Rude Kid

OK, I'm pleased to announce that the DDP will be under the management of Octopus of Odstock as of 1/1/08. Judging by the very efficient and willing assistance he's given us since he joined in 2004, it'll be in capable hands. (Pauses for a polite ripple of applause) As for the calls to allow CNN as a valid obit source, well, that will of course be up to the eight-legged one, but the reason we've been resisting it is that we wanted the DDP to retain its Britishness and not be totally swamped by old baseball players and bit-part sitcom actors who no-one over here has heard of. There are plenty of US deadpools out there already if that's what you want. It's also worth pointing out that the 2002, '03 and '05 winners were American, and Meet Your Maker, who looks like he's going to make it 2 wins in 2 years, is Canadian, so good research can certainly overcome the disadvantage of having to rely on foreign news sources. Oh, and thanks for the good wishes on our retirement ("stars in the twilight land of the deadpoolers" indeed ), although we'll still be around as players if Octopus will have us.

Ah, volunteers already - good show. Nooo to redecoration! At least not till the new tenant moves in. The wood effect wallpaper's kind of grown on me over the years... The webhosting is free - the only slight catch being you have to use their dialup service to send email from the DDP account, but it's only 1p a minute or whatever. Everything else (receiving emails and updating the website) can be done via your normal broadband ISP. The webpages, as I mentioned, are automatically generated, apart from the front page with the news and stuff on it; the uploading is done using free FTP software that's dead easy to use. I'm seeing the Baboon for a few beers tomorrow evening, so I'll mention your 'job applications' to him then, and we'll be in touch over the weekend.

Evening all - long time no see. Good to see many of the old faces still kicking around on DL, and I gather I've missed a real-life get-together of late. Shame - sounds like it was a good laugh. Anyway, a bit of an announcement...after 5 years of running the DDP, Siegfried and I have decided to retire, as it were, so we're looking to hand over the reins to someone else. Behind the frankly shoddy website lies a database and a load of code to automate tasks such as setting up the teams at the start of the year and updating the webpages whenever someone croaks, so it's all pretty straightforward to run. We're keen to see the DDP continue (and over 100 new teams have applied to join in for 2008), so we'd pass all this on and be on hand to answer any questions. Plus we've always found the competitors willing to help out, and they're very good at spotting obits that we've missed, so we don't even have to keep a close eye on the news. Oh, and you would of course be able to change any rules that you don't like - and I gather from some of the latest posts on this thread that there are a few... So there's the sales pitch...anyone interested?

About 180 teams, including all those who picked Magnus Magnusson, will go up later today if I can get away from work at any reasonable time. The rest will be done in bits over the next, I dunno, 2 weeks or so.

How do you mean? Picking the low-hanging fruit of al-Bandar and al-Tikriti? I'm claiming the moral high ground by not having gone for Josie G though! My principles are worth more than 24 points.

Happy New Year all! Thanks for all the DDP2007 entries - we've received about 450, and have processed just over a third of those so far, slowed down of course by most people needing to amend their teams at the last minute as a result of Saddam's demise. The current plan is to bung up on the website in the next couple of days what we've got so far, and keep updating it as we process more teams. In the meantime, if you can't remember who you picked, post your team name up here and I'll list it for you. My 20 are as follows: 1) Awad Hamed al-Bandar 2) Muhammad Ali 3) Henry Allingham 4) Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti (JOKER) 5) Tammy Faye Bakker Messner 6) Fidel Castro 7) Carlo Azeglio Ciampi 8) Louis Farrakhan 9) Farrah Fawcett 10) John Forsythe 11) Estelle Getty 12) Rev Billy Graham 13) King Harald V of Norway 14) Tony Hart 15) George Melly 16) Emiliano Mercado del Toro 17) Ariel Sharon 18) Suharto 19) Brian Wilson 20) Amy Winehouse

Since Mr Godot emailed and asked me to comment on whether a certain Ms J. Grove will be allowed to be picked in the DDP, I thought I'd pop in and say...yes. She's 16, in most respects the law now recognises her as an adult, and she comes across as being very mature for her age, so let's not get all precious about her being a child when she clearly isn't. Besides, when we took a vote recently, about half of those who replied felt that children of any age should be allowed to be picked anyway. (Oddly, almost all of the female respondees said kids were fair game...I thought you lot were supposed to be all caring and maternal? ) That said, I won't be picking her myself because choosing people who are so terminally ill that you can practically name their date of death is no fun. Maybe next year we'll introduce a rule that people have to be famous for something other than just being ill, but for now, she stays.

Afternoon all. Well, you bunch of Luddites! The scoring system definitely needs overhauling - it's just too dull (not least for us) with all those teams stuck on the same number of points, and almost every death being worth either 4 or 5 points. So far, we've got 60-odd votes in, and they're about 85% in favour of the new system and evenly split as to whether we allow under-18s or not. We'll be closing the voting and making the final decisions on Wednesday, so if anyone has any thoughts on the matter that they haven't yet sent in, get on with it! In the meantime, to answer a few points that have been raised here and in the emails we've received: Points based on 125 minus the person's age - I like it (certainly better than 100 minus the age, which has been suggested before). Will consider this as an alternative to the proposed banding. Points based on number of times the person has been selected as well as their age - Potentially confusing - as has been said, I think part of the reason for the DDP's popularity is its simplicity. Plus I don't want to encourage ever more obscure picks - they take time to research, and we get complaints from people who've never heard of them, which are hard to refute when we haven't either! Increase the number of picks per team - Enough people (especially newbies) whinge about not being able to think of 20 as it is! Will you still be allowing prisoners on Death Row to be selected? - Yes, due to the unpredictability of when/whether their sentence will be carried out. Mirza Tahir Hussain was suddenly freed the other day, just a few weeks after being sentenced to hang at the end of the year, and even Saddam Hussein has an appeal left. Does execution qualify for the new "unnatural causes" bonus? - Nope; murder, suicide and accidents only. Granted, execution's pretty unnatural, but we couldn't think of a better phrase. I don't like the new bonuses - The point of them is to try to introduce some randomness and stop the competition becoming a very few horse race from about March onwards, but without going overboard and letting someone with a flukey hit or two beat someone with a solid array of hits. If they don't work, we can always scrap them after a year. Any more thoughts welcome! - RK

Cynic! But the truth is...I only visit this thread when it comes back to the top of the forum, because I assume there's been a death that we've missed - and I'm usually right.

Play the desktop blues Have some poor-quality building work done

So Proof wasn't Bulletproof then? He actually released an album last year called "Searching for Jerry Garcia". He certainly stands a better chance of finding him now.

Took me a while to work out you were talking about Denis Donaldson there - I'd missed that bit of news. Better do another update then. If I'd known the daft bugger was still living in Ireland, I'd have picked him!

Ah, you could be right - I'm slowly going senile. Don't bet against me for next year's list! Anyway, that's all sorted - have decided to update their descriptions as opposed to removing them, and I've added a pic of Eddy Arnold. Ta for the info. Site to be updated shortly for Weinberger's demise...

I didn't know about the dead WWI veterans - do you have a source, Mr Octopus? If so, I'll remove them from their respective teams, as we've already done with one of Fallen Sparrow's picks for the same reason. All I can find is a reference to Oborne still being alive in August 2004.

Someone tried that last year with the Arsenal team, but we couldn't be bothered typing in all the unique picks. So, no. Their team name was good though..."Dennis Bergkamp I Ain't Gettin' On No Plane Fool".