Move over Helvetica...

This is a poo font. It is a font made from poo.

The X, the R, the S - nothing was manipulated. Arne Gutmann simply sat on the can as you or I do when we go about our business and voila! A perfectly formed "A."

"Dude, everybody's got magic," Gutmann said. "I have pretty good digestive system. Everybody's got magic, man."

One day, about 20 years ago, he was about to flush at his home in Toronto when he took a peek - as so many of us do - and discovered a letter floating in the water.

"I was impressed," he said. "I grabbed my camera and took a picture. And then, I don't know, a couple of weeks or a couple of months later, I got another one. I was like, 'Dude, this is wild.'"

He doesn't recall what that first letter was but it stirred something within him. An idea was fermenting. A photographer by trade (he's active in the Whistler scene, curating local arts exhibits and sitting on the board for the Point) his passion has always laid in the obscure. So whenever a new letter would drop, he'd keep a record of it. It has had nothing to do with a fecal fascination - he claims he has never had one - but he just "keeps stuff." Over time, he decided to make something of all the letters and by using Photoshop to grayscale the images of his excrement he created an entire alphabet. It's now available for purchase at www.poofont.com

"I have so many (letters), man - like the alphabet five times over but in different variations. They're not all the same," he said.

He's clearly amused when showing the raw images of his turds. While they are all quite horrific, they're also uncanny. That the human body can produce waste in the alphabet form is a perverted wonder and unless you see the original images - of which there is no rush, trust - you'll never see the true magic behind the letter "R" or the number "4."

Nothing like this has ever been created before. There are plenty of poo-based fonts, characters and images but most of them are hand drawn. An alphabet plopped out letter by letter over the years...well Gutmann's on the leading edge. No one has paid to use the font yet, and aside from the above headline and a few X's (a trademark, of sorts) given to a few friends it has yet to be used in the public.

People have been talking about it though to gauge their reactions is to gauge the vitality of the font as a work of art. Reactions lie somewhere between revulsion and fascination, often at both extremes and often at the same time.

"It's a natural thing. It's a natural bodily function," he said. "We're all aware of it... but it's also a repulsive thing too."

Gutmann is hardly the first artist to use bodily fluids as a vehicle for artistic expression. Among others, Italian artist Piero Manconi once sold one-ounce tin cans of his feces, complete with a label, in a collection known as "Merda d'artista" ("Artist's shit"). They didn't sell well at first but in 2007 a single can fetch 124,000 euros.

Like Manconi, Gutmann had an idea, and like every artist is compelled to do, he took the idea and executed it. As many artists will testify, the art is not always a biographical assessment of the artist as a whole.

"People are like, 'You're obsessed! You're obsessed!'" Gutmann said." I'm not obsessed, man, it's just a thing, you know? It's my magic and I've realized it and I have tried to capitalize on it," he said.

Gutmann plans to self-publish publish a book featuring all the letters, which include outtakes for letters that didn't make it, as well as original images to compare to the finished product.

Interested?

We thought so.

The Valentine's Day love story you've been waiting for

My first kiss was a peck on the lips of the girl I had been in love with for four or five months. We kissed on a dare made by our mutual friend, Suzie. It was innocent enough, simple enough - a brief peck and that was it. Kaily was smiling about it. For her, it was not a big deal.

She had a husband, see, and had been kissing him and holding hands with him throughout the fall. She had been married the month before in a wedding ceremony at the school yard baseball diamond, where she and her fiancée, Edward, a four-foot Filipino with a lustrous crop of jet-black hair I could never live up to, exchanged rings made of twist ties.

Because I didn't have a date I was not welcome to the ceremony and had to watch my love given away to another man atop some monkey bars located across the field with the few other 12-year-old rejects barred from the celebration, listening as the wind carried the wedding party's giggles in our direction.

A month later, Kaily, Suzie and myself were playing truth or dare. I had smoked my very first cigarette an hour or so before and my mouth tasted like the insole of a running shoe. I was self-conscious about the smell but as Kaily leaned in closer I noticed she reeked like cigarettes, too. This was a little comforting but as she leaned her face toward mine, I became a radiator of human heat. My heart was beating too fast and I thought this is the end. My chest is going to explode in a bloody mess all over my love.

