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In France, one of the few ways cars may escape immolation is to be driven off cliffs by suicidal Frenchsters:
Tons of mangled cars piled up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon de Verdon in Provence are sombre evidence of France’s high suicide rate. But on a brighter note, engineers now clearing the accumulated wreckage of 100 years are uncovering a veritable auto museum ...
It’s a graveyard of old automobiles, some of them dating back to the 1930s. No one has bothered to it clean up—until now. After two years of fund-raising, regional authorities recently completed the first two-week stage of a massive clean-up operation, lifting as much as 20 tonnes of debris out of the canyons.
Apparently 11,000 French folk kill themselves every year. Adele Horin could get a column out of this.
No one dared clean up 100 year’s worth of cars? That’s just bizarre to me. In the States everytime someone so much as skates off a highway exit ramp there’s nothing left a day later but the inevitable roadside memorial.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2006 11 11 at 10:52 AM • permalinkCalifornia did that in the Seventies. Getting wrecks out of some of the canyons was hard and expensive. Of course in Calfornia all the bodies had been removed long since. It simply wasn’t considered worthwhile at the time to spend the money to recover the junk.
They started with a small appropriation from the State, and some matching funds from the counties, but in the end, after selling the scrap metal and some collectibles, it came very close to breaking even on cost.
Regards,
RicSo that’s were all the pre-war Hotchkisses ended up.
Posted by Pat Patterson on 2006 11 11 at 11:04 AM • permalinkThere are better and easier ways you can make your final statement…BUT since these are doing as Frank S. sang…“I did it my way”, it ain’t the fall that kills ya’, it’s the sudden stop.
OH and ummmmm….
Of sound mind and presence, I hereby bequeath all of my worldly possessions (which of course INCLUDES CASH) to: El Cid.
Name________________________________
Date________________________________
Please sign and date on the above lines.OH, one more thing, please make sure you have this Notarized.
Thank you in advance….:).
Andrea has it right, wrecked cars along the road get picked up pronto in the States.
I guess the French just aren’t very sympathetic to the plight of Mother Gaia™, if they let all that fuel and oil just sit there for years, seeping into the ground.
Is this a change in culture for the French? If so, what’s next? Bathing daily? With soap?
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 11 11 at 01:35 PM • permalinkJust looked up some figures:
French population (2005): 62 million
US population (2006): 300 million
US suicides (2000): 29,350So we have a suicide rate in the US of 0.001%, compared to a French rate of 0.018%. Is this one of the aspects of Europe the left wants us to emulate?
Posted by Steve Skubinna on 2006 11 11 at 02:39 PM • permalink#6 I was going to comment on how I think that 11000 suicides is a truly saddening number of desperate people, then I read about CSI-Verdun.
As an avid watcher of CSI, CSI-Miami and an occasional watcher of CSI-New York (with a bit of L&O - pick one) thrown in for variety) that cracked me up.
Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2006 11 11 at 03:33 PM • permalinkDo they pull the bodies out of the wrecked cars and just leave the cars there? How slack.
Or do these suicide vehicles still contain decomposing cadavers and/or musty old skeletons? How slack.
Anyway, which is it? Inquiring minds wish to know.
Posted by James Waterton on 2006 11 11 at 03:47 PM • permalinkBarrie-out of curiousity at your question I googled “grand canyon suicides” and found Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon, of which a reviewer says:
Where this book is instructive is in its analysis of death in the canyon. Stupid behavior, ignoring warnings, not taking enough water on canyon hikes and swimming in the off-limits Colorado River account for about 90% of the deaths recorded. It is clear that the Grand Canyon could be remarkably safe if people exercised commonsense and obeyed park rules. It is also interesting to note that males perish way out of proportion to their numbers, indicating that risky and show-off behavior is still unfortunately our birthright.
Now for a little local color: here less than 20 miles north of me in western NC is the Linville gorge which is the deepest cut in the U.S. east of the grand canyon. The gorge is 12 miles long and 2000 feet deep in places with spectacular views and waterfalls. It is also unknown by most Americans-locals and hardcore rock climbers excepted. Hikers are constantly getting lost there and there is an occasional death, mostly from foolish mistakes as described in the grand canyon book.
“With 11,000 people taking their own lives each year, France has one of the highest suicide rates in the western world.”
Russia’s still far out in front though. Gotta try harder, garçons!
Posted by Ed Driscoll on 2006 11 11 at 07:37 PM • permalinkApparently 11,000 French folk kill themselves every year.
They’ve cancelled the Glasshouse on French TV as well?
Forget the Grand Canyon. If you’re going sightseeing in Arizona, visit the lesser-known Canyon de Chelly. And don’t take the ‘jeep’ tour down along the bottom, they’re noisy and dusty. Shell out the small amount of extra green for horses.
#20, Steve, one of your calculations, using your figures, is wrong. I get 0.018% for France, and 0.0098% for the US (not 0.001%, which is off by a factor of 10).
Here are the figures from the WHO for suicides per 100 000:
France: 35.7
USA: 21.7
Australia: 25.4These are all from the year 2001 (not that the first figure in the WHO table is a year, not a rate).
Posted by Dan Phillips on 2006 11 12 at 01:24 AM • permalinkMemo to self: Check the brakes on the Peugeot.
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2006 11 12 at 02:42 AM • permalinkWhen I was in Paris a few years ago an old clapped out truck rattled by. It backfired loudly, the entire city surrendered.
Posted by curious george on 2006 11 12 at 02:50 AM • permalink#36, thanks, Dan, after I posted the number didn’t seem right but I couldn’t spot my error. I should have rounded the .0098 to .01…
So the Froggies only off themselves at not quite twice the rate we stupid dysfunctional Americans do.
Posted by Steve Skubinna on 2006 11 12 at 01:39 PM • permalinkAt least they widen the gap by killing off Gramps and Granny during the summertime…
Posted by Steve Skubinna on 2006 11 12 at 01:41 PM • permalinkNo kidding ... so if in France you want to off yourself, you have to drive a freakin’ CAR into a CANYON!?
Environmentalists should promote gun ownership in France just to reduce the litter.
Posted by Shaky Barnes on 2006 11 12 at 10:25 PM • permalink“With 11,000 people taking their own lives each year, France has one of the highest suicide rates in the western world.”
How do you say ennui in French?
Posted by Shaky Barnes on 2006 11 12 at 10:27 PM • permalinkI used to watch this show on cable called House Hunters International. Basically the show would follow a person and his real estate agent around a foreign city (most interesting so far was Montevideo in Uruguay as they looked for a house or apartment to buy. This one time they went to Paris and the “star” was a young, single French guy. First they showed his current digs: a tiny flat, where every single wall was painted bright urine-yellow. At the end of the show he had picked a refurbished 16th century cellar to live in. It looked like a cave—all it needed was a few bats and a skeleton wearing the mouldering remains of a Girondist uniform chained to the wall. The yellow walls, and the cellar, are all I needed to tell me French people are nuts.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2006 11 13 at 12:36 AM • permalink
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The French waited 100 years to clean up this mess? I’d always heard they had a bad reputation for cleanliness and tidiness, but this is pretty slack, even for them.
Dibs on any Packards.