Spade_Cooley

He's been working more in recent years than he has for decades though - Megalopolis is due to hit the festivals circuit next month, a project that he's been tinkering with since the late 70s and had to sell his winefields to finance because it ballooned in production costs a la Apocalypse Now.

This set me on a short detour trying to find the shortest Wikipedia article (excluding external links and disambiguation pages). In terms of character count, this takes some beating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_national_bandy_team

Literally in one case if you believe the rumours...

Juice detox.

Does he try and jog her memory by going "have you seen this? did you hear about this?"

Mister Cee, legendary New York hip-hop DJ and the man who (probably) discovered Biggie, dead at 57.

Probably too early for the "Dying off the radar" thread, but while looking for something else I found out that the character actor Tom Stern died last month and it doesn't appear to have made it anywhere outside of his family's Facebook. Not to be confused with the Tom Stern who has a long history as cinematographer for Clint Eastwood movies, or Tom Stern the director of music videos by Marilyn Manson and Ice Cube, this Tom Stern was the lead in the 1971 namspolitation film Trip to Kill (billed ahead of Telly Savalas, Robert Vaughan and Burgess Meredith), but was also a mainstay villain-of-the-week in American TV throughout the 60s and 70s. Was also one of the endless "it could have been us!" residents of 10050 Cielo Drive prior to Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski taking up residence there.

Toby Simkin, theatre producer and the first man to sell tickets for performances on a new-fangled thing called "the internet" in the mid-90s, dead at 59. Normally wouldn't have posted, but he hits one of my favourite niches for dead celebs: people who clearly wrote their own Wikipedia entry.

How have you people managed to make this thread even worse?

Latest on David Elmore Smith (the censoring of the name is done by him, not me, because it's a total mystery what could come after the "David S" in the Facebook account for David Elmore Smith).

Is there an explanation somewhere of how a Chess Records mainstay of the 50s ended up doing the scampi-and-chips seaside circuit in the UK 30 years later? Was it just a "people in the UK gave more of a shit and he had bills to pay" deal?