But I leaned ever closer, my left eye shut tight and my right eye open a crack to view with limited visibility Kaily's puckered, wrinkled mouth inch toward mine. And we pecked and it was done.

Soon after that, Suzie and Kaily fellated their boyfriends. Suzie had passed a note around the classroom about the incident and later threw it away in the class trashcan. For some reason, our teacher dug it out of the bin and a controversy was born upon discovering the debauched behaviour of cigarette-smoking seventh graders trading after-school sexual favours in family living rooms. It was a big deal around the classroom and I'm certain it shook the more innocent-minded students out of their naiveté. It certainly did mine. I had no concept of such behaviour, and the thought of having someone's mouth...y'know, down there was absurd and unappealing.

Because this was a Catholic elementary school, any indecent behaviour was magnified ten-fold and I'd find out later this was one of - if not the -first time St. Paul's Catholic Elementary School had to deal with issues of student sexuality.

I'd also find out later through some friends that during this same period, at a public elementary school across the road, oral sex was akin to eating peppermints. Seventh-graders were taking regular hits of LSD and having sex in the bushes lining the playground. Indecent behaviour was rampant around this part of Richmond, British Columbia, and was a vital sign that Canada's youth were learning the methods of grown-up fun at a far younger age than their parents.

It seems strange to me, even now, that anybody in the seventh grade was even contemplating sex. I had only a vague sense of what it implied and what it looked like. It was something dark and murky and sounded like sheets rustling from behind bedroom walls. I thought ejaculate was yellow, like urine, and the prospect of sexual intercourse seemed to me as ludicrous as navigating my own way across the Pacific Ocean.

But this single event had yanked me from my carefully coddled universe of toy cars and Goosebumps novels into a more carnal reality of human sexuality. There was suddenly a realm of experience that existed beyond what Saturday morning cartoons were describing. The muffled rustling behind bedroom walls now had some clear visuals. It was alluring yet alarming, and bewildering that I had remained so ignorant of these primal desires while kids that I knew - that I talked with and shared granola bars, traded baseball cards with - were acting out their hormonal urges after school while their parents were away at work.

The following year - the first year of high school, when sex was still perplexing but the rite of masturbation had clarified some of its mysteries -a girl from my old seventh grade class admitted she wanted me to be her boyfriend, so she could "do it" with me.

"Would you have said yes?" she said.

"Probably not," I said.

I made up some nonsense about being in love with someone else, but the truth was I was too awkward to think about even kissing a girl. It would take several more years before the buds of this hormonal human would blossom into something, um, more fully functioning, but at this moment I was still holding on to that single moment one year before when ignorant innocence was still my reality and a pair of puckered, shriveled lips were enough to make my head explode.

I left that conversation and walked on home, wondering if I could catch the last half of Animaniacs.

Ten ways to a good roommate

By Stephen Smysnuik

Living with roommates is a bummer because it generally means having to live with people we can't sleep with. Few people will readily resign to the deficiencies humans are known for if sex isn't available as a reward for putting up with them.

So, yeah, living with people is a bummer. In order to ease the burden I've spent hours poring over ancient texts relating to home-sharing, from Mayan scheduling for taking out the garbage to Roman philosophies on how to deal with foul-smelling roommates. It's true.

This painstaking research has been to provide you, the Good People of Whistler, with 10 rules to live by that will make you not only a decent person to live with but, by extension, a decent human being.


1) Do the dishes: This is the cardinal rule. If there's one thing that breeds resentment in roommates, it's letting the dishes stack in the sink. They're crusted with

food, people! They attract flies in the summer and cause smells that no human

paying $775 per month should have to live with. Wash your dishes as soon as you're finished with them. If you're too lazy to do this one simple task, well, maybe you shouldn't exist.



2) No parties on a school night: We all like the occasional 2 a.m. living-room dance party but it's unfair to subject your roommates to this behaviour if they have to work in the morning. Friday nights/nights of mutual days off are fine - that's the cross we bear for having to live with people. But on a Tuesday night? With five to eight other people carrying on? With Kool and the Gang soundtracking the shenanigans? Not cool.



3) No loud sex: This will be a tough rule to follow for all the Don Juans in town but it's important to test pre-coitus just how thin your walls are. Sound will travel to other rooms and other people will be subjected to your impassioned noise making. This is awkward for everyone concerned, especially the lonely.



