dead Brooke Astor

[in eternum+ 22]

What fantastic news!! At this rate, we'll have TONS to hits by the end of the year!

 

(I think it's a shame to see the bulk of posts about her death (hurrah!) are regarding various DP teams. There are specific threads for the DDP etc.. Can't we just celebrate our own success in the candidates' thread, and have DP scoring discussions in the relevant threads? I mean, I'm all for DP teams, but this is the DL and not a general DP-comparison site.)

[maryportfuncity 10,645]

I'm staggered mind, I'm due a unique pick bonus on CPDP for this one. Still struggling to believe nobody else bagged her on there.

 

Mainly cos the whole idea of that particular deadpool was not to choose easy picks like ancient old biddies.

 

I think it's also notable that none of the teams that selected her on DDP had her down as a joker pick.

I'm guessing that most people had her down as a "20th person" or "low banker" pick - a strong, good pick, but not worth as many points as say the Iraqis or Messner etc.

 

 

(Shamir was my 20th/low banker pick - he'd better die as Lady Bird Johnson, Astor, Bruce Bennett & Zahir Shah were all rejected in favour of him)

 

Not to mention it puts him in first place in the Theme Team category too The votes are still coming in for the Theme Team bonus points, but I don't think FF will get them.

 

So not only does Brooke Astor kick me out of the top ten on the DDP, but she causes headaches for my own pool.

 

Still, MPFC is playing by the rules, so it's really all my fault for allowing the team in the first place. As has been discussed, however, it shall be verboten in future years. Nothing personal MPFC, just frustrated.

 

 

Aye well it was an experiment on my part too. Low points for their ages, higher probability of death for the same reason. Haven't done owt about a CPDP entry yet, I must get moving, eh? Might apply to the Astor foundation for support for an afternoon off work to sort out my next theme team.

[Cowboy Ronnie 78]

Well, that's the low hanging fruit for the season harvested. Unless Ruby Muhammad, whom I'm really starting to regret we picked, should fall.

[maryportfuncity 10,645]

Still a few I'm unlikely to reap, including them two tough old Tommies Patch and Allingham. I thought Edward Upward - still writing the last I heard - would've carked it too. That there fruit might be low hanging but each deadpool is a season and not all of it falls as hoped for, or summat.

[Tomb raider 9]

All this crap about picking easy targets (or 'low hanging fruit') that is said to be taking the sport out of the death-picking-game is annoying me. Why would it be unsportsmanlike to select a somewhat obscure and perfectly healthy centenarian as opposed to an equally obscure terminally ill 65-years-old preacher's wife!? Selecting 73-year old braintumourpatient Lou Rawls - who was not likely to live out the first week of january - was as much a cheat as picking one 200 year old Halibuta whose only fame is that some sources abusively declare her the widow of Elijah Muhammad.

 

As I mentioned previously in the Ruby Muhammad-thread, picking the ancients has never turned out to be a guarantee for DL-success. Centenarians tend to be in fairly good health - otherwise they wouldn't have made it to their ripe old age - and though they are of course likely to die within the next couple of years, their chances to survive one particular year are not as slim as those of a terminal lungcancer-sufferer.

[Cowboy Ronnie 78]

All this crap about picking easy targets (or 'low hanging fruit') that is said to be taking the sport out of the death-picking-game is annoying me. Why would it be unsportsmanlike to select a somewhat obscure and perfectly healthy centenarian as opposed to an equally obscure terminally ill 65-years-old preacher's wife!? Selecting 73-year old braintumourpatient Lou Rawls - who was not likely to live out the first week of january - was as much a cheat as picking one 200 year old Halibuta whose only fame is that some sources abusively declare her the widow of Elijah Muhammad.

 

As I mentioned previously in the Ruby Muhammad-thread, picking the ancients has never turned out to be a guarantee for DL-success. Centenarians tend to be in fairly good health - otherwise they wouldn't have made it to their ripe old age - and though they are of course likely to die within the next couple of years, their chances to survive one particular year are not as slim as those of a terminal lungcancer-sufferer.

