Lisa, thank you for pointing out my sensitivity to food that smiles. This is a difficult subject for me, and I appreciate your discretion, but I think it would be best if I tell the others the cause of my phobia.

As most of you already know, when I was a small child my family was very, very poor. We were so poor that my parents had to kill the rats in our crawl space so that we could eat dinner. Eventually we ran out of rats, and we were forced to eat slugs from under the rocks in our driveway.

When we ran out of slugs, we were left with no choice but to eat Smurfs. For breakfast we had smurf heads in milk. My mom would pack a smurf-salad sandwich in my lunch every schoolday, and I would come home to find her cooking up a Smurf-parts-platter dinner garnished with smurf sauce, followed by a dessert of frosty smurf sorbet. Every morning I would awaken to their insipid little songs, only to hear the melody cut short with a solid Whack! of the butcher's knife. You cannot imagine the kind of hell I went through. This continued for two years, until finally my parents discovered the secret recipe for turning Smurfs into gold. The rest, as they say, is history.