4) Respect the bathroom: It gets very crowded in there, meaning a lot of grit and grime (at the very least, if you're lucky) very quickly. This is typically an unpleasant experience for everyone concerned. Clean often and create a chart for who does what when, so everyone has equal opportunity to avoid the most unsavoury of tasks. And light a match once you've had your way with it, for chris'sake.


5) Share condiments BUT: only if you add to the condiment selection. Everything else in the fridge is off limits. Unless, of course, you bought it/made it, then you can eat it. But if it's growing fur, it's your responsibility to make sure it doesn't come back to life.


6) Clean up after yourself: It's essentially the same thing as doing your dishes.

No one wants to sit in a room decorated with your old socks or eat off a table peppered with your marijuana crumbs, however enthusiastic we may be about these assorted items. It's simple and decent to put your belongings in their appropriate places. It's easy, regardless of how stoned you might be.


7) Ask about having outsiders stay over: Note, it's uncool to have someone
stay over for longer than a week straight, even if it's in your room. It's off base to even ask. If you plan on having someone over for one night, no need to say anything (unless your roommate is a real stickler). If they plan on staying two, it's important to let everyone in the house know ahead of time. If more than one person is staying over, even for one night, the same rule applies. And ALWAYS inform your guests which door the bathroom is, lest some serious awkwardness should occur.


8) Communicate: Don't leave notes. Avoid passive aggressive anything. If you have a problem with someone, tell them, but don't be aggressive. It's easier said than done but if everyone lets their resentment fester, it compounds and explodes in typically dramatic and unappealing terms.


9) Wear clothing: You may think your abdominal muscles will weaken the knees of

all the ladies but they won't. It's actually an unseemly nuisance especially if you're hairy and spend most of your time in the kitchen.


10) Use common sense: Don't have any? Find some. It's readily available. Some examples: Buy paper towels when they're all done. Clean the counter if it's dirty. Take out the garbage if it's over-flowing with the week's Ramen noodle packages. Vacuum. Don't be the resident slob in the house because if you are, no one will love you. You'll be regarded with scowls and won't be invited to parties, even if they're thrown in your own home.

Zombies may solve world hunger

"I don't know what's scarier, the fact that zombies could rise or the fact there are actually people out there that can't wait for it to happen."

- Max Brooks

I've been awaiting the zombie apocalypse for a while now. It'll sure beat a regular apocalypse, which from the movies I have seen will be likely be dull and monotonous.

If humanity truly is doomed, it seems that a zombie uprising is better suited to the unpredictability of life. Life is weird, right? Well, zombies are weird.

Other options for human annihilation are not. Nuclear Armageddon seems lame because we've been waiting for it for 65 years. The Bible's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seems embarrassingly outdated now that we've been desensitized to vampires deflowering teenagers and aliens destroying our most prized architectural achievements. Global warming is the weakest of the bunch. Weather did us in? Please. Humanity can do better than that.

If it's overpopulation and mass starvation, as some are postulating, then we have only the entire human population to blame for its over-stimulated libidos. With a worldwide zombie attack there will be only one person to blame, the daft biochemist who infects his lab assistant with an acne-preventing serum intended for rhesus monkeys but turns humans into narrow-minded flesh-eaters.

Which means that we'll all just be going about our business, pumping the gas, changing the diapers, eating the cheese or whatever, and one day we turn to the sound of some peculiar shuffling in the dining room and BRRRAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGG here's the blood-and-sore-ravaged shell of your beloved using your arm as a beef skewer.

As for the survivors, the American logic of improving self worth through retail products and lip injections will be replaced with something far more visceral - slaughtering zombies! It will be a useful skill and the already-adept video game addicts will have a more productive avenue to direct their latent aggressions.

Yes, losing our friends and family to a legion of the walking dead will certainly be a bummer, but really at least we can get all of our grieving done at one time. And anyway, death by zombie seems like an excellent alternative to costly funeral arrangements.

This is no joke. This could really happen. (Editor's note: this is all a joke.) Popular culture has been preparing us for a large-scale zombie attack for over 40 years. A joint study by Carleton University and University of Ottawa found that an outbreak of the zombie virus "is likely to lead to the collapse of civilization, unless it is dealt with quickly." (Editor's note: this part is not a joke.) We must be prepared.

