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...
LITTLE MR. SUNSET Actor Alan Arkin has died aged 89. He began his career as a folk singer with the Tarriers (they had a 50s hit with a retooling of “The Banana Boat Song”) and indeed made his film debut as part of the group in a musical showcase for calypso acts. Acting took the […]
ON THE BRINK Activist and Tupac’s stepfather Mutulu Shakur has died aged 72. The elder Shakur was active in the Black Liberation Army and helped recovering heroin addicts through acupuncture. In the late 80s he was convicted and imprisoned for the 1981 armed robbery of a Brink’s car that resulted in the deaths of a […]
CLOUDY FORECAST It’s the ultimate sign that Labour contrarian Frank Field is taking the piss out of us deadpoolers when he outlives his namesake. Though that does give a glimmer of hope to music fans everywhere WRT the Simon Cowells. The dead Frank Field was a weatherman and the first professional meteorologist in New York […]
PEARLS BEFORE SLAIN Soaps actress Meg Johnson has died aged 86. Her showbiz backdrop was in musical theatre, with a repertoire including Oliver!, Follies, and Chicago. After acting in Corrie as Eunice Gee and Brookside as Brigid McKenna, she channeled this West End flair into her best-known role, boisterous receptionist Pearl Ladderbanks in Emmerdale. Pearl’s […]
PAGE TURNER IN HER GRAVE In recent years, Yahoo has taken up most of the oxygen among resurrected QO sources, but let’s not undervalue the local BBC pages as a vessel for canny differentials. Case in point: Caroline Page. Lib Dem Page represented Woodbridge on the Suffolk City Council, where she campaigned for causes such […]
D-DEAD Only one French unit – the Fusiliers Marins Commandos captained by Philippe Kieffer – partook in the beach-storming Normandy landings that eventually freed their homeland. Over half the squad died at D-Day, and the death of Léon Gautier marks the complete extinction of the unit. Gautier fought in the Congo, Syria, and Lebanon before […]
GONE WITH A VENGENACE Premature obituaries are not uncommon, but it’s a little more peculiar for most of the UK tabloids to run with a death hoax (of which only The Mirror mea culpa’d) and then forget the person existed once they actually died. Though in fairness, Carmen Sevilla forgot she existed too. Hailing from […]
JOHN B. DEADENOUGH For every Australian MP or supporting cast member of a 70s US sitcom assured a QO by our increasingly lax UK media landscape, one field that’s decreased in obitability is science Nobel laureates. Winning the dynamite gong for chemistry or physics went from “assured Telegraph obit within a month” in 2013 to […]
DISCONNECT Lowell Weicker was the last Republican senator to represent Connecticut, but the Democratic victory in his 1988 defeat proved a Pyrrhic one for Team Donkey as it gave them Joe Lieberman. Indeed, the liberal Weicker was such a pre-Gingrich relic that Lieberman challenged him from the right. Weicker first gained attention as the first […]
AVAST! Yarrrr, that pirate guy at the Queen’s funeral has walked the plank aged 97. David Ogilvy, 13th Earl of Airlie, was a longtime matey of the royal family who was the last surviving participant of the coronation of George VI and a former Lord Chamberlain. A frail, eyepatched Ogilvy turned up at Her Maj’s […]
