Christmas is just around the corner, which means there’s only one week left to get your entries in for the
2009 Celebrity Dead Pool !
Entries are flooding in already, you can read all the rules here and email me with your nominations at ilikeportello@gmail.com.
Don’t delay!
With just three weeks remaining of 2008, we're on the downhill run for the 2008 Celebrity Dead Pool, which means . . .
It's time to start thinking about who's going to be dropping off the perch in 2009 !
We've had a some surprising celebrity deaths this year, and you can bet your last dog-eared copy of Who magazine that 2009 will be no exception.
The only question is . . . can YOU pick a winner?
Just like the 2008 Celebrity Dead Pool, the game is very simple.
Simply nominate a list of 10 celebrities you believe are not long for this world, and submit them to me before 12am on 1 January 2009.
You can email your nominations to me at ilikeportello@gmail.com.
And that's it! From then on it's just a ghoulish waiting game.
Entry is free and the prize once again will be a double pass to Village Cinema Gold Class.
And finally there are, of course, some rules.
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Scoring
1. The score awarded for a correctly predicted death will be equal to 100 minus Age at Date of Death.
2. A person's "age" will be defined as their Age Last Birthday. This figure is incremented at the instant of 12am on the date of the person's birthday. This means that if a person dies on their birthday, their age is taken as the age they had just become that day.
3. If a person is over the age of 100 at their date of death, the score will be zero.
4. In the event of dispute about a person's precise age, the issue will be investigated by the moderator (me) and a decision made based on the best available evidence. The moderator's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered in to.
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The Rules
1. All nominated persons must be human and must be alive as at 12am on 1 January 2009.
2. If you make a nomination and the person dies before 12am on 1 January 2009, you may substitute another name. You have 1 day's grace, and the substitution must happen before 12am on 2 January 2009.
3. Nominated persons must be famous or infamous in their own right, not (for example) because they're sick, or because they're very old, or because they're hideously and tragically deformed, or because they're about to undergo an extraordinary, ground-breaking and very risky operation.
4. For a death to be valid, it must be reported by at least one major mainstream media outlet. Examples include AP, AAP, Reuters, a major national or metropolitan newspaper or a major national or metropolitan TV network. Your blog doesn't count.
5. The death of a local celebrity will only be valid if their death is reported by a national media outlet, or by a major media outlet in another city.
6. If a nominated person is on death row or known to have a terminal illness at the start of the game, no points will be awarded if they die of the expected cause. Similarly, if a nominated person is being held hostage at the start of the game, no points will be awarded if they are killed by their captors or in a rescue attempt. Points will be awarded only if such a nominated person dies from another unrelated cause.
7. Each nomination list may have at most 10 names.
8. No name may appear on a nomination list more than once. You may, however, submit more than one list.
9. Any attempts to influence the result via homicidal acts will result in immediate disqualification.
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Get your nominations in before 1 January, and good luck!
November was a pretty slow month for celebrity deaths.
On the 4th prolific paperback producer Michael Crichton passed away at the age of 66. His legacies include the science fiction classic Westworld, the story of an amusement park where things go horribly wrong. And science fiction classic Jurassic Park, the story of an amusement park where things go . . . wait a minute.
On the 9th Jayden Federline (aka Britney Baby II) was admitted to hospital suffering a “bad reaction” to “something” he “ingested”. Uh-huh. It turned out he was fine. Sorry, Shannon.
On the 10th legendary mathematician Kiyoshi Itō died of respiratory failure at the age of 93. This guy has a whole branch of calculus named after him which enables analysis of complicated stochastic processes like Brownian motion. This is incredibly useful in financial mathematics, but most importantly it’s one of the main components of Douglas Adams' Infinite Improbability Drive.
The 12th saw the death of Mitch Mitchell, original drummer of The Jimi Hendrix Experience. As a kind of anti-tribute to Spinal Tap and their disposable drummers, he was the last to go.