The one cup that cannot be accused of sportswashing is back. The Deathlist Cup is a series of 100m sprints compared to the marathon that is the DDP, and has been won by all the deadpooling greats: deadsox, DDT, An Fear Beag, gcreptile, my good self, and Joey Russ. Will we be engraving yet another name on the trophy in 2023, or will someone finally become the first two-time winner? Here's the rules, which I've surely left an error c+p-ing from last year. The Deathlist Cup   1. This is a knockout tournament featuring one-on-one matchups between Deathlist forum posters. These matches will be determined by use of a random draw, using Random.org.   2. Unless we happen to end up with 2/4/8/16/32/64 entrants, then certain competitors will get byes to the Second Round. This will be based on results from the 2022 Cup: ie, winners first. 3. Players, on receiving their randomly drawn opponent, will have a ten day period to send the Referee their First Eleven for the match by PM, and one sub in case of an early death. These eleven picks can be very low hanging fruit if you so wish, as the point of the game is to score as many “goals” during the month a match is played. ie, a perfect team would look like this 1. Adam Ant (joker) 2. Bob Backlund 3. Chelsea Clinton 4. Didier Drogba 5. Erika Eleniak 6. Frank Field 7. Green Gartside  8. Harry Hill  9. Ilias Iliadis (gold medal winner in the men's 81kg judo at the 2004 Olympics) 10. Joe Jackson 11. Kevin Keegan subs 12. Lennox Lewis 13. Meghan McCain 14. Nick Nolte 4. Banned picks – We're slightly more lenient than the DDP, but we're still banning Famous For Being Ill, people on Death Row (unless they die naturally), anyone who is a prisoner of a terrorist organisation, animals, the under 18s, and anyone who is "missing in action" but blatantly already dead. 5. Famous For Being Ill picks are those who have no notoriety outside of their cancer/other illness. If they played two matches for a Conference North team or they were mayor of a city in Kiribati back in the 90s, that's fine. If they're Joe Bloggs who is in a coma after refusing a covid vaccine or a Brave Parent Celebrating Their Last Christmas, they're not getting accepted.   6. If in doubt, submit a pick, but the decision of the ref (me) is final and is not open to any court of appeal. If you think it’s a dodgy pick, it probably is. 7. Each match will take place over the course of a single month. For example, a February match would take place from February 1st to February 28th, a March match from March 1st to March 31st and so on... 8. Games will be scored in the following manner: A person in your team dies = 3 points A unique person in your team dies = 1 more point (ie 1 bonus point) Fatality – Your joker. Double points  9. Here is what happens in the case of a team member dying prematurely (ie on 28th Feb for the March game). If you discover this before the 3rd of the month, your top sub will automatically go into place. If it is discovered on the 3rd or after, sorry about your luck. If it turns out the person was dead and known to be (this is determined via a reference in a newspaper or magazine, not social media) then subs don’t come into play. This will upset at least one player a year. Will it lead to a huffy forum stormout in 2023? Let's see. 10. At the end of the month, the player in the match with the highest score wins that game, and will advance to the next round. The player who doesn’t have the highest score will lose, and be eliminated. 11. In the event of a draw, the following tiebreaks will be used:   1st tiebreak = number of hits 2nd tiebreak = average age of hits 3rd tiebreak = a coin toss   12. A player is only held to one team for a single match. If they win their match and advance to the next round, they may pick eleven entirely different people for the next round. In this way, folk who announce their terminal illness in, say, May, can be put to good dead pooling use. 13. Qualifying obits? Every single English-language newspaper, magazine or significant website in the universe. Also Le Monde, Le Figaro, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, El Pais, El Mundo and Corriere Della Sera. If they still can't get a QO from that, then they really weren't famous. 14. For the removal of any doubt, any players who do not send in their team before the deadline will be DQ'd and replaced by the highest scoring loser. No matter how many sad PMs you send afterwards.  This draw takes place in Month 1 (ie January) and is for matches taking place in Month 2 (February). After the draw, each player sends me (via PM) a team of eleven celebrities (and some subs hopefully) they think will snuff it in Month 2.   Good luck and sign up to take part in this thread. Entries close on January 21 with the draw to take place immediately after.

Rare public appearance from Matthew Corbett at a Sooty live show yesterday, looks a lot better than you'd have imagined considering recent news about him:

Big into the World Runners Association waiting until he'd nearly done it to say "actually, he's not the first person to run the full length of Africa"

Blink-182 rocker apparently feelin' this - this being some form of cancer.

The daughter of Chuwit Kamolvisit denies claims on social media that he has died, posts what is meant to be a fresh selfie with him: However, he's looking a lot better here than he did in those photos from the end of last year: I'm skeptical.

Barman in this memorable anti-drink-driving PSA as well.

I'm the guy who had a hit with Andrew Millwall, and even I think this is time for a review of the rules.

I didn't realise that was him voicing the guy selling the Delorean door in the Back to the Future-referencing episode of American Dad, and thus I missed the metatextual reference.

@John "요한" Sulu my apologies, you were right.

Radcliffe "pausing his radio work". Might be nothing, might not...

Posthumous Nobels have been barred since 1974 (and only two people were ever awarded them: Dag Hammarskjöld for peace in 1961 and Erik Axel Karlfeldt for literature in 1931, both Swedes). However, if the decision to award a Nobel is made before it's public knowledge the person is dead, then it can still be awarded (as with Ralph Steinman for medicine in 2011).

Joe Flaherty dying 36 hours too late to save my Cup run, but a good few of you will be cashing in after the QO comes out.

Ed Piskor, alternative comics artist who was accused of inappropriate behaviour around some young'uns the other month, has posted a suicide note to Facebook and some on Twitter are confirming it's legit.

Kudos to @GuyFromFuture, proper early DL Cup giantkilling that and I have no excuses, the better team won.