Dead Pool 24th November 2024

Alas, no points to dispense this week. With little over five weeks left to go, one big death  could change the outcome! 

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Agnes Boström, 112, Swedish supercentenarian, oldest person in Sweden, cardiac arrest. 
• Charles Dumont, 95, French singer and songwriter (“Non, je ne regrette rien“). 
• Colin Petersen, 78, Australian drummer (Bee Gees, Humpy Bong) and actor (Smiley). 
• Colin Chilvers, 79, English music video director (Smooth Criminal) and special effects coordinator (Superman, X-Men). 
• Peter Maddocks, 96, English cartoonist (The Family-Ness, Penny Crayon, Jimbo and the Jet-Set).
• John Prescott, Baron Prescott, 86, British politician, deputy prime minister (1997–2007), first secretary of state (2001–2007), and MP (1970–2010), complications from Alzheimer’s disease. 
• Chuck Woolery, 83, American game show host (Wheel of Fortune, Love Connection)

In Other News

Lauren Laverne has revealed she’s cancer free and would be back presenting BBC’s The One Show on Tuesday. The broadcaster, 46, took to her Instagram with the news alongside a beaming selfie in which she proudly wore a jumper which read: ‘Life is beautiful’. The mother of-two did not reveal the type of cancer she had been diagnosed with but said when announcing the news in August had been picked up ‘unexpectedly’ during a screening test. Now in a lengthy statement she paid tribute to hospital staff and her ‘astounding’ sons and ‘absolutely extraordinary’ husband Greame Fisher. She penned: ‘Well hello there! Just a quick update from me to say that after taking some time off to get better I’ve had the all clear and will be back to work on your TV this Tuesday with the wonderful @bbctheoneshow team. I’ve also been working on some new #DesertIslandDiscs episodes (which will air soon) and am looking forward to returning to @BBC6Music in the New Year’.  She continued: I want to say a huge thank you to the brilliant medical teams who took such great care of me, to the thousands of people who sent me such beautiful and encouraging messages, the friends and acquaintances who took the time to support me after going through cancer themselves, and most of all to my family: my two astounding kids and especially my husband Graeme, who was absolutely extraordinary throughout’.  It’s been a difficult time but one that has taught me so much about what really matters. I can’t say I suddenly regretted never having hiked the Inca Trail, more that I now see more beauty in ordinary things than I could have imagined, and feel more than ever that the small things in life – the connections we make and care we take with each other – are the big things really’.

A prisoner convicted of the 1994 murder of a female hitchhiker is set to become the third person executed by controversial nitrogen gas. Alabama this year began using nitrogen gas to carry out some death sentences, the first use of a new execution method in the United States since lethal injection was introduced in 1982. The method involves placing a respirator gas mask over the person’s face to replace breathable air with pure nitrogen gas, causing death by lack of oxygen. Critics of the method cite how the first two people executed shook for several minutes. They say the method needs more scrutiny, particularly if other states follow Alabama’s path and adopt it. Carey Dale Grayson, 50, was one of four teenagers convicted of killing Vickie Deblieux, 37, who was hitchhiking through Alabama on her way to her mother’s home in Louisiana. He is scheduled to be executed at 6pm on Thursday at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in south Alabama. Deblieux’s mutilated body was found at the bottom of a bluff near Odenville, Alabama, on Feb. 26, 1994. Prosecutors said Deblieux was hitchhiking from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to her mother’s home in West Monroe, Louisiana, when four teens offered her a ride. Prosecutors said the teens took her to a wooded area and attacked and beat her. They threw her off a cliff and later returned to mutilate her body. A medical examiner testified that Deblieux’s face was so fractured that she was identified by an earlier X-ray of her spine. Her fingers had also been severed. Investigators said the four teens were identified as suspects after one of them showed a friend a severed finger and boasted about the killing. Grayson is the only one of the four facing a death sentence since the other teens were under 18 at the time of the killing. Grayson was 19. Two of the teens were initially sentenced to death but had those sentences set aside when the U.S. Supreme Court banned the execution of offenders who were younger than 18 at the time of their crimes. Another teen involved in Deblieux’s killing was sentenced to life in prison. Grayson’s final appeals focused on the call for more scrutiny of the new execution method. They argued that the person experiences “conscious suffocation” and that the first two nitrogen executions did not result in swift unconsciousness and death as the state promised. Attorneys for Grayson asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution to give time to weigh the constitutionality of the method. “Given this is the first new execution method used in the United States since lethal injection was first used in 1982, it is appropriate for this Court to reach the issues surrounding this novel method,” Grayson’s attorneys wrote. Lawyers for the Alabama attorney general’s office asked justices to let the execution go forward, saying a lower court found Grayson’s claims speculative. The state lawyers wrote that Alabama’s “nitrogen hypoxia protocol has been successfully used twice, and both times it resulted in a death within a matter of minutes.” 

