The 2013 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool - Signup thread

[Guynemer]

Excelsior, Embalmer.

Shirley Temple and Hugh Hefner--there are those "Jesus ****ing Christ, why didn't I think of that?" picks I was talking about.

[embalmer42]

Thanks for the kind words. I'm not really sure what I'll do for next year though....

[Sparrowhawk]

Thanks for the kind words. I'm not really sure what I'll do for next year though....

Well we look forward to whatever you come up with An impressive entry once again this year.

I'm still not sure what to think of this thread/"game" but I find myself coming back to it regularly throughout the year (though I'm not sure if that is the same morbid curiousity that causes people to slow down for accidents, or just to keep up to date on who passed away, or just the fact that it is one of the more interesting threads left in Apolyton).

I actually started a list about a week or two ago, but only got to about 5 before I got busy with something else and didn't get back to it. Maybe next year though.....maybe...

Sparrowhawk

[-Jrabbit]

Just throw together a list and submit it, Sparrow.

a) Late submissions will be accepted until January 7, 2013 under the following conditions:
i) New players must submit a list of 20 unique (not picked in 2013) celebrities. Consult the 2013 game thread opening posts for a complete list of picked celebrities.

Heck, I can probably provide enough unique names to fill out a list.

[Wezil]

I'm still not sure what to think of this thread/"game" but I find myself coming back to it regularly throughout the year (though I'm not sure if that is the same morbid curiousity that causes people to slow down for accidents, or just to keep up to date on who passed away, or just the fact that it is one of the more interesting threads left in Apolyton).

It's part of my long term plan. I figure in a couple years I'll rule Poly through Dead Pool thread traffic alone.

[Robert]

It's part of my long term plan. I figure in a couple years I'll rule Poly through Dead Pool thread traffic alone.

We'll consider adding more adds in the deathpool threads then!

[Wezil]

We'll consider adding more adds in the deathpool threads then!

We'll discuss my cut later.

[Sava]

I pick Al Roker and Matt Lauer by murder suicide.

[molly bloom]

Sol Yurick best known I suspect, for 'The Warriors'- made into a very silly film.

The American novelist Sol Yurick, who has died aged 87, was too radical, too extreme and too violent for the respectable literary establishment of New York, yet no writer more fully embodied the city's anguished spirit in the 1960s. His novels The Warriors (1965), Fertig (1966) and The Bag (1968) constitute a trilogy of vibrant energy, biting satire and high, though irreverent, artistic seriousness.

The Warriors, a tale of gangs and street violence, was rejected by 27 publishers before it finally appeared. With its carefully crafted parallels with Xenophon's Anabasis, it was more literary than Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), but shared its gritty feel for the city's underclass. In 1979 it was made into a stylish film by Walter Hill. Vincent Canby in the New York Times considered the film "a mish-mash of romantic cliches, moods and visual effects". Yurick, who thought it trashy and sentimentalised, agreed. After the New York premiere, his daughter, Susanna, said: "It's all right, daddy, the kids will love it." And they did. The Warriors became a cult classic, later embraced by hip-hop acts including the Wu-Tang Clan, spoofed in a Nike commercial and adapted as a PlayStation 2 game.

Hill's movie drew upon comic-book characterisation but Yurick, who came out of the proletarian belly of New York, knew better. His parents, Sam and Flo, immigrants from eastern Europe, were communists and trade-union activists. Marx and Lenin, strikes and demonstrations, were regular topics of dinner-table conversation. His earliest political memory was, at the age of 14, the anguish he felt at the Stalin-Hitler pact.

Yurick enlisted in the US army in 1944 and trained as a surgical technician. An extended illness led to a medical discharge in 1945. The GI bill enabled him to attend New York University, where he studied literature. He read James Joyce with intensity and conceived (half-seriously) the Joycean idea of using the Anabasis of Xenophon as a way to tell the story of a gang battling through the city towards their home at Coney Island.