Finally, on the 29th we farewelled Jørn Utzon, the Danish architect who won an award for Norway the Sydney Opera House. There is no truth to the rumour that his funeral will be delayed because of cost overruns and poor planning.
Well, that’s it for November and the scores remain as they were last month:
Spoon 17 Kate 16
There’s only one month to go for the 2008 competition, and unless something big happens it looks like it might be Spoon’s year.
But it is the silly season, so it’s not over yet.
March is turning out to be a rough month for the nerds.
On the 4th we lost Gary Gygax, a giant of the gaming and fantasy world, and today Arthur C. Clarke, renowned writer, scientist, futurist, humanist and visionary passed away at his home in Sri Lanka.
I'm not going to attempt to offer a detailed obituary for Clarke. Most of it is well known, and anything else I know of his life is just what's on Wikipedia. I don't have much to add to that.
All I do want to say is how much this man's vision and work has touched my life.
As a child I loved his television show Mysterious World. It opened up my curiosity for science. It showed me that asking questions was the way to knowledge, and that even the strangest of phenomena could be studied and understood and explained.
As a teenager I read and loved his novels and short stories. His writing combined the very best of storytelling with his extraordinary visions of the future. These visions were at once optimistic and cautionary. He knew that mankind could achieve great things but also had the potential, if compassion were missing, to wreak havoc on itself and its world.
This compassion was the key to his storytelling genius. In every single one of Clarke's stories, he never lost sight of the need to make it about people. Technology and its impacts were only ever important to the extent that they affected people.
Clarke's philosophies, both scientific and storytelling, were perfectly crystallised in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film's theme of man's evolution, from Neanderthal to star child, is mesmerising and deeply moving. The film shows us that man can reach for the stars, and that great things await him when he gets there.
At the age of 90, I guess Clarke's passing is not totally unexpected.
There will be shock and sadness as the news is announced, but I think this is because people like Clarke just seem like they could live forever.
His work and his name certainly will.
Nerds the world over are mourning the death on Tuesday of E. Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons and the father of the modern role-playing game.
While I was into some role-playing games as a kid, I wasn't hugely into D&D. The fantasy genre always left me a little cold, and D&D was always a bit too Tolkein for my liking.
Some fantasy-buff friends of mine would spend days at a time building D&D characters, creating scenarios and drawing ridiculously detailed maps of mountain paths and dungeons. I'd sit and watch for a while, play the odd game with them, but soon get bored and go read some Asimov or Lovecraft.
Even in the role-playing world it was always the horror and science fiction genres for me, with games like Chill, The Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia.
But still, I appreciate that D&D is where it all began.
Almost from inception, D&D managed to engender moral panic in some of the less imaginative sections of society. I remember hearing a lot about this when I was at school in the early 1980s, with D&D being blamed for everything from the rise in teen suicide to the impending apocalypse.
Of course, this only served to increase its exposure and popularity. Boggle just didn't get that sort of press.
D&D's influence on popular culture in general and gaming in particular cannot be denied. Its notion of immersive and freeform gameplay has influenced a new generation of computer games, with World of Warcraft and Second Life just two of the most obvious examples.
But even this isn't really new. These recent MMORPGs are just the latest in a long line that started way back with text-based adventure games on the very earliest home personal computers. D&D's genesis in the mid-70s coincided with the introduction of the first PCs, and those text-based adventure games were simple attempts to recreate the atmosphere of a D&D round-table.
The tabletop game still exists of course, although its popularity has taken a hit from the ubiquity and quality of the gaming console. But in any high school or university you'll still be able to find, huddled away in some dark corner, a group of nerds quietly rolling their dice and going on their heroic quests.
Gygax really started something special with D&D. It continues to this day and Gygax will be remembered for as long as nerds continue to gather together, fuelled by too much pizza and coke, to lay waste to the armies of orcs and demons in their imaginations.
And when the battles are done, there'll be more than a few mugs of virtual mead raised in Gary's honour tonight.
