The 2013 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[OneFootInTheGrave]

I'd support as well, we are still early, at least you get 20 players for this season, if last one was missed with Dec 30th hit. Who checks for dead celebs on New Year anyhow?

[Krill]

+1 to whatever Wezil says should happen.

[Uncle Sparky]

Reddit co-founder, 26, kills self in NY weeks before trial on charges he stole online articles

NEW YORK, N.Y. - The family of a Reddit co-founder is blaming prosecutors for his suicide just weeks before he was to go on trial on federal charges that he stole millions of scholarly articles.

Aaron Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment Friday night, his family and authorities said. The 26-year-old had fought to make online content free to the public and as a teenager helped create RSS, a family of Web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for users.

In 2011, he was charged with stealing millions of scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an attempt to make them freely available.

He had pleaded not guilty, and his federal trial was to begin next month. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a fortune in fines.

[molly bloom]

What is a Kardashian?

Space that could be profitably occupied by almost anything else.

Gosh darnit, Jon Finch died late December:

In the 1970s, it seemed a sure bet that the actor Jon Finch, who has died aged 71, would become a durable film star of some magnitude. He had the dark good looks, the voice, the charisma and the opportunities. At the beginning of his film career, he played the title role in Roman Polanski's The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971) and starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972). Around the same time he was offered the chance to replace Sean Connery as James Bond in Live and Let Die (1973). The fact that Finch turned the part down stupefied many commentators.

That Finch never achieved the level of stardom that was anticipated may be attributed to his dislike of the kind of media publicity that goes with it and his self-proclaimed lack of ambition. "I never wanted to be a big star," Finch once said. "I usually do one film a year, so I always have enough money to enjoy myself and keep myself out of the public eye. It's a very pleasant life, not one of great ambition." Actually, leaving aside the great expectations, Finch's career was a reasonably successful one by normal standards.

Finch was born in Caterham, Surrey, the son of a merchant banker. He first started acting at school, later gaining experience in amateur theatre groups. After serving in a parachute regiment during his military service, he joined an SAS reserve regiment. "I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the SAS and I'm still very proud of having been a member," he recalled. "But eventually I had to leave because I was becoming more and more involved in the theatre and the SAS demands most of your weekends and several nights a week."

Finch had started acting professionally with several different repertory companies around the UK before he got a part in Crossroads, the popular daytime soap, during its first run in 1964. Finch then appeared in Z-Cars (1967-68) and in 10 episodes of Counterstrike (1969), a short-lived BBC sci-fi series about an alien (Finch) sent to Earth to save it from extinction.

His film career began in two hammy Hammer horrors, The Vampire Lovers and The Horror of Frankenstein (both 1970). Polanski, who had made his own comic horror movie, The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), thought Finch had the credentials to play Macbeth.

There were those who thought it in bad taste that Polanski made a film of the most blood-soaked of all Shakespeare's plays just two years after his wife, Sharon Tate, had been murdered by the followers of Charles Manson. Finch and Francesca Annis, as the Macbeths, were impressively youthful, tortured and impassioned.

Equally outraged and baffled as a bitter ex-RAF hero down on his luck, Finch subtly avoided the temptation to be sympathetic as "the wrong man" accused of being the "neck-tie strangler" in Frenzy, Hitchcock's first film shot in England for 16 years.

He was quietly authoritative as the cuckolded politician Lord Melbourne in Robert Bolt's Lady Caroline Lamb (1973), in a role that had first been offered to Timothy Dalton, a future James Bond. Around the same time, Finch declined the Bond offer, as well as one from Richard Lester to play Aramis in The Three Musketeers. He preferred real-life derring-do – motor racing and parachuting.

But in 1976, Finch discovered that he had diabetes. A few years later, he remarked: "I am over all the trauma of it now and, apart from motor racing, parachuting and a few other things, I can still do what I want. I have plenty of energy for the parts I play and I just thank God for the discovery of insulin, otherwise I'd be dead."

Although he turned down the part of Doyle (eventually taken by Martin Shaw) in London Weekend's The Professionals (1977), claiming curiously that he "couldn't possibly play a policeman," Finch continued to appear regularly on television and in films. These included Death on the Nile (1978), based on Agatha Christie, in which he played a Marxist who resents the wealth of some of the other suspects. However, he had to drop out when he fell ill on the first day of filming of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and was replaced by John Hurt.