He went to work as a social investigator in the department of welfare in 1954. Life within the welfare bureaucracy led Yurick to conclude that such programmes were designed solely to control the poor. He later wrote an angry essay on welfare which he submitted to Commentary, a leading Jewish magazine with intellectual pretensions. It was repeatedly rejected by the editor, Norman Podhoretz. He had committed the unforgivable sin of writing with too much passion, of violating the canons of civility and detachment. Yurick was sure that the rejection was political.

Sol Yurick wanted to explore the underbelly of New York and felt that writers were ignoring the city's streets Despite the critical success of Elia Kazan's harsh film On the Waterfront and the romantic ethnic ghettos of West Side Story, Yurick felt that writers were ignoring the city's streets. He wanted to bring night-time New York, after the shoppers and the men in grey-flannel suits went home to the suburbs, back to the centre of culture. While working with poor families, he encountered children who were members of street gangs. He found it impossible to talk to them directly about gang life; they would tell him only what they believed he wanted to hear. A rented panel truck gave him a way to observe them secretly. With trepidation, he walked the streets where the gangs ruled, and once went on foot through the subway tunnel between 96th Street and 110th Street. It was a scary experience. He wanted to show that street gangs, universally seen as a symptom of social dysfunctionality, gave to the poor a structure of loyalty and a sense of community. They were neither sick, nor bad, only poor.

Fertig, Yurick's second novel, was a scathing commentary on the American healthcare and legal system. He spent several years doing research for the book in Kings County and Bellevue hospitals in New York, taking mental notes, as he tried to figure out the way a grieving father might take revenge upon the doctors, nurses and administrators whose indifference led to the death of his son. Fertig was made into the film The Confession (1999), featuring Alec Baldwin and Ben Kingsley. Its feelgood ending was false to the spirit of the novel.

From the mid-1960s Yurick became increasingly involved in street protests against the war in Vietnam. As the protests accelerated into free speech confrontations with "liberal" educational establishments such as Columbia University, he worked with Students for a Democratic Society, contributing to the SDS tract Who Runs Columbia? and sharpening their strategy. Yurick's wife, Adrienne, was a close associate of Ted Gold, an SDS leader who was a dominant figure in the radical Weather Underground organisation. Gold was one of three bombmakers killed in an explosion at 18 West 11th Street in 1970. The survivors of the explosion went into hiding. The FBI were all over the cell, and the documentation later released under the Freedom of Information Act (available with redaction on the FBI website) patiently builds a chilling portrait of the city's middle-class terrorists in the 1960s.

Yurick's third novel, The Bag was soaked in the violence-fuelled spirit of that terrible year, with its mix of racism, sex, revolution, police repression and Molotov cocktails. Truman Capote thought it was the worst novel of the year. Two further novels followed, and a collection of short stories, Someone Just Like You (1973), but the rapid disintegration of the student protest movement that decade left Yurick to confront the prospect of being a novelist, and not the mentor of a revolution.

He edited an anthology of previously unpublished Brooklyn writers in 1973, using material submitted in an open (and unpaid) competition organised by the Brooklyn Public Library. He worked with Bertell Ollmann on an alternative socialist boardgame to Monopoly, and began work on a Marxist detective story hopefully aiming to reveal the innocence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were found guilty of espionage in 1951.

Projects came and went, books were announced and never published. Film projects – including a remake of The Warriors, relocated to Los Angeles, by Tony Scott – were abandoned. Several of his books were marked "offsite" in the New York Public Library catalogue. It was a kind of cultural death.

He published Behold Metatron in 1985, collecting complex and verbose essays on the emerging "Metastate". Yurick was an occasional reviewer and signer of public letters protesting against one enormity after another. In 1987 he took a job working in an office in Brooklyn.

A venturesome publisher is needed to reissue Yurick's complete 60s trilogy; like Selby and the New York novelist Daniel Fuchs, he saw American cities with a ferocious clarity.

He is survived by Adrienne, Susanna and a grandson.

