Dead Pool 14th January 2024

After last weeks points extravaganza, this week seems little bit of a let down. Never mind though, the Flying Monkeys are out and about, ready to reap a few names for next week.  

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Franz Beckenbauer, 78, German football player (Bayern Munich, national team) and manager, two-time world champion and Ballon d’Or winner. 
• Adan Canto, 42, Mexican actor (X-Men: Days of Future Past, Designated Survivor, The Cleaning Lady), appendiceal cancer. 
• Georgina Hale, 80, British actress (Mahler, The Devils, Castaway).
• J. P. R. Williams, 74, Welsh rugby union player (Barbarians, British & Irish Lions, national team), bacterial meningitis.
• Peter Crombie, 71, American actor (Seinfeld, Se7en, My Dog Skip). 
• Jennell Jaquays, 67, American game designer (Dungeons & Dragons) and video game artist (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong), complications from Guillain–Barré syndrome. 
• Annie Nightingale, 83, English radio and television broadcaster (BBC Radio 1).  

In Other News

Baywatch star Nicole Eggert has revealed that she has been diagnosed with breast cancer at 51 years old. In an interview with the Flying Monkeys she revealed that she was diagnosed in early December with stage 2 cribriform carcinoma breast cancer. She first noticed the symptoms after she gained 25 pounds in a three-month period. Nicole was also experiencing a lot of pain in her left breast in October, and she found a lump during a self-exam. “It really was throbbing and hurting. I immediately went to my general practitioner and she told me I had to immediately go get it looked at,” she said. “But the problem was, I just couldn’t get an appointment. Everything was booked. So I had to wait until the end of November to get it done.” Finally, she was able to get a mammogram and three biopsies on her breasts. “This journey’s been rough for me,” Nicole said. “This hasn’t been a breezy sail through life.” However, she always tried to keep a positive outlook, saying: “I always read inspirational quotes and corny stuff, but it gets me through.” Nicole plans on having the cancer surgically removed. Regarding the lump, she said: “I can definitely feel it. It’s there. It needs to be taken out. So it’s just a matter of do I have to do treatment before the surgery, or can they perform the surgery and then I do the treatment after.” The actress isn’t quite sure what her next steps are because she doesn’t know if the cancer has spread. “I have panics where I’m like, ‘just get this out of me,’” she said. “You sit there and it’s in you and you’re like, every second that passes and it’s inside of me, it’s growing, and you’re just like, you just want it out.”  

Sven-Goran Eriksson has revealed he has “at best a year left to live” after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Eriksson collapsed while on a 5km run last year, which prompted doctors to investigate. They told the 75-year-old he had suffered a stroke, and subsequently discovered advanced pancreatic cancer. “They don’t know how long I had cancer, maybe a month or a year,” the former England manager told the Flying Monkeys. “Everyone understands that I have an illness, that is not good. Everyone guesses it’s cancer and it is. But I have to fight as long as I can. I have maybe at best a year, at worst a little less, or at best maybe even longer. You can’t be absolutely sure. It is better not to think about it.” Eriksson had been working as a sporting director for Swedish side Karlstad and stepped back from his role. He said he is trying to maintain a positive mindset. “You can trick your brain. See the positive in things, don’t wallow in adversity because this is the biggest adversity, of course, but make something good out of it.” Eriksson added: “I was fully healthy and then I collapsed and fainted and ended up at the hospital. And it turned out that I had cancer. The day before I had been out running five kilometres. It just came from nothing. And that makes you shocked. I’m not in any major pain. But I’ve been diagnosed with a disease that you can slow down but you cannot operate. So it is what it is.”  

Roger Daltrey is more than ready to die. In fact, he reckons he’s ‘in the way’. The London-born musician and co-founder of The Who, 79, has had his fair share of health woes in the past, having contracted viral meningitis while touring America in 2015. After falling ill, he said he saw the ‘exit sign’ and genuinely didn’t believe he’d make it through, which appears to have shifted his attitude toward death. ‘I didn’t think I was coming back and I thought about my life,’ he said. Daltrey added in a new interview with the Flying Monkeys: ‘My dreams came true so, listen, I’m ready to go at any time. My family are all great and all taken care of. You’ve got to be realistic. You can’t live your life forever.’ He added that ‘people my age, we’re in the way. There are no guitar strings to be changed on this old instrument.’ Daltrey also admitted that he would ‘consider’ joining the assisted dying organisation Dignitas should ill health make him a ‘burden’ on his loved ones. He praised 83-year-old TV icon Dame Esther Rantzen, who revealed her stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis last year and who has since spoken about the option of assisted dying should her treatment fail to improve her condition. ‘I think she is incredibly brave to raise the subject and I’m kind of there too, so I have thought about it,’ Daltrey said. Clarifying that he is not ill himself currently, he added: ‘No, but if I became a burden on everyone I’d consider it. A good friend of mine, a lovely woodsman called Tom, he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer. If I had stage 4 pancreatic cancer I wouldn’t have chemo. I’d take the morphine and go down.’ Daltrey recently announced that 2024 would be his final year as curator of Teenage Cancer Trust after 24 trailblazing years. The music star will continue as a Teenage Cancer Trust Honorary Patron, following his tireless fundraising and advocacy for the charity for nearly a quarter of a century.

On This Day

• 1907 – An earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica kills more than 1,000 people.
• 1969 – USS Enterprise fire: An accidental explosion aboard the USS Enterprise near Hawaii kills 28 people. 
• 1973 – Elvis Presley’s concert Aloha from Hawaii is broadcast live via satellite, and sets the record as the most watched broadcast by an individual entertainer in television history.

Deaths

• 1898 – Lewis Carroll, English novelist, poet, and mathematician (b. 1832).
• 1957 – Humphrey Bogart, American actor (b. 1899).
• 1977 – Anthony Eden, English soldier and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1897).
• 2009  – Ricardo Montalbán, Mexican actor (b. 1920).
• 2016  – Alan Rickman, English actor (b. 1946).

Last Week’s Birthdays

Jason Bateman (55), Kevin Durand (50), Faye Dunaway (83), Mark Addy (60), Grant Gustin (34), Carl Weathers (76), Dave Grohl (55), Orlando Bloom (47), Natalia Dyer (29), Ruth Wilson (42), Liam Hemsworth (34), Michael Peña (48), Bill Bailey (59), Howard Stern (70), Jason Connery (61), Rachel Riley (38), Jemaine Clement (50), Evan Handler (63), Rod Stewart (79), Imelda Staunton (68), J.K. Simmons (69), Joely Richardson (59), James Acaster (39), Michelle Forbes (59), and Amber Benson (47).