msc

In 2010 when the BBC did the 50th anniversary doc on Mockingbird, Lee's sister told us that Lee was still active and out and about. Less than a year later, she is in assisted living, and going blind/suffering from memory loss. Short of the sister fibbing, sounds like a dramatic downturn in health, which suggests a good pick for 2012.

Goodness, 11 unique picks? That leaves more chance of one in the DDP. Some tough opposition though - deadsoxs team looks inspired on paper for example - but all of them look like they could spring several hits. Lots of low hanging fruit in terms of severe illness. Should be a cracker - good luck to all involved!

She gave an interview to the Guardian in November. Now she could just being practical, but that bit certainly suggests she doesn't expect to be around long enough to finish another book, however long that may be. Going off the science of a Wikipedia page, it takes about three years for her to write a book, and she was fixing this one up instead... There's a lot of lines to read between there.

I am not surprised Penny Marshall misses out as she didn't feel like a DL pick. I am surprised Clive James did, as he does, though the Committee may well suspect he shall see 2013. A quick count of the folk I suspect they've 100% hit their mark on (famous last words) makes 14/50, which would equal the record I believe. Though I am wary of Tariq Aziz. He is a frail old man, but there is every chance they'll get away with this executing lark. Executions don't equal hits do they?

Patrick MacNee is 90 and has had two strokes in the previous few years. No idea on Randi's present health, though he has had cancer and heart issues in recent years.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-01/rex-jackson-dies-aged-83/3754114 Rex Jackson dies. Hadn't heard of him but the fall from grace story sounds a cracker - proper dedication to the art of corruption, none of this "just bring a friend on holiday and hope no one notices" British way.

2012 DDP team: Etta James (joker), Penny Marshall, Harper Lee, R Coase, A Williams, R Levi-Montalcini, Bernard Lovell, Sir P Worsthorne, J Garner, M Bygraves, V Sassoon, M Noriega, Clive James, G Clerides, R Gibb, Mary Wilson, L Phillips, W Jaruzelski, E Wallach, L Rainer Went a bit safe really.

It went up on the dot here. Good list, should break double figures again.

I've gone for Zsa Zsa. After that 2011, she'll probably confound us and go quietly in her sleep or something. (Though Ronnie's heart might be broken, he's lost his top spot!)

Just makes u realise how cruel and unfair the world is.17 yr old pregnant girl dies of cancer while old bastards like Thatcher Castro and Mugabe go on and on. Makes it hard to believe in a God really... I believe we do it to ourselves. God doesnt kill us, our own lack of faith and clinginess to evil spirits does. Yes, dont cling to evil spirits. Pick better booze instead.

Well, the DD sides look to have some good picks in them. I'm happy with my lot too, though I still suspect DDT will murder everyone (not literally, unless he is, as suspected, the Reaper ) in his way.

Neither made my list on the end, though I was cutting down from my Shadow List of 100 names. (If you are going to score low, might as well do it prepared!) Though one of my list did bloody die a few days ago, since the list came in. Thank god for subs!

In a sad end to a neglected thread, Cora died in September. This may have been mentioned, though it didn't come up in searches. I certainly wasn't doing a search on DDT's posts to see if he'd mentioned any good picks that had been forgotten and came across this thread, honest. (Actually, I thought to myself: "I'll just see if there's been any updates, just so the next post isn't from some sod who updates a 9 month dead thread just to tell us the person is dead... ) No British obits at all either.

