Another week, another newsletter. This week we have no points to award but we are now in the final month countdown with Dave in the lead with an impressive 531 points, correctly predicting six out of thirteen deaths, consisting of the first death of the year and both his Cert and Woman. Embarrassingly I’m in second place with 355 points with Emily hot on my heels with 349. All to play for with the cold weather in front of us with plenty of points still to be had, so Dave’s seemingly unassailable lead could easily crumble.

Now onto 2014. If you need a rules refresher, please visit http://thedeadpool.rip/the-rules/ You can also point anyone who wants to join in for 2014 in that direction.

For 2014, I’d like you to fill in a spreadsheet I’ve prepared to help on the admin side, because there’s quite a few of us nowadays it would save me a lot of time if you could download the form and fill it in. There are various formats there for you to choose from, if you have any problems just contact me. These forms can be downloaded from http://thedeadpool.rip/downloads/.

I can’t stress enough that you must get your entries in by the closing date, you may not realise how much actual work goes into producing all of this on a weekly basis so the less time I have to spend chasing you for 13 names the better 😛

I’m also looking for guest editors, Stu has been amazing with his weekly TFHD, which I’m sure you all enjoy reading, I know I do, if you have an idea you would like to try please let me know. It doesn’t have to be a weekly thing, maybe a monthly or quarterly edition, every little helps as Tesco’s are so fond of saying, although those cunts prefer to screw both their suppliers, workers and customers, with me I’ll just want to screw you… 😛

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• Robin Leigh-Pemberton, Baron Kingsdown, 86, British peer and banker, Governor of the Bank of England (1983–1993).
• Stan Stennett, 88, Welsh comic entertainer, actor and jazz musician, complications following stroke.
• John Galbraith Graham, 92, British crossword compiler (“Araucaria” of The Guardian) and Church of England priest.
• Lewis Collins, 67, British actor (The Professionals), cancer.
• Jean Kent, 92, English actress (The Browning Version), complications from a fall.
• Paul Walker, 40, American actor (The Fast and the Furious, Pleasantville, Into the Blue), traffic collision.
• Elwood, 8, American Chinese crested/chihuahua dog, World’s Ugliest Dog (2007).

 In Other News

Hot on the heels of last weeks revelation by Hugh Jackman that he contracted skin cancer, Vinnie Jones decided he wanted in on some of that hot shit. The 48-year-old, who turned to acting after hanging up his football boots says cancer is his ‘toughest and scariest opponent yet’. Vinnie found a lump under his eye, and did’t know whether it was a wart or a spot until he went to get it checked out. Turns out this pimple was CANCER!!! Since his diagnosis he’s had three operations to remove two patches under his eye and one on the back of his head. Unsurprisingly he’s also advocating you should get things checked out, unlike a real man who just chews the cancer off his face between a snakes fang and a polar bear canine, whilst they are both still alive!

The N-Dubz rapper Dappy has been hospitalised after a horse he was riding kicked him in the face His doctors reported they found it hard to notice any difference between the before and after pictures. Apparently he was riding the horse at his Hertfordshire home when it threw him and stamped on his face, I can only empathise with the horse, as I’m sure you do. Lets hope that a tractor takes exception to him next time…

For fans of Family Guy, we are all shocked at the news that Brian the Dog is being killed off. He might have been just an eight-year-old animated labrador to some, but to devotees of the show, Brian Griffin was top dog in the world of cartoon canines and will be sorely missed. Brian will be killed by a car. On the plus side, this means the troubled mutt never get’s to use the gun he always carried in case he needed to commit suicide. On the downside, the Griffins have apparently already bought a new dog called Vinny as a replacement. Monsters!

