Friday at 3pm - good time for a protest. St Paul's Cathedral - good place for a protest!

This was put on by Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), whose soul mission since 1999 has been to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS). HLS is a contract animal-testing company. This campaign by SHAC was started after film shot secretly inside Huntingdon, and shown on British television, showed staff punching and laughing at the animals in their care. A few people were fired and HLS very nearly went bust as a result of SHAC's actions, but have since recuperated somewhat (pity).

Charming.

This guy was at the wrong protest hehe!

And I don't think this guy even knew where he was.

While biking home after work along Regent Street, there were choppers hovering in the sky above me, traffic more jammed than usual, and loud noises coming from further up the road. After fighting my way through the traffic I eventually found this mob.

Way up there, where everyone was gazing, was...

U2! This was a publicity stunt by the BBC, and was completely unannounced, although word-of-mouth (or word-of-txt) spread fast!

I thought Bono was going to jump off at one point, but no ;)

U2's new album is to be released here next week, although it has already been leaked on the Internet and the initial reviews aren't good hehe - bummer Bono!

After all that excitement, there was more just around the corner - never a dull moment in London Town! This guy has transformed his bike into a mobile drum kit, and he is absolutely amazing at beating the shit out of it for about five minutes at a time! He calls his set 'Puncture Kit', and plays at random locations all over the country. Check out his Facebook page here.

Believe it or not he does actually ride that thing! The front wheel comes off, the metal bar with the percussion instruments goes on, and Bob's your nana - awesome!

Half of them were impressed, and half were completely confused - like the old duck in the middle there hehe!

The weather was a bit crap for a decent ride this weekend, so something random (and cheap) instead - the Kinetica Art Fair. By definition, kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect.

Clap clap!

Push the button, be amazed for about 5 seconds, and then get bored and move on to something else.

Laser shows - awesome!

Some random crap for the living room.

Nintendo Wii wind chime hehe.

Pole dancing robots hahaha!

What's he taking a photo of?! ;)

Drawing machines.

Room of lights that follow you as you move through them.

Something to take care of the mosquitoes. Apparently after this thing zaps the little fuckers they fall into a power cell that somehow produces a small amount of electricity from them to supplement the running of this thing - very cool!

Man-animal-machine hybrid - weird! It walks slowly across the floor, and has sensors on its neck to detect obstacles.

I don't know, but it looks cool!

This is actually a table - something for a doctor's surgery?

Here's something for you to try: say each of the words one-by-one as fast as you can (Orange, Blue, Green, etc), and then say each of the colours you see one-by-one as fast as you can (green, purple, orange, etc). How many times do you accidently get the word and colour mixed up? :)

Back in November I put up a video of snippets showing the constant battle I have with ignorant bloody London pedestrians. I said it last time, and I'll say it again: I do not run red lights on the bike, I do stop at pedestrians crossings if someone is waiting to go, I don't bike on the footpath, and I don't go out of my way looking for this shit to happen - it just does because Londoners seem to be off with the fairies half the time and blatantly step out in front of me or make no effort to get out of my way! As a (reluctant) pedestrian I too ignore the little red man at the traffic lights and so forth, but I sure have a bloody good look for traffic before I step foot on the road; evidently that's just too hard for some people to comprehend and this is the inevitable result.

So, here is Part 2 of Aaron vs. the idiots of London!

As you'll see, pedestrian #2 bit the dust today, but I hit this one a lot harder than the last one in November. The intersection on the left is where it happened (Aldwych looking towards Fleet Street). It's downhill, it's a corner, and so a pedestrian's view is somewhat obscured - all the more reason not to cross on a red man but they still do it! As I was flying around here today I had a car out of camera shot to my right meaning I couldn't swerve out of this guy's way. I was also on the brakes anyway to allow the other pedestrians crossing to get out of my way, but unfortunately the fella I hit saw me, panicked, and froze, leaving me nowhere to go. I'm not sure exactly how fast I hit him - 30km/h at a guess. My left bar-end took the full brunt (above-right), and to give you some idea of just how hard the impact was, my bar-end should be level with the green line. Those things are bolted on there bloody tight; tight enough that I can't force it back down with my bare hands without loosening it first. He was a fairly big guy and eventually picked himself up off the road claiming to be alright, but he'll have a bloody good mark on him!