• Sol Yurick, novelist, born 18 January 1925; died 5 January 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/07/sol-yurick

[molly bloom]

No more new leaves for Patti Page:

With record sales estimated at more than 100m, which included more than a dozen million-selling singles, Patti Page, who has died aged 85, was one of America's favourite popular singers of the 1950s. She was dubbed "the Singing Rage", and her alto voice was often double tracked, on hits such as Mockin' Bird Hill, (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window and, her signature song, Tennessee Waltz.

Page's first big hit was With My Eyes Wide Open, I'm Dreaming, in 1950. In the same year, she recorded Tennessee Waltz. This had already been a great success in versions by its composer, the country singer Pee Wee King, and others, but Page's recording, again with overdubs of her vocals, outsold them all. This inaugurated the period of her greatest popularity. More country songs were given the Page touch, such as Mockin' Bird Hill and Detour, both bestsellers in 1951, while the 1952 tearjerker I Went to Your Wedding was memorably parodied by the comedy bandleader Spike Jones.

The 1953 novelty (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window, was Page's only British hit, and faced strong competition from several other recordings, including one by Carole Carr, with children's chorus and Rustler the dog, and a version by Lita Roza that reached No 1.

Page also specialised in songs about American places and landscapes, notably Allegheny Moon, which reached No 2 in the charts in 1956, and Old Cape Cod, a No 3 hit the following year. Her final top 10 hit of the decade was Left Right Out of Your Heart in 1958. Among Page's albums were Folk Song Favorites (1951) and Manhattan Tower (1956), a version of a Gordon Jenkins narrative tone poem produced by her musical director Vic Schoen.

By the end of the 50s, the arrival of rock'n'roll had dented the popularity of Page and her contemporaries. She would have only one more big hit single, the film theme Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, in 1965. However, she continued to record and perform occasionally until the 1990s, finding a new audience among country music fans. She received several honours from the music industry and was due to be presented with a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys ceremony in February 2013.

She was born Clara Ann Fowler in rural Oklahoma, the 10th of 11 children of a railway worker and a farm labourer. While still at school, she started work in the art department of a Tulsa radio station. Her vocal skills soon led to her promotion to become the voice of the Patti Page Show, a daily 15-minute programme sponsored by the local Page Milk Company.

The broadcasts attracted the attention of Jack Rael, the manager of a Texas orchestra, the Jimmy Joy band. She joined the band in 1946, taking with her the name Patti Page. With Rael as her personal manager, Page left the band a year later to essay a solo career, beginning with a broadcast at a Chicago radio station, where she was accompanied by a small group led by Benny Goodman.

Almost immediately, Page was signed by Mercury Records, a recently founded Chicago record company, as their "girl singer". Her early recordings were supervised by Mitch Miller, a former orchestral oboist. Her first disc, Confess, featured the then novel multitrack technology, enabling Page to provide her own backing vocals.

Page hosted television shows in the 50s, and was a frequent guest on the programmes of Ed Sullivan, Steve Martin and others. She also appeared in the 1960 film Elmer Gantry.

She was married three times, first to Jack Skiba, then to the choreographer Charles O'Curran and thirdly to a maple-syrup magnate, Jerry Filiciotti. Her first two marriages ended in divorce and Filiciotti died in 2009. She is survived by a son, Danny, and a daughter, Kathleen.

• Patti Page (Clara Ann Fowler), singer, born 8 November 1927; died 1 January 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jan/03/patti-page

[molly bloom]

A voice familiar to Brits of a certain age is stilled:

"When the music stops, Daphne Oxenford will be here to speak to you."

The music was the Berceuse from Fauré's Dolly suite for piano duet; and Daphne Oxenford, who has died aged 93, was the voice of children's stories on Listen With Mother, BBC Radio 4's 1.45pm weekday programme, always preceding Women's Hour, from 1950 to 1971.

When Oxenford spoke, she made the smoothest, most comforting sound in the world: "Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin." For a generation of postwar children in homes without television, that phrase remains stingingly evocative.

