Dead Pool Round 124: Comes the Fall
Deborah HH wins again with Jeffrey Epstein. An inspired pick, and yet somehow I would have said a long shot.
I mean, can you believe this shit? From the article above: ‘If Epstein’s neck fracture was fresh, Hua said, then “at a minimum, it’s a very unusual suicide.”’
Ya think? Scare a bunch of perverted billionaires, and the whackiest things happen!
Okay. Enough of that. Are you ready?
0. Rule Zero (AKA Steve’s Rule): your pick has to be living when picked. Also, nobody whose execution date is circled on the calendar. Also, please don’t kill anybody. Plus (Pupster’s Rule) no picking someone who’s only famous for being the oldest person alive.
1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of (I don’t generally follow the Dead Pool threads carefully, so if you’re unsure of your pick, call it to my attention).
2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.
3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.
4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay? Also, make sure you have a correct spelling of your choice somewhere in your comment. These threads get longish and I use search to figure out if we have a winner.
5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy to catch the dupes. Popular picks go fast.
6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.
7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you’ve won before, send me your address again. I don’t keep good records.
8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.
The winner, if the winner chooses to entrust me with a mailing address, will receive an Official Certificate of Dick Winning and a small original drawing on paper suffused with elephant shit particles. Because I’m fresh out of fairy shit particles.
August 16, 2019 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 59
But can it pull a plough?
There were several of these tear-assing around the last country show. What they have to do with things rural I do not know, but the plough horse didn’t seem bothered.
I hate to think what it costs to run one of these in a country where gasoline is somewhere north of eight bucks a gallon.
Reminder: new Dead Pool tomorrow. I am still stunned at the brazenness of the Jeffrey Epstein murder.
I say ‘murder’ with confidence, because you can’t break bones in your neck with a jail cell hanging. Dude was manually strangled.
It takes a drop of approximately the height of the hangee to snap the neck. It’s more complicated than that – Albert Pierrepoint, long-serving British executioner, had a complex formula for working out the height of the drop, depending on the height and weight of the subject. Too short a drop, and the convict strangled slowly. Too long a drop, and his head popped off like a Barbie doll. Both very embarrassing for the hangman.
Anyway. You get the point. Somebody went into that cell and killed the man, and I’m sure we’ll never get to the bottom of it. Stand by for a bajillion speculative paperback exposés for, like, the rest of our lives.
But we don’t care about that. We care about Dead Pool Round 124. See you here!
August 15, 2019 — 8:58 pm
Comments: 9
This is my Not Happy face
It is August 14 AND WE HAVE THE CENTRAL HEATING ON. And not for the first time. Seriously, this is ridiculous.
We have had four whole days of weather in the 80s this summer, and the BBC keeps banging on about warmest month since records have been kept. I can’t even imagine how they’ve tortured the numbers to promote that lie.
I’m no meteorologist (and certainly not a climatologist, which I gather is what you call yourself if you’re a meteorologist who believes in global warmening), but it’s cold in here. And getting colder. The little I’ve read about sunspots and natural climate patterns leads me to believe we’re headed for something like a little ice age.
I’m not happy about this. I don’t like being cold and I certainly don’t look forward to being a cold old lady.
You know what, though? I wonder if there are deep state actors who are getting off on this. Not the grassroots true believers, but the shadowy bastards who make up our lords and masters: pushing the idea that the planet is burning up while we’re all shivering in our August cardigans. It’s just their sort of perverse.
Picture is a local beach today. Nicked from social media. You can nick things from social media, right? Don’t people relinquish exclusive rights when they post online?
August 14, 2019 — 8:28 pm
Comments: 9
Brother, can you spare a groat?
At a country show this weekend, we fell in with a group of very enthusiastic metal detectorists. They had some astonishing finds — although, if you read the labels, it was over quite an extended time period. I think one has a long wait between astonishing finds.
Many of them were probably votive offerings – small objects thrown into water for religious reasons. We…don’t really know much about this. My favorite of these — I was an idiot and didn’t get a picture — was a tiny head of a…well, I thought it was a wolf at first. But it either had three horns, or two standy-up ears and a single horn growing out of the center of its forehead. So! Either a wolf unicorn or, much more likely, the debbil.
I wonder who was trying to conjure that boi out of the brackish water and why?
Inset: a very good Henry VII silver groat. I love groats. Probably because I love saying ‘groat’. They were worth four pence and fell out of use in the Nineteenth C.
Uncle B bought me a metal detector when we first moved here. Then I discovered most of the land around is protected conservation land, no detectoring allowed. So I scanned our garden and found a few rusty nails. No groat for me!
August 13, 2019 — 9:02 pm
Comments: 12
Poor bird
The (British) National Gallery’s Picture of the Month this month is Joseph Wright of Darby’s “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump.”
I’m indebted to Uncle B for introducing me to this painter — and, in particular, this painting — years ago. Wright lived in the late 18th C and has been called the first painter of the Industrial Revolution.
Do click through and look at the painting in full, in color. He was famous for chiaroscuro and clever light effects, and the character studies are excellent. Whether the scientist sucks alllll the life out of the poor cockatiel is unclear.
