Dead Pool 1st August 2021

This week we could almost make up a band with those who have died. However, we have a world first in the news section, an actual video on the Dead Pool Newsletter! You heard right, a bloody video! Quick shout out to Nickie once again for finding loads of stories recently, makes editing the newsletter really easy 🙂  

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Dieter Brummer, 45, Australian actor (Home and Away, Neighbours, Underbelly: The Golden Mile). 
• Rick Aiello, 65, American actor (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Do the Right Thing, The Sopranos), pancreatic cancer.   
• Mike Howe, 55, American heavy metal singer (Metal Church, Heretic). 
• Joey Jordison, 46, American musician & drummer (Slipknot, Murderdolls, Sinsaenum). 
• Lee Man Tat, 91, Hong Kong food manufacturer, chairman of Lee Kum Kee. 
• Mo Hayder, 59, British author (Birdman, The Treatment, Pig Island), complications from motor neurone disease.   
• Dusty Hill, 72, American Hall of Fame musician (ZZ Top) and songwriter (“Tush“). 

In Other News

If you remember, we covered the death of a last tribesman by Covid back in March, just so happens there’s more than one last tribe!!!  Karapiru Awá Guajá had survived a massacre that killed most of his family in the Brazilian Amazon and lived for 10 years alone in the forest, but he could not escape the pandemic. Karapiru, one of the last of the hunter-gatherer nomadic Awá of Maranhão state, died of Covid-19 earlier this month. With only 300 Awá thought to remain, they have been called the “earth’s most threatened tribe”. In the 1970’s, Karapiru lost almost everyone he knew in a genocidal attack on his tribe by settlers. His wife, daughter, siblings and other family members were killed, and he was shot in the back. But his resilience became a source of inspiration for activists working to protect indigenous and un-contacted peoples. Awá lands have been under attack since the discovery of iron ore in the late 1960’s. Skilled archers, the Awá live scattered in family groups over a large area, and travel at night using torches made from tree resin. Many have had no contact with the outside world. Karapiru was estimated to be 75 when he died. The Indigenist Missionary Council a Catholic NGO working with indigenous peoples, reported his death as “a victim of Covid-19”, despite him having had the Covid vaccine. Fiona Watson, research director at Survival International, first met Karapiru in 1992. “I just thought I cannot believe this man survived on his own for 10 years, not speaking to anybody,” she says. “He spoke so quietly, he whispered, that really struck me because I thought, of course, he’s had to become invisible in order to survive. He started talking and smiling, and I thought how is he not more traumatised? He knew I wasn’t [an enemy], he had no rancour, no bitterness. That astounded me. That magnanimity. What an extraordinary human being, to be able to sort of forgive people in a way and to be able to carry on your life.” 

Bob Odenkirk has collapsed on the New Mexico set of Better Call Saul and is in hospital. The actor was filming a scene when he “went down, and was immediately surrounded by crew members who called an ambulance.” Odenkirk is suspected to have suffered a heart related incident on Tuesday while filming but is now in a stable condition. His son has issued a statement saying he will make a full recovery. But while the circumstances around his collapse are unknown, anti-vaxxers have decided to blame the coronavirus vaccine. An article by right-wing Big League Politics used the misleading headline: “Better Call Saul Star Bob Odenkirk collapses on set after receiving experimental Covid-19 vaccine.” Odenkirk announced he had got the jab four months ago. Side effects are rare and are more likely to include a “sore arm” or “headache” – as per the NHS website. These effects occur in the first week of getting the jab, if at all, not four months later. But this has not stopped those who wish to discredit the vaccine. It is not the first time there have been unfounded conspiracies about the vaccine. Anti-vaxxers have also claimed the jab makes them magnetic!!!!  

An entitled Ruby Rose has posted a tearful video to fans, revealing that it took her hours to get accepted into an emergency room after she had complications from surgery. The Orange is the New Black star said that “I did have a procedure and I had to have surgery, but it was fine and the surgery went well. But then I had a few complications and I had to go to the emergency room to go to the hospital.” She said that she “called an ambulance and it took hours to find a hospital that would be able to take me or anyone”. Rose began to cry as she told fans emergency rooms were “rejecting taking people and I… and my case was quite serious”. The Australian actress said she believes the difficulty getting into hospital was due to the pandemic. “Please stay safe, try to keep everyone safe. Get vaccinated if you can, please,” she said. “It’s just… it doesn’t need to be this hard for everyone and I just can’t imagine all the other people that are having way more, way, way more serious situations happening right now.” Rose did not disclose what procedure she had originally had that led to complications, but we suspect it was dramatitis.…  

