated into a bowl of cottage cheese (which I proceeded to eat anyway because I was hungry.)

Finally, the wrapping paper was off and I was staring at an aquarium -- one of the last things on the planet I expected him to buy. Why was I shocked?

Well, he's not exactly the kind of person that likes to maintain something that gives absolutely nothing back in return. I mean, what could a fish do for him? They weren't exactly big enough to eat, and they sure couldn't pay the mortgage on the house or give him an autographed photo of Bill O'Reilly.

I half-expected Ashton Kutcher and a cameraman to appear from behind the Christmas tree to tell me I had been Punk'd, but then I realized I wasn't a celebrity. I finally had to come to a conclusion.

We did, indeed, have an aquarium.

"Wow, an aquarium," I said, just in case everyone else had forgotten what an aquarium was. I continued to look at it suspiciously as if it were a nuclear bomb in disguise.

Several days later, my suspicions began to fade as we went shopping for supplies at a pet store. We chose things we thought best represented what you would find in a fish's natural habitat. Plants, pebbles, a little plastic octopus with large, animated eyes holding a sign with the clever saying "No Fishing."

I think we'll enjoy having fish for pets.

You don't have to potty-train them, and when they die, a quick flush of the toilet takes care of it all.

Isn't that everything you could ask for in a pet?

Contact Sam at sdereign@ semissourian.com.