We also have Ian Watkins of The Lost Prophets found guilty of fucking a baby. Yeah, I know, shame we can’t just send him off to hell as soon as possible, along with those two mothers who let this happen due to ‘celeb eyes’. He’s going to be sentenced shortly, so without doubt he will be jailed in a top security prison which will hopefully put him in harms way from the other inmates. My guess is he’ll last all of three minutes, nobody likes a manipulative cunt, let alone a paedophile.  I only feel sorry for H from Steps, who shares his name, sadly he received a barrage of abuse online and a case of mistaken identity when his photo was used by Entertainment Online instead of the real cunto! *sigh*

On This Day

• 1420 – Henry V of England enters Paris. The City, not Hilton…
• 1885 – First serving of the soft drink Dr Pepper at a drug store in Waco, Texas.
• 1913 – The Ford Motor Company introduces the first moving assembly line.
• 1919 – Lady Astor becomes the first female Member of Parliament to take her seat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.
• 1952 – The New York Daily News reports the news of Christine Jorgensen, the first notable case of sexual reassignment surgery.
• 1955 – American Civil Rights Movement: In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
• 1990 – Channel Tunnel sections started from the United Kingdom and France meet 40 metres beneath the seabed.

Deaths

• 1866 – George Everest, Welsh geographer and surveyor, namesake of Mt. Everest (b. 1790)
• 1947 – Aleister Crowley, English occultist and author (b. 1875)
• 2007 – Anton Rodgers, English actor and director (b. 1933)

Thank Fuck He’s Dead by Stu

This weeks TFHD is homegrown “hero” Michael Ryan. The unemployed labourer and (apparently) antiques dealer was responsible for the Hungerford massacre on 19th August, 1987.

Like so many of these lunatics I’ve written about in the past few weeks, Ryan had what was described as an unhealthy relationship with his mother, the Guardian wrote that she spoiled him, and that he was a “mummy’s boy”

His first victim was Susan Godfrey, who was out having a picnic with her children, aged 2 & 4. He spared the children, who sought help from a pensioner they met, telling her “a man in black has shot our mummy”

After a failed attempt to kill a petrol station cashier, he returned home to load his car with guns, shoot the dogs and torch the place. The car wouldn’t start, so he shot that too. He made his way through the town, shooting young and old indiscriminately as he went. He shot at PC Roger Brereton 23 times, hitting him with four bullets. The officer died sat in his car radioing for help. A couple who drove into the step rest just after the police car were shot at, but managed to escape with their lives.

Ryan’s mother soon turned up, and was understandably shocked to find half the street on fire and dead bodies everywhere. She tried to reason with her son, so he shot and killed her too. An old lady in a house nearby narrowly escaped with her life after coming outside to tell Ryan to keep the bloody noise down.

In the town centre he continued his rampage, shooting at drivers who had ironically been diverted through the scene of the carnage as police attempts to contain the spree started to go tits-up. He killed Douglas Wainwright, the constable who had signed Ryan’s gun license extension only two weeks before. A brave soldier, Carl Harries, was in the town at the time and attempted to give first aid to those who were wounded and dying.

Michael Ryan’s end came in the school he went to as a child. After locking himself inside, police surrounded the building, and sensing no escape, he stuck his beretta in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The Hungerford massacre was one of the worst firearms atrocities committed in the UK, alongside Dunblaine and the Cumbria Shootings, and led to the Firearms (Amendment) 1988.

There are many references to the Hungerford massacre in popular culture, including the Radiohead song Sulk, Marvel comics antihero Pete Wisdom’s backstory includes his mother being one of the victims, Morrissey continued his long standing tradition of cheerfulness with Michael’s Bones and the Goldie Lookin Chain song Guns Don’t Kill People, Rappers Do includes the line “Like Michael Ryan about to snap, guns don’t kill people, it’s just rap”

Last Week’s Birthdays

Ben Stiller (48), Don Cheadle (49), Christina Applegate (42), Ed Harris (63), Tina Turner (74), Jon Stewart (51), Elisha Cuthbert (31), Billy Idol (58), Anna Faris (37), Judd Nelson (54), Randy Newman (70), Tom Sizemore (52), Robin Givens (49), Stephen  Merchant (39), Katie Cassidy (27), Joel Cohen (59), Kathryn Bigelow (62), Mandy Patinkin (61), Riley Scott (76), Percy Sledge (72), Bruno Tonioli (58), Peter Facinelli (40), Natasha Bedingfield (32) and Bill Nye (58).

2013 League Table

[confidential]

Next Week peeps!

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

[confidential]

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!