It's one thing to cancel a festival -
even a kimchi festival! - but it's not nearly as drastic-sounding as
this move from France:
Hands get shaken; hands get kissed. And the light cheek-to-cheek peck, known as "la bise," is a social greeting, woven in at the very youngest age.
Some observes joke that before the French could ever give up such social graces, pigs would fly.
But then ... swine flu.
With official publicity campaigns about the H1N1 virus, to directives on avoiding practically any close encounter of the corporal kind, the country has been put on alert as the flu season gets under way.
