Dead Pool 15th November 2015

What a week! The flying monkeys have certainly been busy. Lets begin by dishing out the points! With the demise of Helmut Schmidt, 54 points to Paul G, Ashley and Barry, well done all of you! And with Warren Mitchell kicking the bucket, 61 points go to me!!! I scored at last!!! Woo! With little over six weeks left to go, there’s still hope for all of us!

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Yitzhak Navon, 94, Israeli politician, President (1978–1983).
• Carol Doda, 78, American stripper, kidney failure.
• Andy White, 85, British drummer (The Beatles), stroke.
• Pat Eddery, 63, Irish jockey, eleven-time Champion Jockey, four-time Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe winner, three-time Lester Award and Epsom Derby winner.
• Helmut Schmidt, 96, German politician, Chancellor of West Germany (1974–1982), complications from surgery.
• Allen Toussaint, 77, American musician, producer, songwriter (“Fortune Teller“, “Working in the Coal Mine“, “Southern Nights“) and arranger, heart attack.
• Phil Taylor, 61, English drummer (Motörhead).
• Jihadi John, 27, Kuwaiti-born British Islamic State propagandist, drone strike.
• Warren Mitchell, 89, British actor (Till Death Us Do Part, Death of a Salesman).

In Other News

Convicted paedophile Rolf Harris has been taken to hospital amid fears about his health. The 85-year-old former children’s entertainer, who is diabetic, is feared to have fallen ill after gorging on chocolate and sweets in jail. Harris was taken from Stafford prison, where he is serving nearly six years for carrying out a string of sex attacks, to Stafford hospital, and we all know how shit that hospital is! Singer Vince Hill, 81, told the newspaper that he had heard from one of Harris’s friends that he had “sort of overdosed on chocolate”. He added: “According to him, that was the scale of the problem … he didn’t know he was eating too much chocolate.” Yeah, a diabetic not knowing that too much sugar is bad for him!

Sir Terry Wogan did not host BBC1’s Children in Need appeal for the first time in its 35-year history due to poor health. The 77-year-old presenter said he missed presenting the “wonderful, inspiring evening” on Friday night. A BBC spokesman said that Wogan was having a procedure on his back and, under doctor’s orders, cannot host a six-and-a-half hour show, adding: “We are so sorry that Terry won’t be able to host the show as we know how passionate he is about Children in Need. We wish him a very speedy recovery.” The veteran presenter recently admitted that he “probably drinks too much”, but walked for 30 minutes a day and ate a lot of fruit and vegetables. Wogan told the Daily Record he had no plans to retire: “They’ll have to carry me off stage. I do seven hours on my feet of live television for Children in Need every year, so the day that I can’t stand up is when I will stop doing it. So is this it?

Former US President Jimmy Carter is responding well to cancer treatment, according to his spokeswoman. Doctors in Atlanta have told the 91-year-old the tumours in his brain are being treated successfully and there are no signs of further cancer growth. However, the spokeswoman said that doctors will continue tests. Mr Carter, who served as president of the US from 1977 to 1981 and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, announced his illness in August. He said then he would receive radiation and chemotherapy for four tumours that had formed in his brain. Media reports have suggested that Mr Carter was not experiencing any pain or discomfort during the treatments, and that his work with The Carter Centre had not been scaled back. The former president had been planning to travel to Nepal this month for volunteer work, but the trip was cancelled due to “civil unrest” in the country, so he can’t be all that bad.

Suspended Fifa president Sepp Blatter is in hospital after what has been described as a “small emotional breakdown”. Blatter, 79, who has led world football’s governing body for 18 years, was provisionally suspended for 90 days last month amid a corruption scandal. He was admitted last week, initially for a check-up, said his former publicist Klaus Stoelhker. “He is very happy and he is relaxing a few days,” he said. Last Friday, Blatter’s lawyer Richard Cullen confirmed that the Swiss had undergone stress-related health checks in hospital.

