Dead Pool 8th September 2019

Welcome all, more points to dispense this week with the demise of Robert Mugabe!! Both Shan and Jamie had him as a Cert, so 155 points each, and Chrissy and Mark get 55 points each! Well done everyone, slight movement in the league table with only the last quarter of the year to go.  

Look Who You Could Have Had:

In Other News

Comedian and actor Kevin Hart was taken to hospital with “major back injuries” on Sunday following a car accident in Los Angeles. According to the California Highway Patrol, Hart was being driven in his 1970 Plymouth Barracuda on Mulholland Highway at the time of the accident. His wife Eniko Parrish told news reporters on Monday that the comedian was awake and “going to be just fine”. The accident happened just after midnight. The driver, Jared Black, lost control of the car and it tumbled into an embankment, the report stated. Black also sustained major back injuries. A third passenger was unhurt. Black – the fiance of the third passenger, Rebecca Broxterman – was determined not to have been driving under the influence at the time of the crash. Hart was taken to Northridge Hospital Medical Centre and the driver was taken to another hospital, the patrol report said. Photos published by the media showed the car had suffered considerable damage. It looks like the fire department had to saw the roof off to free the two occupants who were pinned to their seats.    

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro will miss a planned summit on the fires ravaging the Amazon rainforest to prepare for surgery, an aide has said. The operation will be the far-right leader’s fourth after he was stabbed in the stomach during his presidential election campaign in 2018. Brazil may send a representative in his place or ask for the summit to be postponed, the spokesman said. More than 80,000 fires have broken out in the Amazon rainforest this year. The controversial leader was elected to the presidency in October 2018, a month after he was stabbed at a campaign rally. His surgery is to correct an incisional hernia and is his fourth operation since the attack. Speaking to reporters outside his official residence, the president vowed on Monday to defend his Amazon policy “even in a wheelchair” at a UN General Assembly meeting on 24th September. Let’s hope hr has a complication on the operating table.  

It is the kind of incident that might convince one of a higher power, or not. A priest has accidentally shot himself in the face with a spear gun while scuba diving. Despite the three-foot dart impaling his head, he survived. Connie Hallowell, from Umkomaas, in South Africa, called his escape a “miracle”, obviously… The near-tragedy happened as he was spearfishing in the sea off Scottburgh Beach, south of Durban, on Saturday. “I put my gun down while I was trying to get some sinkers out of the rocks,” the 48-year-old father-of-two told us from his hospital bed. “A big wave came, and with that wave in action, I tried to remove the gun, and the trigger went off and fired the spear into my face.” The arrow smashed straight through his right check and out in front of his left ear – but crucially missed his brain and eyes. He said: “When I tried to move my head, I couldn’t, and I realised it was a spear. I managed to stand up, and I just thought let me stay awake. I screamed for people to help me while I walked back towards the shore.” He was able to make it to dry land where lifeguards treated him while a fisherman shortened the embedded projectile with an angle grinder. Doctors were able to remove the spear after he was airlifted to hospital. “I can see, I can talk, everything is going well. I’ve got a bit of numbness, but I will be much better,” Mr Hallowell said on Sunday. “It’s amazing that I am here at all.” He added that he had no plans to quit spearfishing and was already planning his next trip. God is planning his next ‘miracle’ to cleanse the earth of priests as we speak. 

On This Day

  • 1727 – A barn fire during a puppet show in the village of Burwell in Cambridgeshire, England kills 78 people, many of whom are children.
  • 1888 – In London, the body of Jack the Ripper’s second murder victim, Annie Chapman, is found.
  • 1914 – World War I: Private Thomas Highgate becomes the first British soldier to be executed for desertion during the war.
  • 1966 – The landmark American science fiction television series Star Trek premieres with its first-aired episode, “The Man Trap”.

