Okay, so my 8-day holiday to New York turned into a 15-day trip due to someone in Iceland lighting the blue touch paper and standing back. Grrr.

Still, I could've been stuck in somewhere really nasty, like India, or Pakistan, or Romania... Like my friend was! :-)

Galapagos damage 'must be curbed'
From BBC News:
Famed for their unique biological treasures, the Galapagos Islands face irreversible damage unless tourism is curbed, according to conservationists. On the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, the director of the Darwin Foundation says there is only a decade to avoid an ecological disaster.

In a BBC interview, Gabriel Lopez calls for limits on the level of visitors. Last year, the number of tourists reached a record of 173,000, a four-fold increase over the past 20 years. "The Galapagos is still the best preserved archipelago in the world. But what's at stake if current trends continue is that the Galapagos will be lost. Yes the Galapagos will still be there but the richness will be lost."

The rising numbers have led to a boom in the construction of hotels and a surge in imports from mainland Ecuador. And the result is a sharp spike in the number of alien species arriving in this fragile ecosystem: 112 were recorded in 1900 but by 2007 the total had leaped to 1,321. At the harbour in the main town of Puerto Ayora, I watched dock workers transfer crates and sacks of rice and maize from cargo ships on to barges for the journey ashore.

The airport on Baltra island, which serves the archipelago, sometimes handles half a dozen flights every day - the number has doubled in the last eight years. The aircraft cabins are sprayed before landing but evidently some insects are getting through. One of the most aggressive is the fire ant - tiny but with a powerful sting - an example in its own right of the evolutionary principle of survival of the vicious.

In a field outside the village of Bellavista, insect specialist Henri Herrera scraped away leaf litter to reveal a seething mass of the tiny red creatures. "They're getting everywhere - it's a disaster. It could even mean that for some species the ants stop evolution." Fire ants are known to attack baby birds and young tortoises and their march from one island to another seems inexorable.

Other threats include a parasitic fly which attacks young finches and mosquitoes - which could serve as a vector for diseases which are known to exist on the mainland but have not yet arrived here. The government of Ecuador has drawn up an action plan to curb this menace. Criticised by the UN agency UNESCO - which in 2007 listed the Galapagos as a world heritage site in danger - the authorities are now introducing tougher measures.

The director of the Galapagos National Park, Edgar Munoz, accepts that invasive species pose the most serious risk to the islands but says the government's actions will tackle the threat. "What we're hoping to accomplish is fifty more years in which any problems will be diminished."

Earlier conservation efforts - to cull several islands of feral goats which eat the plants giant tortoises depend on - have proved successful but some experts warn that eliminating particular insects will be far harder. For Ecuador, a developing country, the Galapagos provides a major source of revenue. But a balance will need to found if the islands are to preserve what makes them so special.
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If you only do one thing today, make the decision to not visit the Galapagos Islands. They need to be preserved. As much as I agree with, understand and accept the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, and as much as I would dearly love to visit this important site, it is far more important that it is preserved than I get the satisfaction of visiting. I would ask you all to do the same. Thank you.

Congratulations to Dawn and Wayne for tying the knot over the weekend!

Best wishes for the future.

I was just on a bus and the bus stopped at a bus stop (no surprise there), but I was standing by the exit doors and there was a woman on the pavement ready to get onto the bus via the exit. I told her she had to go to the front of the bus, and pay like everyone else. She said: "I don't have to pay," and she showed me her Police Officer badge and ID.

Oh, I'm very sorry, madam WPC, but if you were trying to act covertly you really screwed up by getting on the bus via the exit where someone is going to tell you to go to the front of the bus (like I did). I really don't know whether police officers get free travel on buses or not, but I doubt it. If she was on duty, she should've said so. If she wasn't on duty, then she should have paid like everyone else at the front of the bus.

Next time this sort of thing happens, I'll just take their name and ID and make a complaint. Seriously, just use the front of the f**king bus like everyone else.

Police officers can be so f**king annoying sometimes. You try to do your bit by making people pay for the services they use (which reminds me, BAN BENDY BUSES! RAH! RAH! RAH!), and YOU get made to look like a fool.