All will not be lost and there will be some considerable benefits. All our current global dilemmas can be solved by a plague of flesh-eating zombies. Please consider: there will be almost three billion more mouths to feed on this planet by 2060. As the Third World develops its economic superiority, it will pump ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere, dissolving what we in the West are half-assedly attempting to preserve. As countries continue to squabble, all those Pomade-enthusiasts in the 1950s will be proven correct - that nuclear war is imminent at any time. If this happens, we'll either perish immediately or inherit a planet void of bananas as we await our emphysemic fate under a sunless sky.

So, what better way to distract North and South Korea from their petulant squabbling? Zombies! Want to end starvation in the Third World? Watch impoverished zombies eat the impoverished living. World hunger: solved! Four-point-seven billion zombies will lack the motor skills to drive a car or operate a steel mill. Global warming: solved!

There are issues, of course, around the zombies adapting to their environments, like learning how to climb ladders or how to plan strategic offensive attacks, which according to George A. Romero are areas that the living have enjoyed the upper hand. But this is real life people! We must consider all the options for survival, like how to harvest grain in a world ravaged by monsters, or how to deal with the inevitable zombie-fetishists who will put our survivor camps in danger for their own twisted desires. It's a new world people!

Through this new phase of history, we will finally see humanity working together on a united front, confronting a terrifying legion of the walking dead, all in the name of a brighter tomorrow. Humanity can then rebuild itself. A group of people cooperating en masse for a common goal is, to me, the most beautiful thing life has to offer, and the repopulation of the human race seems like a righteous goal, indeed.

Of course, once society is rebuilt we'll likely revert back to the self-destructive behaviour that got us in this zombie-infested mess in the first place. But with any luck, it'll be a new version of self-destruction, which suits me fine because this current incarnation is getting tedious.

Zombies!

The Book Snob

The single life in a new town can be a lonely one.

I've spent some time sulking in the streets and wondering which of the faces I encounter I'll get to know one day. But I spend most of my time reading, partly to ward off tedium by engaging in the considerable drama of fictional characters. Regardless of how lonely I may sometimes feel, nothing is as dire as Billy Pilgrim coming unstuck in time, as Frodo protecting that problematic ring. These characters can be as engaging as real people but where real people will ignore me for lack of interest in what they see, book people haven't the capacity to do anything but ignore me. They're too tangled up in their own existence to look up and notice the giant human following their every move. Also, they're not real. This brings me enormous satisfaction.

But for the past few years I've used books as a device for meeting people, especially women. Great conversations can begin with the words, "Is that book any good?" Wonderful things can happen. I met a girl once in a New York bar while reading The Doors of Perception and yadda, yadda I haven't seen her since. It's a marvelous tool! They have proven effective conversation lubricant and, coupled with some red wine, you may find that a shared taste in books equates to similar personal philosophies. Chicks love that crap.

In cafes or on transit, I'll position my book in such way that other people will notice the cover and hopefully understand exactly the type of person I'm trying to be. Whether you realize it or not, the book that you choose to read in public will be used by people like me as signal of your internal character and we will use the dust jackets and author name to construct a definition of who you are. If you're reading Robinson Crusoe, you can't let go of the past. If you're reading Dan Brown, you haven't read another book before the one in your lap in 12 years. Fyodor Dostoevsky = melodramatic brooder. We can use this to gauge the depth of conversation should we start to use it. People should be impressed that I'm a quarter of the way through Gravity's Rainbow, though I have no idea what the bloody book is even about. These people will find me "hip," "cultured" and other adjectives prized by young people who have nothing better to think about.

Whistler's a different story all together. "Hip" is as meaningless a word as "blaffugla" and so it's no wonder that I'm single. There are some cultured people here but they tend not to use transit. The ones that do are usually more concerned about hurling their mortal selves over mountainsides than they are about Nabakov's wordplay. Very few people give a good goddamn what I'm reading except maybe my friends and even then interest passes quick. I'm desperate and frightened that I need to find a new gimmick to make people like me.

People have the tendency, and some more than others, to project onto complete strangers the qualities of ourselves we've experienced through works of art. Books in particular say wonders about who this person might be. The fantasies are endless but few Whistler people read in public and I find I have to construct back-stories for transit riders based solely on appearance. Everyone is from Australia, everyone is poor and I have no leeway into conversation.

