Wardonkey, you're right - the planet is a hardy thing which has a way of attempting to heal itself, which makes me think that man is probably due for a damn good retro-virus some time soon (disease tends to knock down the size of any population which is breeding out of control).

I have to admit that the environment is one of my pet subjects - I'm doing a degree in it for the kicks and the more I read, the more worried I become. Added to that fact is the small point that I don't, in general, like people very much ;-)

Importance is all relevant IMO, if you're a Gomphus Vulgatissimus then dragonflys rate pretty highly on your agenda. However, if you're a Homo-Sapien while you can still respect and rejoice in all forms of life, humans probably figure highest on your list of priorities.

If a rat were capable of philosophy would it consider itself vermin? Should it?
I don't see humanity on the whole as being verminous, however, I do believe we should all better understand and be humbled by our own individual insignificance from time to time.

There's no problem considering yourself important if your lifestyle doesn't impact negatively on all around you. Unfortunately man's lifestyle is currently to the detriment of almost everything else. We can't continue the way we're going, it's that simple. Sure we can bury our collective heads in the sand for a generation or two and leave the problem to the next one, however even that may not be possible anymore as the changes in our climate are escalating drastically.

Survival of the fittest isn't applicable to the situation we're in. That's a theory applied to natural evolution over millions of years but no species is capable of drastically evolving over the space of 100 years (which is the time-span man has managed to do most of the major environmental damage in). An organutan can no more adapt to the loss of virgin rainforest in 10 years than man could adapt to living in salt-water when the tsunamis hit.

Be careful, when you call people 'vermin' you might end up condoning all sorts of despicable behavior. 

My thoughts on human kind always shock people unfortunately.

I don't personally condone harming others, however it is an absolute fact that the planet cannot sustain the current biodiversity whilst the human population continues to increase as it is and we pillage more and more in order to satisfy its needs. Like it or not, the signs that we're destroying the planet are all around us, from the numbers of species becoming extinct each year to the changing climate and the massive loss of diverse habitats to make way for commercially driven monocultures.

As good old David Attenborough said not so long ago, humans are irrelevant to life on this earth. We could all disappear tomorrow and life would go on with no adverse effects. If, on the other hand, insects were to die out tomorrow we'd all be screwed.

As we are quite clearly not the most important beings on the earth - a concept, incidentally, pretty much alien before the evil of modern religion surfaced - then given that we are the most 'advanced' it behoves us to be good caretakers. But we're failing miserably at that.

There are too many of us and that's a fact which many like to shy away from because it's just a little bit uncomfortable to admit. What can we do? Well we can become more responsible about breeding and try to view any religion opposed to birth control as the outdated, human-centric piece of BS that it so obviously is. We can also pull our heads out of our butts and realise that our current lifestyle in 'developed' countries is unsustainable and that buying that new MP3 player or merrily jumping in the car to drive 10 minutes down the road for a paper is simply squandering resources which are fast running dry.

Why do I use the term 'vermin' to describe the human race as a whole? A quick look at the dictionary and it becomes clear "destructive, annoying and injurious to health". That's us.

Do you doubt?  Try this http://www.myfootprint.org/ for a bit of an eyeopener.

That's my sermon for today, I'm quite sure I've left some people steaming from the ears but, hey, I never set out to win friends and influence people, I just state my opinions and screw the consequences ;-)

I felt far more upset over the death of the whale than that of Dianna. The comment " thousands of Londoners lined the streets to stare pointlessly at a dead creature they didn't know", wasn't this the same as Dianna. None of us knew her, but that didn't stop people sheding crocodile tears. The whale died in agony, was separated from its own kind and was probably scared witless. Not a nice way to go if you ask me.

Diana was just a human being. Human beings are essentially vermin; breeding far too rapidly and infesting an otherwise perfectly good planet - slowly destroying it.

A whale, on the other hand, lives in balance with nature and is a creature of beauty.

According to me olde itunes, my most listened to at the moment is......in no particular order:

1.   I Want You - Inspiral Carpets Feat Mark E. Smith
2.   The Hardest Button to Button - White Stripes
3.   With You - The Subways
4.   Can't Stand Me Now - Libertines
5.   You & Me Song - Wannadies
6.   Club Foot - Kasabian
7.   Munich - Editors
8.   6 Underground - Sneaker Pimps
9.   Jilted John - Jilted John   (worrying this one as it represents the number of times I've deliberately set out to annoy the other half)
10. Ooh La La - Goldfrapp

She is just unbelievable...I think I must have spent half my night folding and thinking "she's got bloody 74os again hasn't she..."

hmm so my hex didn't work for you Mr End. Sorry about that!