People who cut you up on the pavement. No, not thugs with knives, but ordinary citizens who think it's perfectly reasonable to walk right across your path, and then 'tut' when you walk into them. Well, I'm sorry, but if you had used your brain a little more you mightn't have walked in my way and forced me to walk into you! Ass-hats.

Someone is setting off fireworks at midnight. I don't want to seem like an old fart, but I'm f**king p*ssed off with people setting off fireworks at all hours of the morning. Just last month, some religious f**kwits set fireworks off at 3am to celebrate the Islamic festival of Eid - when Muslims stop fasting for Ramadan. Did they have fireworks in Mohammed's time? No? So why use them? And why at F**KING 3AM?!

Oh, but you can't complain because "it's a religious celebration, and everyone should be allowed to practice their religion"... B*LL*CKS! Next time someone sets off fireworks at 3am, I'm calling the police. There are laws against this, and why should religion be exempt?

I watched Macbeth last night at The Gielgud Theatre in London. Fabulous performance by the entire cast. A little hard to understand given that it was set in what appeared to be Russia, but nonetheless a great interpretation.

Though the performance should be the greatest part of the evening, I did manage to see Patrick Stewart and get his autograph; that was pretty cool.

Won't someone please give him a knighthood? Come on, Your Majesty!!!

Hey, to the arsehole-faced bint who pushed a woman who was trying to get off the Tube carriage out of the way so she could get on, wise up, b!tch! Let people off the carriage FIRST!

And, to the African man taking a piss outside my local Sainsbury's, take your ass to the public toilets 2 minutes down the road. I don't know if it's okay to piss up a wall in your home country, but it's not acceptable here. F**k off back to your home country if you want to do sh!t like that. You disgust me.

If you really feel that you need to drink a can of Stella Artois at 7:23 in the morning, please don't do it on the Tube. It's disgusting if you have to sit next to someone doing that. Seriously, 7:23am?! F**king drunks! Oh, and when finished, take the empty can with you. Funnily enough, the Tube is NOT a f**king litter bin!

The only pleasure I got from this experience was seeing the guy get off the train and realising that he'd left behind another can in a blue carrier bag (obviously from a corner shop) on his seat. That'll learn yer! Ha!

With a title like that, you just know this is going to be a doozy...

Right, when standing at a bus stop that has a bin with ashtray feature on top of it, if you're smoking, PUT THE CIGARETTE OUT IN THE ASHTRAY! If you simply drop your fag end on the floor, you are actually littering, and there's fines for that kind of thing. No, smokers, you are not immune to the law. Just like cyclists who go through red lights, you are not immune to the law, okay? Being foreign and not understanding the laws of England is not an excuse. You must know that dropping litter is wrong? Or is that why you came to England in the first place? Because you've dirtied your own countries up so much that you need to spread your dirt and disgusting habits elsewhere. (Let's not even get into the Tuberculosis epidemic that sweeping Eastern Europe, and how you're all bringing it here...)

Now, foreigners, if your car or 'builder's' van has a broken rear light, it has to be fixed. It's an offence to drive with a broken light. But that doesn't bother you, does it? You don't care. You just come here and disrespect us, and our pathetic government bend over backwards and hand you the bleedin' dildo! While on the subject of cars, driving the wrong way down a one-way street (especially the one outside my front door) is against the law. Please read the road signs and use your F**KING BRAINS!!! (if you have any).

One final point, try and learn the language of the country you're in. I worked in Slovakia for three weeks, and even though I was only there for that short time, I had Slovakian lessons. Coming to England, you should learn English so you fit in. If you don't, you end up staying in little groups of your own people and never integrating with the indiginous population, and then you complain that we're the problem!!! Bugger off back to your own country if you don't like it here!!!

And no, I'm not a member of the BNP, nor do I support them in any way. I'm simply fed up of not hearing English spoken on the streets, and I'm fed up of foreigners coming here and disrespecting our country. We were great once, we can be again, but it won't be through mass immigration of a hundred different cultures. MULTICULTURALISM HAS NOT WORKED IN BRITAIN.