So, with three days left of 2011, here is who is left from the msc Shadowlist: Michael Douglas - Announced his tumour was gone, 11/1. "Very high" chances it will come back with a vengeance in 2-3 years possibly, but seems safe enough to see in 2013. Kirk Douglas - Stole the show at the Oscars, which is good going for a 94 year old stroke victim. Still active, but a favourite of deadpoolers due to the health issues and being 96 in 2012. Risky. He seems like he'll hang on a bit longer. Stefano Borgonovo - Diagnosed with motor neurone in 2008. Average survival of said illness - 3-5 years, with 20% surviving 10 years and the odd exception defying everyone like Hawking. Good 2012 pick. Al Megrahi - Still dying, just slowly. Superstar Billy Graham - A diva. Trust sod all he says. Richard Attenborough - Spidey senses played up when he spent ages in hospital after a fall in 2008. Wheel chair bound since. Mentally ok, but has gone back into hospital as of Christmas Eve there. 89 in August, and does feel like he's on the road out. Liz Dawn - Has emphysema. Was in wheelchair in 2010, made appearance at Soap Awards in 2011. Quiet. John Demjamjuk - Nazi found guilty in May, with more 'ailments' than Pinochet. In December 2011, had attempt to gain US citizenship rejected. Is 92 in 2012. Fats Domino - Old R&B singer-songwriter. Favourite after Hurricane Katrina issues, has weathered that storm for now. Still 84 in February - will be a deadpool fave. Zsa Zsa Gabor - You know who she is by now. And her "lovely" husband will keep us all up to date with every new setback she faces. She is dying, and she will get the obits, it's just a case of when. (And if her darling husband happens to do himself him in first by accident) Joao Havelange - Former FIFA boss. Ruled his various sporting empires with an iron fist and seemed immortal. Spent 2011 accused of bribery and skulduggery. No change there. Did resign from the IOC after 48 years though, which was. First cracks perhaps? Claimed "health issues" in his resignation. Amidst another investigation into his actions, wouldn't surprise if Havelange pops out in 2012 to get one final victory over his accusers. Wojciech Jaruzelski - Former dictator/leader of Poland. Has cancer and other ailments, and looked hideous in recent photos. Massive pick for 2012. Bernard Lovell - British Science legend, the man who was the inspiration for Quatermass. In orthopedic wheel chair and nearly blind, though clear of mind. 99 next year. Still gives insightful interviews, but this tetchy British genius can only defeat the Reaper for so long. Rita Levi Montalcini/Robert G Edwards/Frederick Sanger/Andrew Huxley - Ancient Nobel Prize winners. Picked them on my gut feeling there'd be lots of Nobel laureates leaving us in 2011. There WAS, just none of the lot I picked. Montalcini is still working, but 103 next year. Sanger, the only living 2 time Nobel laureate, is 93 and quietly retired gardening in Cambridge. Robert G Edwards was "very ill" in 2010 Oscar Niemeyer - Hard working, grumpy architect. Just turned 104. Still working despite tumours, falls and various hospital stays in recent years. Will work till he drops. Will be on many deadpools but strikes me as more likely to reach 2013 than some decades younger. Chapman Pincher - Harold Wilson hating journalist. Was profiled by Guardian in August, otherwise relatively quiet and 98 next year. Luise Rainer - 2 time Oscar winner, in good form for a BBC interview during Oscar season, but is 102 in the upcoming year. Margaret Thatcher. Gough Whitlam - Ailing former Australian PM. In a care home, but still works. Nicholas Winton - WW2 saviour of 700 odd Jewish kids. 103 next year, slowed down in recent years. Aretha Franklin - Massive excitement online over potential pancreatic cancer - rumoured dismissed in 2011, alleges doctors have added "20 years to her life". Rubbish 2012 pick. The Pope - Frailty and health gossip continues, but should be good for another few years. Lawrence Ferlinghetti - A Beat poet about to reach 93? How improper! Yet another who has quietened down in their old age. Denis Healey - Last summer (July 2010) his wife died. Average time husbands live after their long time wives die - 18 months. One to watch. Kim Novak - 78 year old actress with breast cancer. Meant to have made good progress since diagnosis though. Olivia de Havilland/Joan Fontaine - Ancient Hollywood darlings and sisters. Havent spoken to each other since the 70s. Fontaine is a recluse. de Havilland seemed in good spirits in recent interviews, but is 96 in 2010. Fontaine one year younger. George Martin - Of the Beatles. Very ill in November 2010, recovered by August 2011 to give a fine interview in the papers. A fighter, it'll take a lot to see him off. Ravi Shankar - 91 but was still performing. As of 2011, retiring to spend more time with family due to "physical demand" and "slowing reflexes". (ie, getting old) Patrick MacNee - Bloody legend. Is 90 in February. Not as active as he once was, after a few strokes the other year, but recovered enough to do a webcam Q&A at the Avengers event last June. In twilight of life, but retains his old charms. Ali Khamenei - Has leukemia allegedly. Richard Adams/Eric Hobsbawm - writers tend to live a long time. The Watership Down author is 92 next year. Marxist historian Hobsbawm is 94. Anne Feeney - Cancer stricken folk singer. Recovering from lung cancer, has brain tumours and a high chance of inoperable lung cancer showing up in next five years. Still a rebel rouser though from backstage since diagnosis in August 2010. More news to come in early 2012 (and to be honest, I'm hoping for good news - my kind of a singer-songwriter) Douglas Hurd/Ted Short - Old parlimentarians. Short will be 100 next year. Hurd is only 81 but has looked rough for wear in recent interviews. Douglas Hurd - Ted Short.

I keep swearing internally every time someone bumps the Etta James thread in the last few days. It's been that kind of a month.

Carter was on the shortlist for my DDP team, but I left him out because I was unsure he'd get the required obit. Annoyingly 3 people died between writing up my team and sending it in requiring last minute changes - obvious picks mind - and since I've sent it in, another one of them has gone and bitten the dust. Thank goodness for the 3 subs rule. Wont be publishing who is on it till January 1st though, as some of the names have been relatively quiet on here best as I've seen, and there is the off chance that everyone else has forgotten about them (stop laughing at the back there) - every little helps!

I'm giving this a shot for the first time. My rare abilities to keep folk alive in these things suggests I'll do rather badly.

Well, he may be better known now for being a very old actor, but he's still acting, so he's famous for something other than being ancient. He wont get picked, because there's little chance of a British Obit. The BBC last covered him in 2008, last I checked no British papers have mentioned him in some time.

Sid Waddell, Frank Carson both feel like Deathlist kind of picks.

