Welcome once again to the weekly Dead Pool Newsletter. As per usual we have a dearth of famous deaths but hopefully we’ve managed to compile an interesting if not readable effort nevertheless. What I did notice this week was the amount of gorgeous MILF birthdays there are, maybe I’m getting a bit desperate in the trouser department, see what you think…

Without further ado…

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Sheila Matthews Allen, 84, American actress (The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure), pulmonary fibrosis.
• Diane Disney Miller, 79, American philanthropist, complications from a fall.
• Marc Breaux, 89, American choreographer (The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins).
• Joseph Paul Franklin, 63, American serial killer, executed by lethal injection.
• Frederick Sanger, 95, British biochemist, laureate of Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1958, 1980).

In Other News

Heart throb and Wolverine actor Hugh Jackman has disclosed that he’s had treatment for cancer. The Australian found a small mark on his nose and at the insistence of his wife he sought medical advice and found he had skin cancer on his schnoz. Luckily it seems to have been operable and they only had to take half his face away. He’s now advocating that everyone use sunscreen. Sounds to me his little fall was a bit more death defying than his cancer.

In a prime example of Darwinism in action, rapper George Watsky thought it would be a fine idea to do a stage dive, from a lighting gantry 35ft above the stage. Unsurprisingly he fell to the floor with a bump injuring himself and a couple of audience members who were a bit too slow to move out of the way like everyone else did. It’s not the first time he’s done this either, last month, he posted a series of pictures on his Facebook page showing himself jump off a first floor balcony into a crowd while wearing a green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume. Good call for next year I think…

Argentine President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has returned to work after undergoing brain surgery. The 60 year old politician had surgery in October to remove a blood clot on her brain found during routine checks after a fall that was suspected to have been brought on by low blood pressure due her lack of a thyroid. Her illness forced her to abandon campaigning for mid-term congressional elections meaning that her allies suffered heavy losses in the 27 October vote, and Ms Fernandez had her majority in Congress reduced. This puts an end to any speculation that she may try to amend the constitution to allow her to run for a third term in office, thank god…

On This Day

• 1429 – Joan of Arc unsuccessfully besieges La Charité.
• 1642 – Abel Tasman becomes the first European to discover the island Van Diemen’s Land (later renamed Tasmania).
• 1859 – Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.
• 1962 – The influential British satirical television programme That Was the Week That Was is first broadcast.
• 1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald, the convicted assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is murdered two days after the assassination, by Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas police department headquarters. The shooting happens to be broadcast live on 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.

Deaths

• 1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald, American assassin of John F. Kennedy (b. 1939).
• 1982 – Barack Obama, Sr., Kenyan economist (b. 1936).
• 1991 – Freddie Mercury, Tanzanian-English singer-songwriter and producer (Queen) (b. 1946).

Thank Fuck He’s Dead by Stu

This week we have the terrible tale of Albert Fish.

Hamilton “Albert” Fish is known as one of America’s most notorious child murderers and cannibals. He was born in Washington, DC, in 1870 into a family with an already-established history of mental illness. After his father died his mother put him into an orphanage where he was treated sadistically, he eventually grew to enjoy the physical pain the beatings brought.

After he was removed from the orphanage, he began a relationship with a telegraph boy, who taught him to drink urine and eat faeces a la Bear Grylls (I’m not ever so certain that Mr Grylls really has much experience in the latter.) He also began hanging round public baths in order to see naked boys, and writing obscene letters to women whose names he found in classified ads.

By 1890 he had become a prostitute, and began raping young boys. A visit to a waxworks museum where he saw a model of a bisected penis turned him in to the concept of genital mutilation, and the next few years saw him spiral out of control, experimenting with self flagellation, making his own children paddle his backside with a nail-embedded board, and sticking long pins through his groin and perineum.

The murder for which he is probably best known, is that of 10-year-old Grace Budd. Having befriended her family, he abducted Grace on the pretence of taking her to a birthday party. Having stripped naked in order to avoid getting blood on his clothes, he strangled the girl, cut her up and ate her flesh. In a letter to her family in which he described the killing, and how he himself became hooked on eating children, he chillingly finished with the line “How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of (sic) had I wished. She died a virgin.” So at least that was some consolation for the Budd family.

He boasted that he “had children in every state” and hinted that his tally of victims could have been over a hundred. He was executed on January 16th, 1936 in the electric chair of Sing Sing prison, New York. After his death, his lawyer claimed to be in possession of Fish’s “Final Statement” which had been written by the murderer in the hours before his execution. When he was pressed to reveal the contents of the statement, he refused. “I will never show it to anyone” he said. “It was the most filthy string of obscenities I have ever read.”

