Dead Pool 24th November 2013

Welcome once again to the weekly Dead Pool Newsletter. As per usual we have a dearth of famous deaths but hopefully we’ve managed to compile an interesting if not readable effort nevertheless. What I did notice this week was the amount of gorgeous MILF birthdays there are, maybe I’m getting a bit desperate in the trouser department, see what you think…

Without further ado…

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Sheila Matthews Allen, 84, American actress (The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure), pulmonary fibrosis.
• Diane Disney Miller, 79, American philanthropist, complications from a fall.
• Marc Breaux, 89, American choreographer (The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins).
• Joseph Paul Franklin, 63, American serial killer, executed by lethal injection.
• Frederick Sanger, 95, British biochemist, laureate of Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1958, 1980).

In Other News

Heart throb and Wolverine actor Hugh Jackman has disclosed that he’s had treatment for cancer. The Australian found a small mark on his nose and at the insistence of his wife he sought medical advice and found he had skin cancer on his schnoz. Luckily it seems to have been operable and they only had to take half his face away. He’s now advocating that everyone use sunscreen. Sounds to me his little fall was a bit more death defying than his cancer.

In a prime example of Darwinism in action, rapper George Watsky thought it would be a fine idea to do a stage dive, from a lighting gantry 35ft above the stage. Unsurprisingly he fell to the floor with a bump injuring himself and a couple of audience members who were a bit too slow to move out of the way like everyone else did. It’s not the first time he’s done this either, last month, he posted a series of pictures on his Facebook page showing himself jump off a first floor balcony into a crowd while wearing a green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume. Good call for next year I think…

Argentine President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has returned to work after undergoing brain surgery. The 60 year old politician had surgery in October to remove a blood clot on her brain found during routine checks after a fall that was suspected to have been brought on by low blood pressure due her lack of a thyroid. Her illness forced her to abandon campaigning for mid-term congressional elections meaning that her allies suffered heavy losses in the 27 October vote, and Ms Fernandez had her majority in Congress reduced. This puts an end to any speculation that she may try to amend the constitution to allow her to run for a third term in office, thank god…

On This Day

• 1429 – Joan of Arc unsuccessfully besieges La Charité.
• 1642 – Abel Tasman becomes the first European to discover the island Van Diemen’s Land (later renamed Tasmania).
• 1859 – Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.
• 1962 – The influential British satirical television programme That Was the Week That Was is first broadcast.
• 1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald, the convicted assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is murdered two days after the assassination, by Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas police department headquarters. The shooting happens to be broadcast live on television.
• 1971 – During a severe thunderstorm over Washington state, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper (AKA D. B. Cooper) parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money. He has never been found.

Deaths

• 1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald, American assassin of John F. Kennedy (b. 1939).
• 1982 – Barack Obama, Sr., Kenyan economist (b. 1936).
• 1991 – Freddie Mercury, Tanzanian-English singer-songwriter and producer (Queen) (b. 1946).

Thank Fuck He’s Dead by Stu

This week we have the terrible tale of Albert Fish.

Hamilton “Albert” Fish is known as one of America’s most notorious child murderers and cannibals. He was born in Washington, DC, in 1870 into a family with an already-established history of mental illness. After his father died his mother put him into an orphanage where he was treated sadistically, he eventually grew to enjoy the physical pain the beatings brought.

After he was removed from the orphanage, he began a relationship with a telegraph boy, who taught him to drink urine and eat faeces a la Bear Grylls (I’m not ever so certain that Mr Grylls really has much experience in the latter.) He also began hanging round public baths in order to see naked boys, and writing obscene letters to women whose names he found in classified ads.

By 1890 he had become a prostitute, and began raping young boys. A visit to a waxworks museum where he saw a model of a bisected penis turned him in to the concept of genital mutilation, and the next few years saw him spiral out of control, experimenting with self flagellation, making his own children paddle his backside with a nail-embedded board, and sticking long pins through his groin and perineum.

The murder for which he is probably best known, is that of 10-year-old Grace Budd. Having befriended her family, he abducted Grace on the pretence of taking her to a birthday party. Having stripped naked in order to avoid getting blood on his clothes, he strangled the girl, cut her up and ate her flesh. In a letter to her family in which he described the killing, and how he himself became hooked on eating children, he chillingly finished with the line “How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of (sic) had I wished. She died a virgin.” So at least that was some consolation for the Budd family.

He boasted that he “had children in every state” and hinted that his tally of victims could have been over a hundred. He was executed on January 16th, 1936 in the electric chair of Sing Sing prison, New York. After his death, his lawyer claimed to be in possession of Fish’s “Final Statement” which had been written by the murderer in the hours before his execution. When he was pressed to reveal the contents of the statement, he refused. “I will never show it to anyone” he said. “It was the most filthy string of obscenities I have ever read.”

Last Week’s Birthdays

Scarlett Johansson (29), Owen Wilson (45), Miley Cyrus (21), Rachel McAdams (35), Danny DeVito (69), Mark Ruffalo (46), Jamie Lee Curtis (55), Goldie Hawn (68), Joe Binden (71), Jodie Foster (51), Larry King (80), Meg Ryan (52), Carly Rae Jepsen (28), Bjork (48), Bo Derek (57), Martin Scorsese (71), RuPaul (53), Linda Evans (71), Delroy Lindo (61), Sean Young (54), Michael Kenneth Williams (47), Boris Becker (46), Mariel Hemingway (52) and Billy Jean King (70).

2013 League Table

[confidential]

Next Week peeps!