| Marco Simoncelli, MotoGP competitor, 24 |
His robust riding style upset a number of other riders but Simo was clearly going places. The 2008 250cc world champion took the step up to MotoGP last year. He achieved his best ever MotoGP result the week before his last ride, taking 2nd place in the Australian race behind new champion Casey Stoner. He was on his own piece of track in Malaysia, after an exciting tussle with Bautista, when he had what looked, at first, like a survivable accident. Perversely, instead of sliding into the gravel, his bike dug its rear wheel into the track and propelled Simoncelli into the path of 2 other riders to a collision which proved fatal.
| Muammar Gadaffy, dictator, 69 |
He shot to fame when he led a coup which deposed the king of Libya. He spent the next 42 years enjoying the perks of an absolute ruler and making friends with terrorists around the world. He sponsored attacks on Britain by Irish terrorists and provided them with weapons and explosives. He enjoyed the friendship of gullible politicians when he pretended to turn his back on terrorism in the 21st century, and triggered a rush of businessmen and politicians (e.g. Tony B. Liar), who hoped to cash in on Libya's huge oil reserves. But come the Arab Spring, which began in neighbouring Algeria, everything went sour and, with the help of strategic bombing by NATO, led by Britain & France, rebels in the west of Libya managed to topple their dictator. He ended up shot with as little ceremony as his victims.
| Dan Wheldon, racing car driver, 33 |
The winner of this year's Indianapolis 500 race has become a victim of wish of the Indy Car series operators to move away from sport to sport-entertainment, the genre of TV wrestling in the United States. In effect, Mr. Wheldon took $5 million bet that he couldn't start the race at the back, drive through the field of 34 cars and win. With so many cars on the short Las Vegas track, which is built to allow an average lap speed of 220 mph, crashes are inevitable. Dan Wheldon had the misfortune to be caught up in an almighty race-ending shunt.
 Those bloody Germans are at it again!
Not content with failing to prop up the euro with their savings, the Germans are about to bombard the Earth with bits of a rogue satellite. The X-ray observatory ROSAT weighs around 1.6 tons and it's going at 17,000 miles per hour. The Deutsche Luftraum Centrum has admitted that it has no idea where the satellite will hit when it re-enters the atmosphere in the third week of the month.
 Why do Russian spacecraft crash?
The recent failures of Russia's usually reliable Soyuz and Proton-M launch vehicles is all down to the workers, an investigation has found. They're underpaid and they can't be bothered doing a thorough job because no one really cares any more at Roskosmos.
World obesity crisis to be solved by Global Warming!
It's being presented as the latest climate change story but the news that animals and plants are shrinking because of global warming can be only good news for the NHS and sister organizations around the world, all of which are facing crises of various sorts due to standard equipment being inadequate for people the size of a house.
Brains in the feet but not in the bonce?
It would appear that highly paid Italian footballers are too dim to know that letting off fireworks in the bathroom is a stoopid idea. Which is why a Man. Utd. import had to call the fire brigade when he set light to his house in the posh part of Cheshire.
While you're waiting out a crash . . .
Attention all Blackberry phone users: why not arm yourself with a good book to read when your phone stops working. It will do you more good than messing with a phone and it will be a lot cheaper!
 Crushed or Crap Story?
Some guy strolled through the non-existent security at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris last May and strolled off with 5 paintings worth £450 million. The French Serious Crime Brigade turned over lots of rocks and earlier this year, they homed in on the man suspected of being the strolling thief and 2 accomplices. The thief and one of his assistants were arrested in May of this year. Now, the story has leaked out that the third man went into a panic, put them in a rubbish bin and let a refuse lorry crush them to bits the next time it compacted its load. If the story is true, the world has lost fairly okay works by Picasso and Leger and fairly uninspiring works by Matisse, Braque and Modigliani. If the story is true, of course.
A Day To Remember
October 10th is World Porridge Day.
We thought you might care to know that.
If ever a country deserved to go bust . . .
Why is Greece bust? Because the state is so useless with money that it doesn't stop their pension when someone dies or investigate when someone becomes suspiciously old. As a result, the country is paying out cash it doesn't have to swindling relatives of people who are supposed to be 120 years old!
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You couldn't make it up!
Rochdale council has decided to name a sports centre after Sir Cyril Smith, the former Liberal MP for the area, who was famous for being 29 stone, HUGE and the epitome of unsportiness.
Not very good imitation, but making a start!
Big Ben's clock tower is on the way to becoming a rival to the equally famous bell tower in Pisa. The tower is now leaning 1½ feet off the vertical to the north; something which tourists can spot with the naked eye.
• It will take 4,000 years, if nothing is done about it, for the lean to catch up with the Tower of Piza's. A committee of MPs, whose offices will be flattened if the tower falls over, is currently trying to decide whether to accelerate the lean to increase Big Ben's tourist value or to straighten the tower up as a demonstration of the superiority of British engineering.
Just a thought, but . . .
. . . if "rebalancing" is the buzz word of the day, how about "rebalancing" New Labor's policy of unchecked, unrecorded immigration by dropping subsidies to unwelcome overstayers and bogus asylum seekers, and making them pay their way instead of having it done by the British taxpayer?