Last Week’s Birthdays

Scarlett Johansson (29), Owen Wilson (45), Miley Cyrus (21), Rachel McAdams (35), Danny DeVito (69), Mark Ruffalo (46), Jamie Lee Curtis (55), Goldie Hawn (68), Joe Binden (71), Jodie Foster (51), Larry King (80), Meg Ryan (52), Carly Rae Jepsen (28), Bjork (48), Bo Derek (57), Martin Scorsese (71), RuPaul (53), Linda Evans (71), Delroy Lindo (61), Sean Young (54), Michael Kenneth Williams (47), Boris Becker (46), Mariel Hemingway (52) and Billy Jean King (70).

2013 League Table

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Next Week peeps!

We have a winner! Dave correctly guessed that Britain’s oldest person would die this year, and lo she did, sadly she was the last person to have been born in the 1800’s that was still alive. So Dave now extends his lead over everyone else by a further 37 points! With little over seven weeks left to go this year, Dave’s lead looks certain, but who knows what will happen.

We also have to welcome a new member to the Dead Pool, Vic & Stu managed to bring a new life into the world in the form of a bouncing 9lb 3oz baby boy. I’m sure we would all like to send our congratulations to all three of them.

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Dennis Livson, 66, Finnish producer of children’s programs, founder of the Moomin World theme park.
• Sir John Tavener, 69, British composer (Children of Men).
• Al Ruscio, 89, American actor (The Godfather Part III, Showgirls).
• Grace Jones, 113, British supercentenarian, oldest person in the United Kingdom and world’s sixth-oldest person.
• Doris Lessing, 94, British novelist, poet, playwright and librettist, Nobel laureate in Literature (2007).

In Other News

There seems to be some unrest in the world of politics of late. The Colombian government says it has uncovered a plot by the country’s largest rebel group, the Farc, to kill the former president, Alvaro Uribe. Sadly they have now reinforced the security surrounding the former president, but even so, he might be a good shout for next year.

We also heard that a heavily armed taxi driver was caught on his way to kill David Cameron. Irfaq Naz was stopped in London with a 950,000-volt stun gun, a Samurai sword and masking tape in his Vauxhall Astra. Naz, 34, also had hammers, kitchen knives and a machete when he was stopped in July after going the wrong way down a north London street. If only he observed the Highway Code, we might all be happier people right now. Nick Clegg refuted allegations he was behind the plot.

Former South African president Nelson Mandela is now unable to speak but uses facial expressions to communicate. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela said the 95-year-old remained “quite ill” but she dismissed speculation that he was on a life support machine. Things seem to be looking rather grim for the old chap, maybe we are in for a points windfall before the year is out!

On This Day

• 1855 – David Livingstone becomes the first European to see the Victoria Falls in what is now present-day Zambia–Zimbabwe.
• 1947 – American scientists John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain observe the basic principles of the transistor, a key element for the electronics revolution of the 20th century.
• 1973 – Watergate scandal: In Orlando, Florida, U.S. President Richard Nixon tells 400 Associated Press managing editors “I am not a crook.”

Deaths

• 1917 – Auguste Rodin, French sculptor (b. 1840).
• 1968 – Mervyn Peake, English poet, author, and illustrator (b. 1911)

Thank Fuck He’s Dead

Today we have Ed Gein.

Now, I imagine that quite a few of you may have heard of Mr. Gein. If you haven’t, then chances are you are a bit more familiar with some of the horror movie characters he has inspired; Psycho‘s Norman Bates, Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Jamie Gumb (A.K.A Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs) being the most well-known.

So you can probably guess that Gein didn’t fuck about. As far as totally screwed-up individuals go, he ticked all the boxes. For much of his early life he was a devoted momma’s boy and didn’t see many people beyond her and his brother, Henry. Henry wasn’t nearly as complimentary of their mother as Ed was, and there were suspicions that Ed was the one who offed his brother in a marshfield one day, though nothing was ever brought against him for this.

Old momma Gein pegged it in December 1945, leaving Ed all alone with his thoughts. Instead of just getting on with it like a normal, rational person however, Gein decided he needed to become a woman. Unlike most transgender people though, he figured the best way to achieve this would be to remove dead peoples skins and make suits from them (Leatherface and Buffalo Bill there for you.)

