Dead Pool 31st December 2022

Jeez! What a final week! So many late in the year deaths and changes to peoples 2023 lists. Obviously a few points do dispense, so… With the passing of the football great Pele, Neil and myself get 68 points; however Debbie gets 168 points as she had him down as her Cert. A further 57 points awarded to Laura for the passing of Barbara Walters. Surprisingly, only one of us had Pope Benedict, and that was Sarai, finally breaking her duck on the last possible day, 55 points. Which does mean everyone scored this year! Yay! 

So, if nobody else decides to rock the boat between now and midnight, I think we can hopefully pronounce Lee as our winner of 2022! An astounding 740 points in total with seven deaths to his name. Well done that man, the trophy will be with you at some point in the New Year. Commiserations to Paul C, for coming in second with 674 points and an unbelievable nine deaths!!! The rest of us weren’t even close to the top two, but well done everyone for scoring this year, even I did quite well, finally made it into the top ten this year.

Thank you all for taking part, especially those of you who have already donated towards the running costs, even more so as technically I’ve not yet begged for contributions. For full transparency there is a list of paid invoices in the members area and the budget will be uploaded when all donations are in by the end of January. To date we’ve never reached the goal and the remainder always comes from my own pocket, including all the time and effort I put in to keep the pool running. 

Here’s to a successful 2023, may the flying monkeys swoop upon your choices. 

Look Who You Could Have Had:

In Other News

Yet another Russian tycoon has been found dead in mysterious circumstances. Sausage tycoon Pavel Antov was found dead at at an Indian hotel, two days after a friend died during the same trip. They were visiting the eastern state of Odisha and the millionaire, who was also a local politician, had just celebrated his birthday at the hotel. Antov was a well known figure in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow. Last summer he denied criticising Russia’s war in Ukraine after a message appeared on his WhatsApp account. The millionaire’s death is the latest in a series of unexplained deaths involving Russian tycoons since the start of the Russian invasion, many of whom have openly criticised the war. Reports in Russian media said Mr Antov, 65, had fallen from a window at the hotel in the city of Rayagada on Sunday. Another member of his four-strong Russian group, Vladimir Budanov, died at the hotel on Friday. Superintendent Vivekananda Sharma of Odisha police said Mr Budanov was found to have suffered a stroke while his friend “was depressed after his death and he too died”. The Russian consul in Kolkata, Alexei Idamkin, told the Tass news agency that police did not see a “criminal element in these tragic events”. Tourist guide Jitendra Singh told reporters that Mr Budanov may have “consumed a lot of alcohol as he had liquor bottles”. Pavel Antov founded the Vladimir Standard meat processing plant and in 2019 Forbes estimated his fortune at some $140m (£118m) at the top of Russia’s rich list of lawmakers and civil servants. He played an important role at the legislative assembly in Vladimir, heading a committee on agrarian policy and ecology. The assembly’s deputy chairman Vyacheslav Kartukhin said he had died in “tragic circumstances”. Late last June he appeared to react to a Russian missile attack on a residential block in the Shevchenkivskyi district of Kyiv that left a man dead and his seven-year-old daughter and her mother wounded. A WhatsApp message on Antov’s account described how the family were pulled out of the rubble: “It’s extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror.” The message was deleted and Antov then posted on social media that he was a supporter of the president, a “patriot of my country” and backed the war. The WhatsApp message had come from someone whose opinion on the “special military operation in Ukraine” he strongly disagreed with, he insisted. It had been posted accidentally on his messenger and was a highly annoying misunderstanding, he said. Several high-profile Russian tycoons have died in mysterious circumstances since the war began. In September the head of Russia’s oil giant Lukoil, Ravil Maganov, apparently fell from a hospital window in Moscow.  

