Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

Bon Weekend!!

Friday… Went out for something to eat at Zizzi which was nice. Their olives are the best!! I had a lovely pizza with Mushrooms, olives, pepperoni, parma ham and artichokes! Yum!! By the time I’d dropped Nat off and battled through the 10mph roadworks on the A516 - A38 on-ramp it was gone 1 am by the time I got in…. good job I had no work on Saturday!

Saturday… didn’t do a lot tbh, went to McArthur Glen with the newly engaged Brahn and Lola (Congratulations again guys!!) and had some lunch and some coffee from Gloria Jeans. I was gonna go to the Green Room but a. I coulen’t be bothered and b. No one ended up going. I just cooled out at home and watched the exorcist 2… it was pretty bad.

Sunday… well me and Nat were gonna watch Anchorman round at hers but I was awoken by a text from her saying we couldn’t for whatever reason so needed to rethink the day’s plans…. Went round her house about 12:30 and then we went into Derby for some lunch at the Standing Order. After that we wandered around some shops before realising it was a beautiful day and it would be rude not to go to markeaton park. We chilled out there til nearly 7 getting a tan! Then to top it all off we went to see the long awaited Die Hard 4.0! I tell you something…. It was fucking fantastic but didn’t feel like a Die Hard Movie. Don’t get me wrong, John Mclane was very much himself with the usual no nonsense wisecracks (”Last time I saw her she was at the bottom of an elevator shaft with an SUV parked up her ass”) but the feel of the movie and the action was definately not Die Hard. Don’t let this make you think that I enjoyed it any less though because it was still a kick ass action film that ticked all the right boxes for me. Well, there’s nothing out thats worth seeing now til the 20th when not only does Transformers come out, the Simpsons movie is also released.

Speaking of Transformers, I’ve changed my text message alert tone to the sound the transformers make when they change. It’s cool in a hugely geeky way!

Now, on to something a bit more serious. I noticed a couple of people on MySpace have posted this shock-jock bulletin regarding seal clubbing and animal testing. I say “shock jock” because they are images showing the suffering of these animals. Pictures of seals with their skulls split wide open and monkeys being experemented on with their limbs restrained. To these bulletins and to the people that aproach me in the street I say the same thing. Open your eyes a little wider!

Yes, the things seen in those images are horrific, no animal should have to suffer to that degree. Seal clubbing is something I cannot agree with and to that extent the bulletin is correct. It does need to stop. But the animal testing part just gets my goat. Just think where we’d be in the field of medecine if there was no animal testing? No chemotherapy, no antibiotics, very few vaccines. We’d be pretty much fucked without it.

So next timeyou hear someone talk about putting an end to animal testing, tell them to think about the last person they knew to make it through cancer or a heart bypass or overcome a potentially life threatening disease and think if they’d still be around if there was no animal testing.