Dead Pool 14th/21st October 2018

Firstly let me apologise for the lack of a weekly newsletter last week, life got in the way and to be fair, not many famous people died over the last fortnight. However, we now have a bumper two week edition full of facts and news. 

Look Who You Could Have Had:

In Other News

John McCririck, 78, sparked serious health concerns last week when he appeared on Bit On The Side. John, who presented on Channel 4 racing for over 30 years, began: “I’m getting better. I couldn’t speak for about three months. It really was awful.” The telly personality was struck down with the flu back in January. He added: “I’m recovering, but only slowly. “I’m not well. I’m never going to fully recover because age has taken over.” John urged audiences to “set yourself a target that you will reach. Have an aim, an ambition, a drive.” The former CBB housemate, who appeared in the 2005 series, said being sacked from Channel 4 contributed to his poor health. “I wake up in the morning now and I have no purpose in life,” he admitted. “I’ve worked over 50 years in my life. Work comes first, because you can’t look after your family if you’re not working. “You feel you’re lacking something.” Viewers were gobsmacked by John’s telly appearance and rushed to Twitter worried. One person tweeted: “It’s so sad when you see a usually strapping old man fade to virtually nothing! Wishing John well.” “This John McCririck interview is really uncomfortable. He’s speaking so incoherently,” said another. We’ll give him three months….       

Bill Turnbull has described dealing with cancer every day as “relentlessly boring” and admitted he asked doctors to stop his “unbearable” chemotherapy. The former BBC Breakfast anchor, who’s now a presenter on Classic FM, said: “I just couldn’t bear it any longer.” After that round of chemo in July – his eighth – he went on to have one more. Turnbull said he coped with the “bad phases” of chemo by watching “lots” of TV, including all 67 episodes of Game of Thrones. The broadcaster, who was diagnosed with incurable prostate cancer in November 2017. “It’s the fact that having cancer is so relentlessly boring. You go to bed at night thinking about it, and it’s still there when you wake up. “It’s there all day, every day – a fact of life you have to get used to. And it’s a massive pain in the backside.” Turnbull, whose cancer has spread to the bone – across his pelvis, hips, legs and spine – said of chemo: “Each round felt worse.” He lost his sense of taste, and some days could only cope by lying down to wait “for the feeling of crushing fatigue and nausea to pass”. By round six, “it felt as if the chemo was now taking on a life of its own, like some malevolent gremlin”. Turnbull said the disease has stopped spreading but “hasn’t been beaten back entirely”, adding: “We’re at a stalemate.” He said: “I’m still optimistic about hanging around for some time yet.”  

Selma Blair has revealed she has multiple sclerosis (MS). The 46-year-old actor shared the news with fans on Saturday, explaining how she had been diagnosed with the lifelong condition, which affects the brain and the spinal cord, in August. Writing on Instagram, Blair said that despite only just being diagnosed, she has been experiencing symptoms for years, leading her to believe she might’ve had the disease for more than a decade. The Cruel Intentions star begins the candid post by recalling a recent wardrobe fitting for Another Life, the 10-part Netflix series she is currently filming for, explaining how she has the “deepest gratitude” for the show’s costume designer, Allisa Swanson, for helping her into her clothes. “She carefully gets my legs in my pants, pulls my tops over my head, buttons my coats and offers her shoulder to steady myself,” Blair writes. “I have Multiple Sclerosis. I am in an exacerbation.” She goes on to thank the producers at Netflix for their compassion before illustrating how the disease is beginning to have an adverse effect on her daily existence. “I am disabled. I fall sometimes. I drop things. My memory is foggy. And my left side is asking for directions from a broken GPS.” MS is an incurable condition that disrupts the central nervous system and can cause a number of physically debilitating symptoms, including blurred vision, difficulty walking, muscle spasms and fatigue. Two months after receiving the initial diagnosis, Blair explains she is now “in the thick” of her illness and feels perpetually exhausted. 

On This Day

  • 14th October
  • 1066 – Norman conquest of England: Battle of Hastings: In England on Senlac Hill, seven miles from Hastings, the Norman forces of William the Conqueror defeat the English army and kill King Harold II of England.  
  • 1322 – Robert the Bruce of Scotland defeats King Edward II of England at Byland, forcing Edward to accept Scotland’s independence.  
  • 1912 – While campaigning in Milwaukee, the former President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, is shot and mildly wounded by John Schrank, a mentally-disturbed saloon keeper. With the fresh wound in his chest, and the bullet still within it, Mr. Roosevelt still carries out his scheduled public speech.   
  • 1913 – Senghenydd colliery disaster, the United Kingdom’s worst coal mining accident claims the lives of 439 miners.  
  • 1926 – The children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne, is first published.  
  • 1947 – Captain Chuck Yeager of the United States Air Force flies a Bell X-1 rocket-powered experimental aircraft, the Glamorous Glennis, faster than the speed of sound at Mach 1.06 (700 miles per hour (1,100 km/h; 610 kn) over the high desert of Southern California and becomes the first pilot and the first airplane to do so in level flight.  
  • 2012 – Felix Baumgartner successfully jumped to Earth from a helium balloon in the stratosphere in the Red Bull Stratos project.
  • 21st October
  • 1854 – Florence Nightingale and a staff of 38 nurses are sent to the Crimean War.  
  • 1879 – Thomas Edison applies for a patent for his design for an incandescent light bulb.  
  • 1966 – Aberfan disaster: A colliery spoil tip collapses on the village of Aberfan in Wales, killing 144 people, mostly schoolchildren.  
  • 1983 – The metre is defined at the seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second, just because… 

Deaths

  • 14th October 
  • 1066 – Harold Godwinson, English king (b. 1022)  
  • 1944 – Erwin Rommel, German field marshal (b. 1891)  
  • 1959 – Errol Flynn, Australian-American actor, singer, and producer (b. 1909)  
  • 1977 – Bing Crosby, American singer-songwriter and actor (b. 1903)  
  • 1990 – Leonard Bernstein, American pianist, composer, and conductor (b. 1918)  
  • 2010 – Simon MacCorkindale, English actor, director, and producer (b. 1952)

Last Two Week’s Birthdays

Viggo Mortensen (59), Danny Boyle (61), Snoop Dogg (46), John Lithgow (73), Michael Gambon (78), John le Carré (87), Zac Efron (31), Jean-Claude Van Damme (58), Pam Dawber (67), Paul Chuckle (71), Eminem (46), Mark Gatiss (52), George Wendt (70), Angela Lansbury (93), Tim Robbins (60), Suzanne Somers (72), Peter Bowles (82), Dominic West (49), Sarah Ferguson (59), Steve Coogan (53), Sacha Baron Cohen (47), Paul Simon (77), Chris Carter (62), Hugh Jackman (50), Robin Askwith (68), Michelle Trachtenberg (33), Emily Deschanel (42), Jane Krakowski (50), Joan Cusack (56), Stephen Moyer (49), John Nettles (75), Dawn French (61), Rose McIver (30), Manu Bennett (49), Charles Dance (72), Martin Kemp (57), Guillermo del Toro (54), Brandon Routh (39), Scott Bakula (64), Chris O’Dowd (39), Tony Shalhoub (65), Brian Blessed (82), Sharon Osbourne (66), Kristanna Loken (39), Matt Damon (48), Sigourney Weaver (69), Chevy Chase (75), Paul Hogan (79), Ardal O’Hanlon (53), Bruno Mars (33), Simon Cowell (59), Alesha Dixon (40), Tim Minchin (43), Thom Yorke (50), Britt Ekland (76), Ioan Gruffudd (45), and Bree Olson (32).

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