Dead Pool 16th April 2023

If you remember back in February, you all nearly lost your ‘first death of the year’ points, well, now you have. I had a bit of time on my hands last week to go through the lists looking for people I missed, and lo and behold I missed that I had Carole Cook, who died on the 11th January, thus trumping Lucile Randon who died on the 17th January. Sorry folks, got to steal your points back! 

But it doesn’t end there, on the off chance I double checked if they had got around to listing Amber McLaughlin, who was executed on 3rd January, and Fuck Me, they have!!! 

So a little bit of jiggery-pokery has to be undertaken to straighten out the scores. Apologies everyone, but got to do it right. So, Jamie now gets the first death bonus points and all of you who had Randon unfortunately lose 50 points. However, this does open up the league table as it gives a the rest of us a chance to catch up. Oh what fun!  

Look Who You Could Have Had:

In Other News

Gene Simmons was forced to take a seat when he became ill on stage during a recent Kiss concert in Brazil. The rock band performed in Manaus, Brazil on Wednesday. During the show, however, Simmons, 73, had to pause the show before sitting down for the remainder of the performance. In videos posted by fans, singer and guitarist Paul Stanley can be heard asking the crowd to show their support for Simmons. “Hold on, Hold on,” said Stanley, 71. “We’re gonna have to stop.” He continued: “We know how much you love Gene, and he’s obviously sick. We’re gonna have to stop to take care of him, because we love him, right? Let’s give Gene a really loud, ‘Gene!’ One, two, three – Gene!” The performance was paused for five minutes before Simmons returned to the stage with a chair. Staying seated, he continued to perform the band’s song “Say Yeah”. The Flying Monkeys  have reached out to a representative of Simmons for comment. Kiss are currently on their farewell tour, End of the Road, which was announced in 2018. Last month, the band announced they would return to the US from October till December. They plan to call it quits after two back-to-back shows at Madison Square Garden in New York at the end of 2023. 

An ex-Neighbours star has left fans bewildered after details of her recovery from aggressive stage four breast cancer have been shrouded in mystery. They rallied around Australian actress Kate Keltie, 37, when she revealed she had been diagnosed with the illness last November, and helped her raise almost $37,000 AUD on a GoFundMe appeal. However, last month, after she revealed her recovery on the website, her words were removed and the account was deactivated and deleted from public view. She has declined requests to tell her story, prompting former co-stars to appeal to the actress-turned-recruitment consultant to share her ‘amazing story of how she beat the cancer’. A Neighbours source said: ‘It would just be really nice to hear a little bit more about her story, it’s amazing. She was a big part of the Neighbours family and while not everyone is in touch any more, we all wish her well.’ Ms Keltie, who played Michelle Scully for five years from 1999 when she was 13 as the on-screen sister of Holly Valance’s character Flick, shocked fans when she revealed she had the disease last November. She said it had spread to other parts of her body, including her lymph nodes, blood and hip bone. She explained that she was about to start chemotherapy. Fans and her former colleagues immediately gave to her fund which was orchestrated by her financier cousin, Ebony Gilbert. Appealing to people to donate, she wrote: ‘Given the severity of the chemotherapy that Kate requires, her oncologist advised that working and maintaining her job during this time is not an option. She will lose her gorgeous hair and cannot carry children in the future.’ Ms Keltie went on to be treated at the Peter Mac cancer centre in her hometown of Melbourne. But just four months later friends and family were overjoyed when Ms Keltie updated her GoFundMe page to say she had to ‘share some incredible news’ that she was now cancer-free. She wrote: ‘I recently received results of my latest scan and was told that there had been a complete metabolic response to diseased areas. ‘The last six months have been the most challenging time I have ever experienced, to say the least… I couldn’t have done it without each and every one of you. Your support played a huge part in my navigating this horrible time.’