So imagine my delight when I see a cute girl reading Tom Robbins on the bus. I imagine that she is the feminine version of myself. She reads Pitchfork obsessively and loves homemade perogies. I hold my own book up and lean against the window in such a way that she can see the front cover if she looks over. Maybe she'll like my face but this Michael Chabon dust jacket will surely win her over. I'll speak up, make a passing reference to Still Life With Woodpecker because she's reading it and, because we're identical in personality, she's absolutely smitten by it. The conversation will be smooth, insightful and as she gets off at her stop we promise to see each other again.

And before I've spoken a single word to this girl, we're eating popcorn together on my couch, shoulders touching and the loneliness that compelled the both of us to read in the first place will be locked away and hopefully forgotten for a little while at least.

The Dognapper

If you steal your roommate's dog, make sure it looks like a run-away scenario. It should go down like this:

Step 1: Ensure the roommate is out of the house at the time of the heist. Step 2: Leave all the dog's belongings behind, especially the kennel. Step 3: Leave the door ajar when you leave to create the illusion that the dog left of its own volition. Step 4: Buy a kennel on the way to the airport. Step 5: Check as luggage when you get there and fly far, far away.

I had this chance when I rescued my roommate's Chihuahua, Peanut, but I was so flustered by the prospect of taking the dog that, in the heat of the moment, I left a note instead. It read, Tabby*, I've taken your dog to the pound. It's better for everyone concerned. Don't bother trying to find him - you've neglected him for too long. I slid the note under her door, and boarded a bus to the Toronto airport.

On the plane to Vancouver, with Peanut's kennel stowed in the luggage compartment below, I developed the comprehensive system of dog-napping mentioned above, realizing that I should have developed it the day before. Oh well. I decided that I would change his name to Patrick Swayze, thereby altering his identity so he could live on the lam together forever. In a perfect world, Peanut and I would live peacefully by passing our days in the abundant British Columbian meadows under vibrant double rainbows while deer and squirrels marveled at our exquisite frolicking skills.

Instead, I returned home to find a series of frantic, caps-locked Facebook messages from Tabby stating that OH MY GAWD I LOVED THAT DOG SO MUCH HOW COULD YOU TAKE HIM U PSYKO!!!! and that she SERCHD ALL THE POUNDZ AND PEANUT ISNT THEIR!!!!

Here was a person who locked her dog in a kennel in the hallway for the first three days he lived with us, and then talked incessantly of getting rid of him every time she opened her mouth. But now that her eccentric former roommate had whisked away her beloved Peanut... well, I guess her reaction was understandable. As power-ballad powerhouses Cinderella philosophized in 1988, "You don't know what you got till it's gone."

Tabby and I got along fine at first, but she was the sort who liked little accessories that fit into her vast collection of purses - and that included Peanut. It was clear from the way she regarded her pet that all she wanted was something fluffy to hug on occasion, without any of the icky responsibilities that came with owning a dog.

What love he hath lost, this poor Peanut. He was no bigger than a Rottweiler's turd and about the same colour. He pissed wherever he pleased and didn't give a damn about it. While this was certainly a symptom of poor house-training on Tabby's part, it said to me he had that right idea about life. I loved him immediately.

He was smaller than most Chihuahua's, and because he pranced when he walked, I had trouble believing he was a man, but I assumed responsibility over him anyway. With Tabby out of the equation, he adopted me as his owner within the week. We'd go for walks - me, wearing lumberjack flannel and a full beard while an effeminate pooch attached to a Louis Vitton leash danced around my ankles. At night, he'd curl up like a furry Danish at the foot of my bed. It was love.

Yet I deferred the serious responsibilities to Tabby, like bathing him or buying him food. It was her dog after all. As a result, he wasn't eating much.

"You can't leave him here," my friend Lauren said one day. We were discussing my impending move to Vancouver and she was holding the dog on her lap, running her hands through his protruding rib cage. His coat had lost some of its sheen and he was shedding more than usual. "Does your roommate even feed him? She hasn't even had him neutered. What kind of cruelty is that? Look at how cute he is."

"Well what am I supposed to do? Just take him?"

It was an option. Lauren and I debated the ethics of the decision over the course of a week: on the one hand, he'd lead a miserable, neglected life if he stayed in Toronto. On the other, I'd be a criminal if I took him. I decided that morality trumped lawfulness in this case and only I could provide the life that Peanut deserved.

