2013 Dead Pool List

Who do you think is going to die this year? Keith Richards, Peter O'Toole, Jan Micheal Vincent, William Shatner, Charlie Sheen, Gary Busey, George H W Bush, Dick Cheney, or Miley Cyrus? It's been a while since I made a celebrity Dead Pool but I have this feeling that this year is going to be a real shocker for celebrity deaths. So far this year we have lost a celebrity a day - that's pretty impressive. Of course, most of those who have croaked recently are celebrity athletes so not everyone knows who they are. Or cares.

I think I'm bothered when I see that a celebrity has died and no one really takes notice of it. It's just some minor blurb on a website and the write up about their life barely tells you much other than they had one role (or two) and that they died in relative obscurity. That's so sad to me.


I remember when I heard that the girl from the Poltergeist movies died. I remember it not because she died but because of all the ballyhoo which surrounded her untimely demise. A young girl died? How unheard of! And she was white? What the shit? I remember clearly (I remember almost everything because according to a recent conversation with a friend, I have Asperger's) a conversation with the mother of one of my friends at the time it happened. She was convinced that the little girl died because she appeared in horror films and she wasn't right with God. It's an odd hypothesis but not so uncommon for those Christiany folk. My friend was a sort of psuedo-churchy guy but his parents were full fledged morons. They felt, and probably still do to this day, that all good things that happen in this world are because of God, and that all bad things that happen are because of an absence of God. Doesn't that baffle you? It baffles me. Anyway, this woman felt the little girl died because she mocked God, or something like that.

Then the guy from the TV show, VOYAGERS died. Hexum something. He was killed when a bullet was left in a gun barrel and then he shot off a blank that was in the gun AT HIS head and it killed him. My friend's mom was pretty sure he was Satan's penis. FYI.. I loved that show when I was a kid. They used to finish each Satan soaked episode by saying, "If you want to learn more about history, you can learn more about it at your local library."  Damn it! Hexum should have gone to more church.

So now when celebrities die, I always think of my friend's mother. I can always hear her saying something like, "All those kids in Newtown... and those people watching the movie in Colorado... They all must not have been doing God's work."  I wonder what she must have thought when Mother Theresa died?

So my Dead Pool this year is going to be guided by those who aren't right with God. I'm pretty sure I know where to start. Of course, this means I have to call my friend's mother and see what she thinks. I hope she says Cameron Diaz!

I have great stories about my friend's mom. Years ago I wrote about her famous Dungeon and Dragons Book Burning which became a real good vs. "evil" good. It turns out that the D&D books were all printed on flame-retardant paper and wouldn't burn without some dramatics involved. This woman and a large group of her friends gathered at another one of my friend's house in the middle of the night and demanded that he bring out his D&D books so they could burn them. He complied because he was young and a group of self-righteous adults on your porch in the middle of the night telling you they want to burn books is just too much crazy to fight alone. Best to just let them burn the books before they build a wicker man and... Well.  He brought out all of his books - all twenty of them. And he threw them in a burn barrel and waited for them to light them on fire. Someone in the crowd paused, stood over the burn barrel and started to give a small speech about how evil these books were and how important it was that they be destroyed. My friend just stood there wide-eyed, waiting for the bonfire to begin.

The person finished their speech and lit a match. He threw it on books and nothing happened. They didn't burn. They lit another match. And then another. And after ten minutes, three dozen matches, a few small arguments about how to start a fire properly, and a humorous, yet unsuccessful attempt with a lighter, they decided that Satan's literature would need gasoline. Sort of a napalm baptism of sorts.

If you know anything of the way gasoline ignites it doesn't light softly, it explodes. The books were doused. The match was lit and a bunch of arm hair was singed off.

God's work.

It took over twenty minutes for the gasoline soaked pages to be completely destroyed.

Yes. I am going to call THAT lady and ask her who she thinks is going to die this year. I might even add Billy Graham to the list just to see what she thinks.