Sarah Beeny has revealed that she has been given the all-clear by doctors after being diagnosed with cancer last year. The TV presenter and property expert, 51, was  diagnosed with breast cancer in August. Appearing on Lorraine alongside her two sons, Billy and Raffy, the Help! My House is Falling Down star told host Christine Lampard that the last few months had been a “rollercoaster ride”. “But I feel very fortunate that I had the diagnosis that I did, and that I live in 2023 and that I’m the age that I am. So many things I’m fortunate for, so I feel very blessed,” she said. Asked how she feels after being given the all-clear, Beeny, who lost her mother to breast cancer when she was 10 years old, replied: “Weird. It’s good but it’s weird.” She continued: “They kind of go, ‘That’s it then, that’s the end of that’. And you kind of go, ‘How do you know?’ and they go ‘We don’t, we just kind of think so’.” Beeny, who received chemotherapy, said she would have to take medication for the next 10 years and remain “very vigilant”. “But, yeah, it’s been a weird ride that I wouldn’t wish on anyone else but I’m glad I did it rather than somebody else,” she added. Beeny also thanked the NHS and staff at Yeovil Hospital and the Royal Marsden Hospital for treating her. Her family will appear in a new series of Sarah Beeny’s New Life In The Country, which was filmed before her diagnosis. 

Approximately 18,000 cows were killed in a blast at a Texas dairy farm earlier this week, according to local authorities. The explosion, at South Fork Dairy near the town of Dimmitt, also left one person in critical condition. Authorities believe that machinery in the facility may have ignited methane gas (cow farts). Nearly three million farm animals died in fires across the US between 2018 and 2021. In a statement, the Castro County Sheriff’s Office said they received a report of a fire at the farm at about 7:21 PM on 10th April. Photos posted by the Sheriff’s Office show a huge plume of black smoke rising from the ground. When police and emergency personnel arrived at the scene, they found one person trapped who had to be rescued and flown to hospital in critical condition. While the exact figure of cows that were killed by fire and smoke remains unknown, a spokeswoman for the Castro County Sheriff’s Office told the Flying Monkeys that “an estimated 18,000 head of cattle have been lost”. Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera said that most of the cattle were lost after the blaze spread to an area in which cows were held before being taken to a milking area and then into a holding pen. “There’s some that survived,” he was quoted as saying. “There’s some that are probably injured to the point where they’ll have to be destroyed.” Mr Rivera said that investigators believe the fire may have started with a machine referred to as a “honey badger”, which he described as “vacuum that sucks the manure and water out”. “Possibly it got overheated and probably the methane and things like that ignited and spread out and exploded,” he said. In a statement sent to the Flying Monkeys, the Washington DC-based Animal Welfare Institute said that – if confirmed – a death toll of 18,000 cows would be “by far” the deadliest barn fire involving cattle since it began keeping statistics in 2013. “We hope the industry will remain focused on this issue and strongly encourage farms to adopt common sense fire safety measures,” said Allie Granger, policy associate for AWI’s farm animal program. “It is hard to imagine anything worse than being burned alive.” According to the AWI, nearly 6.5m farm animals have been killed in barn fires since 2013, of which about 6m were chickens and about 7,300 were cows. Between 2018 and 2021, nearly 3 million farm animals died in fire, with 1.76m chickens dying in the six largest fires over that time period. You can say one thing about the Texans, they certainly know how to BBQ. 

On This Day

  • 1912 – Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly an airplane across the English Channel.
  • 1943 – Albert Hofmann accidentally discovers the hallucinogenic effects of the research drug LSD. He intentionally takes the drug three days later on April 19th.
  • 1947 – An explosion on board a freighter in port causes Texas City to catch fire, killing almost 600.
  • 2016 – Ecuador’s worst earthquake in nearly 40 years kills 676 and injures 6,274.

Deaths

  • 1828 – Francisco Goya, Spanish-French painter and illustrator (b. 1746).
  • 1850 – Marie Tussaud, French-English sculptor, founded the Madame Tussauds Wax Museum (b. 1761).
  • 1991 – David Lean, English director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1908).
  • 2021 – Helen McCrory, British actress (b. 1968).

Heavenly Creatures 

With the death of Anne Perry this week, I thought it might be interesting to remind ourselves of her life. 

Perry (born Juliet Marion Hulme) was a British writer best known as the author of the Thomas Pitt and William Monk series of historical detective fiction.

In 1994, it became public knowledge that Perry had been convicted for murder as a teenager. In 1954, at the age of fifteen, she and her 16-year-old friend Pauline Parker had been convicted of the murder of Parker’s mother, Honorah Rieper in Christchurch, New Zealand. After serving a five-year sentence for the murder, she changed her name and returned to the United Kingdom. She was identified by journalists following the release of the movie Heavenly Creatures, directed by Peter Jackson, in which Kate Winslet portrays Hulme (Perry). 

