753 celebrity death prognosticators could be wrong!
In what is sort of a Pazz & Jop for deathlisters, Stiffs.com has tallied up its most popular deathlist names for 2009. Unsurprisingly, the Kennedy-Swayze double whammy is the landslide pack-leader. Neither made my 09 list, because it’s too easy and obvious, and I frankly don’t expect both to drop this year. Maybe one of the two—probably Swayze, given recent events. If I recall correctly (Stiffs unfortunately does not archive these lists), the number one name on this list hasn’t actually died since Pope John Paul II in 2005. Hell, nobody in the 2008 Top Ten died last year, and only two of the 2009 Top Ten (and three of the Top 30) made my 2009 list. Here’s how the names on my 2009 Top Shelf list stack up against the 753 Stiffs ballots (list ranking in parentheses, followed by total ballots).
Burying another Hager…and the rag deep in your face
The TV Land Awards strike again!
I have viewed many episodes of Hee Haw in my 25 years, and I still can’t recall all that much about the Hager Twins. I know they were there, but on a stage with Junior Samples and Grandpa Jones and Buck Owens, there was nothing distinctive about them. Certainly nothing as distinctive as the fact that they died within a year of each other, which is now the case. It was announced today that Jon Hager was found dead, less than a year after his twin brother and performing partner Jim met a similar fate. For men who were only in their mid-sixties, this is an eerily close proximity. Jim Hager died of a heart attack, and Jon had reportedly been in failing health for years, failing health that his brother’s death couldn’t have helped. I can’t think of any famous twins, or even famous siblings, who died, completely separately (i.e. not in the same accident or something), within a matter of months. Even the Delany Sisters died four years apart, and they were both over 100!
The Mike Peters principle
Browsing Yahoo!’s Obituaries in the News page yesterday morning, I got all tingly with excitement, as I thought, on January 6, I had scored my deathlist kill of the year, albeit a bottom-shelver. Mike Peters had died. But alas, it was this guy, not the dude from The Alarm. I’m sure he’s huge in Connecticut, but this is why I specify who’s who in my annual deathlist entry. This Mike Peters was only a year older than the still-living Mike Peters who sang “Sixty-Eight Guns.” And in the grand tradition of Ron Carey and Robert Palmer (perhaps Michael Jackson), perhaps there’s more Mike Peters death news slated for 2009.
The deadly heather on the hill
Not much going on in the death game right now, aside from a four-time Commissioner Gordon, the Charlie Rose debacle, some forgotten attorney general, and another scientology casualty. So I’ll go ahead and note a shamefully overlooked (on this blog, at least) 2008 death trend, which in the New Year’s Eve/deathlist haze, completely slipped my radar. Namely, that the second and third-billed stars of the 1954 movie musical Brigadoon (an overrated and highly uneven film, to these eyes, with little value even as kitsch) both met their end last year: Van Johnson and Cyd Charisse.