Regarded by Finch as the highlight of his career was his powerful portrayal of Henry Bolingbroke in Richard II (1978), and Henry IV (parts one and two) (1979) in the BBC's Shakespeare History Cycle. He was later a nobly played and spoken Don Pedro in the BBC's Much Ado About Nothing (1984).

In 1980, Finch married the actor Catriona MacColl, with whom he co-starred in a minor Spanish film, Power Game (1983). They divorced in 1987. Finch was seen in various television series throughout the 90s. His last film role was as the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven (2005); in which he finally got to work for Ridley Scott.

Finch is survived by his daughter, Holly.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/13/jon-finch

I'd swap a Kardashian for Finch, any day....

[molly bloom]

Eugene Patterson died this weekend:

Eugene Patterson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and columnist who helped fellow southern whites understand the civil rights movement, eloquently reminding the silent majority of its complicity in racial violence, died Saturday evening at his Florida home. He was 89.

Patterson was surrounded by family and friends when he died of complications from prostate cancer, according to B.J. Phillips, a spokeswoman for the family.

Patterson was editor of the Atlanta Constitution from 1960 to 1968, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for editorial writing and doing a signed column every day for eight years. He wrote about the civil rights movement at a time when many southern newspapers wouldn't aggressively cover it.

Patterson's September 16, 1963, column about the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing that killed four girls, titled A Flower for the Graves, was so moving he was asked by Walter Cronkite to read it on the CBS Evening News.

"A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham," Patterson began the column. "In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.

"Every one of us in the white south holds that small shoe in his hand. … We who go on electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate. … (The bomber) feels right now that he has been a hero. He is only guilty of murder. He thinks he has pleased us. We of the white south who know better are the ones who must take a harsher judgment."

"It was the high point of my life," Patterson said in a June 2006 interview from his home in St Petersburg. "It was the only time I was absolutely sure I was right. They were not telling the truth to people and we tried to change that."
Patterson said he was fortunate to work for a newspaper with "deep pockets" and "enlightened" leadership that encouraged him to use his voice.

"We were rather rare editors in the south at that time," Patterson said of himself and Constitution Publisher Ralph McGill, who both wrote columns. He worked under McGill, himself a Pulitzer winner in 1959, and then succeeded him at the helm of the Constitution four years later.

In the 2004 Discovery Times Channel documentary Someone's Watching, Patterson recalled being asked by the FBI to print damaging information on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"He said we have information from our informant (and that means in FBI lingo, a wiretap) that Dr King is being unfaithful to his wife," Patterson said. "And I said to him: 'We're not a peephole journal. We don't print that kind of stuff.'"

When he was approached a second time, Patterson recalled: "I finally said to him: 'Look, the news story here is not Dr King's life. It's the misuse of the federal police power by the FBI in trying to damage an American citizen.'"

In 1968, Patterson joined the Washington Post and served three years as its managing editor, playing a central role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers. After leaving the Post he spent a year teaching at Duke University.

He became editor of The St Petersburg Times and its Washington publication, Congressional Quarterly, in 1972 and was later chief executive officer of the St Petersburg Times Co. Under his leadership, the Times won two Pulitzer Prizes and became known as one of the top newspapers in the country.

Times owner Nelson Poynter, who died in 1978, chose Patterson to ensure his controlling stock in the newspaper company was used to fund a school for journalists then called the Modern Media Insititute. It is now known as the Poynter Institute, which owns the Tampa Bay Times (formerly The St Petersburg Times).

"A person one person had to be entrusted with fulfilling what Mr Poynter intended," said Roy Peter Clark, the school's first faculty member. "That meant he had to be trusted enough not to sell the newspaper to Knight Ridder or Gannett or take away millions of dollars for personal use. He had to be totally trustworthy, so Mr Poynter chose Mr Patterson."

A champion of high ethical standards for journalists, Patterson insisted the St Petersburg Times play the story prominently on the front page when he was arrested for driving while intoxicated.

In 1981, Patterson refused to join other Pulitzer board members in awarding Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke the prize for her story of a young heroin addict.

Patterson said at the time the story didn't "smell right", and said at best the story was "an aberration", tainted by Cooke's promise not to disclose information that could help save a child's life.