And there was me thinking Spade was doing me a kindness ignoring my score, but 10th from 17 isn't *too* bad.

Different Andrew Smiths. It's a fairly common name here.

I assume something would have shown up in the last month had it been true.

The matter with Barbara Kent is that this forumite hadn't heard of her and she hadn't come up in his research. Which isn't unusual. Several folk I've gotten into I wouldn't have heard of if not for these forums: Captain Beefheart comes to mind.

http://www.deathlist...ndpost&p=154594 So, at the end of last year, after several arguments over time about the DL not picking older folk, I came up with the Old People Deathlist in the 2011 version of this thread. With about a year passed, it -containing the oldest people I could find who might have been noteworthy, minus the famous for existing war vets - has success rate of 13/50. 1. Miriam Seegar 1907- Jan 2nd 2011 (Telegraph obit) 2. Ruby Muhammed 1907- 2nd March 2011 3. Dorothy Young 1907- 20th March 2011 (Telegraph obit) 4. Wade Mainer 1907-12th September 2011 (Guardian obit) 5. Alfred Proksch 1908 – 3rd January 2011 6. Dolores Hope 1909 – 19th September 2011 (BBC obit) 7. Paulette Dubost 1910 – 21st September 2011 (Guardian obit) 8. Edmundo Ros 1910 – 21st October 2011 (Guardian obit) 9. Otakar Vavra 1911 – 15th September 2011 (Guardian obit) 10. Maurice Goldhaber 1911 – 11th May 2011* 11. Ernesto Sabato 1911 – 30th April 2011 (BBC obit) 12. Pierre Dansereau 1911 – 28th September 2011 13. Otto Von Hapsburg 1912 – 4th July 2011 (Telegraph obit) (I just picked the first British obit that showed up on Google, some got several) Note that 4 of those people didn't get British obits up to this point. The most bizarre being Goldhaber, who has been mentioned several times by The Guardian this year, including in two other obits, yet hasn't gotten one of his own. Maybe they don't know he's dead? Despite the decent number of hits, there is no way of predicting which of the 50 will go. Otto VH, a relative youngster on the pool, went whilst Federica Sagor Maas and Johannes Heesters still live on. Take away the four without obits, and you get 9/50 heading into December, which isn't that far off an average Deathlist year. Plus, unlike the Deathlist, you have to second guess the whim of one or two Obit writers - a few above got one obit and one alone to qualify. So whilst picking lots of very very old folk may seem like a key to success, it doesn't seem to bring up much more success than any other path. Crucially, if this team was cut off at 20 for a DDP team, it'd have scored 5 out of 20, with 2 DQ'd for no obit. Well, I found this experiment very interesting. I may well be the only one. List of the Currently Alive (as far as I can tell) from said list: 6th July 1900 – Frederica Sagor Maas 5th December 1903 – Johannes Heesters 30th April 1905 – Sergey Nikolsky 18th December 1905 – Irving Kahn 18th January 1907 – Lina Haag (WWII German resistance fighter) 25th February 1907 – Kathryn Wasserman Davis 1st April 1907 – Dr Sree Sree Shivakumara Swamiji 24th August 1907 – Bruno Giacometti (architect) 23rd November 1907 – Run Run Shaw 12th December 1907 – Roy Douglas 15th December 1907 – Oscar Niemeyer 26th May 1908 – Nguyen Ngoc Tho (first PM of South Vietnam) 11th December 1908 – Elliot Carter 11th December 1908 – Manoel de Oliveira (film director) 1st February 1909 – George Beverly Shea 22nd April 1909 – Rita Levi-Montalcini (1986 Nobel Medicine Prize) 19th May 1909 – Nicholas Winton 12th January 1910 – Luise Rainer 25th March 1910 – Magda Olivero (Italian soprano) 29th December 1910 – Ronald Coase (1991 Nobel Economics Prize) 1st January 1911 – Roman Totenberg (violinist) 25th January 1911 – Kurt Maetzig (German director) 28th January 1911 – Johan Van Hulst 9th March 1911 – Ebby Halliday 10th May 1911 – Bel Kaufman 20th June 1911 – Paul Pietsch (German racer) 1st July 1911 – Sergei Sokolov 18th August 1911 – Amelia Boynton Robinson (civil rights activist) 10th October 1911 – Clare Hollingworth (journalist) 3rd February 1912 – Mary Carlisle 1st March 1912 – Boris Chertok (Russian rocket designer) 17th April 1912 – Marta Eggerth 1st October 1912 – Kathleen Ollenrenshaw 1st November 1912 – Gunther Plaut 17th December 1912 – Edward Short 22nd January 1913 – Henry Bauchau 10th February 1913 – Douglas Slocombe

- nice one Ron! (1:20 into the clip). And thanks for dropping by from time to time, CriticalDivide, we appreciate the updates. I think Ronnie should stay at #1 and Clive at #50 till they pop off, which will probably be another 10 years at least. Agreed. Has the Deathlist ever had someone take such a public interest in their placing? He's like the mascot.