Dead Pool 4th November 2016

I’d forgive you if you have never heard of any of this weeks deaths before now, we seem to have hit a polar opposite of last year where it seemed that anyone who was someone was dying. Time to free the Evil Flying Monkeys I feel….    

Look Who You Could Have Had:

  • Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, 60, Thai duty-free retailer (King Power) and football club owner (Leicester City), helicopter crash.  
  • Whitey Bulger, 89, American gangster (Winter Hill Gang) and convicted murderer, beaten.  
  • Sir Jeremy Heywood, 56, British civil servant, Cabinet Secretary (2012–2018), cancer.

In Other News

Ex-Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown is being treated for bladder cancer. The former MP  for Yeovil told us that he had been diagnosed three weeks ago and while the outcome was “unpredictable” he had “complete confidence” in the care he was getting at the Somerset town’s hospital. The ex-marine commando led the party between 1988 and 1999, during which it became a growing force in UK politics. “I’ve fought a lot of battles in my life,” he told the website. “This time I am lucky enough to have the magnificent help of our local hospital, and my friends and family, and that gives me great confidence”. Later, he tweeted that he had been “moved” by people’s reactions, but it “did not merit a fuss”. The longest serving leader of the Lib Dems in its history, the 77-year old peer remains an influential figure within the party. 

Actor Charles Lawson, best known as Jim McDonald on Coronation Street, has said he was diagnosed with exhaustion before suffering a mini-stroke on stage. A doctor asked him whether he would consider pulling out of playing Ian Rankin’s  detective Rebus, he said. But Lawson responded that he would “feel like a chicken” if he did. He went on to have the stroke mid-show in Edinburgh this month. “I knew I hadn’t a clue what was happening, and then it just all went black,” he said. Lawson is now back on tour in Rebus – Long Shadows with co-stars Cathy Tyson and John Stahl, and told BBC Breakfast he feels “very well”. He told viewers who may be in a similar position to “listen to your alarm bells”. “I didn’t sleep properly for a month,” Lawson said. “I lost a stone. [On] press night we opened and everything was fine and all reviews were good.” Lawson said: “First night in Edinburgh. Packed house. Second half, Cathy, John and myself were on stage. There’s a 35-page scene, the climax of the piece, and I was looking at John and I was aware very quickly something was wrong. “I went deaf. The colour changed – my vision changed.” He said he could hardly see Tyson, and thought Stahl was messing about by reciting lines from a different play. “I remember feeling annoyed,” he said. “And I remember moving to where I should have been, and there was a piece of me that knew something was wrong. “And then big John just put his arm around me and said, ‘Come on big lad, off you go’.” Lawson went backstage and said he felt fine within 20 minutes, but scans the following day revealed the transient ischemic attack (TIA) – or mini-stroke. 

Although not famous enough for our purposes, Mario Segale, the man after whom video game hero Super Mario was named, has died aged 84. Mr Segale was a successful Italian-American property developer from the US state of Washington. In the 1980s, he leased a warehouse to Nintendo of America who decided to name the star of their new video game after him. Mr Segale joked to the Seattle Times in 1993 that he was “still waiting for my royalty cheques”. Super Mario was originally called Jumpman until Nintendo decided it wanted to give the character a proper name. Mr Segale said it was Minoru Arakawa, who had been tasked with setting up Nintendo of America, who told him the video game hero carried his name. The Mario series is often cited as the most successful video games franchise of all time.

On This Day

  • 1839 – Newport Rising: The last large-scale armed rebellion against authority in mainland Britain.  
  • 1922 – In Egypt, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his men find the entrance to Tutankhamun‘s tomb in the Valley of the Kings.  
  • 1960 – At the Kasakela Chimpanzee Community in Tanzania, Dr Jane Goodall observes chimpanzees creating tools, the first-ever observation in non-human animals.  
  • 2008 – Barack Obama becomes the first person of biracial or African-American descent to be elected President of the United States.

Deaths

  • 1995 – Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli general and politician, 5th Prime Minister of Israel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate (b. 1922)   
  • 1995 – Paul Eddington, English actor (b. 1927)  
  • 2008 – Michael Crichton, American physician, author, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1942)

Last Meals

A convicted double murderer has been executed by electrocution in Tennessee – the first man in the state to be killed that way since 2007. The Supreme Court turned down the last minute appeals of Edmund Zagorski, 63, without comment. Asked if he had any last words in the death chamber, the inmate said “Let’s rock” shortly before the execution was carried out. Zagorski had asked for the electric chair over lethal injection believing it would be a quicker and less painful way to die. Zagorski was pronounced dead at 7:26pm on Thursday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. For his last meal, Zagorski chose pickled pig knuckles and pig tails. Death row inmates are allowed $20 for a special meal before they’re executed. Zagorski was convicted of the killing of two men during a drug deal. Prosecutors said Zagorski shot John Dotson and Jimmy Porter and then cut their throats after robbing them. The two men had come to him to buy a large amount of marijuana.  

Last Week’s Birthdays

Dolph Lundgren (61), Kate Capshaw (65), Tom Savini (72), Dylan Moran (47), Anna Wintour (69), David Schwimmer (52), Stefanie Powers (76), Toni Collette (46), Jenny McCarthy (46), Anthony Kiedis (56), Peter Jackson (57), Willow Smith (18), Stephen Rea (72), Michael J. Anderson (65), Vanilla Ice (51), Clémence Poésy (36), Henry Winkler (73), Jessica Hynes (46), Juliet Stevenson (62), Ivanka Trump (37), Winona Ryder (47), Ben Foster (38), Rufus Sewell (51), Richard Dreyfuss (71) and Dan Castellaneta (61).

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