Tomb raider

That's one of the most remarkable comments ever in defense of a DL-nominee. He has a great hairstyle?! Why would that make him unfit for the list, I wonder? Of course we could draw up a list of people with notoriously bad haircuts (I nominate Don King!) and I suppose it could be fun, but I think there could be a problem concerning the objectivity. Off topic: to check if Don King was actually still alive, I read his wikipage. I vaguely remembered that he had killed two people, but wiki opens with some rather shocking details about the murders: Mike Tyson could have taken a leaf out of his former sensei's book when he stood trial for rape back in the nineties.

Well said. US Football is similar to the touch rugby that Josco Junior II plays at prep school. Only I expect JJ II doesn't need half his own body weight in padding to play his version of the game. Well, the rather extensive protective garment those very brave footballplayers are wearing must be a comfort for all the mothers watching, I suppose. And besides that, in rugby, one might actually sprain an ankle or something like that. As half of the americans can't afford their health insurance and most of them don't have any right to sick pay, that might be a costly experience.

I'm not exactly 'over there', but I suppose that I'm perfectly able to answer this. Cheltenham is, as you said, to play Newcastle Utd, so a match against Manchester is obviously not on. Not for now, at least. If Cheltenham beats Newcastle (cough) who knows what the future will bring? Rather off topic: I'd like to thank the illustious admins for changing my user name! Hip hip hurray for them, and of course for ff and captain oates who were so kind to plead my cause!

PITTSBURGH'S GOING TO THE SUPERBOWL - HERE WE GO! HERE WE GO! HERE WE GO, STEELERS, HERE WE GO! PITTSBURGH'S GOING TO THE SUPERBOWL! Like that? What sport are we talking about? The superbowl is about fake-rugby for sissies, isn't it?

Well, when I stated that smilies are for morons, there was no offence meant!

After long and careful consideration, I'd like to remove the brackets before and after the 'b' in my username. As I believe that smilies are for mentally limited people, I was in utter shock when I found out that I had a smiley in my username. Would you be so kind to change 'Tom( raider' in 'Tomb raider'? Thanks!

I'd need a tipple before getting into a bed with the late Queen Mother. Well, she doesn't look too bad for a 101-years-old who has been dead for four years. You shouldn't be too picky, mr. Jackal!

I'm glad you ask, he does indeed! According to wiki, his full title is: by the Grace of God, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, Duke of Nassau, Prince of Bourbon of Parma, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Count of Sayn, Königstein, Katzenellenbogen and Diez, Burgrave of Hammerstein, Lord of Mahlberg, Wiesbaden, Idstein, Merenberg, Limburg and Eppstein. I happen to know that the Dutch queen, also a Nassau, and a distant relative to Grand Duke Jean, has even more names. Would anyone like to compare them with Elizabeth? The British monarch used to be king of almost everything, but you're empire is not what it used to be, is it?

What would we do the rest of the year? Could we draw up a new list (and sneak Ariel Sharon on it, of course)?

A very strong possibility for next year (I hope you won't regret it that you overlooked him for 2006) is HRH Jean Benoit Guillaume Robert Antoine Louis Marie Adolphe Marc d'Aviano, the former archduke of Luxembourg, born january 5, 1921. His wife died last year, and he's looking extremely frail.

Yao Wenyuan, the final member of the so-called 'Gang of four', Mao's cronies who were held responsible for the atrocities during the Cultural Revolution, died the 23rd of december. His death had not been made public until today, for some reason only those wacko Chinese commies could understand.

I was going to include his name on my 2006 ddp, but decided against it at the last moment. That would have been a tremendous pick, ff. Did you have any particular reason to expect the 62-year old dying soon? He looked quite healthy on the pic, didn't he?

оно намеревается? A typo. I meant: спасибо. regards, Hein I think you could easily get away with the typo... (If it was not for some know-it-all pain in the a**e...)

