Gravedigger

I did some more searching, and found an article from the Observer of a couple of months back, which quoted the World War One Veterans' Association as its source. Apparently the British survivors are: Henry Allingham, 110 Violet Bolaise, 106 Claude Choules, 105 Sydney Lucas, 107 Philip Mayne, 106 Harry Patch, 108 Bill Stone, 106 Will Young, 106

Here's a few survivors of World War I. I guess there are so few of these guys left that they're all pretty much guaranteed an obituary in the UK papers. 1896 Henry Allingham - World War I veteran (and Europe's oldest man) 1899 Philip Mayne - Last surviving British Officer of World War I 1898 Harry Patch - The Last Tommy 1900 William Stone - World War I veteran [Topics merged - ff]

I think this idea may need a little more research; but previously Ultra skinny Models Ana Carolina Reston and Luisel Ramos managed to starve themselves to death. Possibly next year will bring another Undernourished death. Models Esther Cañadas, Olga Sherer, Vlada Roslyakova and Maria Dvirnik could all be interesting candidates. [Topics merged - ff]

I was wondering the same thing... But given the celebrities that have shuffled off their mortal coils in the past couple of months, I can't really say that there are any I would have substituted for names I was mulling over at the time, given the chance. I guess it just means there will be a bumper crop of deaths in the next three quarters of the year

Could it be that the orignal post was written in crayon?

I saw a picture of the rubber faced comedian (77) earlier in the week, and boy does he look in a bad way! Just released from hospital, after ballooning to 110Kg from an adverse reaction to SPAM, which he was taking to treat pulmonary fibrosis... A quick background check shows he's been declining in health over the last few of years, suffering from viral meningitis, diabetes, chronic back pain, addiction to painkillers, a heart attack and prostate cancer. If he can keep this performance going for the rest of the year, I think he's a good candidate for the 2005 list.

This thread reminds me that Jimmy White was operated on for Testicular Cancer, last year. I doubt he'll be a 2005 pick, but could be one to watch for the following years.

My sister and I used to compile smaller versions of deathlist a few years back. Anyway, to make things more interesting we used a 5 point scoring system to try to encourage more adventurous choices... If its any use, it went like this: 1 point - Old age 2 points - Illness 3 points - Accident 4 points - Murder 5 points - Suicide

I guess by it's very nature any deathlist is going to be a slow business... Unless people go out and start speeding up the process, but that would be kind of cheating! I can't think of any really well known deaths since the start of the year, so adding extra names or changing the scoring probably wouldn't make a lot difference. But I suppose you could try a 2nd smaller experimental list of people aged under 80, a men/women only list or a small list excluding some other characteristic that people here think would increase the likelyhood of contestants dropping dead in the next year. More analysis from Mr Stats would be very interesting too.

The element of skill is picking people who will die, months before they do. A change like this would just mean that celebrities that inconsiderately announce they're about to snuff it mid-year get added in for easy points!