Dead Pool 7th February 2021

Goodness me, what a week! A points avalanche!!!! Let’s start with Capt. Tom Moore, 50 points to Ceri and Paul C, but an exceptional start for newb Sarah as she had him as her Cert, 150 points!! Onto Christopher Plummer,  Sarai had him as her Cert, 159 points and Paul G also gets 59 points. Now Leon Spinks, Laura and Ron had him as their Cert, 183 points each, and 83 points to Paul C. who managed to guess two people in one week, that doesn’t happen very often! Well done all of you. A strong start to the year so far. 

Look Who You Could Have Had:

In Other News

Jennifer Lawrence has sustained minor injuries after a glass explosion stunt went wrong on the set of Don’t Look Up. The forthcoming Netflix comedy – which stars Lawrence opposite Leonardo DiCaprio – has been forced to temporarily suspend production following the disruption. Lawrence had been shooting a scene with Timothee Chalamet when the controlled glass explosion sent shards of glass flying, causing minor injuries to the Hunger Games star. While the details of her injuries aren’t entirely clear, but a malfunction resulted in “shards of glass flying.” As a result of the incident, production on Don’t Look Up has been paused as of Friday, though Lawrence is expected to return to the film’s Boston set on Monday. Don’t Look Up stars Lawrence and DiCaprio as two low-level scientists who attempt to warn the world’s population of an impending meteor strike due in six months.

Jazz legend Tony Bennett has revealed that he has been living with Alzheimer’s Disease for the last four years. The singer, who is 94, made the announcement in AARP Magazine, which focuses on issues affecting people over the age of 50. The article conveys how the condition has affected Bennett’s memory and ability to recognise everyday objects. His wife Susan told the magazine that the star is “not always sure where he is or what is happening around him”. However, Bennett has so far been spared many of the worst characteristics of the disease – including the disorientation that can cause patients to wander from home and episodes of terror, rage or depression. Bennett has been a star since 1951, scoring hits with songs like I Left My Heart In San Francisco and The Shadow Of Your Smile. Some of his biggest successes have come in the last decade, including the chart-topping duets album with Lady Gaga, Cheek to Cheek, which won a Grammy in 2015. The singer’s neurologist Gayatra Devi, told us that, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Bennett’s touring schedule “kept him on his toes and also stimulated his brain in a significant way. However, the decimation of the live music industry has been a real blow from a cognitive perspective, his memory, prior to the pandemic, was so much better. And he’s not alone. So many of my patients are negatively affected by the isolation, the inability to do the things that matter to them,” he said. “For someone like Tony Bennett, the big high he gets from performing was very important.”  said Devi. However, Devi stressed that Bennett was still “doing so many things, at 94, that many people without dementia cannot do. He really is the symbol of hope for someone with a cognitive disorder,” he added.   

Michael Schumacher’s family are set to release rare footage of the F1 legend in a new documentary. The German F1 legend was involved in a devastating skiing accident in the French Alps in 2013 that has left him in a medically-induced coma. Out of respect and eventual disinterest, the world’s media has given him and his family privacy. Only a small handful of people have been allowed to visit the seven-time World Championship winner. His condition has been kept a close-guarded secret by his family. According to PlanetF1, a new documentary titled ‘Schumacher’ is set to be released that will contain private recordings that the German’s family has provided. The documentary is the work of Award-winning German filmmakers Michael Wech and Hanns-Bruno Kammertons. Sabine Kehm, Schumacher family spokesperson, said: “The film portrays Michael’s impressive career, but also many of the facets of the complex man. Many fans will be desperate to see the new documentary with Schumacher such a popular figure in and out of Formula One. 

On This Day

  • 1301 – Edward of Caernarfon (later king Edward II of England) becomes the first English Prince of Wales. 
  • 1497 – In Florence, Italy, supporters of Girolamo Savonarola burn cosmetics, art, and books, in a “Bonfire of the vanities”.  
  • 1900 – A Chinese immigrant in San Francisco falls ill to bubonic plague in the first plague epidemic in the continental United States.  
  • 1940 – The second full-length animated Walt Disney film, Pinocchio, premieres. 
  • 1984 – Astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart make the first untethered space walk using the Manned Manoeuvring Unit.  
  • 1991 – The Troubles: The Provisional IRA launched a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street in London, thirty years later, bet they’re planning some troubles again! 
  • 1992 – The Maastricht Treaty is signed, leading to the creation of the European Union, Farage shits himself. 
  • 2013 – The U.S. state of Mississippi officially certifies the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery.  

Deaths

The Early Days of Plymouth, New England 

In 1642, as a wave of sin swept over the colony of Plymouth, New England, a man named Thomas Graunger entered the history books in the most ignoble way imaginable. 

