- Warp Factor
Three bars bent out of shape – the last impression left by Hollywood actor Anton Yelchin (27), after his own car rolled back and trapped him between the wrought iron gate and a solid brick pillar at the entrance to his Studio City home.
The Los Angeles coroner confirmed ‘blunt trauma asphyxia’ as the cause of Yelchin’s death.
The Russian-born actor was best known for playing navigation officer Chekov in Star Trek, the 1960s TV series recently re-booted as a feature film franchise.
The vehicle found next to Yelchin’s body was a 2015 Grand Cherokee Jeep. Themodel had already been recalled by manufacturers Chrysler because of gear stick problems and ‘rollaway risk’.
The electronic gear-change lets drivers think they’ve gone to ‘park’ when really they are still in ‘neutral’.
In a kitsch coincidence Yelchin will appear from beyond the grave in a Star Trek movie entitled Star Trek Beyond. Finished a few weeks before his freak fatal accident, the film will boldly go on general release in July.
- Tommy Gun
Tommy Mair (52), skinny, bony, pointy thing, better off sent to the Somme a hundred years ago (if you’d wish that on anyone). ’Stead of him pointing a gun at Jo Cox MP, allegedly.
I ask you, who in their right mind would stab and shoot and lastly shout ‘Britain First’? Reverse order, perverse logic; like as not he wasn’t in his right mind.
Day before, this man knocks on the door of Birstall Wellbeing Centre complaining that NHS treatment does nothing to alleviate his condition.
The condition of being epileptic, clinically depressed, hardly had a job and still living at your Nan’s 20 years after she passed on.
Best thing ever happened to me is being a volunteer gardener, he once said.
Come back tomorrow says the forty something lady offering ‘holistic therapies, Spiritual and Psychic guidance in a professional and relaxing environment’.
Pink tinged for local ladies who like a light lunch and a safe journey to the other side.
By snap time ‘tomorrow’ Tommy’s already in the arms of two police officers. Slumping to the ground again, can’t stand up for falling down. That’s him, tha’ knows, not she who he is said to have shot.
Born in Kilmarnock where the football team’s the ‘Killies’, looks like stupid Mair has gone and done it.
- Hail A Regular Hero
Air to take your breath away surges through the rest of the mine as tonnes of watery sludge pour into the new seam.
The new seam which opened up an old shaft that’s not seen the light of day since Queen Victoria’s – and all because the Coal Board didn’t look at maps they should have had sight of, care of the British Geographical Survey.
Equally suddenly, the ‘ventilation came back to normal’, chains clanking like they usually do – but no reverse-charge of rock, mud, water.
Out of 30 miners cutting coal in South 9B, Lofthouse Colliery in the early hours of 21March 1973, 23 managed to get away. Of the remainder, the body of Charles Cotton (49) was recovered by the rescue party – the saddest thing, they say, is when rescue turns to recovery.
But the others were never even recovered; six sets of human remains remain there to this day.
Charles Cotton had been working alongside his son Terry when the stagnant water gushed in. Finding himself floundering, father told son to keep on running – stay aheadof the inrush and stay alive.
The men entombed were matched by six more who tried to get them out. Who took thedecision to go down into the foul-smelling water without knowing whether at any moment it might rise up again to more than meet them.
One of those brave men was Bernard Kenny, the same Bernard Kenny, now aged 78, who suffered stab wounds to the abdomen while attempting to save the late Jo Cox MP when she was attacked last week outside Birstall Library where she was about to start her constituency surgery.
Cox wasn’t quite born when Kenny committed his act of heroism ‘dahn t’pit’. If he gets to celebrate his hundredth, there would have been 66 candles on her cake: the two ofthem share the same birthday.
More than 40 years on, perhaps Kenny’s still trying to turn ‘recovery’ back to ‘rescue’; again, to no avail.
But who in their right mind would call that a fail?