Much of his unusual haul (bowls made from the tops of skulls, belts made from nipples, the usual John Lewis collection sort of stuff) came from graves he robbed, but it wasn’t against his convictions to kill women for their skin either. Oh, he also had a shoe box full of vulvas.

And a lampshade made from somebody’s face.

He was rumbled when police investigated the disappearance of Bernice Worden. They found her decapitated body “dressed out like a deer” hanging by the wrists in his shed. Did I mention he had a pair of lips on a drawstring for his window shade?

Having initially been declared not guilty due to insanity, he was placed in a high security mental institution until eleven years later, when he was declared sane enough to stand trial and found guilty- due to prohibitive costs he was only tried for one murder. Because he was still considered insane he was held for the rest of his life in hospital.

I wish I could tell you that he met his end at the hands of another inmate, who cut off his face and wore it as budgie smugglers (or another amusingly ironic scenario) but the sad truth is that Gein died of respiratory failure in 1984 at the ripe old age of 77. After his burial, morbid souvenir hunters chipped away fragments of his gravestone, before some greedy sod stole the whole thing in 2000. When they got it back a year later, they kept it under lock and key in the Waushara sheriffs department.

Last Week’s Birthdays

Anne Hathaway (31), Ryan Gosling (33), Whoopi Goldberg (64), Gerard Butler (44), Maggie Gyllenhall (36), Prince Charles (65), Demi Moore (51), Leonardo DiCaprio (39), Neil Young (68), Calista Flockhart (49), Beverly D’Angelo (62), Wallace Shawn (70), Anni-Frid Lyngstad (68) and Chad Kroeger (39).

2013 League Table

[confidential]

Next Week peeps!

Well, this week is a bit thin on the ground, I could just  about recognise two names from the Wiki list of notable deaths and even then they’re only vaguely famous. I only remembered who John Cole was because he was a Spitting Image puppet and Steve Prescott came up as a potential name for my own list due to cancer. So I will apologise now for the lack of point scoring or deaths of importance this week, even though I sent out those flying monkeys!! However, I will now put you all into shock mode, the original Karate Kid, Ralph Macchio, is now 51 years old!!!

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• John Cole, 85, British broadcaster and journalist, BBC political editor (1981–1992).
• Steve Prescott, 39, English rugby league player, stomach cancer.

In Other News

Justin Bieber has incensed fans in Brazil after storming off stage because someone threw a water bottle at him. The bottle knocked the microphone out of the hand of the 19 year old  ‘singer’, who looked into the crowd before turning and walking off without even saying goodbye! A Twitter account created for the offending water bottle already has two million followers. One post read: “Stop judging me, I just wanted to touch Justin like the rest of you.”  I for one wished the bottle was made of glass and smashed him in the skull, alas we’re not that lucky.

Ireland’s former prime minister Bertie Ahern was assaulted in a Dublin pub last Friday night. Ahern was attacked with a crutch by a man in his forties inside the Sean O’Casey bar just off O’Connell Street. His attacker, who was said to be extremely drunk, was later arrested by the Garda and detained overnight in a city centre police station. The former Taoiseach has declined to talk about the attack, which comes three years after he was verbally abused by a number of customers in another Dublin pub. Shame this wasn’t a story about Cameron and a gun. *sigh*

On This Day

• 1871 – Henry Morton Stanley locates missing explorer and missionary, Dr. David Livingstone in Ujiji, near Lake Tanganyika, famously greeting him with the words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”.
• 1951 – Direct-dial coast-to-coast telephone service begins in the United States.
• 1969 – National Educational Television (the predecessor to the Public Broadcasting Service) in the United States debuts the children’s television program Sesame Street.
• 1989 – German citizens begin to bring the Berlin wall down.

Deaths

• 1982 – Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet general and politician.
• 2006 – Jack Palance, American actor.
• 2010 – Dino De Laurentiis, Italian film producer.

Thank Fuck He’s Dead by Stu

This week we have Jürgen Bartsch. Born Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski, this crazy Kraut was adopted at eleven months and his name changed to Jurgen (at least it wasn’t Count Grishnack) by his mother, an OCD clean-freak butcher’s wife from Langenberg. His mother forbade him to play with other children, lest he become dirty, and bathed him herself until he was nineteen – probably a good place to start if you wanted to look for an explanation for his crimes.