Thomas E. Kurtz, a mathematician and inventor of the simplified computer programming language known as BASIC, which allowed students to operate early computers and eventually propelled generations into the world of personal computing, died on Tuesday in Lebanon, N.H. He was 96. The cause of his death, in a hospice, was multiple organ failure from sepsis, said Agnes Kurtz, his wife. In the early 1960s, before the days of laptops and smartphones, a computer was the size of a small car and an institution like Dartmouth College, where Dr. Kurtz taught, had just one. Programming one was the province of scientists and mathematicians, specialists who understood the nonintuitive commands used to manipulate data through those hulking machines, which processed data in large batches, an effort that sometimes took days or weeks to complete. Dr. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, then the chairman of Dartmouth’s math department, believed that students would come to depend on computers and benefit from understanding how to use them. The language was simple. Typing the command “RUN” would start a program. “PRINT” printed a word or string of letters. “STOP” told the program to stop. Students could use other popular languages of the time like Algol and Fortran, but BASIC, which required only two one-hour seminars to master the fundamentals, became the language of choice not only for Dartmouth students but also for students learning programming around the globe. The programming language would provide the intellectual building blocks for later software and is still a fundamental tool in teaching computer programming. One student who later benefited from BASIC was Bill Gates, who used a variation of it as the foundation for the first Microsoft operating systems. Versions of BASIC still empower computer operating systems today. 

On This Day

• 1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is killed by Jack Ruby on live 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.
• 1974 – Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discover the 40% complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, nicknamed “Lucy” (after The Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”), in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia’s Afar Depression

Deaths

• 1982 – Barack Obama, Sr., Kenyan economist and academic, father of Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States (b. 1936)
• 1991 – Freddie Mercury, Tanzanian-English singer-songwriter, lead vocalist of Queen, and producer (b. 1946).
• 2005 – Pat Morita, American actor (b. 1932).

Spaced Out! 

Have you ever wondered what would happen to your body if you were to die out in space? Researchers have put their brains together to answer the difficult questions regarding the unusual scenario.

NASA are planning another space mission to send humans to the moon within the next seven years, with wilder plans to send people to Mars in the 2030s.

The journey to the red planet will require a long-distance mission and many months in space. Because of this, there’s a need to consider how humans will survive such a long time out in the ether. 

Since the beginning of human spaceflight over 60 years ago, 20 people have died. However, none of these deaths were actually in space and were due to failed launches before leaving the Earth’s atmosphere.

Though NASA hasn’t illustrated set protocols for dealing with a death that happens in space (because they haven’t had to deal with it yet), some of the world’s space researchers have come up with their own hypothesis.

One of the ways someone could die in space is by being exposed to its vacuum without having a suitably pressurised suit to protect them.

Chris Hadfield, Canadian astronaut and former commander of the International Space Station, shares his thoughts on what could be the worst possible outcome.

He said: “In the worst case scenario, something happens during a spacewalk. You could suddenly be struck by a micro-meteorite, and there’s nothing you can do about that. It could puncture a hole in your suit, and within a few seconds you’re incapacitated.”

Here comes the gruesome part. You probably thought it was just a dramatic effect for films, but nope. 

Emmanuel Urquieta, professor of space medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, described the horrific death experienced by an astronaut who was exposed to the vacuum, saying that it would become impossible for them to breathe and their blood and other bodily fluids would effectively boil.

According to Popular Science, the unfortunate astronaut’s blood would vaporise, along with the water in their body, in just 10 seconds.

They would lose consciousness in 15 seconds as their body horrifically expanded and their lungs collapsed. They’d be paralysed or more likely dead in 30 seconds, most likely of asphyxiation or decompression.

Then there’s the issue of burial – or lack thereof.

If someone died on Mars, Urquieta explained burial or cremation wouldn’t be possible as they ‘could contaminate the Martian surface’.

He said ‘the crew would likely preserve the body in a specialised body bag until it could be returned to Earth’.

If the astronaut was unlucky enough to die out in space, their body would eventually enter a frozen or mummified state and float through the ether – potentially for millions of years, since there’s no oxygen to prompt decomposition – until it was destroyed by a planet or star, or perhaps heat or radiation.

A cheery thought for a Sunday.

Last Week’s Birthdays

Sarah Hyland (34), Colin Hanks (47), Stephen Merchant (50), Conleth Hill (60), Billy Connolly (82), Denise Crosby (67), Dwight Schultz (77), Kayvan Novak (46), Michelle Gomez (58), Miley Cyrus (32), Scarlett Johansson (40), Mads Mikkelsen (59), Jamie Lee Curtis (66), Mark Ruffalo (57), Terry Gilliam (84), Goldie Hawn (79), Alexander Siddig (59), Björk (59), Sean Young (65), Ming-Na Wen (61), Bo Derek (68), Joe Biden (82), Adam Driver (41), Jodie Foster (62), Meg Ryan (63), Terry Farrell (61), Robert Beltran (71), Owen Wilson (56), Linda Evans (82), and Delroy Lindo (72).