 The management of St. Paul's cathedral has realized that so few members of the Scroungers' Army remain in the tent encampment on the cathedral's steps after night descends that they can health & safely hold evening services to generate a scrap of income.
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| Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, 56 |
He is credited with being the mastermind behind the iPhone, iPod, iMac and all sorts of other iGadgets, some great, some clunkers. He decided against a college education, worked for the video-game company Atari and did the philosophy thing in India before teaming up with his childhood friend Steve Wozniak to build computers out of readily available electronic parts. Apple pioneered the use of the computer mouse and, as well as Xerox, a graphical interface for the operating system. PC system running Windows claimed the mass market but Jobs took the company in many other directions, focussing on all aspects of his projects, after falling out of and back in to favour with the board.
His lengthy career included films, theatre and television work, he wrote for radio & television and managed his own theatre company. He is most recently remembered for the part of Chief Inspector Wexford in the Ruth Rendell Mysteries on TV, which he continues to play in Digital Heaven. He was one of The Dam Busters (1953), he was in major TV series like I, Claudius (as the emperor Tiberius) and The Prisoner (as No. 2), he worked in Bond films and Ian Fleming wanted him for the lead role but he was booked elsewhere. He worked in cop shows such as Z Cars and Bergerac, and also in Agatha Christie adaptations, which led to his becoming Inspector Wexford for 13 years and establishing a reputation for playing the role like a real copper.
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No accountability, as usual
M. Yeates, who was chief executive at Stafford Hospital when it was killing hundreds of patients through neglect, will be allowed to dodge the inquiry into his and his staff's failings on health grounds, which don't stop him applying for other jobs in the health industry.
Talk about dotty old judges!
Apparently, a drug-dealing foreigner is entitled to stay here on the family life aspect of his 'uman rights even if the dumped his girlfriend years ago, he never sees his kids and the judge knows it. Which makes you wonder what happened to people when they become judges. Do they have their common sense removed surgically or are drugs used to kill it?
 Something else they don't tell you about . . .
Not only do wind farms blight the landscape, they also blight the lives of anyone living near them. Getting a good night's sleep is impossible and the blades passing through sunlight make the ambient light level appear to rise and fall continuously and irritatingly. The only way to cope is to keep curtains or blinds drawn and the lights on all the time; except in winter, when curtains are no defence against "blade flicker".
 Another £1 BILLION down the drain
The Longannet coal-fired power station in Scotland has given up on a scheme to capture carbon dioxide and store it underground. If it had worked, using the scheme would have doubled the cost of electricity. Are we grateful that successive governments wasted only one billion quid on finding out that the notion is a total non-starter? Not really.
Nationalized or not, makes nae bliddy difference.
Complaints against banks in the last 6 months : Barclays – 250,000 / Lloyds TSB – 182,000 / Santander – 169,000 / NatWest – 147,000.
Unintended opposite or something more sinister?
What do you get when Tesco says it's holding the biggest ever price-cutting campaign in the whole history of the universe? Bigger bills at the check-outs, The Grocer magazine found from a survey of the prices of "staples".
Where some of it went
If you were wondering how we got into the present economic Brown Hole, it has been revealed that Labour lost track of £170 MILLION handed out via the European Regional Development Fund (repatriated British taxpayers' money, not "European" money) in the period 2000-2006.
Attention all Council Taxpayers
You should know that the first 3 weeks' contributions each year go towards gold-plated pensions for council staff and officers on over-inflated salaries.
Capitalist comfort ain't all bad!
Thermal imaging of the squatters' camp, which is blocking access to St Paul's cathedral in London, has shown that 90% of the tents are empty at night. The squatters pretend that they hate Capitalism and everyone with money. They say they're prepared to suffer until wealth is overthrown. But it would appear that most of them either go home when the meeja go home, or choose to spend the night in a warm hotel room.
Bozo!!
"Green taxes are an investment in the future" a deluded Daily Disaster letter-writer would have us believe. Wrong. They're just taxes, which the government will waste along with all the other tax revenue.
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If you go to the Kenyan Coast anywhere near Somalia . . .
. . . you're likely to be kidnapped or killed by terrorists. That's what happened to British tourist Mrs. Judith Tebbut last month (her husband was murdered by the kidnappers) and the same has happened to French tourist M. Marie Dedieu this month, thanks to neglect of duty by the Kenyan authorities.
Fox is cleared, a nation rejoices.
An investigation into the business relationship between Defence Sec. L. Fox and his former flatmate A. Werritty has found that nothing that Mr. Fox did exceeded the bounds of precedent created by New Labour during its 13 years of misrule. The precedents cited include the decision by former prime minister T. B. Liar to put an ex-flatmate in charge of the Millennium Dome and then make the same pal Attorney General.
Roll up, Roll up!
The Gaddafiy Drain is the new hot tourist destination in Libya. But tour companies across the world are already experiencing difficulty in gaining access to this and similar sites where notorious members of the regime were done in. The Libyan Tourist Bureau is already worried about national monuments being worn out by hordes of trippers and it is getting its rationing system deployed well in advance.
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Anyone who thinks what goes on at a political party's conference matters.
"Far queue, far queue very much!" – Frank Zappa.