Graunger became one of the first people hanged in the Plymouth Colony (the first hanged in Plymouth or in any of the colonies of New England being John Billington) and the first known juvenile to be sentenced to death and executed in the territory of today’s United States. Graunger, at the age of 16 or 17, was convicted of “buggery with a mare, a cow, two goats, five divers sheepe, two calves, and a turkey”, according to court records of 7th September 1642. 

Basically, someone walked in on Granger, a teenage servant, while he was engaged in “lewd practice towards the mare,” and the young man eventually confessed to having sex with the horse regularly, along with several other farm animals. 

Then, as now, bestiality was a serious crime. But back in 1642, the punishment was strange by modern standards: The authorities worked to determine which animals Granger had had sex with, following the laws set down in Leviticus 20:15 (“And if a man shall lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast”), then killed them in front of him before executing Granger himself by “hanging until he was dead”. They then buried the animals, as opposed to eating them, because their bodies had been defiled.

The killing and burying of the animals would have been a hardship for the colonists and was therefore another indicator of how seriously this crime was viewed: For an agricultural society this slaughter of all the farm animals was a substantial economic sacrifice. 

Granger’s acts were extreme, but there are other examples from that period of the Pilgrims stuffing more than just turkeys. Plymouth court records from 1642 tell the story of Edward Michell, who was accused of “lewd and sodomitical practices tending to sodomy with Edward Preston, and other lewd carriages with Lydia Hatch,” who was also punished for sharing a bed with her brother. All this came to light because Preston apparently propositioned a man named John Keene, who turned him down and told the authorities. Keene was then ordered to watch while the two Edwards were whipped. Another, tamer, example of sexual wrongdoing was the case of John Casley and his fiancee, Alis, who were discovered to have had sex before their marriage; John was whipped while Alis was forced to look on from the stocks. 

The first woman hanged on the gallows in Plymouth Colony was 32-year-old Alice Bishop in 1648 for the murder of her young daughter; an apparently motiveless crime which must have shocked her fellow settlers. Almost nothing is known about Alice’s early life, she was marry twice and had three daughters: Abigail, Martha and Damaris. By 1648, Alice was living with her second husband, the Plymouth newcomer Richard Bishop, who was Damaris’s father. The family seems to have been unexceptional, just another household trying to eke out a living in a harsh and unforgiving environment. Somewhere along the line, something went very wrong. 

On July 22nd, 1648, while Richard Bishop was away from home, family friend Rachel Ramsden dropped by the Bishops’ residence and spent some time with Alice. Alice’s four-year-old middle child, Martha Clark, was asleep in bed in the loft, which was accessible by ladder. (Where the other two children were has not been recorded.) At some point, Alice gave Rachel a kettle and asked her to go fetch some buttermilk from a neighbour’s house. When Rachel returned, she noticed blood on the floor beneath the ladder. Alice was “sad and dumpish,” and when Rachel asked her what was going on, she wordlessly pointed up at the loft. Rachel climbed up to have a look: there was blood everywhere; Martha’s mattress was drenched in it. 

Rachel fled the house in a panic, found her parents and told them she thought Alice had murdered her daughter. Her father rushed to find the colonial governor. A posse of twelve armed men assembled and went to the Bishop house. By the time the men arrived, Alice was in hysterics. They found Martha’s body lying on her left side, “with her throat cut with divers gashes crose wayes, the wind pipe cut and stuke into the throat downward, and the bloody knife lying by the side.” Nothing could be done for her.

Alice freely admitted she had murdered her daughter and said she was sorry for it, but she claimed she had no recollection of the crime. When they asked her why she’d done it, she had no answer for them. She was tried, found guilty and sentenced to be hanged by the neck until she was dead. Today this crime would probably be attributed to Post Partum depression. 

Last Week’s Birthdays

James Spader (61), Tina Majorino (36), Ashton Kutcher (43), Deborah Ann Woll (36), Chris Rock (56), Eddie Izzard (59), Garth Brooks (59), Emo Philips (65), Alice Eve (39), Mike Farrell (81), Kevin Whately (70), Axl Rose (59), Michael Sheen (52), Jennifer Jason Leigh (59), Christopher Guest (73), Charlotte Rampling (75), Tony Jaa (45), Gabrielle Anwar (51), Natalie Imbruglia (46), Alice Cooper (73), Jim Jefferies (44), Isla Fisher (45), Bridget Regan (39), Warwick Davis (51), Morgan Fairchild (71), Gemma Arterton (35), Brent Spiner (72), David Jason (81), Shakira (44), Sherilyn Fenn (56), Michael C. Hall (50), Harry Styles (27), and Lisa Marie Presley (53).

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