He killed his first victim in 1961, at the age of fifteen. He lured his victims, aged between 8 and 13, into an abandoned air raid shelter, where he would undress them and sexually abuse them. Once they were dead, he would dismember the bodies. This hit a snag when he left his fifth victim, Peter Frese, before killing him. Frese managed to burn through his bindings using a candle that had been left by Bartsch and escaped from the shelter.

When he was arrested, Bartsch confessed openly. Originally sentenced to life imprisonment, this was later reduced to ten years of juvenile imprisonment, after which he was placed in psychiatric care.

Psychiatric reports recommended three possible courses of action to rehabilitate Jurgen; psychotherapy, psychosurgery, or castration. After initially refusing any form of surgery, he quickly changed his mind and opted for castration in order to avoid having to spend the rest of his life in a mental hospital. On April 28, 1976, he went into the operating theatre where an inexperienced nurse unfortunately (or fortunately perhaps) gave him a massive accidental overdose of Halothane which killed him. Karma’s a bitch.

Last Week’s Birthdays

Emma Stone (25), Matthew McConaughey (44), Sam Rockwell (45), Sally Field (67), Lamar Odom (34), Dolph Lundgren (56), Brian Adams (54), Gordon Ramsay (47), Ethan Hawke (43), Laura Bush (67), Tara Reid (38), Lou Ferrigno (62), Thandie Newton (41), P Diddy (44), Roseanne Barr (61), Tatum O’Neil (49), Art Garfunkel (72), Famke Janssen (48), Robert Patrick (55), Maria Shriver (58), Loretta Swift (75), Gretchen Mol (41), Rebecca Romijn (41), Tilda Swinton (53), Ralph Macchio (51), Billy Graham (95) and Jack Osbourne (28).

2013 League Table

[confidential]

Next Week peeps!

What a week! Without Lou Reed I’d have struggled to recognise a single ‘celebrity’ death! Sure I know their faces once I looked them up, but seriously! With less than two months to go for this years pool, things are moving too slowly. I think we need to send out the flying monkeys so we can start scoring again, failing that we all better start praying to Satan for some divine intervention.

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Nigel Davenport, 85, English actor (Chariots of Fire, Howards’ Way).
• Lou Reed, 71, American rock musician (The Velvet Underground) and songwriter (“Walk on the Wild Side“), liver disease.
• Graham Stark, 91, English comedian and actor (The Pink Panther, Superman III, Alfie), stroke.
• Paul Dennis Reid, 55, American convicted murderer.

In Other News

David Beckham has been involved in a car accident which saw his $76k Range Rover hit by another vehicle near his Beverly Hills home. The former England captain was behind the wheel and accompanied by his 14-year-old son Brooklyn when the collision happened. According to reports, the 38-year-old pulled out of his driveway and was hit by an oncoming car driven by a woman. Beckham and his son were sadly unharmed, but this is the second time both have been involved in a crash. In 2011, the two had a “lucky escape” when their vehicle was involved in a pile-up on one of the busiest roads in Los Angeles. Maybe next time…

You may have missed the fact that DJ Paul Gambaccini has been arrested as part of Operation Yewtree. The latest DJ from the Savile camp is now under lock and key and the BBC have pulled his Saturday night show from the radio, which is a great shame because the replacement show was utter tripe! Time will tell if he’s guilty or not, maybe he’ll take the same route as Savile’s former driver and kill himself, so perhaps Gambo is a good shout for next year!

Tranmere midfielder Joe Thompson has been diagnosed with cancer. The 24-year-old has not played for Rovers since September due to feeling ill and medical tests have since found the former Rochdale winger has contracted nodular sclerosing Hodgkin’s disease. Thompson will now undergo a six-month course of chemotherapy. I’m sure we all wish him well during his treatment, but just in case, I expect to see his name on a few lists in a couple of months time.

On This Day

• 1783 – John Austin, a highwayman, is the last person to be publicly hanged at London‘s Tyburn gallows.
• 1918 – Poland declares its independence from Russia.
• 1954 – The first Godzilla film is released and marks the first appearance of the character of the same name.
• 1957 – Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 2. On board is the first animal to enter orbit, a dog named Laika.
• 1976 – Sissy Spacek creeps out audiences in the horror movie Carrie.
• 1978 – The family sitcom Diff’rent Strokes premieres on NBC in 1978.

