Wednesday 17 August 2011

En France, You Only Vive Twice

It seems that the most dangerous substance known to man, secondhand smoke, is even more lethal than we thought. In France, it's now apparently hazardous to the dead!

Interdiction des bureaux de tabac en «zones protégées»

Cela concerne notamment les écoles, les lieux de culte, les établissements de santé ou stades et aussi curieusement les cimetières…
Your host actually listened during French classes at school so got the gist of that. The article talks about new proposals for banning smoking in 'protected areas'.

The word which jumps out of the page on first read is 'cimetières', meaning cemeteries in Frog.

Like the author, I'm curious to know exactly how much danger passive smoke poses to corpses buried six feet under!

Vraiment, les connards anti-tabac français ont sauté le requin*.

* Hint: French. Anti-smoking. Jumping the shark.


6 comments:

Bucko said...

Maybe it causes zombies or something?

Tabac of the living dead?

Anonymous said...

Une bonne maitrise de la langue francaise, Dick! Merci!

The town of Ciotat -- on the Med -- banned smoking along part of its beach a few weeks ago. The mayor (Socialist) used a Stony Stratford-style of argument: 'so many cigarette butts that you could build a castle with them'. I wonder if this is a new anti-tobacco meme. On RMC radio and fora, a load of people said the same thing. Goes to show what constant repetition of a phrase or idea can create -- another big lie.

Cemeteries first, parks next. In fact, the beach discussions brought out two further vox pop requests: no smoking at all on any beaches or in parks. ('Think of the children!')

From being the European smokers' paradise only a decade ago, France has gone into overdrive the other way within the past few years.

Anonymous said...

When the ban first came in I saw a no smoking sign attached to the gates of a cemetery. If I hadn't been raging about the ban I might have been amused.

Jay

Anonymous said...

I posted this on Frank Davis' blog during the CATCH debate.

Here's why they want to ban smoking in cemetaries

Doll – The Resurrection of Smokers!
Doll, in his “doctors study”, monitored British doctors over a period of 50 years, reporting on mortality vs smoking at intervals. The last two reports were in 1994 and 2004.
I was looking at these yesterday when I noticed something truly bizarre. In the ten year period, some 5,000 of his cohort had died. But extraordinarily, it turned out that at least 600 smokers had been brought back from the dead – Hallelujah!
Comparing accumulated mortality figures given in both studies (1)(2):
Never smoker deaths 2215 (1994) – 2917 (2004) = 702 new deaths
Former cig smoker deaths 4802(1994) – 5354 (2004) = 552 new deaths
Current cig smoker deaths 5280 (1994) – 4680 (2004) = 600 resurrections
Former pipe/cigar deaths 3187 (1994) – 5713 (2004) = 2526 new deaths
Current pipe/cigar deaths 5039 (1994) – 6682 (2004) = 1643 new deaths
This is not just a simple typo because:
Smokers of 1-14 per day – 317 resurrected
Smokers of 15-24 per day – 170 resurrected
Smokers of =>25 per day – 113 resurrected
All of the 2004 figures are internally consistent as are the 1994 ones.
References:
1. The 1994 study – table 5
http://www.bmj.com/content/309/6959/901/T5.expansion.html
2. The 2004 study in full (table 1 is the relevant one)
http://www.bmj.com/content/328/7455/1519.full.pdf
Isn’t epidemiology wonderful!
Tony

Anonymous said...

Unbelievable,
there are two timing,
grovelling,spittlelicking,cow towing,capdoffing,bottomsniffing,
cringing,backstabbing,twotongued
so called Englishmen
STILL
visiting the Froginfested cess pit
No wonder we're going down the nick at the speed of light
Worse still there are even more half baked dipsticks and numpties doing the Spanish Gulag.
Anyone fancy Minsk

Alaric's batman

Anonymous said...

Talk about banning smoking. My wife has a pub and she was told yesterday that the fag m/c. has to come out, OR be put out of sight of the punters. She said there is no where? well it will have to come out then, another service lost to the customer. AHHHHH and I dont smoke.

PS fag papers and matches have to be the same :(