I questioned the sanity of this decision for days until I discovered that Tabby had gone away to visit family over the Easter Long Weekend without telling anyone, and had left Peanut behind.

"That's it!" I exclaimed. I looked down at the dog. He was at my feet, wagging his little tail in what was certainly anticipation for my bold declaration. "Dog! You're coming with me!"

It's no big deal, I kept telling myself, Tabby will probably be relieved!

But it seemed my rescue attempt was grossly underappreciated and I couldn't in good conscience keep the dog,.

Step 6: Fly the dog home once your theft is discovered.

*Name changed, for obvious reasons.

One man's advice for surviving in a high-cost pizza world

I live in Whistler now and pizza prices here are completely absurd. They have inspired empty wallets on more drunken occasions than most of us would have liked. I find myself three dollars short for cab fare. I'm slapping the morning-after coffee on Visa. It's a frustrating situation that can't be rectified unless I drive to Vancouver to pay for, what I feel is, an acceptable price for a slice of pizza. But that wouldn't make any sense.

The pizza companies get away with it because in Whistler, a town brimming with 20-somethings with no discernable cooking skills beyond boiling Ramen noodles, pizza is the fail-safe for a quick and filling bite.

Fortunately, there are ways to avoid unloading a quarter of your paycheque. Dominos Pizza offers walk-in/take-away deals for large ($13.50) and medium ($11.50) pepperoni pizzas. It's hardly the best pizza in town, takes on the taste and texture of synthetic rubber following refrigeration but it will fill your belly, if not bloat it eternally.

Ramen-noodle connoisseurs are likely familiar with the assortment of frozen pizzas sold at their favourite grocery store. Of these, Delissio pies are the best deal for size and taste ($9.99 at all grocery stores in Whistler), although they are rife with preservatives and a high fat content that will add pudge to your midsection almost immediately and may take years off your life somewhere down the line.

Ultimately, your safest bet is to make it from scratch. That's right, kids, it's time to learn how to bake your own pizza. It's easy! and good for you for myriad reasons, not least of all for learning the complex and capricious nature of pizza dough. If it's not manipulated the right way, this dough will curl up on you like a frightened baby and sit stubbornly in a gooey lump until you learn the correct way to deal with it. Mastering pizza dough will teach you important life skills that will reveal themselves to you once the mastering is complete. I can't let you in on them - they're secrets.

Pasta Lupino sells such a lump for $3.25 that can make two-three medium pizzas. It also freezes and defrosts like you'd hope dough would: without incident.

Step 1: lightly flour your counter so... wait, no. Step 1 is to free your counter of beer bottles, noodle packages, apple cores, assorted crumbs and, yes, pizza boxes. Then lightly flour the counter top to keep the dough from sticking. Lightly flour your rolling pin and spread the dough out as flat as possible. If you're lacking a rolling pin, a wine bottle will do as well. A beer bottle might work but this is pure speculation.

Once the dough is flattened, you can try the Italian chef flip trick to stretch out the dough but at this beginner stage it's really not necessary. We're aiming for edible food here, nothing fancy.

It should be noted here that the first job I was hired for and subsequently fired from was a Little Caesar's. During my time as a pizza maker, there was a coincidental but dramatic increase in customer complaints over diminished crust-to-topping ratio and/or general absence of mozzarella cheese. I may not be the most qualified person for this particular topic, but since we've come this far I guess there's no turning back...

So anyway, pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees, or something. Lightly grease your baking pan and push the dough to the ends. A square baking pan will work just as well as a round pan, so long as you can deal with quadrangle pizza slices.

From there, lay on whatever toppings you fancy. Remember the mozzarella cheese. Oil the crust to make it golden-crispy and delicious. Handle with care and affection. Bake for 15-20 minutes. Let stand for five. Eat. Enjoy.

Afterward, you can take it out with you to the club, kept snug in your purse or a girlfriend's purse. Hell, leave it in your back pocket to remind you that, at the end of the night, when all the drunks lurch toward the same line outside Fat Tony's, you have something cheaper and much quicker: your two home-made slices, wrapped in tin-foil. They'll be a little mushy, sure, but at least you made them yourself and that's better than anything a plump fellow named Tony can provide.