Good luck Msr End. May your table fellows be plagued by the nibblings of a thousand genital crabs ;-)

Good luck to you all today - may fortune not vomit on your collective eiderdowns, nor the winds of misfortune push a small but annoying draft under your doors of fate.

Oh..and Heids?  I'll pay good money for you NOT to post any photos of that Greco. I've seen a nude of him before in a magazine;  he was wearing a hat and covering his 'areas' with one hand. He has small hands.

One of my partner's sprogs got us the Bullseye DVD game for Xmas.....great fun, especially as where you target the dart bears almost no relation to where it ends up. No Jim Bowen voice-over which is a major disappointment!!

This is all Heidi's fault

In the days when I was office based, Heids had the misfortune to work with me. In the summer I always wore flip-flops and she once exclaimed, at full belt as I was walking down the open-plan floor, "Emma!! your flaps are audible!!"  I'm quite sure nobody in that office ever looked at me in quite the same way again.

Emm, thats a nice one of you .. did you have your flaps on?

Oh yes I did and were truly audible that day!

This is me.  #1 looking pensive, or gormless, depending on how charitable you are.                #2 strangling a dog....as you do.



[attachment deleted by admin]

I breath out of my mouth and my nose. Which hole do you breath out of?

PS

If you don't like D O N D watch something else or turn your TV off.

Unless you're either a) asleep (in which case you can't help it) or b) congested, you should be breathing in and out of your nose in the main. Breathing in and out of one's mouth all the time is an occupation reserved for Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel.

As for DOND - I do indeed go off in search of far more intellectually nourishing television.... Pokoyo

Once, far back in the mists of time, I had a long-term boyfriend who was somewhat eccentric (I go for eccentrics) and who had that wonderful quality of being inquisitive about the world and the way things worked.

Now, we all get sleepless nights and many men use this time to play poker or watch porn. Oh how I wished he'd used this particular sleepless night to watch porn...

I was woken up in the dead of night by a very worried man; a man who wanted me to phone the hospital right away as he feared he was dying. This isn't the sort of thing one's mind is equipped to deal with at 3am so I snapped upright and flicked the light on to find him naked and with bumps...large bumps all over his rather skinny frame. I'm not a doctor so my mind was flipping between the possibilities of bubonic plague or some odd grub picked up off a bunch of bananas from Tescos that had burrowed its way beneath his skin and was about to erupt in to a hellish infestation which would have our house quarantined until we, the occupants, had been eaten alive.

I reached out and gently prodded a bump....it moved away. Right; so that was bubonic plague out of the window as a possible diagnosis and back to the possibility of some weird banana-lurking grub.

Oh how I wish I could tell you that that I spent the next week watching men in quarantine suits sealing off the street...

No, it was my man's curiosity about the human body and not some weird grub that was the culprit. It would seem that, whilst most men would happy watch topless darts at 3am, this man had decided to see if testicles can be inflated. Naturally testicles are not like Reeboks and there is no pump mechanism so he'd happened upon the really sterling idea of making a small incision in the scrotal skin and applying a bicycle pump over the hole. After 5 minutes of pumping he'd noted that his testicles did not, in fact, appear to be anything other than red and somewhat sore so he abandoned the trial. At this point he noticed the bumps.

I can tell you that phoning the A&E at St Georges in Tooting in the night and telling the nurse "my boyfriend has blown up his balls with a bicycle pump and now has pockets of air all over his body and thinks he'll die, will he?" was not a high point for me. Neither was repeating the episode to the on-duty doctor who was ushered to the phone and who told me, between muffled bouts of laughter, that his life was in no danger.

I can now say, with some authority, that if any of you chaps should happen to feel the urge to inflate yourselves, fear not because the body will absorb the excess air in approximately 3-4 days.

For the ladies out there - let this be a lesson to you that sometimes it's better to go for the guys with the beige sweaters and a good stamp collection than the ones who are temptingly bonkers.