Deaths

  • 1965 – Dorothy Dandridge, American actress and singer (b. 1922)
  • 1999 – Moondog, American-German singer-songwriter, drummer, and poet (b. 1916)
  • 2017 – Don Williams, American musician (b. 1939)

Last Meals

Larry Swearingen, 48, was the latest recipient of the lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for his part in the brutal strangling of 19-year-old Melissa Trotter, a Montgomery county girl he claimed was his friend. The Texas death row inmate maintained his innocence until the very moment of his execution for the 1998 rape and murder of the student who was found strangled in woodland with a pair of pantyhose around her neck. Despite Swearingen’s repeated pleas of innocence and a number of push-backs on his execution date – along with Trotter’s family – prosecutors stood firm on their belief that he was her killer. A last-ditch appeal filed by Swearingen’s attorneys was denied by the US Supreme Court just minutes before his scheduled execution time of 6pm. As a result, Swearingen was escorted into the execution chamber, strapped to an IV, and at 6.35pm, he was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital. ‘Lord, forgive them,’ Swearingen said into a microphone hanging above his head after the warden asked if he had a final statement. ‘They don’t know what they’re doing.’ He then began narrating his impending death, saying he could hear the drug going into his arm, before saying he could ‘taste it’. ‘It’s actually burning in my right arm. I don’t feel anything in the left arm,’ he said. Almost immediately, he took a short breath, then started to snore quietly. He stopped moving. He never opened his eyes and never looked at the witnesses who were there on his victim’s behalf, including her parents, who watched through a window just a few feet from him. At 6.47pm – 12 minutes after the lethal dose was administered – Swearingen was pronounced dead and became the 12th inmate to be put to death in the US this year, and the fourth in Texas – the country’s busiest state for capital punishment. But what was his last meal I hear you ask… Well… In Texas, you ain’t getting anything special, and this is the reason why. 

Back in 2011, white supremacist Lawrence Russell Brewer, 44, was served two chicken fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions, a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger and a cheese omelette with beef mince, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and jalapenos. If that wasn’t enough, he was also given fried okra with ketchup, a pound of barbecued meat with half a loaf of white bread, three fajitas and a meat pizza. For dessert he was served a pint of ice cream and peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts. He was also given three root beers to wash it all down. But Brewer thumbed his nose at the system one final time and didn’t have a single bite, telling staff at the Huntsville prison he wasn’t hungry.  

The next day, Texas lawmakers were so outraged that the practice of final meals on death row was brought to an immediate halt. State Senator John Whitmire said Brewer had ordered such an elaborate meal to “make a mockery” of the system. “It’s wrong to treat a vicious murderer in this fashion. Let him eat the same meal on the chow line as the others.” And rightly so, Brewer was convicted of the racist murder of James Byrd Jnr – who was chained to a truck and dragged to death 21 years ago. Along with Shawn Berry, the killers chained Mr Byrd’s ankles to the back of a truck and dragged him for three miles along roads in Jasper, Texas, on a Saturday night in June 1998. They had offered Mr Byrd a ride home but drove him to an isolated spot where they beat him, spray-painted his face and urinated and defecated on him before chaining him to the vehicle. He was alive during much of the dragging before his head and right arm was severed. The killers dumped his body in front of a black cemetery. King was convicted in February 1999 and became the first white man in modern Texas history to be sentenced to death for killing a black person.

Last Week’s Birthdays

Evan Rachel Wood (31), Shannon Elizabeth (45), Leslie Jones (51), Toby Jones (52), Julie Kavner (68), Dario Argento (78), Chrissie Hynde (67), Doug Bradley (64), Idris Elba (47), Michael Keaton (68), Raquel Welch (79), Rose McGowan (46), Carice van Houten (43), Paddy Considine (46), George Lazenby (80), Christopher Morris (54), Beyoncé (38), Michael Berryman (71), Charlie Sheen (54), Jean-Pierre Jeunet (66), Pauline Collins (79), Keanu Reeves (55), Salma Hayek (53), Keith Allen (66), Zendaya (23), Burn Gorman (45), Lily Tomlin (80), Steve Pemberton (52), Gloria Estefan (62), and Barry Gibb (73).

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