“Sales of mobile phone ringtones are set to overtake CD singles, according to new figures” (BBC)
“Britons have replaced New Zealanders as the main source of migrants to Australia, as the British economy falters while New Zealand’s has become the fastest-growing in the West.” (Age)

Went to Brighton Pride on Saturday. It was a lovely day, except for the train trip home, which took three and a half hours, four times as long as usual, and the fact that we had to say goodbye to Sandrine before she left for Canada on Sunday.
Sunday was the hottest day ever in England. I spent most of it in various beer gardens in North London.

“All mail posted in Canada must bear Canadian stamps. That might seem painfully obvious, but apparently large numbers of visitors use stamps from their home countries, especially the United States.” (Frommers)
I have absolutely no comment to make.

When sarcasm works…
“True, “survival of the species” wasn’t a term which had been used a lot lately – at least not since the planet’s population had passed 6 billion last century – but these people were no fools. They’d never gone in for this talk from the trendy lefty pinkoes that the greatest threat to the human race’s survival was global warming, failure to ratify the Kyoto Treaty, the AIDS crisis and the US starting World War III through over-capitalised hubris.
For each of them knew that the real threat to the planet was gay people being accorded even the most basic of human and legal rights. They understood that if society as a whole was obliged to recognise that the gays loved each other too, then the bonds between men and women, their very desire to procreate, would inevitably dissipate. The horror, oh, the horror.
Fortunately it wasn’t just John Howard saying this. As a matter of fact, the Pope himself recognised all that just last week when he authorised the Vatican to release a paper where it specifically stated that the whole concept of gay marriages was “evil”. The paper was further emphatic that “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family. Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law”.
See? True, some did find it a little strange that a man who had never had sex and who was presiding over an institution which has been hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars in legal suits because of wayward priests sexually abusing minors – to the point where Time magazine had a recent cover article saying “Can the Catholic Church Survive?” – should be so doggone dogmatic on a subject you’d think he would be running a million miles from, but there you go. Those who said the Vatican should be concentrating on cleaning up its massive mess – borne of its ancient dogma – instead of calling committed gay people “evil”, just didn’t get it.”
Peter FitzSimons in the (SMH)