She always treasured the quote of the little boy who said: "I like stories on the wireless because the pictures are better." There were other presenters of the programme – Julia Lang, Dorothy Smith and Eileen Browne (who sang the nursery rhymes with George Dixon) – but the euphony of Daphne Oxenford's name, and her mellow, flawless vocal delivery made her the main attraction.

She commuted to London from Manchester to record the programmes on two or three days each week. Otherwise, she raised two daughters while appearing regularly in the theatre and on television – from the second episode of of Coronation Street in 1960, she was in the second episode as Esther Hayes, the helpful spinster at number five who looked after her ailing mother and had a criminal brother.

She stayed in Coronation Street for only a year, though returned for guest appearances in 1971-72. From the 1950s to the 80s she was one of the team of unseen readers on Granada Television's What the Papers Say, in which her gifts as a revue performer were exploited in a wide variety of comic and comically sombre intonations.

Oxenford was born and bred in Barnet, north London, the daughter of Dudley Oxenford, a chartered accountant, and his wife, Marie du Grivel, who wrote historical fiction. She was trained at the Embassy School of Acting (now the Central School of Speech and Drama) in Swiss Cottage. After appearing in small theatre revues, she joined Ensa, entertaining the troops at the end of the war, touring in Britain with Sonnie Hale and then in Germany, where she understudied the clownish, ribald music-hall star Nellie Wallace, 50 years her senior.

Oxenford made her West End debut in Laurier Lister's Tuppence Coloured at the Globe (now the Gielgud) in 1947 with Joyce Grenfell, Elisabeth Welch and Max Adrian. The show ran for a year and was followed by another Lister revue, Oranges and Lemons (1949), at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in which Oxenford and Diana Churchill sang a song about film critics written by Sandy Wilson.

She married David Marshall, a chartered accountant, in 1951, and the couple made their home in Altrincham, near Manchester, where he worked.

On radio in the 1970s, she formed a fruitful partnership with Les Dawson, and was prominent in popular television series for more than years, ranging from The Sweeney and Casualty to Doctor Who, To the Manor Born (1979-81) with Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles and Fresh Fields (1984-86), with Julia McKenzie and Anton Rodgers.

In Manchester, she made occasional appearances with the Library theatre, where a favourite role was gawky Miss Gossage in The Happiest Days of Your Life, played in the film by Grenfell, and the Forum theatre, Wythenshawe. In Michael Elliott's sumptuous revival of TS Eliot's The Family Reunion at the Royal Exchange (and the Roundhouse in London) in 1979, she and Constance Chapman played the two chattering aunts of Edward Fox's tortured, haunted Harry Monchensey.

Oxenford returned to the Royal Exchange, where her second daughter, Sophie Marshall, was casting director for two decades, in 1991 as the far "mumsier", kind-hearted housekeeper of Jeremy Clyde's Sir Colenso Ridgeon in Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma. Her last London appearance was as Pauline Collins's mother in Simon Callow's touching production of Sharman Macdonald's Shades at the Albery (now the Noël Coward) in 1992, but she continued working on radio and television until recently, appearing in Heartbeat in 2005 as a frail centenarian who discovers that she is really only 99.

When David died in 2003 – the couple had moved south to Epping Green in Essex, to be near their elder daughter's family – she settled into the actors' home, Denville Hall, in Northwood, Middlesex. A younger brother, who had emigrated to Canada, predeceased her. She is survived by her daughters, Kate and Sophie, and two grandsons.

• Daphne Margaret du Grivel Oxenford, actor, born 31 October 1919; died 21 December 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/jan/06/daphne-oxenford

[Wezil]

Wrong thread Molly.


As today is the 8th we have passed the deadline for late submissions.

Good luck to all who registered and I'll be back in February for the (hopefully) first update.

[MRT144]

yeah, im not doing it this year as i couldnt get a list together that made any sense.

[embalmer42]

yeah, im not doing it this year as i couldnt get a list together that made any sense.

That didn't stop me.

[Ming]

yeah, im not doing it this year as i couldnt get a list together that made any sense.

You should have just submitted 20 random celebs... you still would probably have done better than I have the last few years