Cooke had to return the Pulitzer two days later after admitting she had fabricated the story.

Patterson retired from the Times and Poynter in 1988.

"There are several generations of journalists who are journalists because of him," said Phillips, who was hired by Patterson in 1967 and worked with him at the Post. "A lot of people looked up to him and imagined themselves trying to be like him. It was a good standard."

A collection of Patterson's Atlanta Constitution columns was published in book form in 2002 as The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil Rights, 1960-1968.

Patterson was born in 1923 in Georgia, the son of a schoolteacher and a bank cashier who later lost his job during the Great Depression. He grew up on a small farm and recalled toiling "behind a plow drawn by two mules across 50 acres of isolation". School, fishing and literature were his only means of escape.

Those experiences in the segregated south would help shape his later world view. Patterson "understood the intense feelings that segregationists had, the great fear they had, that their way of life was about to end," said Hank Klibanoff director of the journalism program at Emory University and co-author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on press coverage of the civil rights movement. "But in the end (he) said that was not reason enough to resist."

Klibanoff said that when black churches were burned in south-western Georgia in 1962, Patterson was "deeply disturbed" and wrote a column tweaking white people who claim to be religious but support segregation. He called on whites to raise money to rebuild the churches, spawning an effort that raised $10,000 and later prompted a visit by King.

"When he sat down to write, that conviction came out. And it came out in just a very, very powerfully written way," Klibanoff said of Patterson, who went on to serve as vice-chairman of the US Civil Rights Commission. Klibanoff, a former managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said he received a note from Patterson recently in response to a letter he'd written him.

Patterson graduated from the University of Georgia in 1943, then served in the Army in Europe. His platoon was in the thick of fighting during the Battle of the Bulge, the final German offensive of World War II. He received a Silver Star for gallantry in action and a Bronze Star with oak leaf cluster for heroic achievement, according to The Tampa Bay Times.

His first reporting job was at the Temple (Texas) Daily Telegram. He later went on to work for United Press in Atlanta, New York and London. It was there that he wrote one of his most famous leads, on a story about Ernest Hemingway being feared dead in an airplane crash in Uganda.

"Ernest Hemingway came out of the jungle today carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin," Patterson wrote.

Even in his last years, Patterson spent time editing and writing. One of his final projects was cutting 600,000 words from the King James Bible. He reasoned that the Bible is full of great stories that are hard to follow.

Clark wrote of that endeavor: "It turns out that even Moses needed an editor."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/13/journalist-eugene-patterson-dies-florida

[molly bloom]

Oshima leaves the empire of the senses and enters the realm of the dead:

In a sense, it is unfortunate that the Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, who has died aged 80, was more infamous than famous, due to one film, In the Realm of the Senses (also known as Ai No Corrida, 1976). Although it was, for many, in the realms of pornography, the film was a serious treatment of the link between the political and the sexual, eroticism and death (previously dealt with in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris), and a breakthrough in the representation of explicit sex in mainstream art cinema. Like Bertolucci, Oshima was held and acquitted on an obscenity charge.

Based on a true cause célèbre, In the Realm of the Senses tells of a married man and a geisha, who retreat from the militarist Japan of 1936 into a world of their own, where they obsessively act out their sexual fantasies. Finally, in the quest for the ultimate orgasm, she strangles and then castrates him. Oshima uses the formula of kabuki theatre and taps the rich erotic literary history of feudal Japan. Although In the Realm of the Senses was his biggest commercial success, it was not his best film, and his reputation declined over the following decades, during which he made only a few films.

Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses was a serious treatment of the link between the political and the sexual, eroticism and death. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive Born in Kyoto, Oshima studied political history at Kyoto University, where he was a student leader involved in leftwing activities, prior to graduating in 1954. He then became a film critic and later editor-in-chief of the film magazine Eiga Hihyo, before learning his craft as an assistant director at the Shochiku Studios. Oshima started directing his first features at the time of the French New Wave and was particularly influenced by Jean-Luc Godard.

