Now, it appears that the Russian youth are at it as well.

According to PetaPixel:

If you’re afraid of heights you may want to look away, and you should certainly never make friends with these daredevil photographers from Russia. We here in the U.S. have memes, young Russian photographers, it seems, have “skywalking”: the newest extremely dangerous photography fad to hit the Internet.

Skywalking basically involves a photographer making his way up to a death-defying height, and snapping a photo that’s meant to give you both a perspective you’ve never seen before, and that feeling like your stomach just made its way into your throat.

And that post links through to Russian photographer Vadim Mahorov’s photoblog, which has an awesome mix of “skywalking” pictures for you to Luke at (geddit?!?) and some great Urbex stuff as well, à la Silent UK.

Prepare to lose PLENTY of time having a look at the rest of the site – it really is full of amazing examples of urban photography.

This time they’re going up the 72 floors (plus the crane on the top) of The Shard in London – and they’ve got another bunch of spectacularly beautiful photos from the top.

Go see. Go see now.

This taken on the Port Vell Aerial Tramway in Barcelona

And then today: geese.
And this quote, after a close encounter with a gander (while having a gander at his missus):

A real photographer would have advanced again, made him angry again, and got a shot of him being angry, while very slightly risking death, again.

I don’t know, hey Brian? If a swan can break a man’s arm (anyone ever seen this happen, by the way?) surely a goose could at least take out a finger…

Take care out there.

This is one of those times.

Because I have discovered a site devoted entirely to bollards in London, handily entitled “Bollards of London“. Yes, that’s bollards, the singular of  which is defined as “one of a series of short posts for excluding or diverting motor vehicles from a road, lawn, or the like”.

Yep – this site is full of photos and painstaking descriptions of bollards. Who would be interested in bollards, you might ask?
These people would:

And yes, before you ask, that is an inverted cannon bollard.

What a beautiful piece of street furniture, the fact it just sits in the middle of a paved area with its beautiful rusting tapering body (outwards) with a narrowing curved top that leads to an almost door knob type handle.

And here’s a description of how and who found it:

My fellow ‘bollardarians’  from left to right @sophontrack @itsyourlondon @AboutLondon @Rigsbyhatstand and @philipkelly29 with the upturned ‘cannon’ bollard in the foreground. I will take this opportunity to thank them all again and to let you know it really was a hunt for this wonderful piece of street furniture. At the beginning of the ‘hunt’ we had a coffee on St Mary’s Axe not 100 yards from this site, it really was a bollard hunt/search with plenty of other little treasures found along the way. Badges are being prepared and made for this great bunch of people.

A wonderful hunt with lots of treasures (a coffee shop) found along the way. Pfft. Why would anyone be interested in… wait. What? There are badges?

I WANT A BADGE!

If you want a badge from Bollards of London, you’ll have to go bollard hunting. In London. And if you’re going to do that, then why not visit Leadenhall Market after trying some LSD?

If you do want a different place to visit in central London the Leadenhall Market is most unusual because of the colours/artwork/bollards/dragons which you’ll find everywhere. In part two of this post I’ll reveal the bollard I was looking which we found in the most unusual place.

Dragons everywhere? Riiiight.
Incidentally, “unusual place” in which they found the bollard turned out to be on a road, which didn’t seem that unusual to me. If they’d found it up a tree or in a lift, I would have considered it more “unusual”, as it is, I consider it disappointingly “usual”, aside from the fact that they then wrote 500 words about it. That strikes me as being a little unusual.

It’s only a matter of time until I begin the Bollards of Cape Town blog but I have some way to go to catch up with the prolific Bollards of London, who are well over 200 posts, each one of them about bollards. In London.

Amazing.

However, today’s subject is no less edgy [really? - Ed.], catchily-entitled Slaying The Stereotype Of The One-Parent, Two-Parent Family, and wherein I comprehensively fail to change anyone’s mind about how little paternal effort and thought typically goes into bringing up children.

That failure aside though, please do go and support my efforts anyway, but keep the insults to yourselves this time.

Thanks.

Fun song. Great energy, great voice.

There’s a free download of this version available on soundcloud here, and you can find shedloads more good music and links on the official site here.

Michael Dubin (that’s “Mike” in the video above) describes the video as

very irreverent, smart, fun, very Internet…

DSC has already raised over $1m in venture capital and despite its rather mundane product offering, it might well be one to watch.

Artist Jon Rafman’s photo project The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, named after the nine lenses mounted on a Google Street View car, collects the strange and beautiful images they capture by accident from around the world.

Slightly different from the previous Steetview art project that we featured here. These are raw images, but there are some weird, some beautiful, some just downright interesting photos on the Guardian site – and a whole lot more via that 9-eye link.

Go. Enjoy.

He looks a little mournful as he was being transported illegally from SA to Russia, when he was detained at Heathrow earlier this year because he wasn’t microchipped.

The animal was one of four being transported from South Africa to Russia, however checks revealed it wasn’t micro-chipped, breaching strict regulations on the movement of endangered animals.

This detention led to two pieces of bad news for our feline friend: firstly, the promises of strippers and vodka were suddenly just history, and secondly, he will now spend the rest of his days at a UK wildlife park, on average about 20ºC colder than his usual habitat in South Africa. I hope this serves as a lesson to other cheetahs trying to make the move from Africa to Northern Europe illegally. You will be captured and punished.

You can see more photos of the cheetah seized at Heathrow in the imaginatively-named Cheetah Seized At Heathrow set. And while you’re at it, don’t miss the excellent Marriage Cheat Sheets Exposed set, in which some marriage cheat sheets are exposed, including some confusion over Maria’s siblings. Like whether or not they actually exist.