Death happens. Why not make it interesting?
The online competition to guess which famous people won't make it to the end of the current year. If they're elderly, ill, or just live a high-risk lifestyle, stick 'em in your team, and for each one whose death you correctly predict, you'll score points. DDP was dreamt up in Derby, England (hence the name...) by Big Iain back in 1996. Other hosts: Siegfried Baboon and Rude Kid (2003-7), Octopus of Odstock (2008-9), The Man in Black (2010-17), Spade Cooley (2018-19), msc (2020-21), Grim Up North (2020-22), and Reptile (2020-23). Now the Committee of DI (2022), time (2024), and Banana (2023) oversee the biggest deadpool going...
APOLLING WAY TO GO Astronaut Thomas P. Stafford has touched the stars aged 93. He was the last survivor of Apollo 10, a mission in which he and Gene Cernan rode a Lunar Module within nine miles of the Moon’s surface, an inching ever-so-closer to landing on the Moon that Neil Armstrong fulfilled two months […]
LAST WALSH Roger Ebert was big on the “Stanton-Walsh Rule”, which proclaimed “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.” Though Ebert considered this rule broken when Walsh did “Wild Wild West”, it’s hard to argue with the overall CV, with highlights including the […]
FLAHERTY WILL GET YOU NOWHERE A staple of the SCTV sketch comedy programme alongside luminaries such as John Candy and Rick Moranis, Joe Flaherty played characters such as seedy station owner Caballero and vampiric horror host Count Floyd. He also delivered a letter to Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part II, yelped “jackass” […]
JUAN VICENTE PERISH Humble Venezuelan sugar cane farmer Juan Vicente Pérez came into this world a day after Matt Busby and three days before Benny Goodman. He was in for the long haul, living to 114 on the typical supercentenarian diet of God and a daily shot of alcohol. The last surviving man born in […]
WE WANT MACNEIL! News anchor Robert MacNeil has died aged 93. He won an Emmy for his Watergate coverage and gained further fame when he and Jim Lehrer joined forces for news programme The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour (currently PBS NewsHour). Picked by Rigor Mort Us and Stars On Ice, footage of his gruesome death can be […]
KINNEAR MY GOD TO THEE Footballer Joe Kinnear has died aged 77. A popular defender with Tottenham Hotspur and the Ireland national team, he won the FA Cup, League Cup, and Uefa Cup with the Spurs. As manager his gravity-defying turn with Wimbledon delayed their relegation by years, though his final managerial stint with Newcastle […]
BARTH LATER John Barth’s literary modus operandi was to challenge the established norms, summarising his approach in his essay The Literature of Exhaustion. His most influential works were The Sot-Weed Factor, which lampooned historical fiction on a colonial Maryland tobacco farm, and Giles Goat-Boy, featuring a part-caprine protagonist and condensing the Cold War into a […]
WILK HE OR WON’T HE Is this baseball player worth giving a shit about? A handy flowchart. Was he Yogi Berra? Y: Yes. But he’s been dead for yonks. N: Go further. Was he in the “Homer at the Bat” episode of The Simpsons? Y: Yes. N: No. Guess where Pete Wilk falls. He […]
CONTER OUT Lou Conter was the last survivor of the sinking of the USS Arizona during the Pearl Harbor attacks. He was credited with saving several lives as he pulled survivors out of the waters and into his lifeboat. He was 102 and picked by Perhaps’ Pointless Punts. Lou Conter13 September 1921 – 1 April […]
ON THE FRITZ Usually, when I see one of these German actor DDP picks dying, I assume it’s some 97-year-old who stands zero chance of gaining press outside of Deutschland, but Fritz Wepper had a branch in the form of Cabaret for the British press to grab on to. He portrayed Fritz Wendel, a German […]
