A Sign I Perhaps Have No Soul

Last night coworkers and I had our yearly exercise in morbidity. We had our 2006 Dead Pool Draft. If for some reason you don’t know what a Dead Pool is, let me briefly explain. Basically you pick famous people you believe are going to die during the year of 2006. Whoever gets the most right wins the cash. Like I said it’s morbid. Though really what else would you expect from people that have to come up with creative ways for people to die every week?

Last year I came in second place with the whopping total of 3 out of 10 correct answers. Brian D. won with 4, and has been proclaiming himself the “Lord of Death” for the past three months. I plan to make that stop this year. In our format nobody can have the same person twice, which made this year somewhat difficult because we have 13 people playing this year. But, it’s also a keeper league so people who were on you list last year and didn’t die you can swap over to the next year without them going into the draft pool.

I’ll be honest and say that my keepers are so strong I kind of slacked off in the draft. My keepers were:

Brooke Astor

Mitch Miller

Lady Bird Johnson

Dolores Hope

Billy Graham

That’s a pretty solid list, especially the women. So, I didn’t really prepare that much. I picked out a few solid picks and the rest were all not so familiar names along the lines of Brooke Astor. So the rest of my list played out with:

Estelle Getty

Claude Levi-Strauss

Peter O’Toole

Judge Wapner

Sean Connery

Not bad. Estelle and Claude are solid. Connery’s a complete gamble. But really what was the last movie he was in? My major problem with the draft is that nobody knew Billy Preston. Sunil did, and Steve confused him with Billy Ocean. But you need at least half of the group to know the person for them to make the list. Anyway, that was one of the locks I was counting on. Billy Preston! The fifth Beatle! He wrote “Outta Space,” “Nothing From Nothing,” and “You are so Beautiful.” That through off the rest of the draft for me. He’s on dialysis too. Man, we are really building up some bad karma with this.