And yes — Deborah HH has won another dick with Epstein. Even though it was the most predicted suicide in the history of predicted suicides, I’m still stunned by the brazenness of this one. But, you know — whadre we gonna do about it, eh? New Dead Pool Friday.
August 12, 2019 — 9:06 pm
Comments: 10
Keep an eye on this
Power outages over a huge swathe of the UK today. There are three things going on here:
Aging infrastructure. They haven’t been maintaining the old suppliers of electricity like they should. This is in large part because:
Push for green alternatives. They’re scrabbling to replace reliable, old-fashioned sources like coal and nuclear with windpower, wavepower and solar. Not only are these things inherently unable to pull the cart, but the old fossil fuel plants aren’t allowed to be maintained properly or upgraded.
But mostly because there are a lot more people on this little island than they’re letting on. The official figure is somewhere around 60 million, but lots of people think it’s at least 10 million more than that. Based on quantifiable data like housing shortages and stock movement in the big supermarket chains. (On an unrelated note, they pulled something like another 30 ‘migrants’ out of the water near us today alone).
It was pretty messy, because it essentially knocked out all transportation. On a Friday. People were using their phones to light their way out of the subway, at least one lady got stuck in a carriage because the doors wouldn’t open (where was the backup power to basic emergency services? Good question).
Expect more of this. But hey, I expect the enthusiasm for green energy to wane when Jemima can’t charge her iphone.
And yes we lost power, but just long enough to turn off our computers and not long enough that we noticed until we noticed our computers were off. Good weekend, everyone!
August 9, 2019 — 10:29 pm
Comments: 13
Feral no more
Twitter reminds me it’s International Cat Day. Slavish devotee of social media that I am, I have posted a cat.
Come to think of it, it’s nearly the anniversary of the day this little monkey stuck his head around our front door (not quite — I’ve just check the blog. It was July 27).
He’s grown into a lovely beast. A fine hunter and climber of trees. A bit of a wanderer.
Tree story. Most days when I get home, he stands outside and cries until I give up and go out to him. Whereupon he makes a great show of dashing up one particular tree (it’s an easy climber near the house) and back down again. Finally — and he’s very particular about this — he steps off the tree at shoulder height and onto my chest. We might repeat this four times in an afternoon.
I have several times rescued this boy out of a tree. The first time, he was genuinely and dangerously stuck — he was little and a neighborhood bully cat had chased him way up a tree with no side branches. Despite the conventional wisdom, I really don’t think he could have come down again intact without help. (In this case, a guy doing work on my neighbor’s house shinnied up the tree far enough to reach him and handed him down).
This may be fanciful of me, but I think he’s reliving a tree rescue over and over.
Anyway, check out social media. It’s fuller than usual of cat pictures tonight.
August 8, 2019 — 8:46 pm
Comments: 10
Hmmm…
Something weird from CCTV footage of the entrance to the Brighton Museum, in the gift shop area I presume. It’s billed as ghostly, but nah. There’s a flash of light (pictured) and then a mug falls off that shelf and shatters (which caught the attention of security staff, which is why they reviewed the footage).
Some kind of static discharge? Hard to imagine that being strong enough to knock something off a shelf.
Did I ever tell you that my grandmother was chased through the house by ball lightning that came down the chimney? True story. Just spitballin’ here.
Hey, I almost went with the story of the girl who fell off famous suicide spot Beachy Head while wandering around in the dark looking for a place to pee.
August 7, 2019 — 8:13 pm
Comments: 8
I did it again
I was trying to buy a broom. I obviously have difficulty visualizing scale.
Not a full-sized broom. I wanted one of those wooden-handled bristle brushes that you sweep pathways and stuff with. But every time I found the one I wanted on Amazon, it was an ‘add on’ item. Which, if you don’t know, means you don’t actually get it until you have put £20 worth of stuff in your basket. And not just any stuff, but stuff sold directly by Amazon. Which they don’t tell you if it is on the product page.
So I usually spend an hour putting stuff into, checking the basket, and taking stuff out again. Amazon is dumb.
This one wasn’t an add-on item. But I should have realized the problem when it was described as a bonsai broom.
August 6, 2019 — 8:26 pm
Comments: 6
Innovation!
Just another word for ‘bodged’.
I bought a pen refill when I bought the micropen because I thought it might be hard to get ahold of one (turns out it’s not). I took an old ratty bamboo paint brush, wrapped a little strip of masking tape around both ends, and jammed that sucker in the hollow end of the bamboo.
Yes, I own a roll of black masking tape. I’m classy like that.
Works a treat. I’ll keep the tiny one for a travel sketchbook or something.
And with that, I go dark for the night. Over the weekend, I heard a pop and a zizz and a quarter of my fancy gaming monitor went dark. To their credit, Iiyama has been awesome about it. They originally scheduled the replacement for today, but I begged off because I had too much on. So tomorrow, they’re delivering me a nice new monitor.
Here’s the catch: I have to take the new monitor out of the box and put the old one in it to send back, no doubt while the driver stands over me and taps his foot. So I’m’a break it all down right now and have it ready to go.
See you tomorrow. You’re going to look 25% brighter, at least along the righthand edge.
August 5, 2019 — 8:18 pm
Comments: 6