Deaths

• 1926 – Annie Oakley, American target shooter.
• 1954 – Henri Matisse, French painter and sculptor.
• 1957 – Laika, Soviet dog. I never said she made it back…
• 1998 – Bob Kane, American writer and illustrator.
• 2002 – Lonnie Donegan, Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist

Thank Fuck He’s Dead by Stu

This week’s TFHD is Euronymous. Ok, so he wasn’t really called Euronymous; Øystein Aarseth was the founder of Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, and originally went by the pseudonym “Destructor” before he renamed himself after the little-known Greek flesh-eating demon of the underworld, Euronymos. Seriously, I’m not making this up.

What sets Aarseth apart from previous entries in this column is that he (probably) didn’t kill anybody. However, this guy was pretty fucked up. A self-confessed satanist, he participated in the 1992 burning of Holmenkollen chapel but his stand-out what the fuck moment came two years earlier, when the lead singer of Mayhem, Per “Dead” Ohlin committed suicide at the house the two shared.

Now if you came home to find your roommate had just blown his brains out all over the walls and floor, you probably wouldn’t react the same way Aarseth did – he phoned bassist Necrobutcher (yes, Necrobutcher) and told him “Dead has done something really cool! He’s killed himself!” In a whirlwind of commercial brilliance he reassured Necrobutcher; “Relax, I have photos of everything!”

Aarseth posed the body of his friend, careful to make sure he arranged the shotgun, bloody knife and brain tastefully, and took photos – one of which was used as an album cover for a bootleg release, Dawn of the Black Hearts (check it out, it’s all over the internet.) It was rumoured that he made a stew out of bits of Dead’s brain, and made necklaces for other “worthy” musicians from fragments of skull. The band later denied the first rumour – but confirmed the second.

He was stabbed to death in 1993 by fellow metaller Count Grishnack (not his real name) in an attack that some speculate was to out-do a previous murder Grishnack had committed, though he claimed that Euronymous had planned to tie him up, electrocute him, and torture him to death on video. The whole story will probably never be known, but the fact remains that Øystein Aarseth was absolutely bat-shit crazy, and to put it bluntly, a bit of a dick.

In March 2012 a Norwegian airline held a public vote to pick a famous Norwegian whose picture would adorn the aircraft. Aarseth was leading the poll but his name was removed from the campaign after his family’s request.

Last Week’s Birthdays

Winona Rider (42), Joaquin Phoenix (39), Toni Collette (41), Jenny McCarthy (41), Julia Roberts (46), Richard Dreyfuss (66), Kelly Osbourne (29), Henry Winkler (68), Matt Smith (31), Charlie Daniels (77), David Shwimmer (47), Bill Gates (58), Simon Le Bon (55), Matthew Morrison (35), Anthony Kiedis (51), John Cleese (74), Vanilla Ice (46), Lyle Lovett (56), Dennis Franz (69), Nelly (39), Peter Jackson (52), Diego Maradona (53) and K.D. Lang (52).

2013 League Table

[confidential]

Next Week peeps!

This week poses a question, with the sad death of Marcia Wallace, the voice of Mrs Krabappel in The Simpsons, would this mean the character she played would have to die? Would we need to award points for both, or even more as she did many so voices! Also, what is going to happen to all those potentially lobster pink travellers going Spain? The voice of their anthem has passed on, this is such a terrible quandary!!
Anyhow, I’m in the process of setting up a new website for the Dead Pool, it will look and feel very much like the old one for the moment but hopefully we will have password protected areas for our Poolers to share and have fun and also downloadable content to help you with next years lists. If you want to have a sneak peek, go to www.kingofankh.co.uk/DeadPool. So if you normally read this on the website, please update your rss feeds or weblinks. Feel a bit stupid saying that, you’re obviously not reading this!

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Naomi Conner, 114, American supercentenarian, oldest living person in Texas.
• Noel Harrison, 79, British singer (“The Windmills of Your Mind“), actor and Olympic skier.
• William Harrison, 79, American author and screenwriter (Rollerball).
• Sir Anthony Caro, 89, British sculptor, heart attack.
• Manolo Escobar, 82, Spanish singer and actor.
• Antonia Bird, 54, English television drama and film director.
• Marcia Wallace, 70, American actress (The Simpsons, The Bob Newhart Show) and comedian, breast cancer.
• Augusto Odone, 80, Italian economist and medical pioneer (Lorenzo’s oil).
• Hal Needham, 82, American stuntman and film director (Smokey and the Bandit, The Cannonball Run), cancer.