I disagree, my dear sir. Portuguese is indeed a difficult language, as is chinese or russian, but I never had the impression that people who had these as their mother tongue were significantly more capable of learning foreign languages. In fact, there's very little chinese people who understand english, let alone any other western tongue.

I'd say there's nothing wrong with an obsession with staying alive, mr. Brimley. Though it certainly is a completely indecent attitude for the people on the list, of course.

Yes, Bouteflika was certainly the most surprising newcomer on the list. Do we have any reason whatsoever to assume he's in bad health, apart from the nasty 'gastric ulcer haemorrhage' he suffered? I mean, that can hardly be considered a terminal illness, can it? And I don't buy it that 'Algeria is such a dangerous country'. If that would be the main-criterium, we could enter a whole bunch of African and Asean statesmen, hoping that at least 15 of them wil be blew up, executed, stabbed or shot. Hell, we could make a pokergame out of that, with each card portraying one of the moving targets! Has that been done before, I wonder?

Well, this list is about who dies in the current year, not about whose death has been announced in that year. I agree with Tempus Fugit that the official day of death on the certificate should count. Another problem could arise if one's death has not been made public for years. So what if, say, Boris Yeltsin (on the 2000 list) turns out to have died years ago, and the Russians replaced him with a lookalike? I believe that there has been a debate along similar lines about Bin Laden, who could have been dead for a long time without any one knowing, but correct me if I'm wrong. (I'm too lazy to find out myself.)

Can they be bought?! Hmm... Think of all the possibilities! It would grant me the power to block people, to delete or edit their posts... People would shiver!

His English wiki is a bit lacking... perhaps MH could tell us if he'd pass the famous test? Well, by the DL-rules (an obit in a UK-newspaper) he certainly wouldn't pass the test. When will the new list be made public?

Tell that to Denise Bulger. I overlooked this remark of yours, which I consider to be even more tasteless than your first post. I wouldn't dare to deny a grieving mother her right to condemn the murderers of her son, no matter how old they were at the time. But as a society, we can't afford to be taken over by emotions when we deal with sick children like the Bulger-murderers.

I beg you pardon, my dear Cowboy. You are, of course, absolutely right. The Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for murderers under 18 is unconstitutional (though I'm unsure whether the ruling applies to military verdicts).

No, they can't. First of all: empathy develops rather late in a child (I believe somewhere in their fourth year), and in many children with a disturbed upbringing it does not develop at all. Being psychopathic (which means: not experiencing empathy) is a more common diagnosis than you might think. I'm not sure if the Bulger-murderers would fit this description, but their obvious lack of empathy can have medical causes, and they should be pitied for it.

I know it's none of my bussiness, but since you published your rather controversial statements about the Bulger-murderers on a public internet forum, I'd like to express my disagreement. The point is this. You stated: Of course it depends on your definition of 'innocent', but legally every child up to a certain age counts as 'innocent'. Not because he wouldn't be able to commit the most horrid crimes (as the Bulger-killers clearly did), but because he can't be held responsible for his actions. That's the reason why no child younger than 16 can be imprisoned, no charges can be filed to anyone younger than 12, and no civilized country (except for the good old U.S. of A.) allows the death penalty to be executed on minors. It is my humble opinion that your post was tasteless and inflammatory. No matter how horrid their crimes were, pillorying children of that age is unnecessarily cruel. As we find 10-yrs-olds incapable of almost anything that requests a sense of responsibility, we should be very careful to judge them on anything as serious as this. These boys should be treated as extremely ill psychiatric patients, and the way their parents raised them should be thoroughly scrutinized. Making them an example of evil is unjustified.

Well, thank God they are!

Well, I'd say there's plenty of them. Good old Maggie, for example, is well-hated all over this forum, though she would probably not qualify as a 'dictator', no matter what definition you'd be using. But her debilitating crony from Chile (ranked as no. 40) definitely would, and the odds on a speedy demise of Pinochet seem to be quite good. And not only that, both of them would clearly fit this description: