Spade_Cooley

Damn, there's a Soviet dissident whose existence I completely forgot. I remember his deportation from the USSR, but after that he didn't make Dutch news much, if at all. Perhaps the reason for that is that he, unlike several other dissidents, didn't cuddle up with loud right-wing types in the west. No, instead he cuddled up to a DVD copy of "Minipops".

Pretty interesting story this guy, left the original Globetrotters over a contract dispute to form the "Harlem Magicians", a rival sports entertainment team who had "Sugar" Ray Robinson in their team for some matches. Eventually made up with his former teammates and got a spot in the Harlem Globetrotters cartoon.

Our man Kara isn't letting a silly little thing like now having outlived his predicted death by 18 months hold him back. Here he is auditioning to be an "ambassador" for the UK edition of Ru Paul's Drag Race. If he does get on the show eventually, that'd certainly guarantee him obiting in the UK without having to wait for a local BBC radio report. Quality video as well, a lot of time and effort went into its production:

Yeah, we do need a Vatican Council over the site within a few months.

Woodhead to enter special measures

The Thrill Is Gone

Pink Floyd Fleetwood Mac Deep Purple Aye, and to be fair, I went around telling people that ZZ Top had never had a line up change and then saw on their Wiki page that the current trio came about after some early hiring and firing. Some bands only make it once the wrong people are dumped. Jack Dee used to do a joke in which Pete Best's wife woke him up every morning with a cup of tea, chucking it on the bed and screaming: "Here's your tea Pete, you tosser!" iirc, ZZ Top's early drummer toing-and-froing hands over the title of the world's longest running, unaltered band as Los Lobos, who've been plugging away since 1973 and had their first recordings in 1976. Yo no soy marinero....

Could go in about 25 different threads this, but... Conjoined twins Saba and Farah have gone on hunger strike in protest at the jailing of Bollywood icon Salman Khan, who has been sent down for five years due to a 2002 hit and run.

Gonna hold a six-second silence in tribute

Only one unique hit in the entirety of the top 10 at the moment. Research skills finally rendering this a much harder thing to gain?

Greaves' pure goal-scoring record has to put him up there though, along with the fact that he succeeded at four different environments (his much maligned spell in Italy still saw him score 9 goals in 12 games for an AC Milan side that weren't exactly pulling up any trees). The fact that he got overshadowed (well, eclipsed entirely) by Geoff Hurst in 66 is presumably what really keeps him out of the discussion.

Weird how there's a very good argument to be made for Greaves being the greatest English footballer of all-time, yet he's going to be remembered as a piss-head proto-banter merchant pundit.

Ride the horse until it can't go no more, then shoot it and eat it. First rule of entertainment management.

When I wrote this dude down as a potential 2015 pick I thought he was the keyboardist in Cameo, not Camel.

I noticed DDP pick Jorge Zorreguieta was celebrating Kings Day at Buenos Aires' Dutch embassy. Doesn't look like he's about to die in the next few weeks but you can never tell. Also it should be pointed out he is responsible for the murders of lots of people.

He was easily the second-best wrestler who went nuts and killed someone with their finishing move irl in the past decade.

Was never a doubt really. Indie must have some pretty big wrasslin' fans in their obit department, they did a Maurice Vachon half-page obit within two days of him passing.

Former Cambridge United and Peterborough manager Chris Turner, who later went on to serve as chairman of the latter side, dead at 64. He'd been suffering from frontal lobe dementia and was unable to feed himself, construct a sentence or maintain control of his bowels for at least six years, a pretty standard occurrence for anyone who spends that much time at London Road.

He wouldn't have been able to vote anyway, he's a lord! Interesting...maybe, maybe not. Dunno what his status was. http://lordsoftheblog.net/2008/05/07/can-peers-vote/ However, definitely not now, the dead can definitely not vote. I looked it up he he. Edit: Dang, just found the aristocrats thread, searched for it earlier and got nothing. Arg. This made me spend about ten minutes trying to find out what happens if you cast a postal vote and then die before the actual election day. Summary: nobody really knows.

Wish we hadn't given Burton the dignity of that applause, we're 3-0 down to them within 40 minutes.

Actually there's going to be a minute's applause for Bloomfield now, so as not to clash with the minute's silence in memory of the Bradford Fire victims. Vaguely reminiscent of when Premier League matches had a minute's silence for Brian Moore, and a few weeks later three minutes' silence for the 9/11 victims, equating Moore as being worth 1,000 Americans.

Colin Bloomfield dead at 33. I found this out because there's gonna be a minute's silence before the Cobblers' game against Burton Albion this afternoon in memory.

That's definitely the best obituary I've read in a long time, would love to see a David Peace novel about his defection to "Model Railways".

In the light of Lauren Hill I have been reassessing these types of deaths. Does Lauren Hill and Steven Sutton provide the counter point to Misao Okawa and Gertrude Weaving. If we plotted the ages of all the picks we would come up with a skewed bell curve with a long leading tail. I imagine the peak of the bell would be somewhere in the 85-90 range. But the deaths of the youngest are as notable as the deaths of the oldest. It is also the changing nature of celebrity and the way social media and the internet have changed our lives. However because of this I think it is important to keep stringent rules for the DDP on the qualifying nature of obituaries. Further thinking on this. Are we actually contributing to the concept of celebrity and by discussing the possibility of obits actually more likely to increase the chances of one. I am sure more than one lazy journalist has passed this way on a slow news day. A couple of years back I'm 99.9% sure that The Sun got the news that the world's tallest woman had died from here: she carked it about four weeks prior but News Corp only printed the news two days after someone here pointed it out.

Why does Danny Alexander remind me of Beaker from the Muppet Show? He's like the exact half-way point between Steve Davis and James Wade.