Michael Phelps, the American swimmer whose 22 Olympic medals make him the most decorated Olympian of all time, has revealed that he was “in a really dark place” after he was arrested last year for drunk-driving – and admitted to feelings of “not wanting to be alive anymore.” Shortly after his arrest, he entered a treatment facility in Arizona. He says his 45-day stint rejuvenated him, but at the time he felt frightened. “Hug-hug, kiss-kiss, turn in my phone and go to my room. It’s probably the most afraid I’ve ever felt in my life.” Phelps was pulled over in September 2014 after being clocked doing 84mph in a 45mph zone in Baltimore. He failed two sobriety tests and was charged with DUI, excessive speed and crossing double lane lines. Phelps’s coach, Bob Bowman, said “I had been living in fear that I was going to get a call that something had happened. Honestly, I thought, the way he was going, he was going to kill himself. Not take his own life, but something like the DUI, but worse.” However, Phelps has not drunk alcohol since his arrest, and has vowed not to drink until the Rio Olympics are finished next August. After years of enduring workouts with a hangover, Phelps is training clean. So, let’s see what happens next August…

And finally, a daughter grieved over the body of a stranger after hospital nurses mistakenly told her her mother was dead. Bernadette Walsh spent almost half-an-hour stroking and holding the hand of the dead woman – until medics revealed her mother was alive on another ward. She had not been told her mother had been moved out of the room on an orthopaedics ward, where she had been for the previous week and had been replaced by a patient who later died. The dead woman was said to bear a striking resemblance to her mother. It was only when nurses told Ms Walsh that “Roy’s on his way” that the mistake began to unravel. The 53-year-old told the staff she did not know anyone called Roy and nursing staff realised the mistake, apologised and took her to another ward where her mother Elizabeth, a 82-year-old widow from Whitefield, was recovering from a hip operation. Mother of four Ms Walsh, from Droylsden, Greater Manchester, said: “No one told me she’d been moved so I went into the room to visit her, the same room she’d been in all week. “Mum’s duffle coat was on the chair. The woman in the bed had grey hair and had thin bones like my mum. She had a pink nightie like my mum. I had no reason to think it wasn’t mum. “She didn’t look right and I didn’t think she was breathing. I went out of the room to ask one of the nurses what was wrong and they said ‘don’t you know? She died half-an-hour ago’. “Well, I just lost it then. I’d only spoken to her the previous night. I was in shock and completely hysterical. They were trying to calm me down. The nurses were saying I should stroke her hand and show her some love. So I was holding her hand and stroking her. I called my sister and told her she was dead. “Then one of them said ‘Roy’s on his way’ and I said ‘who’s Roy?’. They took me into another room and said ‘that’s not your mum’. They took me to my mum on another ward and she was sitting in a chair looking at me, saying ‘what’s up?’ I told her I’d had a shock. I couldn’t really tell her ‘they just told me you’re dead’.” Oh my days!

On This Day

• 1859 – The first modern revival of the Olympic Games takes place in Athens, Greece.
• 1971 – Intel releases the world’s first commercial single-chip microprocessor, the 4004.
• 2007 – Cyclone Sidr hits Bangladesh, killing an estimated 5,000 people and destroying parts of the world’s largest mangrove forest, the Sundarbans.

Deaths

• 1630 – Johannes Kepler, German astronomer and mathematician (b. 1571)
• 1983 – John Le Mesurier, English actor (b. 1912)

Last Week’s Birthdays

Neil Young (70), Tracy Morgan (47), Whoopi Goldberg (60), Leonardo DiCaprio (41), Demi Moore (53), Ryan Gosling (35), Anne Hathaway (33), Jimmy Kimmel (48), Prince Charles (67), Calista Flockhart (51), Gerard Butler (46), Tara Reid (40), Stanley Tucci (55), Gordon Ramsay (49), Jack Osbourne (30), Gretchen Mol (43), Lou Ferrigno (64), Wallace Shawn (72) and Condoleezza Rice (61).

Next week peeps!