Joey Russ

Since I’m no longer a crowdsourced host… Y’all better get Ozzy Osbourne on the list this year.

Wait a second, it's that time of year already? Man, time does fly by fast. So here we are, another year of the annual Advent Avalanche, with the following objective and rules: 25 entrants (24 quickest off the mark plus your host Joey Russ). Competition opens on 1 December with the aim of getting a winner by Christmas Day. And those Rules in Full: 1 - The object of the AVALDP is to WIN. 2 - To enter the AVALDP a contestant must have: A candidate not selected by another other entrant. A candidate in this context means a living person aged 18 or over not being executed within that month who remains alive at midnight on November 30th and is considered likely to cease living soon after and also be capable of gaining a qualifying obit see rule 9 below upon death. 3 - Entries open at 7:00am EST (that's 12:00 PM GMT for the brits) on 30th November and close at midnight (GMT) on 30 November. Entry can only be made by posting the name of a candidate on the AVALDP thread on the Deathlist. 4 The competition is deemed to be open at 00-01 GMT hrs on 1 December 2020. 5 Competition ceases on the death of the first nominated pick on the list of candidates and the winner is the dead pooler who has selected said candidate. 6 Entry is limited to 25 players (24 who are obliged to post entries on the AvalancheDP thread and Joey Russ, who reserves a right of entry as the master of ceremonies for this endeavor). Presumably the artistic intent is obvious but in case you missed it the idea is to get 25 players to compete for a death within 25 days thereby giving us a victory by Christmas Day at the latest. If you're snoozin you're losing. 6a Because he has forced his own entry Joey Russ guarantees to respect the first 24 qualifying picks and only enter a candidate unselected by the others. Thereby ensuring the really hot selections go to others. 7 - In the event that two players select the same candidate the allocation of the pick will go to the player who first posted an entry for that candidate even if the entry times are within the same minute. 8 In the event that two players tie for victory on the basis of picks expiring on the same day all efforts will be made to ascertain a winner on the basis of the actual time of death. For these purposes local time of death will be translated to GMT if required. 9 - An "obit" in the context of the AVALDP is any news report in English from a reliable source. Such sources include - but are not limited to - UK national press, UK national broadcast organizations, foreign press and broadcast organizations with an English language thread to their communication, trade press in English, local news organizations reporting in English and coverage in specialist online sites, such as those monitoring the well-being of super-centenarians. Where dispute arises over the qualifying nature of a news source for obit purposes Joey Russ's decision is final. But he wants fast and furious competition and is generally very amenable to low hanging dead pool fruit of all varieties. 10 The Raymond Hewlett Memorial Award applies to the AVALDP. In honor of everybody's favourite Maddie-implicated paedo scum a candidate widely believed to be alive when the winner is declared and subsequently proven to have died previously will be awarded victory in the event that a AVALDP qualifying obit subsequently appears for said candidate. In the event that a AVALDP qualifying obit for the candidate is subsequently proven to have existed prior to commencement of the AVALDP all points will be voided. RHME points are only available during competition and in the event that a winner has been declared before discovery of a qualifying RHME candidate no revision of the final result will occur. Similarly, if some lucky candidate is awarded RHME victory and this victory once declared is proven to be spurious by late discovery of a qualifying obit; the lucky winner will be allowed to keep his/her lucky win. 10a To ensure smooth operation of rule 10 the period for discovery of result altering obits is deemed to be 48 hours plus the remainder of the calendar day in which victory is first claimed. In other words two days and a part of another day. 11 - If an obited death occurs during play of the AVALDP and is missed despite Joey Russ's best efforts to stay in touch and/or the spirited efforts of AVALDP participants and said death is missed in totting up points, after which a winner is declared, then this death will not count for competition purposes. The same is true in the case of a known death gathering a late obit and therefore allowing some other competitor to be declared a winner. All disputes relating to rule 11 will be resolved by the astute judgement of Joey Russ and there is no appeals procedure (though all sides of opinion are warmly invited to liven up the AVALDP thread by venting their fury). 12 - In the event that Deathlist editing options or other online trickery is discovered to have been employed in the editing of entries, those duly fingered for such cheating will be removed from the AVALDP and banned for life from subsequent entry into AVALDPs. 13 In the unlikely event that a pick selected on 30 November fails to mark the start line the entrant selecting said pick will still be deemed to have entered the competition and will have until midnight 1 December to select a new pick (unselected by other entrants). Should the entrant fail to do so no other entrant will be allowed in as a replacement. AND FINALLY... On completion of AVALDP activities the thread will get lively for a short while as losing contestants and spectators offer well-deserved congratulations to the skillful and highly talented new champion, after which time it is expected that the cooling corpse of the thread will be allowed to gently sink into oblivion. Now you know the rules, here is the list of competitors and their choice of candidates: Sean - Dai Davies The Daredevil - Gerd Muller Sir Creep - Floyd Little gcreptile - Hubert Auriol Spade_Cooley - Zafarullah Khan Jamali drol - Saleh Ajery The Old Crem - James Whale theoldlady - Larry King CaptainChorizo - Litsa Menounous Perhaps - Tommy Lasorda msc - Divya Bhatnagar Toast - Mairead Philpott Bibliogryphon - Rush Limbaugh Banana - Rob Orkies chilean way - Leon Spinks The Quim Reaper - Yoko Ono The Mad Hatter - Valery Giscard d’Estaing HDS - Susan Bayh YoungWillz - Tom Smith Grim Up North - Nick Hitchon Book - Ged Stokes Death Impends - Renee Simonot En Passant - Prince Philip ThereWillBeDeaths7 - Leslie Phillips Joey Russ - Sylvain Sylvain Let's look at the past and current winners of this dead pool now 2016  Death Impends  2017 Sean 2018 Banana 2019 gcreptile Good luck everyone.

