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 Death Impends (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...
AIN’T THAT A SHIMON Leading Sephardi rabbi Shimon Baadani has died aged 94. Long involved in Israeli politics, he was involved in the creation of the right-wing Shas political party, a frequent fixture of Bibi coalitions in recent years. His tart tongue often got him in hot water, including claims that anyone who didn’t vote […]
CORPSE ON THE KALB Journalist Bernard Kalb has died aged 100. A longtime international affairs reporter for CBS News, NBC News, and The New York Times, he extensively covered Kissinger alongside his younger brother Marvin, and is hopefully giving the Reaper pointers as we speak. In the 1980s he was a spokesman for the Reagan […]
BOOM GOES THE DINAMITE And so the explosive start to the DDP continues… 108 of us scored with a colon cancer-addled Brazilian football star at the tailend of 2022, now two teams repeat the feat on this side of the year. Roberto Dinamite might’ve not had Pelé’s level of superstardom, but was a solid player […]
THE DEATH OF A SHE-ANGEL Author Fay Weldon has died aged 91. Her early advertising work saw her popularise the phrase “Go to work on an egg”, and she wrote the pilot episode of Upstairs, Downstairs. She was best known for her novels featuring, in her words, “overweight, plain women”, including Booker-shortlisted Praxis, Puffball, and […]
A CUNNING PICK Astronaut Walter Cunningham has died aged 90. One of NASA’s earliest civilian astronauts, he was on the backup crew for the abortive Apollo 1, which ended in tragedy when a fire killed the main crew. NASA held off on manned missions for over a year, eventually resuming with Apollo 7, where Cunningham […]
CAMPBELL’S SOUP Another year, another “quick hit based off the last-minute “hospice” search” obit. Baseballer Bill Campbell played for a menagerie of teams over his 14-year career, and reached his pinnacle under the Boston Red Sox, where he was deemed an All-Star in 1977. He was 74 and didn’t even need to resort to Yahoo […]
THE DICK SAVITT NO-SHOW Tennis player Dick Savitt has died aged 95. His first love was basketball, but his aspirations for the hoops were quashed by a knee injury and rerouted him to the racket. He won Wimbledon in 1951 and made history as the first Jewish player to do so. Other trophies include three […]
HEAVENS TO BESSIE November 1907: The first free flight of a helicopter occurred, Oklahoma was admitted as a state, Louis B. Mayer opened up his first theatre, and one Bessie Hendricks came into this world. The oldest living American until her death, our geriatric Iowan was the latest in a long line of 110 Clubbers […]
MIRREN PLAYER JOINS SAINTS For the third year in a row, a canon competitive pick checks out hours after the New Year rings in. While Floyd Little and Gary Burgess were both in full “will he or won’t he” deathwatch mode, Scottish footballer Frank McGarvey instead was a classic case of “he was going to […]
So that was 2022. Putin shot to the top of many a wishful thinking list, BoJo was succeeded by a fuckwit who couldn’t outlast a lettuce, and Musk flushed 44 billion buckaroos down the toilet so Twitter would stop laughing at him. They didn’t. Above all else, it will be remembered as the year Queen […]