A Scottish climber has reportedly died in an avalanche on K2 – the world’s most dangerous mountain – as he attempted to take a new route to the summit. Rick Allen, from Aberdeen, was attempting to climb the world’s second highest mountain to raise money for the Partners Relief And Development charity. But according to reports from the base camp in Pakistan, the 68-year-old was caught in an avalanche on the mountain’s south-east face. His two climbing partners, Jordi Tosas of Spain and Stephan Keck of Austria, were reportedly rescued without major injuries. The death has not been officially confirmed but a Foreign Office spokeswoman said: ‘The British High Commission in Islamabad is aware of reports that a British citizen has died climbing K2 and stands ready to assist.’ Sadly, if donations equal his life’s worth, the fundraising effort had only received £170 of the £10,000 target at the time his death was reported. Mr Allen had previously been presumed dead in 2018 after falling from an ice cliff during a solo climb to the summit of Pakistan’s Broad Peak that, at 8,047m, is the 12th highest mountain on Earth. However, his rucksack was eventually spotted by a cook at the mountain’s base camp before a drone was used to locate him and to guide rescuers to his location. K2 is considered to be the world’s most dangerous mountain as it has a fatality rate of around 25 per cent compared to just 6.5 per cent on Everest, which is considerably more  than Mount Snowdon in Wales, as rescuers say two women are “very lucky” to be alive after they were hit by lightning on the summit. The pair were in a five-strong group by its 3,560ft peak when they were struck on Wednesday afternoon. The Llanberis Mountain Rescue Team were called out by North Wales Police to help rescue them. The team said one woman “was falling in and out of consciousness”, while the other had minor injuries. Both women were evacuated from the summit to a lower slope, before a coastguard helicopter took them to hospital in Bangor, Gwynedd. Rescuers said neither woman had sustained life-threatening injuries. The rest of their group, which had been visiting north Wales, were “clearly shocked but otherwise uninjured”, said rescue co-ordinator Phil Benbow without a hint of irony. He added: “The advice generally is don’t be on the top of a mountain when thunder and lightning is about.” No shit Sherlock!  

And finally, a tweet this week by @ScarredForLife2 went viral for correctly stating that the life expectancy of a character in a public information film was roughly 4.3 seconds, and had this video to prove it! For those of us who don’t remember, or who might be too young, public information films were a series of government-commissioned short films, shown during television advertising breaks in the United Kingdom. They were common place in the 1950’s until the 2000’s however became obsolete with the closure of the Central Office Of Information. The films advised the general public on what to do in a multitude of situations, ranging from crossing the road to surviving a nuclear attack!! Many of these films were aimed at children and were shown during breaks in children’s programmes during holidays and at weekends. Many of them involved or were narrated by celebrities of the day, which included the likes of David Prowse, Donald Pleasance, John Hurt and Jimmy Savile. Some of the more memorable  films included the Charley Says animated series which advised children on the various dangers they might encounter in their daily lives, interestingly, Charley’s growls were voiced by none other than Kenny Everett. You might also remember Clunk Click Every Trip and the ever frightening AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance, which stopped a generation of kids from having sex forevermore! 

On This Day

• 1774 – British scientist Joseph Priestley discovers oxygen, prior to this everyone suffocated at birth. 
• 1834 – Slavery is abolished in the British Empire as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 comes into force.  
• 1893 – Henry Perky patents Shredded Wheat. Quite a feat to make straw a breakfast staple. 
• 1965 – Frank Herbert‘s novel, Dune was published for the first time.  
• 1976 – Niki Lauda has a severe accident that almost claims his life at the German Grand Prix at Nürburgring..
• 1981 – MTV begins broadcasting in the United States and airs its first video, “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles.

Deaths

• 30 BC – Mark Antony, Roman general and politician (b. 83 BC)
• 1903 – Calamity Jane, American frontierswoman and scout (b. 1853)
• 2013 – John Amis, English journalist and critic (b. 1922)
• 2014 – Mike Smith, English radio and television host (b. 1955)
• 2015 – Cilla Black, English singer and actress (b. 1943)

Last Meals 

The famous Tollund Man ate a modest but nutritious meal before being hanged around 400 BC, a new study reveals. Scientists have re-examined the last meal of the famous Tollund Man, a naturally mummified corpse found in a bog on the Jutland peninsula in Denmark in 1950. The new analysis reveals that he likely ate an Iron Age meal of fish and porridge packed with seeds, consumed sometime between 12 and 24 hours before his death.