Born in London, the daughter of physicist Henry Rainsford Hulme, Perry was diagnosed with tuberculosis as a child and sent to the Caribbean, South Africa, and New Zealand in hopes that a warmer climate would improve her health. She rejoined her family after her father took a position as rector of Canterbury University College in New Zealand. She attended Christchurch Girls’ High School. 

In June 1954, at the age of 15, Hulme and her best friend Pauline Parker murdered Parker’s mother, Honorah Rieper. Hulme’s parents were in the process of separating and she was supposed to go to South Africa to stay with a relative. The two teenage friends, who had created a complicated fantasy life together populated with celebrities such as Mario Lanza and James Mason, did not want to be separated.

On the 22nd June 1954, the girls and Rieper went for a walk in Victoria Park in the Port Hills of Christchurch. On an isolated path Hulme dropped an ornamental stone so that Rieper would lean over to retrieve it. Parker had planned to hit her mother with half a brick wrapped in a stocking. The girls presumed that one blow would kill her but it took more than 20.

Parker and Hulme stood trial in Christchurch in 1954 and were found guilty. As they were too young to be considered for the death penalty under New Zealand law at the time, they were convicted and sentenced to be “detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure”. They were released separately five years later. As of today, Parker and Hulme were not believed to have had any contact since the trial.

The events formed the basis for the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, in which Melanie Lynskey portrayed a teenage Pauline Parker and Kate Winslet the teenaged Juliet Hulme. At the time of the film’s release, it was not generally known that mystery author Anne Perry was Juliet Hulme; her identity was made public after journalists tracked her down some months after the film’s release. Although some presumed Hulme and Parker’s relationship to be sexual, Perry stated in 2006 that, while the relationship was obsessive, the two “were never lesbians”. 

After being released from prison in November 1959, Hulme returned to England and became a flight attendant. For a period she lived in the United States, where she joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1968. She later settled in the Scottish village of Portmahomack where she lived with her mother. Her father had a distinguished scientific career, heading the British hydrogen bomb programme.

Hulme took the name Anne Perry, using her stepfather’s surname. Her first novel, The Cater Street Hangman, was published under this name in 1979. Her works generally fall into one of several categories of genre fiction, including historical murder mysteries and detective fiction. Many feature recurring characters, most importantly Thomas Pitt, who appeared in her first novel, and amnesiac private investigator William Monk, who first appeared in her 1990 novel The Face of a Stranger.

After Perry’s identity as Hulme was revealed in 1994, she said: 

“It seemed so unfair. Everything I had worked to achieve as a decent member of society was threatened. And once again my life was being interpreted by someone else. It had happened in court when, as a minor, I wasn’t allowed to speak and I heard all these lies being told. And now there was a film, but nobody had bothered to talk to me. I knew nothing about it until the day before release. All I could think of was that my life would fall apart and that it might kill my mother.”

She continued writing and said that she was surprised that her friends stuck by her despite the revelation of her identity and the ensuing media attention.

In 2017, Perry left Scotland and moved to Los Angeles in order to more effectively promote films based on her novels.[ She had a heart attack in December 2022, and died at a hospital in Los Angeles on 10th April 2023, aged 84. Her final novel, The Fourth Enemy, was published the week before her death.

Last Week’s Birthdays

Anya Taylor-Joy (27), Gina Carano (41), Sadie Sink (21), Ellen Barkin (69), Claire Foy (39), Martin Lawrence (58), Luke Evans (44), Emma Watson (33), Seth Rogen (41), Emma Thompson (64), Maisie Williams (26), Adrien Brody (50), Sarah Michelle Gellar (46), Rob McElhenney (46), Robert Carlyle (62), Julie Christie (83), Peter Capaldi (65), Ron Perlman (73), Edward Fox (86), Peter Davison (72), Saoirse Ronan (29), Jennifer Morrison (44), Claire Danes (44), Ed O’Neill (77), Shannen Doherty (52), Andy Garcia (67), Nicholas Brendon (52), David Letterman (76), Tricia Helfer (49), Milly Alcock (23), Jeremy Clarkson (63), Matt Ryan (42), Daisy Ridley (31), Charlie Hunnam (43), David Harbour (48), Steven Seagal (71), Haley Joel Osment (35), and Peter MacNicol (69).

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