Those researchers really are amazing.

They never cease to astound me in their quest for knowledge and the new discoveries they keep revealing.

Take for example the Second Hand phenomenon.

First they invented Second Hand smoke.  It had been around for centuries not harming anyone when suddenly they discovered it was lethal and was causing heart attacks and cancer after only a few seconds exposure.  To turn something harmless into something so deadly was quite an achievement and I really have to hand it to them.

They went on of course to prove that there was second hand alcohol and their astounding discovery of Second Hand Obesity.  The latter is of course the scientific fact that if you hang around with your astonishingly obese friend that you'll become astonishingly obese yourself.  Now I find that hard to swallow [if you’ll pardon the expression] but if the researchers say it is fact, then it has to be true.

But now they have discovered the Reverse Second Hand Effect.  Yes – obese people who dally with non-obese become non-obese themselves.

Now, if I hang around with my morbidly obese friend he is the one who loses the weight because my weight is normal.  It's a sort of Second Hand Normality, or even Second Hand Anorexia.  But the problem is that I have been hanging around with him and therefore I have become obese through the original Second Hand Effect.  So now he's thin and I'm fat.  And now the cycle goes into reverse and he starts putting on weight [catching my obesity] and I start to lose it [catching his normality].  So over the months our weights gently undulate from one extreme to the other.

Presumably this phenomenon will spread to other fields as well [but they haven’t invented it just yet].  They will discover that alcoholics who hang around with teetotalers will become teetotalers themselves.  But in the meantime the teetotalers will have become alcoholics.

And what about smoking?  Will they discover that mixing smokers with non-smokers will cause smokers to quit through the Reverse Second Hand Effect?  Will smokers be forced against their will to smoke in pubs and workplaces so that they catch the non-smoking effect?  Or would all the non-smokers become smokers and the gentle swaying from one state to the other start there too?

Where will this all end?  What else is catching?  I'm becoming quite concerned.

I'm steering well clear of red-heads though.

You can't be too careful these days.