 

uh, Tammy Faye Baker was pretty world famous, her death was reported in e.g. that paragon of journalistic excellence the (UK) Metro, and at 65 she's a more interesting selection than, e.g. our own Ruby Muhammad at 110, which is acknowledged above as a lame pick. Lou Rawls was unarguably world famous, wasn't sentenced to die, and for all we know could have hung on a la Ariel Sharon for the whole year.

 

Go back to the 1987 list and see the names chosen - an interesting mix of celebs whose death would be, for lack of a better word, entertaining to the selection committee, even if many of them were most unlikely to die in the subsequent 12 months. That's the spirit of the original DL, which some us will fight to maintain. Whomever picked Anna Nicole Smith in the DDP deserves to win the competition for the year, not lose out because he or she didn't pick two condemned Iraqis whose sole claim to fame was they were condemned Iraqis.

 

Low hanging fruit will continue to be identified as such, especially if people go on about what geniuses they are for picking the person for their DDP list.

[Tomb raider 9]

uh, Tammy Faye Baker was pretty world famous, her death was reported in e.g. that paragon of journalistic excellence the (UK) Metro, and at 65 she's a more interesting selection than, e.g. our own Ruby Muhammad at 110, which is acknowledged above as a lame pick. Lou Rawls was unarguably world famous, wasn't sentenced to die, and for all we know could have hung on a la Ariel Sharon for the whole year.

 

TFBM was world famous only if your americanocentric vision is strictly limited to the borders of the United States. Come on! Here in Europe -the land far far away as the yanks call it- hardly anyone outside the deathpool-watching community had ever heard of her before the (ahum) quality press mentioned her passing.

 

I really don't see why you qualify her as a more interesting pick than Ruby. Face it: speculating about the death of a woman that seems to linger on and on and on, closely watched by nobody but a select group of deathpool-fanatics, is as much fun as watching an equally obscure nobody who's slowly been eaten away by cancer. The only intriguing thing about Tammy Faye was her extravagant transvestite-look and her ridiculously optimistic girlish notes on her website, which I admit caused a little bit more dynamics around her than around Ruby Muhammad who could have been dead for years without anyone of us knowing it.

 

Lou Rawls (whom I never had heard about before, but that tells more about my music-related ignorance than about his alleged fame) was sentenced to die if my memory serves me well, but anyway, I never suggested that it discredited him as a DL-pick. (Quite the opposite, I'd say!) He could well have lived on to survive the year - he would not have been the first terminally ill to do so - but exactly the same applies to Ruby Muhammad or Brooke Astor. I never stated that it was unfair to pick a sick celebrity, I only questioned the unfairness of picking an extremely old celebrity. In my opinion, mind, growing old can be considered an illness in DL-fraseology because of it's life-expectancy-reducing capacity.

 

Go back to the 1987 list and see the names chosen - an interesting mix of celebs whose death would be, for lack of a better word, entertaining to the selection committee, even if many of them were most unlikely to die in the subsequent 12 months. That's the spirit of the original DL, which some us will fight to maintain. Whomever picked Anna Nicole Smith in the DDP deserves to win the competition for the year, not lose out because he or she didn't pick two condemned Iraqis whose sole claim to fame was they were condemned Iraqis.

 

You're right! In fact: for reasons of nostalgia I would like to recommend the committee to select fifty celebs who are under-45, and who are supposed to be in excellent health! As it would take decades for any of them to die, the fun would wear off rapidly, don't you think? I do not entirely disagree with your glorifying the true DL-spirit, but please don't exaggerate the romanticism of it.

 

Low hanging fruit will continue to be identified as such, especially if people go on about what geniuses they are for picking the person for their DDP list.