His first three films were fairly undistinguished seishun eiga (youth films), which included a few experimental sequences. For example, in Naked Youth (1960) there is a long single-shot sequence in which the young hero slowly munches an apple. The neorealist Night and Fog in Japan (1960) – the title deliberately designed to echo Alain Resnais's documentary on Auschwitz – was a despairing indictment of the disunity of the Japanese left, and what Oshima saw as the betrayal of revolutionary action by the Japanese Communist party. The film, which contains only 43 shots, was withdrawn by the studio three days after its release, which pushed him to working as an independent and to found his own production company, Sozosha, with the actor Akiko Koyama, whom he married in 1960.

The Catch (1961), Oshima's first independent movie, set the tone for much that was to follow in its concern about racism and brutality, whether institutionalised or personal. Filmed in long takes with minimum camera movement, it tells the savage story of an African-American PoW held hostage by a small village. While waiting for the military police to remove their "catch", the villagers make the man a scapegoat for all their own problems, eventually murdering him.

Oshima's next important film was Violence at Noon (1966), a deliberately obscure study of a sex criminal. It is very rarely seen because of a legal dispute over the film's distribution abroad. In contrast to The Catch, it was made in CinemaScope and was frenetically cut (it contains 2,000 shots). The unusual Tales of the Ninja (1967) also featured rapid cutting and was made up entirely of panels from a violent and erotic manga comic book.

Death by Hanging (1968), a startling, angry and blackly humorous film, told of an intelligent young Korean, who is being hanged for the rape and murder of two Japanese girls, but his body refuses to die. It begins like a documentary on the death penalty, becoming more and more unreal as the arguments are pursued in seven Brechtian chapters. The main subject that emerges is the shameful treatment by the Japanese of the Korean minority, a fact of crucial importance to the understanding of the film.

Coming hot on the heels of the student revolt of 1968 was Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, an explosive agit-prop movie equating sexual liberation with revolution, whose impact has cooled only marginally. Using black and white with colour inserts and mixing realistic and theatrical acting and cinéma vérité techniques, it involves a young student who is caught shoplifting in a bookshop by a girl masquerading as an assistant, with whom he goes on to have a sexually unfulfilled affair. After seeking sexual advice, they finally find ecstasy as a street riot breaks out.

Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968) literally restarts halfway through. This could cause some unknowing audience members to start to protest, thinking that the projectionist was accidentally replaying the opening reel. That dated oddity was followed by Boy (1969), one of Oshima's most accessible and "finished" films. Like most of his films, it was taken from a true story – in this case, that of a 10-year-old boy who is trained by his parents to be knocked down by cars so that they can demand money from the frightened drivers before moving on to the next town. It was told with remarkable social and psychological insight, and the performances, the colour and the CinemaScope screen are all handled in a masterly manner.

The Ceremony (1971) was Oshima's most ambitious film to that date: no less than the history of Japan from the end of the second world war to the present day, represented by a large and influential family. Each stage is marked by a specific ceremony such as an anniversary, a wedding or a funeral, exposing Oshima's deeply ambivalent attitude to Japanese society. "Ceremonies are a time when the special characteristics of the Japanese spirit are revealed. It is this spirit that concerns and worries me," Oshima explained.

Empire of Passion (1978), a less sexually explicit companion piece to In the Realm of the Senses, is a ghost story with an amour fou at its centre. In a village in 1895, an old rickshaw man is murdered by his wife and her young lover. Three years later, the old man's ghost appears, reawakening their guilt and leading to the exposure of their crime. Although the film won Oshima the best director award at Cannes, he seemed to have one keen eye on the audience's emotions and another on the box-office. The social conviction and complexity of his earlier films seemed to have evaporated.

Oshima's only English-language film was Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), based on a novel by Laurens van der Post set in a Japanese PoW camp. It attempted to explain that despite the wartime atrocities there were many soldiers with noble and gentle qualities. The main interest lay in the homoerotic relationship between a prisoner (David Bowie) and the commander of the camp (Ryuichi Sakamoto), though the two actors – both pop stars – give stilted performances.

The shade of Luis Buñuel hangs over the French-made Max, Mon Amour (1986), about a British diplomat in Paris, who discovers that his bored wife (Charlotte Rampling) has rented an apartment where she can visit her lover Max, a chimpanzee. This reasonably witty black comedy had little success, and Oshima gave up directing to become a popular talkshow host on Japanese television. He tried for some years to set up Hollywood Zen, his script about Sessue Hayakawa, the Japanese actor who became a Hollywood star in the silent era. In 1999, he made a welcome return to form with Gohatto (Taboo), a highly stylised and oblique samurai film about homosexual passions aroused in the very restricted society for a beautiful young fencer. It was to be his last film, following which he suffered a series of strokes.

