Spade_Cooley

Oft-mentioned around these parts (mainly by me) "Queen of Swing" Norma Miller dead at 99. EDIT: Full-scale NYT obituary for Miller here, great read.

Nancy Fouts, creative behind the Silk Cut advertisements of the 1980s among other stuff, dead at 74 .

Food poisoning from bad seitan. Fucking vegans.

You're very much onto something here. The entry phase is basically a full-time job for a fortnight. And when I've sounded out people on Upwork et al about a new system, I've had bites of interest but I'm not anywhere near organised enough to sit down and write a full job spec for a programmer and say "look, we need a data management system where someone goes to a website, writes 20 names down, hits enter and then it turns that into a deadpool team). But we do, eventually, need to do that. It'd probably take a programmer working for the amount of cash we could raise here (nowhere north of £300 I'd imagine) at least four months to turn something even workable out. So if we want to change the mechanism for entry for 2020, then we need to get a ball rolling asap. The Fantasy Football model is the obvious one yeah. We do have "master" databases in existence that are now jumbled through going through various owners as well. The question was raised previously as to whether place of birth/death adds anything to the site. A good question tbf.

Full-blown outsourcing is probably not the lick, but one thing that saved me multiple times earlier this year when I was getting the game set up was using Updesk or Fiverr just for things like the logo and spreadsheet formatting issues. Admittedly, our current logo is shit but I'm not paying for another. I think, at the end of the day, it has to be a Brit running the thing: it is a British deadpool after all, and we will always favour the obituaries of an Allo Allo castmember over a World Series--winning pitcher. The tasks across several people is where I assume it will end up, but unfortunately a lot of the "hard" work (the day-to-day stuff, the first rush of spreadsheet entering) kind of has to be one person's work: it's not like we're going to email each other Excel documents and go "I'm up to number 239, your turn". 1. Nobody, I kinda didn't want to "force" but nobody seems overly eager to be the man at the helm. I can name people on-site who I think would make a decent gamerunner, but I don't want to put pressure on anybody. 2. I think this is where we'll end up, and it's doable, but it will need a Man In Charge. 3. See upthread. Computing knowhow level.... intermediate? TMIB knew a lot more than I did as far as backends go, my internet knowledge is all front-end stuff (I work in the media not IT). Make-up not bone structure.

Right, let's do this.... The latter, but I'm happy to hear any suggestions for the former. Yeah, this is where I'm leaning to as it stands. We have had the DDP run by a duopoly before - and although that was before my time, from what I understand it ran well enough. So the question is what does a gamerunner do throughout the year? As it stands, I suppose the gamerunner's job is split into two main parts: setting the game up and running it. Setting the game up entails: Writing up updated rules Sending out invitation, "game starts on January 1st" emails Responding to people to let them know their entries have been received Checking entries for duplicates/already dead people Entering entries into (currently a spreadsheet that has numerous possible places for error) Entering entries also involves adding new players to a separate database, along with updating running statistics Processing the game to generate the first full team lists/lists of celebrities Writing pen portraits/DoBs Finding pen pics Running the game entails Checking to see who's dead Updating (as it stands) spreadsheets and processing them Uploading the resulting HTML files to the site Writing frontpage obits List of the Lost/Missed/News/Theme Team league stuff (all manual) Correcting errors Dealing with any other queries throughout the year And, although I've not had this yet, one of DDP's bains: emails from people included in the game asking to be taken down. I think that's everything.

Which he has now done, noting his "recent ill health" as one of the main reasons behind it. Not even remaining as honorary chairman or chairman-for-life or some such bullshit title.

Ditched him for last month when I saw a photo of him out for a fucking steak dinner.

Labour losing votes to the Lib Dems in Bolsover and Sunderland is... quite something.

MMMDP Form Guide #21 David Prowse With one Star Wars lummox saying his goodbyes this week, could he be followed by another? The man whose voice was sadly deleted from history because George Lucas didn't want Darth Vader to sound like a member of the Wurzels hasn't been in great health over recent years, so it's not a bad bet. And you know he'll look both ways before crossing the Styx.

Watch out South African actor Keenan Arrison, bodybuilding contest MC Kim "Kong" Farrison and true crime novelist James Marrison.

Looks like the Tory candidate will be this lad: https://twitter.com/paulbristow79 Whereas the Labour candidate will be: https://twitter.com/LisaForbes_ This might be Farage's chance if he stands as the Brexit UK candidate. But then we've said that 100 times before. Galloway standing throws another wrench into the works as well.

Just as an FYI: I'm not avoiding the points here, I'm just covering sickness leave at work and also have backpain myself so I'm not that coherent right now. Will expand and inform on some points mentioned upthread over the weekend.

As with all other avid readers of Dirt On Dirt - The Internet's #1 Resource For Dirt Car Racing News - I was very upset to learn about the passing of GRT Racing CEO Joe Garrison.

Level 42 guitarist Boon Gould dead at 64. The sun goes down

Will sort this. There's always an issue when the picks are already in the database rather than just being added. Congrats to Dead Ends for becoming the April Team of the Month, btw.

Marcia Waters, formerly in charge of wine for Tesco shelves and then the Rothschilds' personal collection, dead at 59.

Mine's in as well. Willing to be there'll be a heavy crossover in player choices...

Viral marketing for the Sonic movie gone wrong?

Didn't even bother checking if he was a DDP pick when I saw his death, that's how far off the radar I thought he was.

I've gone through a list of all 136 original UK episodes of Whose Line.... surely Peter Cook can't be the only person that was on the show who's now dead? US version had Robin Williams in an episode, plus a few novelty guests who turned up that are now dead as well (Chyna, Hugh Hefner, Florence Henderson).

It is weird, Twitter is full of people doing the "Oh I adored him as a teenager/child/whatever," when I'm sure 99.9% of the world's population used to schedule 1990s viewings of Whose Line around whether or not it was a majority American panel and Stiles & Mochrie were there to drag matters up. Thread can also be used for Mike McShane, who I'm stunned is still alive.

MMMDP Form Guide #7 Norma Miller Before fat white girls wearing polka dots colonised it, the lindy hop was actually done by real live black people. Head among these was the "Queen of Swing" Norma Miller. Our Norma's not been in the best health recently, with a dose of congestive heart failure stopping any jumps, jives and wails. However - she has promised to make it to her 100th birthday in December. Do you think Miller Time will be called earlier?

Bunch of Hollywood historian types on Twitter reporting that Ruben Rueda has died. He was a bartender at Musso and Frank's for 50 years and had served pretty much everyone in Tinseltown. Nice piece on him from a few years ago here.

Finally gets his QO based not on his footballing exploits, but the fact he was the last surviving "kinder trespasser".