I was at Target back in Fort Dodge using some Christmas gift cards to buy “Super Mario Galaxy”, and after the cashier rang it up, the dude told me something hilarious.

“Huh, that’s different. There’s 41 cents left on your card, dude. Do you even want it back?”

41 cents left? Are you kidding?

“41 cents? That’s enough for a candy bar! You bet I’ll take it.”

And so I left the Electronics department and headed for the main checkouts, where I would use the 41 cents to buy a Three Musketeers bar, leading to the cashier telling me my total was NINE CENTS. I haven’t heard a cashier tell me that since I was about eight years old. Nine cents. You bet.

On the way home, we stopped at McDonald’s for lunch. I really wasn’t hungry for a greasy burger, so I ordered the Chicken McNuggets. My brother ordered a McTasty Deluxe or something like that…I have to be honest, I don’t eat at McDonald’s often enough to know their menu. Is it a Big N Tasty? McTasty? One of those burgers with the misnomer, anyway. As we were driving away, my brother chided me, “Chicken McNuggets? What are you, 12?” Nice.

As for Super Mario Galaxy (because I know Cliff Glypha is gonna want my full opinion)…when the hell did Elmo start doing the voice for Mario? I put the disc in the Wii and was greeted with freaking Elmo screaming “Soooooooper Marrrrreeeeo Galaxeeeee!!!” Hopefully 10 year old kids think this is dominant, because it upset me so greatly I almost spilled my Bud Light.

The game itself, thankfully, is just about the greatest video game ever, and I am comfortable saying that. Its like a suped-up version of old Mario games — modern remixes of the classic music, giant 3D versions of all the old characters, and modern twists on the Warp Zone feature. And thankfully, even though the Wii has the ability to play full speech, the characters still only speak one or two words, with the rest typed out in poorly-translated Engrish (and yes, I know that’s misspelled, its a joke you moron).

Nine cent purchases at Target? Mario video games? Chicken McNuggets? If it wasn’t for the existence of my mortgage and car payments, maybe there would be some credence to those “What are you, 12″ claims. You bet.

My brother and I surprised our Dad with tickets to the Vikings game Sunday night, and managed to keep it a secret until Sunday morning. This was amazing not only because we talked about how the Vikes were going to dominate the game practically ALL NIGHT on Saturday, but because a couple of people at dinner were so excited they almost spilled the beans.

Seriously, this wasn’t that big a deal. But one of my mother’s best friends, upon hearing the plans, told me “Oh, I have goosebumps just thinking about you guys doing this for your dad! What a special gift, tickets to the game with his two sons!” Apparently we’re better shoppers than we thought. I had the idea for this little adventure back in September when the Vikings were still terrible. In past years, its been impossible to get Viking tickets; with their recent run of suckiness, that has changed. A bad year on the field translated into a great year to buy tickets for a game.

For Christmas this year, my brother and I are surprising our Dad with tickets to the Vikings-Redskins game on the 23rd. While we’ve both been to Vikings games in the past, he hasn’t been since the Met Stadium days some 30 years ago. That was back when the Vikings were tough and played outdoors, frequently in the snow. News flash: it gets just as cold and snowy in Minny as it does in Green Bay. The advantages of the cold weather the Packers now enjoy were once employed by the Vikings too.

Hell, I wish the Vikings still played outdoors. Football is a game meant to be played outdoors, taking the elements into account, and adapting your style of play to succeed. But having been to two games in late December/early January, I have to tell you…the ‘Dome is awfully nice as a fan.

In June at a Twins game, when its 85 degrees and sunny? The dome is not a friendly place. It stinks, quite frankly. But in December when its 15 degrees below zero? Its a freakin’ oasis of friendliness.

The first Vikings game I went to in person was on January 2, 2000. We drove through 18 inches of snow on mostly unplowed interstates to get there, and upon arriving in the Twin Cities, stepped out of our car into frigid 10 degree weather with 20 mile-per-hour wind gusts. The 70-degree climate controlled Metrodome was a friendly place that day, I have to tell you.

Four years later, my brother and I went to a Saturday-before-Christmas game between the Dolphins and Vikings, and it was the same story. There was only about six inches of snow, but it was 10 below zero with the wind chill. Sitting outside for 3-1/2 hours in that, or in a 70 degree teflon bubble? Um, is that even a question?

And this Sunday, with Minnesota buried beneath two feet of snow and temperatures expected to barely crack the mid-teens, it would be a pretty damn menacing prospect to sit outside for four hours. That was before NBC decided to move the game to Sunday Night, because its the best game of the week. The low on Sunday is expected to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 degrees. I don’t care who you are, that’s cold.

In June, when the Twins are playing, I despise the Metrodome with every fiber of my being. In December, its the most glorious place on earth. Especially when the Vikings don’t wear their ridiculous clown pants.

You bet.

I’m all for convenience and moving towards a paperless society. And I love Ticketmaster’s PDF ticket option — which if you’re not familiar, you should be. Order tickets online, they email you a PDF ticket, you print it out, and BAM you’ve got your tickets. I love this.

That was until I bought them as a gift for someone.

There’s something tangible about putting paper tickets in an envelope, gifting them to someone, and having them open the envelope to discover tickets to an event they want to attend. PDF tickets are on letter-sized paper, and are roughly 85% advertisements, depending on the event and the venue. Your options in gifting them, as I see it, are threefold:

1) Email the PDF file to the person

2) Stick the 8-1/2 x 11 paper ticket-slash-commercial in a manila letter envelope, and gift it as you normally would, or fold said ticket-slash-commercial down to a smaller size before putting it in an appropriate sized envelope

3) Tell the person verbally, “Hey, I bought you tickets for XYZ!”

Lame, lame, lame. Sorry, I just think those are all lame options. The 8-1/2 x 11 paper ticket is terrible looking. There’s just no way that looks right as a gift. And emailing a PDF seems so…impersonal. And telling someone what you bought them seems wrong. I dunno, maybe I’m just being stupid.

All I know is I’ve got two days until my brother and I have to give these tickets to our Dad, and I still don’t know how we’re going to present them to him. You Bet.

“Ninjas. Shadow men with ice water in their veins and death at their fingertips, elusive assassins who fill the midnight world with the whispery footprints of vengeance. These are their stories.”

That’s good writing, isn’t it? Its from the back of a value DVD from the Dollar Aisle at Super Target, which is pretty much the best place ever. Usually DVDs from the dollar bin are poorly produced crap, with badly designed artwork and broken english text. Surprisingly, while the front cover of this one the usual crap, the back is cleanly designed (using Helvetica!) and the writer had what appears to be at least a 12th grade grasp of english, which is at least three and quite possibly even four years more than most discount DVDs.

“The Master” is the latest in a long line of gag Christmas gifts exchanged between by brother and I. Its hard to go wrong with picking out the worst DVD from the bargain bin. When its two episodes of a short-lived TV show from the heydey of bad dramatic television — the 1970s — and it stars Lee Van Cleef, well, its Awesome, even when its trying ever so hard not to be.

“Starring Lee Van Cleef as John McAllister, one of the few westerners welcomed into this bloody underworld of righteous reckoning, The Master is filled with enough breathless martial arts action to captivate even the fiercest of video warriors.”

Video warriors? Righteous reckoning? Wow. Just…wow.