Derby Dead Pool

MILITARY SPUNK FUNTIME HOUR Nothing like some ancient army officers to help kick off the year, albeit two of a very different moral bent. Frank Kitson’s most favourable obits still made sure to say he was “controversial”. As did Kissinger’s. You know where this is heading. Kitson cut his craft during the Mau Mau Uprising […]

ZZ TOPPED Oddly topically, both Israel and Palestine get a cadaver in these early days. Zvi Zamir was chief of the Mossad from 1968-74, where he retaliated against the Munich massacre and received advanced warning, largely unheeded, of the attack that morphed into the Yom Kippur War. He was 98 and picked by The Policies […]

AL-AROURI BOREALIS!? AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, AT THIS TIME OF DAY, IN THIS PART OF THE COUNTRY, LOCALIZED ENTIRELY WITHIN YOUR DEADPOOL!? If there’s any good we can say about Hamas, it’s this – they’ll confirm a senior official’s death ASAP, rather than keeping us on tenterhooks the way ISIS does. Saleh al-Arouri was […]

And so the door closes on 2023. Sure, we laughed as pack of cocky billionaires steered a Logitech game controller into Davey Jones’s Locker, and stood in horror as war waged in Gaza. But overall, in contrast with 2022’s obvious shape, the past year has felt largely a retread. Putin’s still a fuckwit, the Tories […]

DINGLE SMELLS Emmerdale star Steve Halliwell has died aged 77. His scrappy flat-capped Zak Dingle was the pulse of the soap, making an unforgettable first impression getting into a bare-knuckle brawl with Ned Glover. He lost the bout, but won the audiences with his troublemaking. Dingle was planned just for that brief run, but proved […]

EUREKA, THEY FOUND HIM Madcap inventor Wilf Lunn has died aged 81. The child of deaf parents, he became a familiar face on the hearing-impaired-geared children’s programme Vision On, where he displayed zany bicycle contraptions like the pigeon catcher and the choir boy tuner. His popularity spread and he was soon appearing on Eureka, Jigsaw, […]

MORE BONES TO COLLECT Inuit elder Qapik Attagutsiak has died aged 103. She was the last surviving Inuit contributor to World War II, helping gather seal and walrus bones which were then shipped to cities to be converted to ammo and aircraft glue. After the war ended she was active as a seamstress and midwife, […]

FIELD OF MULCH Lest you thought 1923 was finished with its missed centenaries of note, Mike Nussbaum slips out the back door a mere six days before hitting 100. Nussbaum was a pillar of Chicago’s theatre scene and was the oldest working actor in the US. While the theatre was his home, he was best […]

A MINOR OBIT MLB’s longest consecutive playing streak belongs to Cal Ripken Jr, who played 2,632 consecutive games for the Baltimore Orioles. His replacement on the would-be #2,633 was one Ryan Minor, who played 142 games total across his entire career. Before that he had a brief basketball career with the Oklahoma City Cavalry. Of […]

EXIT SANDMAN Torben Ulrich boasted many talents – a tennis player who once reached the semifinals at Wimbledon, a jazz journalist and musician who was releasing albums into his 90s, and a director of artsy films. If the surname looked familiar, your intuitions were correct – he was also Lars’s father, and his input on […]