One of those nights

New Year's Eve scorecard: 313 cars torched (plus 83 by ricochet) and 258 arrests despite a police presence of 25,000. The French are getting so touchy about these statistics that they are "breaking out" a separate category of torched cars as in "cars accidentally exploding because they were too close to cars that were intentionally torched" (voitures brûlée par propagation). French authorities (who seem to have much more authority over bean counting regulations than over their own territory) confide that such levels of violence are well within what is now considered to be acceptable inevitable. They do express concern that the average age of festive French youths is ever younger as witnessed by incidents involving 8 to 10 year olds. No doubt some new statistical gimmick will be found to finesse such hard realities in time for 2008.