São Paulo Pride: As Billions Cheer!

A record-breaking one billion people have attended this year's São Paulo pride carnival in Brazil.
Fagburn is, of course, exaggerating - but that seems to be par for the parade these day.
As is the supposedly sheer number of people going becoming an annual news event.
BBC News - and others - put the number at one million.
According to the ever laughable Gay Star News it was "millions".
[Edit: According to Pink News, numbers may have peaked "at over 4 million" in 2011!]
This is thought to be the tenth year running when São Paulo pride has had its attendance figures ludicrously over-inflated - a wonderful ad for the tourism industry, and - I'll hazard a guess here - all the better to get corporate sponsorship.
But making up numbers only a fool would believe is now a gay pride tradition.
In London organisers used to say a million people attended - though this, curiously, was downgraded to 25,000 last year.
An internal document by Brighton Pride - the gay capital of the UK, no less - showed that though official figures given in 2010 were put at 150,000, only about 25,000 people may have attended.
So who still believes any of this crapola?
And who gains?
¡Ay, caramba!
And that's your actual Portuguese.