Twelvetrees

Please don't. By the way, Andy Bell is HIV positive, quite different from having AIDS. Perhaps you in turn might care to "get your fact (sic) straight".

"Fit the best...Everest." That's my recollection - that and a feather floating down inside a room while a helicopter landed silently in the garden. Perhaps if the double glazing hadn't been so good, someone might have heard the gunshot and got to him in time... As for what he did - he was a farmer who won the radio quiz 'Brain of Britain' and then, as Handrejka says, went on to be a panel show member on radio and TV. I think he may have actually appeared on the very first episode of 'Countdown', and therefore been in at the start of television history. Of a sort.

The death of Michael Jackson has been announced. Not the baby-dangling freak though - this Michael Jackson is perhaps better known as the Beer Hunter.

So, Banshees, what are you doing with your right hand? Making gnostic gestures, perchance? 'Snake may wriggle into bamboo tube, but may not wriggle out' - Kung-fu-tzu Whichever path you choose, may it lead to yourself.

Actually only 51% of eligible RMT members bothered to vote this time (which is a high turnout for them), meaning that a majority do not actively support his arrant buffoonery.

Bob Crow. The leader of the RMT union. This doesn't mean much if you don't use the tube, but if you do...I mean, people should have the right to withdraw their labour, but this beady-eyed pudding-brained buffoon does his level best to undermine that right every time he speaks. Previous causes of threats of industrial action have been over the sacking of a tube driver who was seen playing sport when on long-term sick leave (evidently badminton is therapeutic), and because of the replacement of tea-urns with kettles in tube station kitchen areas. His usual tactic is to threaten a series of strikes either during discussions to resolve problems or before they begin. It is nothing short of blackmail, and brings the entire trade union movement into disrepute. His discourse is also nothing more than a thin pastiche of seventies labour disputes, but he simply hasn't got the intellect or the ideological basis to back up his rent-a-playground-bully outbursts. It's as though someone has attempted to shave a bulldog, cruelly dressed it in a cheap suit and tried (and failed) to teach it some rudimentary English. His latest wheeze is to threaten two 72-hour strikes next month that will have two effects - 1 - It will cause absolute chaos in London, and not just for tube users. 2 - It will erode any residual sympathy that the public has for tube workers. There is only one remedy. Bob Crow should be captured (by being lured inside a giant pork pie), paraded around the City in a scold's bridle and then taken to Tower Hill, placed in a giant tea urn and publicly boiled in his own sh!t. Please be advised that if you opt to reply to this post, I really have only just started.... Toodle-pip!

It's been a sprint to the Job Centre for Neil McDonald, though. McDonald sacked

"Sorry" - Margaret Thatcher "This is no time for soundbites, but I feel the hand of death on my shoulder" - Tony Blair "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you pleased to see me?" - Bobby Kennedy

I can understand your suggestion, but experience suggests that someone's search for information on the topic of the young girl in question might lead them here, and we could do without the death threats, quite frankly. The occasional sh!t flinger can be dealt with wittily, but who wants to drown in the stuff? It was bad enough with the Tongans and the snooker fans. However, I do have to say that I believe that the collective intelligence of the Deathlist would do a better job than the Portuguese police.

Forigive me if I seem a little critical, but you do appear to have imposed some retrospective rules that seek to alter the nature of the debate. After all, your original post was "off the top of your head". What you were really looking for is the most famous person to have died, and this within a strictly defined set of media-based US-focused criteria (even the contrived start date sets a blatantly pro-US agenda). What you were not seeking, as the thread title would seem to imply, was the most significant death. I mean, Pat Nixon in 1993...seriously? What did she achieve that did not come directly as the result of her having married a sweaty crook in 1940? For me - and hopefully for others, she'd be trailing way, way behind in the wake of Audrey Hepburn, Arthur Ashe, Bobby Moore, William Golding, Federico Fellini, River Phoenix, Pablo Escobar and Frank Zappa, all of whom, in one way or another, did a little more than become "Outstanding Homemaker of the Year" in 1953. By the way, for the sake of accuracy - Yeltsin, Diana. Cheerio

Interesting idea, and I agree that there is a difference between the death of a famous person and a death that has significance in itself. As a case in point, I'd argue that the death of Salvador Allende in 1973 was more important to more people (the entire population of Chile) than that of Picasso or LBJ. Also looking very briefly beyond the Western world, Japan throws up Yukio Mishima in 1970 and Hirohito in 1989. This will run and run....either that or we'll all get bored very quickly.

As an AFC Bournemouth fan, it could mean that we won't be bottom of the table until at least November 6, when you come to destroy the town centre again.

Now we can wait for the conspiracy 'theorists' to claim that he was murdered by the Government in order to cover up their own anti-Halibut activities...seriously, a growing number of people believe that the July 7 bombings were Government-initiated so as to both develop anti-Islamic prejudice in Britain and to allow for a civil rights crackdown. As for the eighty virgins, I can't help but hope that they're all nonagenerian monks.

The former Angolan rebel leader Alvara Holden Roberto has died at the age of 84. He never got the chance to be a despot, as his US and Israeli-backed FNLA forces lost out to the Communist MPLA; however, as Fortinbras says in 'Hamlet' "...he was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royally..."

Sorry, edited myself too zealously. Stabbed himself in the foot with a staff as he was beating time. How about Major General John Sedgwick, at the battle of Spotsylvania in the US Civil War in 1864. His last words were evidently "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist..."

Or the famous case of composer Jean-Baptiste Lully who, when conducting a work celebrating the recovery of Louis XIV from illness, succeeded in stabbing himself in the foot with it, dying of an infection two months later.

Brooke Astor. We've seen off Charles Lane already, and it's finally time for the ancients to shuffle off one by one. Realistically, though, I don't most of the rest of the list bothering the stonemason this year.

And here's an obit. from The Washington Post. Six down, and after a slow start, this may yet be a good year.

Speaking as a Somerset follower, quite right too. Poor old 'Dasher' - the solid county pro whom no-one ever noticed when Viv and Botham were winning things for us.

As I had reported here

What I want to know is - who the hell is voting for Dunn? Can we not count these as spoiled ballots?

The American operatic tenor Jerry Hadley is in intensive care after evidently shooting himself with an air-rifle. It looks like there's no way that he's going to make 2008, but we don't have a 'Catch 'em before they're gone' thread.

The journalist Nigel Dempster has died aged 65 from liver cancer. A noted gossip columnist and diarist, he is probably less well-known as the father-in-law of Zodiac Mindwarp.

Zsa Zsa's been in the news over the embezzlement case with her daughter, Francesca Hilton (Paris' step-great aunt or something), but she hasn't been in court. Evidently, she has a leg infection as a result of a bad fall last month as she tried to get out of bed unaided. How long before she's wearing that little black shroud?

Good find, FF. She now weighs just four stone four pounds and has 'started hospice'. I think we all know how hospice finishes...