Oh, look! Harry knows his numbers!

Sunday was the big Pride Day parade in Toronto. The heat was hot, the ground was dry, and the air was full of sounds - music, applause, cheers and the sort of racket that only an enormous number of people can make.

In a story on its website, CBC News said organizers estimated the crowd at 1.3 million.

In addition to the back-and-forth between the "a splendid time was had by all" and the "homosexuality is an abomination" factions, the usual contingent of CBC-bashers showed off the synergy between their mathematical abilities and deductive reasoning skills.

Alert reader "HarryPomm" - ha, ha, ha - asked (and answered),

Are you kidding 1.3 million people? That's almost half the people in Toronto, crammed into a fairly narrow parade route. Doesn't the CBC ever check facts, any logic says that this is impossible. So therefore it must be political.

Meanwhile, alert reader "SMC-BC" could only wait furiously by his tv for the new FOX News-style channel to get rolling.

The claim that there were 1.3 million people at the event is untrue and not possible.... This is one more reason I'm glad Sun News is coming. Maybe honest reporting will come with it.

He would not be heartened to know that the Toronto Sun, published by the same company that will run Sun News and, presumably, use its resources, reported that "More than 1 million people flooded Yonge St. Sunday to take part in the event."

Perhaps Mr. Pomm and Mr. -BC can team up at next year's parade and count the attendees themselves. I suspect they'll give up about the time they run out of fingers, assuming they can get past the inevitable argument over which one has to count the left side of the route.

Errrrrrrata.

I - believe it or not - hesitate to correct people online because - well, because I look like this guy "dorsyn", correcting another guy, "carbonhog", who posted a comment to a recent blog by editorial cartoonist Tom Toles in the Washington Post:

hey carbonhog- the word is emmigrating. immigrants come in and emmigrants leave. Duh.

Or mmaybe dorsyn's just typing on a Mmacbook.

Also, everything he knows about politics he learned from John Frankenheimer's "The Manchurian Candidate."

Commenting on a story about scientists who recovered a piece of a Japanese spaceship that may have collected dust samples from an asteroid, alert reader "Pixelfix" says,

I wonder what sort of contamination screening they have for this. Did they all watch and pay close attention to The Andromeda Strain ( the original not the stupid remake ). Who knows what might be lying dormant, frozen in that dust.

Having not seen the "stupid remake" I can't hazard a guess as to the deeply flawed contamination screening procedures that might have been employed in that two-part made-for-tv movie, but no doubt Robert Wise's 1971 feature employed the sort of rigorous testing that will protect modern Earthlings from the kind of alien-microbe-slash-Japanese-movie-monster that might spring forth from Hayabusa's sample collection chamber.

Are there any other things from the science fiction of forty years ago you'd like to bring to bear on the problem, Pixelfix? Maybe have HAL9000 run through the data - oh, no, wait - wait - he's just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours - so we can't do that. Maybe we could ship it up to Moonbase Alpha and - what? You don't say. Sonofagun.