Formaldehyde Press
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People die every day, and according to death experts Gelfand and Wikinson, at a rate of more than a hundred per second.
Nobody loses much sleep over it, unless you happen to personally know the deceased. Unless the dead person in question is a celebrity - then people all over the world unite and mourn as one. Headlines lament (or trumpet - sometimes it's hard to tell which) the passing of the elite. Everybody sheds a tear over a Princess Diana or a Frank Sinatra.
Everybody except the dead poolers.
If Di or Old Blue Eyes himself is on a pooler's list, a cheer is more likely to be sounded than a keen.
An underground craze for many years, dead pools are finally coming into their own as a pop culture pastime thanks to the Internet and a spiffy new handbook written by a couple of death prognostication experts.
"Dead Pool: Stretch & Wilk's Official Annual Guide 1999 Edition" offers up guidelines for dead pools, hot tips on who in the public eye is most likely to expire and a host of dead pool anecdotes - yes, dead pools can bring families together and tear friendships apart, all over a famous corpse.
Like your typical NCAA basketball betting pool where you pick certain teams from the pool of 64, a dead pool involves choosing wisely.
Obviously, there's a much larger element of chance at work in a dead pool: Who can reliably predict when a stray blank will fell an up and coming actor (Brandon Lee) or a politician will ski into a tree (Sonny Bono)? That's what dead pools are all about: Morbid fate.
Dead pools usually utilize a system much like a yearly sports draft, in which on a particular day, pool members draft various personalities from the limelight and hope that they end up in quicklime.
Noticeably ailing celebs such as Bob Hope or aging hipsters such as Strom Thurmond tend to go in the first round, while long shots such as Dom DeLuise (as the guide says, "one word: fat") can go deep in the tenth round.
Impending death indicators such as rehab stints or a penchant for motorcycles can land an otherwise outwardly healthy guy such as Gerard Depardieu much higher in the draft than he would have gone before his Harley wipeout last year.
The 1999 guide, written by Mike "Stretch" Gelfand and Mike Wilkinson, is a slim text written in a personal, easy-to-read style. There's no great prose here, but there are plenty of great stories.
It does get bogged down from time to time in dead pool jargon, rules and semantics, but as Stretch and Wilk attest, it's all there to you and your friends run your own dead pools fatally smooth. The two authors prove themselves as masters of the morbid, reeling off negative facts about the rich and famous in grand style, even if they do happen to be hoping for a grand mal seizure.
Picking dead people requires a lot of forethought and knowledge, almost as much as a life insurance agent. Health habits, marital situation, drug additions, vices, lifestyle (Ol' Dirty Bastard, as a rapper with connections to gangland and the whole East-West rivalry, is so high-risk that he makes Stretch's "drop dead" top ten picks) all factor in to the likelihood of a pick kicking the bucket during the dead pool.
"Dead Pool" is, at the very least a fun, quick read. At most, it will make somebody relatively wealthy and his friends relatively poor when the astute reader puts the teachings of the guide to work picking his dream team of grim reaper fodder.
Stretch and Wilk are also running a national dead pool at their Website, www.deadpoolguide.com. The site contains news flashes about the ailing famesters - alert! Cal Ripken Sr. diagnosed with lung cancer!
Play devil's advocate for a day and pick a winner.
- Erin Podolsky
11-30-98
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