Wouldn’t that rule out the Kardashians?
BAZINGA!!!
I wish he would still play. It was good spooky fun to read his list on the first day of the year and know that those people were doomed.
Ok, use a reasonable person standard. If that person is searchable on the internet but the only mentions are in the East Bumfuq Patch, not a celebrity. If they are mentioned multiple times in Entertainment Weekly then they are. I’m sure you could find a dying actor who has one minor IMDB mention but I wouldn’t call that a celebrity.
Would Frank Marth, longtime character actor, be eligible… he just passed away at 91.
http://www.contactmusic.com/story/actor-frank-marth-dies_4022713
You’d know his face, but only a few of us would be able to put a name to the face. He acted in TV for over 40 years. http://www.aveleyman.com/ActorCredit.aspx?ActorID=11195
He was one (of the 100+) names I’d considered, but it’s more fun to include names that everyone knows.
Maybe, but if it weren’t for the Death Pool, I’d have no idea who Michael Schumacher, Sam Simon, Wilko Johnson, Frankie Muniz, and Ryan Buell are - and they’re all in the top 25 most chosen celebs. Or take CAMJAY77’s list:
I know who Valerie Harper and Darren Daulton are, and I know of Katherine Crowe because she was on CAMJAY’s 2013 list. I found out about a few of the others while doing my Death Pool research in December, and the rest (Alby Schultz, Dan Peters, Kate Crawford, Sally Farmiloe, Mario Oriani-Ambrosini, Jay Lake) are in ‘who the hell are they’ territory, at least for me. (Maybe I’m just revealing the extent of my own ignorance with some of these, but what the hey.)
There are two ways to go with a list like this: you can admire it as a product of some topnotch Death Pool research, or you can say it’s mostly composed of local or minor celebs who shouldn’t be on anyone’s list.
I’m in the former camp, myself.
(Actually, there’s a third thing you can say, and I’m just the man to say it: what the hell is Project Sweet Pea, and dammit, you’ve got that godawful Tommy Roe song going through my head, damn you! Make it stop!!!)
If they can’t be a candidate just because they are ill, then knowing about them through someone’s death list doesn’t count either. 
And I’m in the later. I can’t see any way you can define a minor functionary in a small colleges sports department as a celebrity. Sure he has a two line entry on Wikipedia. But I understand that no one wants to get bogged down in the definition of celebrity. It just seems like a really cheap way to get points so I won’t do it myself. I’ve looked at a lot of other death pools and none of the others would allow entries like that.
ETA: I’m glad I didn’t notice the Sweet Pea thing or it might have driven me out of this pool. Hell she’s listed fourth on their own website which I have never heard of. But I’ll stop now.
I don’t see why any sports person is a celebrity.
Boring as hell, watching grown men play a children’s game. 
Here it was Hunter Kelly. Jim Kelly was the quarterback of the Buffalo Bills and he was a legitimate celebrity for picking (despite what carnivorousplant might think). But somebody picked his five-year-old son Hunter who was terminally ill.
I was still running the pool at that point and I decided that picking a terminally ill five year old was going too far even for me. So I changed the rules.
Ironically, Hunter Kelly lived out that year and the person chosen to replace him after I disqualified him was Layne Staley, who died that year.
And I don’t understand why actors are celebrities; they’re just grown people playing make believe. Boring as hell, it is.
Sports are real people doing fake things; movies are fake people doing real things ~ Jon Carroll
If there weren’t something just a little bit fake about all of these celebrities, it would be a lot harder to play them in a Death Pool.
Good point, well taken.
Pardon me?! Why are you surprised that Magic Johnson is still living? The man is incredibly rich and can afford the very finest medicine available. He only has the virus which never developed past that.
At the time, AIDS was a pretty damn scary disease and everyone assumed that anyone who had it (or even just the virus) was going to die, and pretty soon, no matter how much money they had. I’m just glad he made it out of that scary period before the really good medications showed up.
I wonder what his meds and treatments cost on a monthly basis. Must be ridiculously expensive.
Working on an update of the Scorekeeper I made last year (ref/link) This is essentially an Excel file that allows you to type in the age of death of a Celeb, and it automatically scores, updates, and ranks the players.
PM me if you are interested in receiving a copy of the spreadsheet via e-mail, and I will send out a copy once the working version has been checked for bugs and such.
You’re not alone. I think it goes against the spirit of the game to pick “celebrities” who can only be EXTREMELY charitably described as minor local celebrities. For example, people who got extremely sick and started a tiny local charity to host one event, put out a “press release,” and did nothing else. Or people who own a bait shop in a small town, and the small town paper writes a single article noting that they’re closing the shop due to health concerns.
In fact, before the cutoff, I PM’ed Baker with concerns about some specific picks along these lines and am still waiting to hear back.
I know nobody likes Mr. Tattle-tale Snitchy-face, but if rules aren’t enforced, they might as well not exist. And a game without rules is no fun. Except for Calvinball.
I emailed Chief Baker about Kate Crawford in December and she said she was fine to pick.
Do I have a reason to dislike you?