In Other News

It is truly with a very heavy heart, literally, that I have to share the news that Kadir Nurman has died at the age of 80. ‘Who?’ I hear you lament. Kadir is the Turkish immigrant who is credited with inventing the doner kebab! I know, this is truly a horrific moment for many of us.
Kadir emigrated to Germany in 1960 and noticed that the fast paced lives of the Germans needed a succulent dish that could be carried around, and lo, the mana of the gods for pissed people was born. Alas he didn’t patent the recipe so he made little money from the dish. However, he was pleased that so many Turkish people have managed to do so well with his recipe, thus improving the quality of life for his fellow countrymen. I’m not so sure about the quality of my life though, a few too many kebabs has left me with horrific angina that even red wine can’t help!

Dick Cheney has revealed to the world that he’s had to have his pacemaker modified in case of terrorist attack. Yup, the former vice-president is so paranoid he made sure that his wi-fi enabled ticker was impervious to Bin Laden and his friends. Now, I’m not one to cast an opinion normally, but wouldn’t it be easier to just give Cheney a gun and let him get on with it, after all he managed to shoot his mate in the face, so why bother making a complex device that would interfere with his pacemaker? Methinks he’s been watching too many episodes of Homeland.

We are all going to die!!! Yes, it’s true! But if you are to believe most media reports at the moment, we will all die from False Widow Spider bites. Now, I’m not a huge fan of spiders myself, but for us in the UK we’re pretty lucky really, overall they don’t grow as large as a house and they can’t kill you. In fact, the worst a False Widow can do it give you a tiny sting, much like a bee sting, certainly not lethal. So I’m wondering why a school in Gloucestershire insisted on closing due to a sighting of said spider? Any fucking excuse for a day off if you ask me. You don’t hear of Australian schools closing ever, and everything there is lethal and very ready to bite you on the testicles when you sit on the toilet! Shame on Dean School Chepstow, grow some balls!

On This Day

Not a lot happened on the 27th October in years past, but Wallis Simpson is granted a divorce in order to marry the Duke of Windsor, thus changing the face of the monarchy in the UK.
On a stranger note, Gloria Estefan becomes the first pop artist to be called upon by a Pope to perform at the Vatican. Who knew John Paul II was such a groover!
So who died on this day? Remember Akbar the Great, the Muslim emperor of India, whom established a sprawling kingdom through military conquests, but is more widely known for his policy of religious tolerance, no you won’t, but how things have changed…
We also lost Æthelstan, the first king of England, other than that I didn’t recognise anyone.

Thank Fuck He’s Dead bu Stu

This week’s TFHS is Ronald Clark O’Bryan.
As we approach Halloween we will probably be subjected to a glut of phoney Facebook warnings, quoting apocryphal tales from “friends of friends” who all claim to know somebody whose snot-faced little bastards rosy-cheeked little cherubs fell victims to razor blades, rat poison or other hilariously deadly items secreted inside Halloween treats.
They’re all bollocks, of course. One tale that is true, unfortunately, is that of 8-year-old Timothy O’Bryan from Deer Park, Texas, who finished off his trick-or-treating in 1974 with a Pixie Stix that was more than just past it’s sell-by date. Suffering convulsions, he was taken to hospital where he later died of cyanide poisoning.
It didn’t take the police long to catch the murderer – Timothy’s own father Ronald. Deep in debt this class cunt decided to take out life insurance policies worth over $60,000 on his two children in order to claim the insurance money because, you know, that never looks suspicious, especially when they’re eight.
O’Bryan was executed in 1984 by lethal injection. During the execution, a crowd of college students wearing Halloween masks showed up to cheer as he took his final breath.
The song Candyman was written about this nomination for father of the year. That’s the one by Siouxie and the Banshees, by the way, not the song from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

Last Week’s Birthdays

Katy Perry (29), Ryan Reynolds (37), Kim Kardashian (33), Judge Judy (71), Snoop Dogg (42), Jeff Goldblum (61), Carrie Fisher (57), Keith Urban (46), Jaclyn Smith (68), Tom Petty (63), Cat Deeley (37), Hilary Clinton (66), Seth McFarlane (40), Viggo Mortansen (55), Kevin Kline (74), Nancy Cartwright (56), Carly Elwes (51), Weird Al Yankovic (54), Catherine Deneuve (70), Christopher Lloyd (75), Jon Heder (36), Jesse Tyler Ferguson (38), Ang Lee (59), Bill Wyman (77), Bob Hoskins (71), Spike Jonze (44), F. Murray Abraham (74), Pele (73) and Wayne Rooney (28).

2013 League Table

[confidential]

Next Week peeps!