Dead Pool 2nd August 2015

Welcome all, we have a lorra lorra stuff to get through today, so get your reading glasses on. Yes, it was a huge Surprise! Surprise! to find out that Cilla Black has passed away, but even more so because John had her listed! 78 points awarded!

The last week really has been a week of shocking deaths, some very unexpected indeed and at too young an age. Shame we don’t have access to the future, a fuckload of points have just gone to the ether!

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Bobbi Kristina Brown, 22, American media personality and singer.
• Sir Peter O’Sullevan, 97, Irish-born British horse racing commentator, cancer.
• Lynn Anderson, 67, American country singer (“Rose Garden“), heart attack.
• Stuart Baggs, 27, Manx reality television contestant and businessman (The Apprentice).
• Roddy Piper, 61, Canadian professional wrestler (WWE, NWA, WCW); Hall of Fame (2005, 2007) and actor (They Live, Hell Comes to Frogtown, Body Slam), heart attack.
• Cilla Black, 72, British singer, television presenter and actress.

In Other News 

Joe Jackson, the father of late singer Michael Jackson, has suffered a stroke. The Albert Einstein hospital in Sao Paulo said Jackson, 87, was admitted on Sunday afternoon and is being treated in the intensive care unit. A statement from the hospital also said he was suffering from an irregular heartbeat. Apparently he was in Brazil to celebrate his 87th birthday, but he missed his own party due to being in hospital.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Libya’s former dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, has been sentenced to death by a court in Tripoli. Saif, once seen as  his father’s heir apparent, was condemned to death along with eight other figures from the former dictatorship, including the former intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi and Gaddafi’s last prime minister, Al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi. There is uncertainty about whether the sentence will be carried out, as Gaddafi is being held by a militia in the mountain town of Zintan that is opposed to Libya Dawn, the militia coalition in control of Tripoli. Yes, you can list him next year, these death sentences can take forever to be upheld so you might have a long wait.

South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu has returned to hospital just a week after being discharged. He has what has only been described as a “persistent infection” which his foundation says is unrelated to the prostate cancer he has had for 15 years. Tutu was first hospitalised by the infection on 14th July. The 83-year-old Nobel peace laureate also continues to battle prostate cancer, first diagnosed 15 years ago, but his foundation said the current infection was unrelated. The foundation said the veteran rights campaigner would undergo bed rest while his doctors determine further treatment, and remain in the hospital at least for the weekend. Tutu survived an illness believed to be polio as a baby, and battled tuberculosis as a teenager. He has been in and out of hospital for minor complaints since 2011.

And now on to Cecil the Lion. One would believe that Walter Palmer, the dentist that shot the lion with an bow and arrow, missing his mark so the lion escaped for 40 hours until shot by a marksman in his hunting group, is on plenty of death lists by now. Having paid $50k for the ‘privilege’ of killing a lion, Palmer is now in hiding and his dental practice has closed down. Sadly, court records have shown that Mr Palmer has a felony record in the US after killing a black bear in the state of Wisconsin in 2006. The dentist was given a one-year probation and fined $3,000, having shot the creature outside an authorised zone and then tried to pass it off as having been killed elsewhere, so this is not the first time he’s tried it on. I should offer an extra 200 points for the death of Palmer, alas this would contravene the rules of the Dead Pool.

Finally, a Texas man was hospitalised this week, after being hit in the head by a ricocheting bullet he had aimed at an armadillo. The man decided to  shoot the armadillo after seeing it on his property, near the east Texas town of Marietta, just before 3am on Thursday, Cass County sheriff’s officials said. He fired three shots at the armadillo. At least one rebounded and hit the man in the jaw. The man was airlifted to a nearby hospital, where his jaw was wired shut. It is not known whether the armadillo survived, but we can hope. The incident is the second this year in which a person has been injured in the southern US by a bullet ricocheting off an armadillo. In April, a Georgia man wounded his mother-in-law after he fired a pistol at an armadillo and the bullet bounced off the animal, traveled through the back door of a mobile home and struck the 74-year-old woman in the back. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why Americans should not be allowed to own guns!

On This Day

• 1776 – The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence took place.
• 1790 – The first United States Census is conducted.
• 1869 – Japan‘s samurai, farmer, artisan, merchant class system (Shinōkōshō) is abolished as part of the Meiji Restoration reforms.
• 1870 – Tower Subway, the world’s first underground tube railway, opens in London, England, United Kingdom.
• 1932 – The positron (antiparticle of the electron) is discovered by Carl D. Anderson.
• 1934 – Adolf Hitler becomes Führer of Germany following the death of President Paul von Hindenburg.
• 1937 – The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 is passed in America, the effect of which is to render marijuana and all its by-products illegal.
• 1939 – Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard write a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging him to begin the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon.
• 1990 – Iraq invades Kuwait, eventually leading to the Gulf War.

Deaths

• 1788 – Thomas Gainsborough, English painter (b. 1727)
• 1921 – Enrico Caruso, Italian tenor (b. 1873)
• 1922 – Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish-Canadian engineer, invented the telephone (b. 1847)
• 1976 – Fritz Lang, Austrian-American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1890)
• 1997 – William S. Burroughs, American author and painter (b. 1914)

Last Week’s Birthdays

Sandra Bullock (51), Kate Beckinsale (42), Arnold Schwarzenegger (68), Taylor Schilling (31), Mick Jagger (72), Helen Mirren (70), Wesley Snipes (53), Lisa Kudrow (52), Jason Statham (48), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (45), Dean Cain (49), J.K. Rowling (50), Laurence Fishburne (54), Jonathan Rhys Mayers (38), Paul Anka (74), Jean Reno (67) and Christopher Nolan (45).

Next Week peeps!