We can always start another Death Pool, with the single rule, “Pick no Dopers”. I’m pretty sure the mods would jump on us otherwise.
“Who Will Croak This Year?”
I’m thinking very Loach-like at the moment, myself. After reading the last half-a-dozen or so entries in the game thread, I had to spend the next 20 minutes surfing Wikipedia and, when that failed, Google to figure out precisely who Yo-sam Choi and Gary Betty were.
I usually approach my list as a lark – wouldn’t it be an amazing story if Michael Jackson went down in flames, holed up in Neverland holding a chimp hostage, or wouldn’t it just be *the *headline if Paris Hilton bit the dust. Sure I picked Swayze this year, but fuck, man – he’s been a movie star for the past 30 years.
The fact that my entire list (outside of Swayze and Jackson) consist of people who share the same birth date as me pretty much shows I’m not going for points, but for entertainment value. And when it comes to a discussion of the rules to prevent people from “winning” based on the loosest definition of fame and some medical reports … it starts to become not entertaining anymore.
I know, I know. If I don’t like it, don’t play. I’ll probably still play, but only because I want to force **amarone **to tally my potential points for me.
The rules discussion is in a separate thread precisely so you can totally ignore it if you wish. Then come next year there may or may not be rule changes that seem very unlikely to affect the way you pick your candidates. They would probably increase your chance of winning.
I don’t mean to be snarky, but if the rules discussion is not fun, then don’t take part in the rules discussion. The game will still be there.
Eh?
Relax. Just - adding a little 2-cents and goofing around a bit.
I think you’re doing a yeoman’s job.
Sorry to hear that. My condolences to your family.
Coming into this thread, my idea was ‘divide the number of points for the celeb’s age by the number of people who picked him/her’ as this would encourage more research and less bandwagoning. Reading through the discussion, though, this seems to run exactly opposite most posters’ opinions, as it would likely entail more obscure names and debatable degrees of celebrity. It would also probably make a lot more work for amarone.
Of course, there’s self-interest at work here, since I believe all but three of my picks this year are uniques.
Personally, I have no problem with the rules as they stand now, or with Rach Qoch’s picks for this year.
All but four. You are probably thinking of Robert Muller, but one other person had him. Me.
The problem with this type of idea is that it punishs somebody who picks a unique person and then has a dozen other people follow his example. My proposal for giving the first person to pick somebody an extra point rewards people for pioneering.
In a way I suppose there’s no real need to reward people for unique picks - it already has an inherent reward. Let’s say, for example, that I had Denis Leary on my list (I don’t think anyone actually picked him) and he dies tomorrow. My “reward” for picking him is that I get 49 points that nobody else on the board gets.
Exactly. Part of the game is deciding between going for “easy” picks that are more likely to score, but are also more likely to spread the points around a large pool of people, or whether to go for riskier picks that will give you and you alone points if they score. Although of course there’s no such thing as a truly “easy” pick, as I’m sure anyone who’s had Ariel Sharon on their list for the last couple of years could tell you.
How do you feel about Captain Lance Murdoch’s 79-point pick?
I wonder how many people, even in Canada, knew who that guy was before he got hurt. I don’t mean to pick on Lance – it’s not like he’s the first one to make a play like that – but come on, is that really a celebrity? What if I heard that some kind of grave accident had befallen, for example, a successful real estate developer well known in my state but not outside of it – would that also be an acceptable pick?
Ah, yes. I’d blocked that out. Layne Staley dies, and yet Scott Weiland is still around.
I applaud the Captain on good research. Quasi-celebrity, but within the rules. I am only mad I didn’t find that one myself.
And I have no problem with it, and I am not one to do any research for the pool. I just keep using the same list, over and over and over…
So let’s talk about this. As you see it, what put that guy into the quasi-celebrity category?
It pisses me off a great deal, but only because I’d been looking at the same guy and decided not to pick him.
Totally legit under current rules, of course, but if we decided we want to tighten up in the definition of celebrity, including omitting people only known for their illness, I would rule against him. I think he was only known because of being in a coma as a result of the fight. While I confess I did not look at every page, when I Googled his name and looked at about 8 pages of links, they were all about his death - I could not find any that reported on him before the fight. Nor does he have a Wikipedia page.
As far as I can tell his death was not reported on CNN (including SI) nor on the BBC.
So I would rule him out.
With respect to using the yardstick that a person’s death must be reported by a major news service, I looked at the 16 most recent deaths from the 2008 list. Six were not on either CNN or the BBC. Of those, four were reported by clearly major news outlets (e.g. NY Times).
Sherrill Headrick was only reported by local news channels, and the KC Chiefs own web site, if that counts as major, although he did have a proper Wikipedia entry (i.e. not a stub) and was an AFL All-star, so to me he feels like a valid celebrity.
I couldn’t find anything major reporting Vice Vukov, although when you read up on him he was clearly a celebrity in Yugoslavia/Croatia.
So if we are to impose any restrictions, we can set guidelines but we may want to allow an element of judgment.
You know, I really don’t have a problem with people naming local celebrities. Just because they’re only famous in a particular locality doesn’t mean they’re not celebrities. Frex, we just had a local sportscaster, Jimmy Crum die recently. Probably not reported in the NY Times, BBC, or CNN, but definitely a household name in the central Ohio area. I personally do not have a problem with people like this being named. With the Internet, there’s no reason that anyone who wanted to do a bit of research couldn’t turn people like this up. (Crum wasn’t sick, btw; he was just old.)
Plays a public sport for which he gets paid, trying to break into the professional leagues. No different than a mayor of a small town to me.
It is an amateur league. Does that affect your opinion?