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...
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 […]
LORD, BYRON A rare pupil of Vladimir Horowitz, classical pianist Byron Janis was a child prodigy on the ivories who became an American hero for wooing Soviet audiences under a US-Soviet cultural exchange programme. An expert on Chopin, he had in fact discovered four hitherto-unknown manuscripts of waltzes by ol’ Frédéric. Arthritis tickled his own […]
DUG A HOLE Born to a millionaire and Oxford educated, Rose Dugdale was all set for a cozy life. Trips to Cuba and Belfast in the 60s changed all that, and amidst a leftward lurch she vowed to give her wealth to the poor. What started nobly spiraled out of control, with her stealing paintings […]
DEAD AS A HATTER The oldest surviving footballer for the English national team, Ron Baynham was also known for his fourteen-year stint with Luton Town. Playing north of 400 times, to this day Hatters fans consider him the team’s greatest goalkeeper. He was 94 and picked by five teams. Ron Baynham10 June 1929 – 18 […]
WALID NOW SQUALID Walid Daqqah was the longest-imprisoned Palestinian in an Israeli jail, being sent to the slammer in 1984 after a group he commanded kidnapped and murdered an Israeli soldier. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2021 and his treatment was about as humane as you’d expect. He was 62 and unique for Pazuzu […]
ISSA COME ISSA GO While Bibi is busy killing all the innocents in the Gaza strip, occasionally a terrorist gets caught in the crossfire. Marwan Issa was second-in-command to Mohammed Deif in the Hamas ranks, and was a key player in the October 2023 atrocities. His death aged roughly 58 was confirmed by both sides […]
OUT COLD Jean Malaurie was a French explorer who, with the Inuk Kutsikitsoq, was one of the first two to reach the Geomagnetic North Pole in 1951. After discovering a secret US airbase nearby and observing its destructive effects on the local populations, he became an ardent defender of Arctic native rights for decades. He […]