Gary Burgess should be a hit this year for me which would make up more ground to Chorizo, but outside of him no idea where I can sneak that win. If only that LG Petrov Yahoo obit translated to the UK…

Twitter is reporting that Pat Martino is dead. Awaiting more info of course… Well, there’s also this

Just the enigma that is David Gulpilil left for Reptile…

Haven’t really done too much research tbh, but I suppose I can bring two fascinating names that have never been mentioned before that I’ve also been listening to lately. Admittedly both are a QO risk but they definitely can be useful for smaller pools. First is Alain Goraguer, who worked with Serge Gainsbourg previously. He also composed film soundtracks such as Fantastic Planet (La planete sauvage) since the 1970s. Second is Gil Trythall, who is a classical pianist. However he is more known for his ventures into electronic music, particularly the album that uses country songs entirely with a moog synthesizer.

Make that married now

I’m sure folk are wondering about whether Amani Liquat (Also mentioned in the article) is DDP worthy. They only have about 500 subscribers on YouTube though, which might be a bit under the YouTube threshold…

Rob Halford had a cancer diagnosis, although he’s currently in remission

Damn, what STD did Bill get hospitalized for?

As usual, I’m sure there are many names we all considered for the DDP that for whatever reason we end up axing them in the end. So who is in your salvage lot this year? Will reveal mine after I reveal my main DDP team tomorrow (not New Years Day yet here at the time of this post)

Hm, think I heard that Tony Bennett has Alzheimer’s disease, can someone confirm?

Hello, I am well aware that this has not really been updated at all during the year. Over the last 6 months or so my overall motivation for keeping up with dead pooling has declined a lot. This is why I’m announcing today that I am retiring from hosting any dead pools barring the yearly Advent Avalanche. Now I won’t be retiring from dead pooling all together but I am probably taking a much more limited approach for the time being. I am sorry this hasn’t been taken care of, but hopefully someone can step up to the plate in hosting both this and the Deathlist cup as they really are amazing pools in general, and I don’t want either of them to die out because of a lack of a host.

I’ve known about this case for almost a week because of nonstop media coverage and I really don’t understand why they report it like it’s a big deal, especially cause other victims don’t get a ton of coverage at all. (Btw, I do feel bad for her, but that doesn’t mean she’s the only thing in the world that deserves a ton of coverage).

Often you get the usual scam emails, and then occasionally something like this shows up. Like yeah, good luck getting me to click on this one:

Eh, I’m inclined to say that’s your lot tbh

She’s still enjoying life despite the cancer. Definitely feels like she’s slowing down now

Well, if Radar Online claims this then it must be true…

Alright, a given 0 thought too list Greg Gilbert David Gulpilil Ally McLaws Susie Steiner Bob Dole Nadia Chaudhri

Gregg Leakes is dead:

US representative Markwayne Mullin might end up being the next recipient of the Darwin Award:

There’s still another month after this…

If relatively short time means 2 years, then sure

And of course there’s a tweet that’s worth a laugh: