Don't Be That Guy: Joyeux Nouvel An

("Happy New Year" in the Black Tongue)

I'll make this quick. France is nuts.

How nuts is it?

So nuts that when French youths get all bothered and snockered with New Year's festivities, it boils over in a rash of frakkin' setting cars on fire. According to French officials, nearly 1200 cars and motorcycles were burned in France this past Tuesday, making the country the most ridiculous country in the world for at least a day.

Seriously, I guess I must be an impotent nerd, because I don't understand the leap from having a happy to lighting it on fire. Though according to paranoid studies, I intake enough violent entertainment to be entitled to at least a couple of acts of random arson a year. Maybe I should clear my schedule for some car-burning after The Desolation of Smaug is released next December.

Now, there's an estimated 31 million cars in France (based on Nationmaster.com's cars stats), so that means the odds of waking up on New Year's Day to find your car torched are about one in thirty thousand. Not bad odds by Lotto standards, but pretty sucktastic when you're a poor Franc planning on driving anywhere ever again. The mass arson is at least partly gang related, as French gangs and blocks compete to burn the most cars and brag about it via social networking.

Merci, Facebook.

Add to that lameness the fact that French officials seem to think that this trend of car arson is a throw back to the mass riots of 2005, and we have one distinct image of the modern Frenchman:

France: home of the rage zombie infected

Apparently those plucky infected Brits made it into France in 2007 after all. Because that's all I can come up with to explain to French authorities the epidemic suckage of their populace. I mean really, the best guess they have is that the masses got 'hooked' on the wanton destruction of the 2005 protests? That's like saying your people found that acting like rugensteins worked out so well in the past, so why not keep doing it?

I'm not exactly champing at the bit to visit France--you'll note I refer to their native language as the Black Tongue above. But I would like to tour some of the historic battlefields of Europe at some point in the future.

Maybe I'll make it a walking tour if I hit France, though.

(These are 28 Weeks Later references, people)