 

I really couldn't care less what person you'd pick for the DDP. If I wanted to discuss the DDP I'd visit the therefore established thread or the DDP-website itself. The DDP is a completely different branch of sport... well, not completely different of course, but it's a completely different concept of predicting death, in which you can differentiate succesfull picks by their likeliness because of age by awarding more or less points. The only DL-argument that counts -apart from the victim being famous, of course- is whether a pick is dead or not, and none of them is 'better' or 'worse' than another. You're free to discuss the fairness of the concept, you're welcome to discredit any pick you like, but please try and avoid using irrelevant arguments.

[Cowboy Ronnie 78]

This link was from the Daily Telegraph's news section, i.e. it's not an obit

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml...7/23/db2301.xml

 

A fairly long piece for someone British readers supposedly have never heard of. And her life story is fairly compelling, if only for its train wreck status. The DL Committee, a reasonably worldly crew with just one American member, felt comfortable she was famous enough for selection. I'd suggest she was a more interesting DL candidate than Ruby because:

 

1. she was much more famous

 

2. she was much younger

 

 

TR hit the nail on the head with the suggestion of an under 45 only list - it would be very interesting, but would take ages to clock up the successes. But when a really well-thought out person who's not obviously old or ill dies (e.g. AN Smith, Croc Hunter, etc.) , we do find ourselves wishing we'd thought of them, which is why I would like to see ten or so spots on the DL reserved for the likes of Pete D'oh!erty, Britney Spears, etc., whose deaths aren't so completely far-fetched that their selection would be a waste.

 

In an ideal world, the DL would be made up of 50 people who, if you'd heard they died, you'd say "Whoa!", as in that was unexpected or that's a significant person to die, or both. When Brooke Astor went, other than a small bit of satisfaction that we'd clocked up number 8 on the year, I couldn't have really given a rat's a$$.

[Godot 149]

Tomb Raider raises an interesting point: is picking a centenarian with a low life expectancy any easier than picking someone at 60 who is known to be in the last stages of lung cancer? Neither demand great skill other than keeping tabs on news reports. Except that Brooke Astor has been a centenarian for five years. Simply participating in this site means you are genned up on such people. The more you gen up and play true to the various deadpool rules (rather than any personal ethic) as FF does, the more you are likely to be in with a chance on the final back nine, so to speak.

 

Traditionally the Deathlist pursued its own ideals, only in the past few years it too has gone the way of plucking hopefuls from obscurity. Ruby Mohamed as CR acknowledges, was an unfortunate choice.

 

Still, there is also the international point: there will always be names that are obscure to participants relative to their nationalities so it will be impossible to keep everyone happy all the time. But I do think there is an obligation for the committee to apply the fame test a little more critically in future.

[Octopus of Odstock 2,186]

In an ideal world, the DL would be made up of 50 people who, if you'd heard they died, you'd say "Whoa!", as in that was unexpected or that's a significant person to die, or both.

 

 

How about:

 

Young: Doherty, Winehouse, Lohan, Gazza, Maradona

 

Very Famous (or very famous in their field/country) but ill/old

Heston, Deborah Kerr, Solzhnetisyn, Yitzhak Shamir, Billy Graham, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ariel Sharon, Betty Ford, Norman Wisdom, Evel Knievel, Arthur C Clarke, Suharto, Sir Bobby Robson, Ian Smith, Ian Porterfield, Ravi Shankar, Yves St. Laurent, Sir Edmund Hillary, Malcolm Allison, Richard Widmark, Lena Horne, Luciano Pavarotti, Gough Whitlam, Ronnie Biggs, Jeremy Thorpe, Tony Hart, Tariq Aziz, Farrah Fawcett, Patrick Moore, Maureen O'Hara, Michael Foot, Denis Healey, Mollie Sugden, Baroness Thatcher, Sir Jimmy Young, Nelson Mandela, Walter Cronkite, Helmut Kohl, Jane Tomlinson

 

Assassination: Musharraf

 

Immortal: Dunn

 

The vast majority of them, people on the street would've heard of. Most have been mentioned on DL a number of times.

