msc

If someone runs it. I stepped in last time as a last minute favour to Joey but am a bit swamped/ill this time.

Actually a bit saddened by this news, though it was expected. I always quite liked Prescott's punchy style.

Added the mother's maiden name now I'm home. It's her.

The Times website autocorrects to dot com here too. It's clearly the news source intended however.

Surname USHER Forename VICTORIA MARY Mother's Maiden Name Gender F Year 1939 Right area of birth for her parents.

Fans of ancient philosophers (yeah, I'm looking at @gcreptile), the 90 year old Don Cupitt is appearing on BBC4 tonight for one of those mini "remembers" interviews they love. Could be good form spotting for the more classier DDP teams among us.

Overworked, underpaid because the entire system is vastly understaffed. People can point to money being spent in the wrong areas (consultant doctor pay, overpriced medicine etc) but that's government incompetence again.

The annual le pen is dead rumour. He'll be on tiktok playing basketball with Song Ping before the weekend.

Yeah it wouldn't shock. As I think I mentioned before they reminded me of an old aunt and uncle of mine and the widower (the one with the dementia) lasted a month without his partner of fifty years.

Won't last six months without him imo.

Never mind Bond, Jedburgh is the reason I'd die on the "Joe Don Baker's DLy" hill. "He died, peacefully in his sleep, of bullet wounds." It's just excellent TV and has aged considerably well imo.

Confirmed by friends in the know that Michael Keating (Vila from Blake's 7) has severe dementia and is now very unwell. Shame, he was a nice chap.

Been catching up on the latest series of Colin from Accounts and in episode 7 there is a line which instantly made me think of our @Toast. I'll spoiler tag it in case people are going to watch the show.

I, for one, am saddened to hear we sacrificed our four bears. Bears are awesome.

Where the fuck has 2022 2023 gone to? Apparently it's the 1st November 5th November already, so time to set in motion another Crowdsourced Deathlist. The 2022 3 version looks set to finish ahead level with the official Deathlist (though they lacked the help of Gary Burgess actually all the 2023 TCD picks were vaguely sensible). Hey, no one is ever going to know that was copy and pasted from last years thread. Job done. 2023's list saw a number of familiar faces exit, pursued by a bear, from George Alagiah to Rolf Harris, Topol to the Unabomber. So let's see how the class of 2024 do. Will the 2024 edition be able to top our current list? We will see, but for the time being let's go over the rules, shall we? THE RULES Rules 1. Please send a list of celebrities you wish to vote for to msc, during the time period of 5th November to the 31st December 2023. The list must have a minimum of 12 names on it, and a maximum of 50. Yes, this means we are open now, as I'll just forget to officially open it otherwise. This has happened on multiple occasions... Please send them by either PM or via Shadow List thread, not by email, semaphore, Morse code, Deathlist live chat, animated corpses, text messages, or any other means of communication you can think of. And you may only submit via 1 of those two methods above, NOT BOTH METHODS! 2. Your 1st choice will gain 50 points, 2nd 49, etc etc to 50th which will gain 1 point. This is true even if you only send in 12 names, or 13 names, or 49 names. 3. When the deadline passes, all of the points that an individual celebrity gain will be added together, and the top fifty celebrities with the most points overall will go on the Utterly Unofficial Forum List. 4. Feel free to add substitutes at the bottom of the list, which will only be counted if one of your fifty die before January 1st 2024. If for example your number one pick is such a smart one they die before January 1st, then I will give 50 points to your 2nd pick, and so on until 1 point is given to the first substitute. 4b) Anyone who wishes to avoid a Pope Benny the Fuckwit Meltdown and just says "oh put my subs in at the number of the person who died" gets 10 post likes from diego. 5. Do try to make the picks as "Deathlisty" as possible. More Buffy Sainte-Marie, less Chickadee, if you know what I mean. Someone likely to score an obit with one of the major English language news outlets. 6. The deadline for sending in entries is 31st December 2023 at 9 pm GMT. That's 4pm New York Time (31st December) and 8am (1st Jan) Melbourne time to help out non-Brits. This earlier deadline is so there's enough time to complete the list before the new year as well as enjoying some extra time off as well. I am keeping Joey's earlier cut off time for simplicity because did you see what that bloody ex-Pope did? Chaos everywhere. 7. This is essentially a forum game without a winner. It does however put the long held notion by some that the combined minds of the forum know better than the Committee to the test. 8. Who picked whom will remain anonymous. Unless the person announces it of course. 9. The paranoid probably shouldn't send in their DDP unique hopefuls. Whilst I do not intend to steal them away, it would make no sense: if the person then showed up on the list, their chances of being unique would be very slim indeed! 9b. If you do wish to send your DDP unique hopefuls, I won't complain! 10. To keep to the Deathlist spirit, only the top 25 ranked celebrities from the current list of Crowdsourced Deathlist 2023 survivors will be used: Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, Joanne Woodward, Glynis Johns, Roberta Flack, James Whale, Frank Field, Rosalynn Carter, Jonnie Irwin, Linda Nolan, Eva Marie Saint, June Spencer, Dick van Dyke, Ruth Buzzi, Nigel Starmer Smith, Andy Taylor, Mel Brooks, Yoko Ono, Sandra Day O'Connor, Jean Marie le Pen, Rob Burrow, Shannen Doherty, Norman Tebbit, Jacques Delors, David Attenborough, Noam Chomsky, Marianne Faithfull, Sonny Rollins, Stanley Baxter, Randy Jackson, Norman Lear, James Earl Jones, Francoise Hardy, James Watson, Vera Miles, the Duke of Kent and David Graham. As usual, this is something for me to worry about, not you. ie: 10a) Our actual collated list will stick to the "25 from the previous year" rule. 10b) As a result, if our top fifty, after all votes have been counted, has more than twenty-five of the 2023 survivors (named for ease in Rule 10), then the lowest ranked excess survivors will be axed from the list in favour of The Fifty-First ranked celebrity and so on... 10c) Since we don't know if that'll be an issue until I actually do the counting, voters don't need to worry about limiting their personal lists to 25 survivors. It'd be nice if they did, but that's life. 11) Please pick living people. Folk do die before 1st January, but there were a few cases of people dead for a number of years chosen last time. Please do not pick animals, or ISIS prisoners, or kids, or any of the usual no go areas. 12) The Deathray Rule. If Deathers is reading this, he is more than welcome to find some way to get his usual 50 points for that bloody weatherman in! If that bloody weatherman doesn't get his formerly traditional 50 from a mystery person (ie, not you, TQR) then this rule will be retired in 12 months time. Anyhow, enjoy. Or not. Will Esther still be telling us That's Life in 2024?

