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, first tenure), The Man in Black (2010-17), Spade Cooley (2018-19), msc (2020-21), Grim Up North (2020-22), Reptile (2020-23), and DI (2022 – 2025). Now the Committee of Banana (2023), time (2024), the returning Octopus of Odstock (2026) and the deadpooling equivalent of a gap year temp Marlfox (2026) oversee the biggest deadpool going...
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 […]
IT’S TOO SOON TO KNOW FOR THIS ORIOLE US sports businessman Peter Angelos has died aged 94. He had owned the Baltimore Orioles baseball team for the past thirty years, and their oft-languishing results under his watch has led him to be considered one of the worst MLB owners. Introduced to the DDP in 2021 […]
NO MAN’S LAND FOR MITTERAND Despite being the nephew of socialist darling François, Frédéric Mitterand reached his political crescendo as Minister of Culture and Communication under right-wing Nicolas Sarkozy, as part of Sarkozy’s “rainbow cabinet” strategem to include a menagerie of political stripes in his cabinet. He was better remembered for the semi-autobiographical The Bad […]
VERNOR, HE’S A DEAD MAN In our current online environment swamped with XXX nudes in bio tweetbots, sci-fi author Vernor Vinge has proven a prescient voice. His novel True Names was written over forty years ago yet painted an early cyberspace landscape laden with pseudonymous hackers and trolls, and a couple years later coined “the […]
BABARIC Beloved children’s character Babar the Elephant was born out of a bedtime story Cécile de Brunhoff told to her children, and adapted into book form by her husband Jean de Brunhoff. Jean created seven Babar books and died young, but eldest son Laurent carried the flame with nearly fifty more entries over the coming […]