After another week of doom and gloom it was bloody nice to see the sun on the weekend!

Katie and I caught a train south, passing through some really shitty areas of London (there's no shortage of them) which soon gave way to lush English countryside.

90 minutes later we arrived in Eastbourne, 100kms south of London on England's southern coast, and my goodness - what a boring place!

90,000 bored people call Eastbourne home, and get to enjoy the Museum of Shops...

A popular set lunch from just £3.60...

And a very uninviting beach and pier hehe.

Just as well we didn't come here to be entertained - we came here to climb those bloody big hills and cliffs in the distance! It was extremely windy, and Eastbourne must get a lot of it because those things on the left along the beach are wooden barriers with shingle blown hard up against them.

View looking east over Eastbourne.

After a good slog up the hills we reached an exposed area with winds stronger than any I think I've ever been in. Fun times!

This is what we came to see - the white chalk cliffs of Beachy Head!

I had good fun throwing shit down there ;)

The Beachy Head cliffs are the highest chalk sea cliffs in Britain at around 160 metres above sea level.

Naturally, they're a hotspot for suicide attempts, for when the English just can't take the shit that is their country any longer. An estimated 20 attempts are made each year. During a recovery effort of one successful attempt last year, a British coastguard crew were nearly crushed by a second suicide when someone drove off the cliff and narrowly missed them!

The cliffs continue for ages, eventually becoming the Seven Sisters. However, by this stage the weather - true to form - had completely packed in, and we jogged back to Eastbourne in pissing rain.

Same shot as above, just a couple hours later. Typical! Welcome to Britain.

Marylebone Road is a 3-lane arterial route through central north London, and tonight it was gridlocked like nothing I'd seen before. Nothing was going anywhere (except bikes hehe), including this ambulance with lights blazing and a paramedic running in and out to yell at cars hahaha - good stuff!

I carried on to find the big hold up, and before long found another ambulance but this one was blocking a lane and being hooked up to a tow truck.

Further down the road the traffic was still going nowhere, and in this situation London drivers lose all sense of reality and enter a football-like frame of mind where it's one big free for all and every gap needs to be exploited, but it all usually ends in a draw. That being the case I saw a motorbike almost wiped out by a 4WD cutting lanes to fill such a gap, I had a couple of close calls myself, and the cause of it all was some idiot who'd run a red light about an hour earlier (because he saw one of those gaps open up probably) and the road was getting oil and anti-freeze cleaned off it.

I found this on the way to work this morning - a cyclist being loaded into the back of an ambulance (looks like the one that broke down on Monday night hahaha!) after being wiped out by the dickhead getting interviewed on the right. Last week I put up a second video of my constant battle on the bike with dickhead pedestrians, but what I haven't done yet is make a video of all the near-misses I've had with cars since coming to London, and there are a lot of them! I'm just hoping such a video won't include a collision with a car in the same way my two pedestrian videos have finished with me colliding with people hehe ;)

This is what happens at my company when the CEO has a birthday: 20-something pizzas...

A shit load of garlic bread and chicken pieces and whatever other unhealthy goodies Dominos does, and a lot of fizzy stuff to wash it down with - hell yeah!

And they're off!

Nom nom nom!

While down at one of our many local pubs around here for a couple drinks tonight, a cop car and paddy wagon came screaming along, stopped at the intersection outside for a few seconds, then both tore off in different directions. A minute later two cop cars went screaming down the side-street across the road, and before long I could here more coming. So me being me grabbed my jacket, left my pint where it was, and told everyone I'd be back hehe. As I got outside three more cops went screaming down the same road, and there was a chopper flying quite low overhead! After a couple minutes of running I found the shot on the left - nine cop cars spread all over the place in this little street. All the hoohar was over the car on the left (the Volvo) which had just been stolen and followed to this area. The original cop car and paddy wagon that tore off in different directions were trying to box them in by blocking both exits to this street, but it turns out they didn't have to as the Volvo rammed up the arse of the Mercedes on the right instead and all three occupants fled hehe - little bastards! Apparently they had one of the occupants in one of the nine cop cars but the other two were still elsewhere. So after that little bit of action, I went back to the boozer and finished my beer ;)