[Cowboy Ronnie 78]

In an ideal world, the DL would be made up of 50 people who, if you'd heard they died, you'd say "Whoa!", as in that was unexpected or that's a significant person to die, or both.

 

 

How about:

 

Young: Doherty, Winehouse, Lohan, Gazza, Maradona

 

Very Famous (or very famous in their field/country) but ill/old

Heston, Deborah Kerr, Solzhnetisyn, Yitzhak Shamir, Billy Graham, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ariel Sharon, Betty Ford, Norman Wisdom, Evel Knievel, Arthur C Clarke, Suharto, Sir Bobby Robson, Ian Smith, Ian Porterfield, Ravi Shankar, Yves St. Laurent, Sir Edmund Hillary, Malcolm Allison, Richard Widmark, Lena Horne, Luciano Pavarotti, Gough Whitlam, Ronnie Biggs, Jeremy Thorpe, Tony Hart, Tariq Aziz, Farrah Fawcett, Patrick Moore, Maureen O'Hara, Michael Foot, Denis Healey, Mollie Sugden, Baroness Thatcher, Sir Jimmy Young, Nelson Mandela, Walter Cronkite, Helmut Kohl, Jane Tomlinson

 

Assassination: Musharraf

 

Immortal: Dunn

 

The vast majority of them, people on the street would've heard of. Most have been mentioned on DL a number of times.

 

this is a great suggested list, will try to make sure just about all get discussed at the selection meeting.

 

ps - who's Gough Whitlam?

[Octopus of Odstock 2,186]

This is a great suggested list, will try to make sure just about all get discussed at the selection meeting.

 

ps - who's Gough Whitlam?

 

Ta.

 

Well, Whitlam was the one, along with Porterfield/Allison who might not trascend as much globally, I must admit.

Whitlam was the former, and rather controversial PM of Australia. Now 91, and in a wheelchair.

 

I can't say if all the names on that list would go in 2008, but they are all genuinely strong or good candidates for a variety of reasons. None over the age of 100, either.

 

I realise there's about 4 or 5 spaces, but chances are famous people will be announced as ill between now & December, and some of the list will probably die before December, so there's room for perhaps as many as 10 more good, but more... shall we say.. daring picks?

 

Right, really must go and sort out my suitcase....

[Grim Reaper 186]

Hmm - what a vigorous debate this thread has spawned. I cant help but think of the analogy with allowing drug enhanced athletes. There is a tempatation to want to see some huge steroid-pumped dude steam the 100 metres in 9.5 seconds but then again there's something unsatisfying about it - mainly that the athlete will have to be shoved into a hole in the ground next to the WWF/WWE boys soon after he collects his medal.

 

The DDP is a little like that, in that looking down the leading teams my mind is drawing a blank on half of their successes. But then again. it's a competition so maybe its fair game. The DeathList rule of "they must be famous and not just because they are about to die" is an attempt to eliminate the "steroid" picks but it doesn't quite do the job. Maybe a rule that candidates "must be in the spirit of DeathList" would be more appropriate but I fear its open to too much interpretation. I guess the other problem is that DL effectively competes with its historical performance so a change of rules creates a problem there.

 

Maybe a ban on centurions wouldn't be a such a bad thing? Or perhaps a new DeathList Juniors list (ala S-Club Juniors ) so maybe we can finally get Doherty and nine of his under 50 mates on some sort of list? It feels a bit like tinkering with tradition but maybe that's progress...

[Tempus Fugit 214]

.

[Banshees Scream 110]

so maybe we can finally get Doherty and nine of his under 50 mates on some sort of list? It feels a bit like tinkering with tradition but maybe that's progress...

