Dead Pool 19th July 2015

Welcome all, to a points laden newsletter! Ash, Mark and Paula each get 125 points for correctly guessing that Jules Bianchi would die! Fair play to them all, that’s a huge score for someone that wasn’t one of the Big Three!

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Satoru Iwata, 55, Japanese game programmer (Super Smash Bros., Pokémon), president and CEO of Nintendo (since 2002), bile duct cancer.
• Aubrey Morris, 89, British actor (A Clockwork Orange, Love and Death, The Wicker Man).
• Alan Kupperberg, 62, American comic book artist (The Amazing Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man), thymus cancer.
• Jules Bianchi, 25, French Formula One driver, head injuries sustained in a race collision.

In Other News

South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu is in “good spirits” after his admission to hospital on Tuesday for an unspecified infection, his family says. His daughter Reverend Mpho Tutu said the infection was “below the belt” but was not in his prostate, where his cancer lies dormant and was being well cared for. It is going to take a few days before he returns home, she said in Cape Town. He retired from public life in 2011 but continues to travel widely. The 83-year-old Nobel peace laureate cancelled a planned trip to Rome in December following another infection. His hospitalization comes a few days after he renewed his wedding vows to his wife Leah Tutu to mark their 60th wedding anniversary.

Pelé has undergone surgery on his back in São Paulo,  according to reports. Local media reports say the 74-year-old was suffering from a trapped nerve and has had back surgery at the Albert Einstein hospital. Poor old Pelé underwent prostate surgery at the same hospital in May. The procedure was to treat a condition that creates urinary problems because of an enlarged prostate, doctors said at the time. Tests conducted after that surgery showed there were no tumours.

George HW Bush is in “fair condition” in a hospital after falling and breaking a bone in his neck and is expected to recover from the injury without surgery, his spokesman said. The former US president, who is 91, sustained the injury during a fall at his family home in Kennebunkport, Maine, on Wednesday. Bush’s spokesman was quick to downplay concerns, tweeting that the 41st president was “fine” but likely to be placed in a neck brace. He later added that Bush’s wife, Barbara, was said to have said: “A slip and fall is not going to take out a World War II pilot.” Bush – the oldest living former US president – was hospitalised in Houston over the Christmas period last year for treatment of shortness of breath. In 2012, he spent a lengthy spell in hospital to be treated for bronchitis and other complications. Bush also has lower-body Parkinsons, which causes a loss of balance, and has used wheelchairs since at least 2011. Think I’ll disagree with Barbara!

Cheering news from Buckingham Palace. The Queen has decided to stop breeding corgis or having any more young dogs, because she’s now 88 and can’t bear to leave them behind when she dies. If that’s not a glaring admission that she feels that she’s on the way out, then I don’t know what is!! I’ll not mention the Hitler salute…

And finally, a 101-year-old woman has said she felt no fear as she broke her own world record for being the oldest abseiler, by descending 94m down the side of the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth. Wind and rain did not deter Doris Long, who has been honoured with an MBE for her charity fundraising, as she abseiled down the tower. She last performed the feat on her 100th birthday in May 2014. Long said she was “living in hope” to be able to repeat the challenge next year, when she will be 102.

On This Day

• 1545 – The Tudor warship Mary Rose sinks off Portsmouth; in 1982 the wreck is salvaged in one of the most complex and expensive projects in the history of maritime archaeology.
• 1843 – Brunel’s steamship the SS Great Britain is launched, becoming the first ocean-going craft with an iron hull or screw propeller and becoming the largest vessel afloat in the world.
• 1900 – The first line of the Paris Métro opens for operation.
• 1983 – The first three-dimensional reconstruction of a human head in a CT is published.

Deaths

• 2013 – Mel Smith, English actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1952)
• 2014 – James Garner, American actor, singer, and producer (b. 1928)

Last Week’s Birthdays

Donald Sutherland (80), Brigitte Nielsen (52), Harrison Ford (73), Kirsten Bell (35), Bill Cosby (78), Diane Kruger (39), Will Farrell (48), Elizabeth McGovern (54), Vin Diesel (48), Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall (68), Forest Whitaker (54), David Hasselhoff (63), Corey Feldman (44), Phoebe Cates (52), Cheech Marin (69), Richard Branson (65), John Glenn (94), Cheryl Ladd (64), Richard Simmons (67), Patrick Stewart (75), Harry Dean Stanton (89), Jackie Earle Haley (54), Matthew Fox (49), Michael Flatley (57), Fatboy Slim (52) and Jesse Ventura (64).

Next Week peeps!