Although it sounds fairly ordinary, threshing waste containing the wild seeds was used as an ingredient in the porridge, which is suggestive of ritual practices. They also found Tollund Man had several parasitic infections – likely because he consumed undercooked meat and contaminated water at some point prior to death.

Tollund Man is a bog body – meaning it’s been incredibly well-preserved over more than 2,000 years in the unique conditions of a natural peat bog. Previous research has determined his cause of death as murder by hanging for unknown reasons before his body was placed in the bog. Tollund Man may have been a criminal or was possibly even sacrificed as part of a ritual practice ‘to keep the gods satisfied’. Tollund Man’s gut contents had been analysed forensically when he was discovered in 1950, uncovering traces of cereals and wild plants. When Tollund Man was autopsied in 1950, his intestines were still preserved, and the alimentary canal from the stomach to anus was removed in one piece with its contents still in place.

Now, experts from Silkeborg Museum in Denmark, say they have been able to reconstruct the last meal of Tollund Man in greater detail than ever before – right down to how it was prepared. The researchers used a few millilitres of material from the large intestine for analyses to give the ‘most detailed study’ yet on the gut contents of a bog body.

‘Since knowledge of plant macro-fossils and the methods for analysing gut contents have improved greatly since 1950, we decided to re-investigate the gut contents of Tollund Man,’ said study author Dr Nina H. Nielsen from Museum Silkeborg.

‘In this way, we get very close to a specific situation in the past – you can almost imagine how they were sitting by the fireplace preparing the barley porridge and the fish.

‘We can now pretty much reconstruct the recipe of the last meal of Tollund Man.

Porridge was likely a typical dish in Iron Age northern Europe, and fish was also eaten in this period, although it did not make up a substantial part of the diet. His last meal was cooked in a clay pot, likely using water from a lake or bog, according to the experts.

His ‘quite nutritious’ porridge consisted of barley, flax seeds, pale persicaria seeds and other seeds in ‘negligible amounts’, including gold-of-pleasure seeds. Seeds of Pale persicaria – which grew as a weed – were likely removed as grain was cleaned during threshing and collected along with the grain. The use of threshing waste containing pale persicaria in the porridge could be connected to the human sacrifice ritual, or it might have been part of ordinary Iron Age cooking.

‘As for now, we don’t know whether the use of threshing waste in the Iron Age cuisine was normal practice or whether this ingredient was only used at special occasions like human sacrifices,’ said Dr Nielsen. Threshing waste has also before been found in the Grauballe Man, found in a peat bog near the village of Grauballe in Jutland, Denmark. Together, the plant ingredients alone provided nearly half of the daily caloric intake for a person with limited physical activity.  Traces of a further 20 plant species were also found in the guts, but they made up less than 1 per cent and were probably not an intentional part of the meal. As well as the seeds, threshing waste including sand, charcoal and other detritus seems to have been used as an ingredient in the porridge.

Eggs from whipworm, mawworm and tapeworm were common in the gut contents of Tollund Man and show that he was infected by intestinal parasites. Whipworm and mawworm have previously been found in several bog bodies, but it is the first time that tapeworm is reported. The most likely cause of the tapeworm infection was that Tollund Man at some point had consumed raw or undercooked meat infected with tapeworm cysts. The infestations of whipworm and mawworm reflect poor hygiene, as these are transmitted by eggs present in human faeces, which contaminate the soil in areas where sanitation is poor. The researchers claim their study ‘shows that it can be beneficial to re-analyse bog body gut contents’ to reveal secrets of the past. Because of their exceptionally good preservation, bog bodies can provide detailed insights into how the people looked, dressed and died, as well as their last meal, their health and where they lived.

Last Week’s Birthdays

Jason Momoa (42), Adrian Dunbar (63), Michael Biehn (65), Wesley Snipes (59), Emilia Fox (47), Dean Cain (55), Christopher Nolan (51), Arnold Schwarzenegger (74), Jaime Pressly (44), Hilary Swank (47), Laurence Fishburne (60), Frances de la Tour (77), Terry Crews (53), Lisa Kudrow (58), Jean Reno (73), Carel Struycken (73), Sian Gibson (45), Wil Wheaton (49), Stephen Dorff (48), David Warner (80), Elizabeth Berkley (49), Jonathan Rhys Meyers (44), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (51), Taylor Schilling (37), Donnie Yen (58), Kate Beckinsale (48), Jason Statham (54), Sandra Bullock (57), Helen Mirren (76), Kevin Spacey (62), Nana Visitor (64), Eve Myles (43), and Mick Jagger (78).