Dead Pool 2010

Sadly, my best showing in four years of Dead Pool competition was not enough to assure victory. Though matched with a friend from CSU-Long Beach for the most stiffs overall, I lost the tiebreaker, which favors the list with the lowest cumulative age; Swayze and Fawcett were easy enough picks to make, though my friend’s prescient selection of Michael Jackson — a real forehead-smacker with the benefit of hindsight — pretty much assured her of the top slot.

Here’s my 2009 list:

1. Patrick Swayze [14 September, age 57]
2. Vo Nguyen Giap
3. Claude Levi-Strauss [3 November, age 100]
4. Ariel Sharon
5. Eunice Kennedy Shriver [11 August, age 88]
6. Edward Kennedy [25 August, age 77]
7. Miep Gies
8. John Wooden
9. Farrah Fawcett [25 June, age 62]
10. Fidel Castro

And my starting lineup for 2010:

1. David Hasselhoff
2. Seve Ballasteros
3. Robert Byrd
4. Art Linkletter
5. Gloria Stuart
6. Fidel Castro
7. Ariel Sharon
8. John Wooden
9. Ronnie Biggs
10. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi

As always, there were hard choices to be made. I knocked Giap off my list list this year because I’ve determined that he’s simply never going to die. And while I might come to regret the omission of Gies as he she approaches his her 101st birthday in February, the Dead Pool — as with life itself, I suppose — is no place for regrets.