He is survived by Koyama, who appeared in several of his films.

• Nagisa Oshima, film director, born 31 March 1932; died 15 January 2013

and Evan Connell bows out:

In 2009, when he was nominated for the Man Booker international prize, Evan S Connell was little known to the general public. Over a career that spanned more than half a century, Connell, who has died aged 88, avoided the spotlight and shunned academia, but he established himself as a writer's writer. His 19 books, which ventured into unpredictable subjects, included short stories, poetry, essays and non-fiction.

He was best known for his debut novel, Mrs Bridge (1959), which with its sequel, Mr Bridge (1969), was made into the Merchant Ivory film Mr and Mrs Bridge (1990), starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Son of the Morning Star (1985), Connell's magnificent study of General Custer's last stand, was described by the writer Larry McMurtry as "one of the few masterpieces to concern itself with the American west".

Connell's work often reflected elements of his own life. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, where his father and grandfather were doctors; he was expected to enter into the family practice, rather than pursue writing. "[My father] was concerned that I would never be able to make a living at this kind of thing – it was a justifiable concern," he said.

He left Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, after two years to join the US navy in 1943, becoming a pilot and falling in love with New Mexico, where he did his flight training. After the second world war, he finished his degree at the University of Kansas, and used the GI bill to study painting and creative writing at Stanford in California, Columbia in New York and San Francisco State University. He lived briefly in Paris, where he began writing stories for the Paris Review, and published his first collection of short stories, The Anatomy Lesson (1957), to glowing reviews.

Mrs Bridge, published two years later, might be seen as one of the best novels in the budding genre of American suburban fiction, also explored by John Updike, Richard Yates, John Cheever and Philip Roth (to whose Goodbye, Columbus Mrs Bridge lost the National Book award).

Connell's novel was set during the Depression, in Kansas City, where India Bridge is married to the stiff, proper lawyer Walter. Written from her point of view, in small vignettes that emphasise the disconnection of her world, the novel is a brilliant portrait of emotional repression in the thrall of respectability. A decade later, Mr Bridge appeared, reflecting the added difficulty of approaching a character far more withdrawn than his wife. The Merchant Ivory film, although stunning in many ways, is hampered by the limitations of trying to portray characters who express almost none of their feelings.

Connell's second novel, The Patriot (1960), drew on his wartime experiences and was less successful. He published a book of poetry and another book of short stories, supporting himself in a series of odd jobs, including as an interviewer in an unemployment office in San Francisco. This was the job he gave the psychologically crumbling protagonist of his dark third novel, The Diary of a Rapist (1966). After Mr Bridge, a second poetry collection and two more novels made little impact, but in 1979 he published A Long Desire, followed two years later by The White Lantern. The theme for these two collections of essays might be considered to be the search for knowledge about subjects, such as ancient civilisations, about which we can never be totally sure. Similarly, Connell's fictional characters never seem to really know themselves or those closest to them.

Major publishers turned down Son of the Morning Star, which was accepted by North Point Press, a small outfit in Berkeley, California, which had a national distribution deal with a larger New York firm. The book became a bestseller and inspired a 1991 TV production which, along with the film Mr and Mrs Bridge, afforded Connell some financial security.

He moved to New Mexico, and continued producing eclectic work, including the novels The Alchymist's Journal (1991) and Deus Lo Volt! (2000), the latter set during the Crusades, and a 2004 biography of Francisco Goya. He continued to turn down teaching jobs, living simply, and hiding his television in a closet, bringing it out only to watch American football matches.

Recognition came in a rush in recent years, including a lifetime achievement award from the Lannan Foundation in 2000. His final book, a collection of stories called Lost in Uttar Pradesh, was published in 2008.

He is survived by his sister, Barbara.

• Evan Shelby Connell, writer, born 17 August 1924; found dead 10 January 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/14/evan-s-connell

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/15/nagisa-oshima

[Uncle Sparky]

Conrad Bain, Diff'rent Strokes, died.

http://www.torontosun.com/2013/01/16...nrad-bain-dies

Diff'rent Strokes star Conrad Bain has died just weeks shy of his 90th birthday.