Bob Marley’s grandson has died at the age of 31. Jamaican-American reggae artist Joseph Mersa Marley was found unresponsive in a vehicle in the United States on Tuesday, according to the Flying Monkeys. The initial announcement did not specify a location. The artist – who went by his stage name Jo Mersa – had reportedly suffered from asthma his entire life, and the Flying Monkeys claimed he died of an asthma attack. Bob  Marley tragically died of cancer in 1981 at the age of 36, and is widely considered one of the pioneers of reggae music. The late star had 11 children with seven different partners. Joseph Mersa Marley spent his early years in Jamaica, where he attended Saints Peter and Paul Preparatory School. He then moved to Florida where he was a student at Palmetto High School. When at Miami Dade College he studied studio engineering. In 2014 he released the EP called Comfortable and in 2021 he came out with Eternal.  

The owner of an internet-famous dog who inspired the “doge” meme says she has received a global outpouring of love since revealing her popular pooch was suffering from leukaemia. Kabosu, a 17-year-old Shiba Inu, shot to internet stardom in 2010 after social media users began sharing a photo of her posing with a quizzical expression and crossed paws. The meme was typically overlaid with scattered comic sans text depicting what could be Kabosu’s inner monologue, and internet users started referring to the image as “doge”. It later inspired the creation of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency in 2013. Kabosu’s owner Atsuko Sato, a kindergarten teacher from Sakura, Japan, revealed she was in “a very dangerous condition” after being diagnosed with a form of blood cancer in a series of Instagram posts this week. Ms Sato said Kabosu had stopped eating and drinking just before Christmas and was on antibiotics after vets determined she was suffering from acute cholangiohepatitis, a type of inflammation in the digestive system. She posted an update on 27th December to say Kabosu’s appetite had returned and she was drinking water again. “It’s going to be alright. Because we get our power from all over the world!” Ms Sato wrote on her Instagram page. The doge meme initially found popularity on sites such as Reddit and Tumblr, with internet users photoshopping Kabosu’s face onto famous landmarks and pastries. Her image was later used in marketing by Oreo and on Stockholm subway stations adverts. Kabosu’s face later appeared on the sleeves of players from English Premier League team Watford under a Dogecoin sponsorship deal. An NFT featuring Kabosu’s famous furry face sold for $4m in 2021.  

On This Day

  • 1759 – Arthur Guinness signs a 9,000-year lease at £45 per annum and starts brewing Guinness. 
  • 1879 – Thomas Edison demonstrates incandescent lighting to the public for the first time, in Menlo Park, New Jersey. 
  • 1955 – General Motors becomes the first U.S. corporation to make over US$1 billion in a year.  
  • 1999 – The first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, resigns from office, leaving Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the acting President and successor. 
  • 2000 – The last day of the 20th Century and 2nd Millennium. 
  • 2019 – The World Health Organisation is informed of cases of pneumonia with an unknown cause, detected in Wuhan. This later turned out to be COVID-19, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Deaths

  • 192 – Commodus, Roman emperor (b. 161).   
  • 1691 – Robert Boyle, Anglo-Irish chemist and physicist (b. 1627). 
  • 2013 – James Avery, American actor (b. 1945). 
  • 2015 – Natalie Cole, American singer-songwriter and actress (b. 1950). 
  • 2015 – Wayne Rogers, American actor (b. 1933). 
  • 2016 – William Christopher, American actor (b. 1932). 
  • 2021 – Betty White, American actress, comedian and producer (b. 1922). 

Last Week’s Birthdays

Val Kilmer (63), Anthony Hopkins (85), Ben Kingsley (79), Jane Badler (69), Faye Marsay (36), Eliza Dushku (42), Caity Lotz (36), Tracey Ullman (63), Jude Law (50), Jon Voight (84), Ted Danson (75), Danny McBride (46), Michael Cudlitz (58), Patrick Fischler (53), Lilly Wachowski (55), Denzel Washington (68), Noomi Rapace (43), Maggie Smith (88), Sienna Miller (41), Joe Manganiello (46), John Legend (44), Timothée Chalamet (27), Olivia Cooke (29), Gérard Depardieu (74), John Amos (83), Wilson Cruz (49), Jared Leto (51), Kit Harington (36), and Temuera Morrison (62).

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