First deathlist score of the year…
…goes to Dan Seals, number ten on the top shelf! Lower than I’d have hoped, but as I’d been batting zero all year, I’m not complaining (and still the inevitable one-up over Gavin). It’s about fucking time. This is the longest I’ve gone without a kill since 2002, for Christ’s sake! So thank you, England Dan! I will now appreciate that nights-are-forever song or the not-talking-about-the-linens song with eager, elated ears next time I take my mother to the rheumatologist. Or not!
One Foote in the Grave
I’ve got some Idol to watch and some Rilo Kiley to listen to, so I’ll be brief. While Ed McMahon rots his way to his 86th birthday, the dormant death game is livening up, thanks to Paul Harvey and, today, playwright/screenwriter Horton Foote, the man who adapted Harper Lee’s legendary novel into a legendary film (arguably the greatest film adaptation of a great American novel). Foote was 92 and not on my deathlist, so his death would not be particularly interesting, except for its arrival on the heels of To Kill a Mockingbird director Robert Mulligan, whose death went grossly underreported back in December. Could a Harper Lee death later this year secure a novelist-screenwriter-director trifecta? I guess we’ll never really know until we climb inside her orthopedic shoes and walk around in them.
Hey, while I’m on the death game topic, I would like to point out that we’re into March now, and not one of my thirty 2009 deathlist hopefuls has died. This is the first time since 2002 that I didn’t score at least one kill in the first two months of the year: I got Nedra Volz in 2003, Jack Paar in 2004, Philip Johnson in 2005, Lou Rawls in 2006, Art Buchwald in 2007, and Earl Butz in 2008. Anybody who knows me (and pity those who don’t if they’re reading this entry) knows that the success and prosperity of my deathlist (and celebrity death in general) is inextricably linked to my personal success and prosperity. And since, from a personal contentment standpoint, 2009 is looking to be my worst year since 2006, so may I be sitting on my worst deathlist since 2006’s shameful two-name showing (Rawls and P.W. Botha, if you’re curious). I took some risks on this year’s deathlist (like omitting Swayze and Kennedy) and, like the risks I’ve taken in the somewhat more mature facets of life, I doubt they’ll pay off. (And I’ll note right here that I did initially list Ed McMahon, but in a fit of impulsivity, bumped him for Merle Haggard. Fuck.)
Course, this could be a quirk of the death game itself. Of the Top 50 names on 2009 Stiffs.com ballots, only one (former Attorney General Griffin Bell) has thus far bitten the dust. Expand that to the top 100, and you’re still only at three, adding Ricardo Montalban and Paul Harvey. In short, January and February have produced few major celebrity deaths, and even fewer predictable ones.
Hopefully, this weekend, I’ll get to what the hell happened to my 2008 wrap-up (here’s a hint: it won’t materialize in any notable fashion), if I’m not blogging about the aforementioned McMahon error or the first all-white Top 12 in American Idol history (which is looking increasingly possible).
