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...
DEATH TALK WITH SUE JOHANSON Sue Johanson was essentially the Canadian Dr. Ruth, with a long career in sex therapy that translated to a fruitful renaissance as a talk show host. Johanson was trained as a nurse by stodgy nuns who didn’t discuss sex and ultimately sparked a rebellious flame in Johanson, who preferred to […]
OFF THE MARKOWITZ Economist Harry Markowitz has died aged 95. His main economic legacy was “modern portfolio theory”, which promoted the idea of diversifying one’s assets in an investment portfolio. He postulated that including a mix of risky and safe assets was sounder than putting all your eggs in one basket. So riveting that he […]
TONY BURIED Another one for the recent pile of billionaire deaths comes via natural causes rather than in a flimsy submarine propelled by a video game controller. Tony Murray had a keener sense of self-preservation than that – rather than face certain death as a Jew in Vichy France, he hightailed to Britain in 1940. […]
GLENDA IS MISSING Widely respected actress and politician Glenda Jackson has died aged 87. She made her first splash on the stage, with her breakout role as an insane asylum inmate emulating Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade. She continued to dazzle theatrically with a breadth of performances that included multiple Shakespeare roles and Eugene O’Neill play […]
BUNGLE BUNGLED! Italian mogul, political Lazarus, and party animal Silvio Berlusconi has died aged 86. Shockingly, the cause was leukaemia, rather than a Nelson Rockefeller-style exit. He muscled his way into the Italian elite with a string of successful business ventures, including founding dominant mass media corporation Mediaset and rescuing AC Milan from the brink. […]
WHISTLE BLOWN ON ELLSBERG Pentagon Papers exposer Daniel Ellsberg has died aged 92. Hired by RAND Corporation as a nuclear strategist, he was thrust into the LBJ orbit and was commissioned by Robert McNamara to collate a top-secret report on the Vietnam War. Ellsberg was shaken by the insider knowledge that the Kennedy and Johnson […]
NO COUNTRY FOR DEAD MEN Literary titan Cormac McCarthy’s death aged 89 happened three days after the death of one of his closest friends, the whale biologist Roger Payne. Indeed, McCarthy preferred to hobnob with scientists instead of other writers, emblematic of the reclusive quirks that took him decades to gain wider recognition despite his […]
WINNIE GETS HER EWINGS Winnie Ewing’s victory for the SNP in the 1967 Hamilton by-election was one of the great upsets of UK political history. Though she wasn’t the first SNP MP, Robert McIntyre’s 1945 win at Motherwell only lasted three months and largely a fluke. Labour were the 10-1 favourites for Hamilton, and Ewing […]
RETURN TO SENDER Woah yeah wait a minute Mr. Postman… don’t touch that letter. Explosive environmentalist Ted Kaczynski (long known just as the Unabomber) has been defused aged 81. Once a prodigious mathematician, he ultimately decided technology was the root of all evil and retreated to a simplistic life in a Montana cabin. If he […]
NERVOSA BREAKDOWN Drummer Teresa Taylor has died aged 60. Under the name “Teresa Nervosa”, she joined cult punk rockers Butthole Surfers in the 80s. The era with her is considered the band’s classic lineup, though their biggest hit “Pepper” was released after she left. She also became a familiar face as a woman selling Madonna’s […]