I had wondered if Rifkind not being in the HoL was linked to that mini-scandal in 2015, despite being cleared, as Jack Straw never got a peerage either. But no, turns out he's opposed to an unelected second house and wants it reformed instead.

To be fair (and I only saw this post because you quoted it, for reference - sorry, but as a chronic depression sufferer, even I have my limits on doomscrolling), it does look like he thought the PRESS were out of touch with their pro-Trump stance, rather than the other way round. The lack of commas does make it a difficult read though.

My mum bumped into Julian Glover about a year ago and he was in fine form for his age (and out and about) then, though obviously he's now at an age where you can go downhill quickly.

Crem is going to doomwank himself silly long before the results are in tbh.

Ah come on Paul, who among us didn't know notoriously fit as a fiddle Quincy Jones was on his last legs back in December 2023? Sometimes old people just... die.

See all these people who are going "Godley dead, please Jody Gormley as third sub"? Well, busy here so me too, thanks.

Hegarty and Wallace are pretty much pension age and not in real danger. Vixen and Darragh my age roughly. Sinha has his Parkinsons but can still do TV let alone on the radar yet. Labbett health one to watch given he used to be 29 stone. But he's not that far off pension age either now. Curse couldn't be less worrisome if it was an Indian parliamentary Speaker on life support with sepsis-cancer-rabies/doing amazingly says family.

She has a small role in a nineties Columbo (Ashes to Ashes with Patrick McGoohan as an evil undertaker) as a widow who couldn't be happier her husband is dead and is an absolute hoot in it as is her usual. There have alas been allegations of elder abuse (warning the link gives grim details) here and that tends to speed up the prognosis , thinking of Casey Kasem and the like.

Ah well, one of my favourite Sillars stories is from the Indy Ref when he'd made some controversial comments on the TV about iirc the pound in an independent Scotland and at dinner the next night a friend questioned his motivation. "Oh that?", said Jim, "I was just shit stirring for headlines!"

Jim Sillars health went downhill after Margo died. Reading between the lines of mutual friends (who were furious the press kept quoting him over the SNP collapse as "he's no in a position to remember what he says") bit of mental decline. Dennis Cannavan looked very frail last we saw him, pre-lockdown.