He passed away in Livermore, California on Monday night.

The actor is best known for playing beloved businessman Phillip Drummond, the adopted father of Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges' young characters on the hit U.S. TV sitcom.

This is a hit for Embalmer42.

[-Jrabbit]

As has "Dear Abby"...

Pauline Phillips, Flinty Adviser to Millions as Dear Abby, Dies at 94

Pauline Phillips, a California housewife who nearly 60 years ago, seeking something more meaningful than mah-jongg, transformed herself into the syndicated columnist Dear Abby — and in so doing became a trusted, tart-tongued adviser to tens of millions — died on Thursday in Minneapolis. She was 94.

Her syndicate, Universal Uclick, announced her death on its Web site. Mrs. Phillips had been ill with Alzheimer’s disease for more than a decade.

[embalmer42]

Conrad Bain, Diff'rent Strokes, died.

http://www.torontosun.com/2013/01/16...nrad-bain-dies



This is a hit for Embalmer42.

Never noticed it; thanks for bringing it to our attention

Almost 90 years old - not a bad number at all . Still, RIP

[Wezil]

"I have a proposition for you".

Robert F. Chew, best known as The Wire‘s Proposition Joe, died Thursday of apparent heart failure in his sleep, The Baltimore Sun reports. He was 52.

Chew was a Baltimore actor and teacher who played the Eastside drug boss throughout the HBO drama’s five-season run.

His acting resume also included roles in NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street and the HBO miniseries The Corner. He most recently appeared in the forthcoming feature film Jamesy Boy.

Wire creator David Simon told the Sun Chew was “an exceptional actor” and “an essential part of the film and theater community in Baltimore.”

He added, “He could have gone to New York or Los Angeles and commanded a lot more work, but he loved the city as his home and chose to remain here working… he was a fine and generous man.”

[Wezil]

I'm winning!

That was brief.


Conrad Bain was 89 and a Unique Pick for embalmer42 (11). Also winner of the First Blood Award making Mr. Drummond a very lucrative choice.

= (171 - 11) + (100 - 89) + 25 + 25

= 221 points.

If I'm not mistaken this will be the first time the embalmer has held a points lead. Congrats sir.

[Wezil]

I move that Guynemer be allowed to remove #7 from his list, moving all of his pick (#8-21) up one. Do I have a seconder?

I'm going to deny this for several reasons.

1) The death report was made too late. The rules call for the report no later than the 2nd of January. I would have extended that to the 7th in this case as there is an obvious oddity in the reporting requirements (to be fixed next year) but the 12th is past even that. A line has to be drawn somewhere or I could be rejigging team lists in June.
2) Extra work on my end. Changing team rosters after I have things finalized is a hassle on my end. I have many charts and tables of data that would need to be adjusted (not to mention thread posts). I do all this work over the New Year and breath a sigh of relief when it is finalized. A Zsa Zsa Gabor hit on December 31st has nightmare potential for me...
3) Selfish reason - I would lose a Unique Pick were Guy's 21st choice moved up now. I lost a Unique Pick (or two) last year with the addition of the late submission rules and don't particularly want to see it happen again this year with another after the fact rule change.

[Wezil]

I think the rules are clear on this, in that I am stuck with lovely Miss Rita, but I appreciate your support.

What Wezil says, goes. And I am okay with whatever his rules say.

Appreciated.


Let's use this as a reminder to all to check your obscure celebs every now and then. Not only should players check for celeb deaths during the year but a specific check should be made early in the new year (before the 7th) to make sure you are still good going forward.

I'm usually pretty good at catching names on our list (I play in a busier pool elsewhere and see the hits there) but I can't catch them all.

[Wezil]

Conrad Bain, Diff'rent Strokes, died.

So Todd Bridges outlives them all? It's a very strange world...

[embalmer42]

That was brief.


Conrad Bain was 89 and a Unique Pick for embalmer42 (11). Also winner of the First Blood Award making Mr. Drummond a very lucrative choice.

= (171 - 11) + (100 - 89) + 25 + 25

= 221 points.

If I'm not mistaken this will be the first time the embalmer has held a points lead. Congrats sir.

Thanks I do believe it is the first time I've held a lead and since I am sure it will not last, I'll enjoy it (within the bounds of good taste, of course).