 

Grim take into perspective that in numbers the probability of any young rehab orientated celebrities or steroid pumped (Red eyed) maniacs being on the money isn't a very good chance. The whole idea of creating another attached list sounds very creative but out of a list of say (twenty five) what is the general expectation? That is the question.

 

I'm thinking more along the lines of being more liberal with the selections of a future list but not going as far as 'Anna Nicole Smith' for example because it's impossible to be sure. In the end I'm doors open to drug overdoses and suicides. There are still some standards to be set and it would be an expirience to see how well the visualized projects into reality.

[in eternum+ 22]

Maybe a ban on centurions wouldn't be a such a bad thing?

+

 

CLS turns 100 next year

=

 

Noooooooooooo!

[Tomb raider 9]

About banning the cents, I still don't get the point. If Brooke Astor and Ruby Muhammad get an obit in the UK, they are to be considered famous enough for Deathlist. If the committee would have selected 50 obscure (super)centenarians it would have been different, but there were only five of them on this year's list, and Hoffman, Niemeyer and Lane were never disputed. If Hoffman, Niemeyer and Levi-Strauss (now 99) live out the year, it would be a shame not to be able to select them for the DL 2008 because of some new and completely arbritrary age-limit.

 

Brooke Astor was not the high-profile celeb that CR would have liked, but her surname almost guaranteed an obit, even if she would never have reached centenarian-status. It's the same as the late Princess Alice, the Duchess of Gloucester. She'd never done anything noteworthy in her life, apart from visiting cocktailparties and spending ridiculous amounts of money, but she was famous because of her husband's last name and the fact that she lived to be 100+ was just too good a chance to let slip.

 

Ruby Muhammad has always been more of a dubious pick, but hey, if it wasn't for us the lady would have been ignored completely on the web, so grant her the honour. For all we know, she is still alive and in excellent health, so she has not yet turned out the easy target CR is complaining about.

[Dead O'Gonner 1]

Bit late on the old uptake but was in my pit all day yesterday! That one came out of the blue didnt it! 8 down 42 to go!

[maryportfuncity 10,645]

Re the centegenarians debate; the closest thing to a yardstick we have is my somewhat controversial old and in the way theme team on the CPDP this year. For all the controversy let's not forget that - with a few days to go - half of the ten are still alive and the living specemins include Henry Allingham (111) and Harry Patch (109). Not only that but many highly rich people, with more money and more access to good medical science than people in their position have ever enjoyed are heading for 100 years old. There's more chance than ever that the most prominent centeganarians will live a few years past their 100th birthdays and we're arguing the toss here about putting these people on deadpools that last one year. Individual debates about Ruby Muhammad or Claude Levi Strauss - sort of - miss the point. Eligible is eligible. Henry Allingham will get obits, news coverage, he is 112 next year, he is a good candidate IMHO. And he's less a soft touch on the list than poor old cancer ridden Lou Rawles was. Banning the oldies on age alone is discrimination, surely.

[deadsox 894]

If they're famous they should be in. If they're not they shouldn't. Simple. I don't even mind if they're famous for being old (like my pals Yone Minagawa and Emilio Mercado del Toro. Famous is famous.

[Tempus Fugit 214]

.

[Dead O'Gonner 1]

if they are going to get an mention in the British press then they are fair game! picking a cent is not a guarantee for a hit is it?

[Windsor 2,233]

Here we go.

 

She isn't even in the ground yet.

[Godot 149]

I like the idea of a deathlist junior section for the novices and OoO came up with one or two crackers. They could be in an annually pinned "ones to watch" section that could be quite entertaining. Dawn French has to be in there too. I had no problem with Gough Whitlam or, sadly (as a supporter of the once mighty now shamed and disgraced Leeds United), with Ian Porterfield. But I'm not keen on the idea of Jane Tomlinson famous simply for a diagnosis of untimely death. She could go in the junior section.

[Windsor 2,233]

Brooke Astor's son is convicted of stealing from his mother.