I may be asking for trouble poking fun at a website about dying, but the people at DeathList.net are laughing, so why shouldn’t I have a nervous giggle too? I’d encountered an online celebrity-death pool before and thought I’d rediscovered it here, but it turns out there are loads of websites watching famous old people with delicious anticipation. Few if any of them are in it for the money, as in the classic “office death pool” – they’re in it for the macabre mirth.
DeathList has since 1987 been coming up with an annual, updating roster of the most likely bucket-kickers. The current 50 candidates must be at least worthy of mention in the British media to qualify. No more than 25 can be carried over from the previous year’s list. Them’s the rules, now get dying.
In its first year there were just 31 names on the list and only one of them was crossed off at the end, but the judges have been judging more accurately ever since, scoring 14 croaks in 2004. Pope John Paul, boxer Max Schmeling and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal were among last year’s “successes”, but obviously these people were basically really, really old, so what the actual point of the exercise is must be left to the Freudians.
Successes are celebrated with pithily irreverent profiles of the freshly deceased, such as “Pryor Commitment” to mark the passing (finally) of the hilarious but hopelessly self-erasing comedian Richard Pryor on December 11, 2005: “Pryor managed to chalk up some impressive figures during his life, being married seven times to five different women and having seven children. Pryor first appeared on the 1995 DeathList [but] his reappearance for the 2005 list was well rewarded.”
Along with the pope, the pugilist and the purger of Nazis, last year’s Top 10 scorecard lit up when US Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann and Fatima visionary Sister Lucia all went to meet their assorted makers, but dodging the bullet were Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs, age 76, astronomer Patrick Moore, 82, architect Oscar Niemeyer, 98, and philanthropist Brooke Astor, hanging in there stubbornly, almost rudely, at 103.
The DeathList committee and the faithful fans will continue glowering with ghoulish expectation at these and other ancient VIPs, and in the meantime they amuse one another with callous jesting in the website forum and recommendations of online-entertainment sites suitable for making the tick-tock of earthly existence move along a little faster.
At this they’re quite adept. There are also links to demise-related “news”, such as the BBC’s report in February that eBay had yanked a Scottish man’s offer of portions of his late mother’s ashes to people willing to scatter them around the world. Margaret Beaton had always wanted to travel to the US, Australia and New Zealand, said her son Glen, 45, so he was trying to oblige by flogging sachets of her remains for onepence each, with no intention of actually collecting the money. (He was also offering his soul for auction, saying, “I am an atheist so I don’t think I really need it.”)
Then there was the Ananova report about a Dutch entrepreneur offering to inter people five feet under in his backyard for an hour, in what he called “fun burials”, the logical next step in extreme sport now that everyone’s done bungee. Eddy Daams wanted 75 euros to entomb people in a coffin under a three-tonne concrete block. They’d have oxygen, a webcam link so friends could watch, and a panic button in case a whole hour started seeming like about 55 minutes too long.

Well, death looms large everywhere, doesn’t it, so why not cyberdeath? Meanwhile, how do you like these “fantasy coffins”, filed under “way to go”? Displayed at an annual festival in Melbourne, Australia, were a shark casket, a mobile phone and, um, a palm nut. Very exotic. Thankyou.

Everyone back into the pool, then, and specifically Celebrity Death Pool, which calls itself “the Most Notorious Game on the Web”. Alas, this particular romp through the Who’s Who of the Soon To Be Was is, ah, well it’s dead actually. The website apparently had some sort of shock in September 2001 – maybe the sudden spike in non-celebrity snuffings – and now it’s a haunted house!
All it says is “we’ve been re-evaluating the Celebrity Death Pool rules and making some decisions on its future course”, though “the current game will continue”. But I don’t think it did. There’s only names floating eerily around a sea of black. Spooky.

Shake off the shudders and head over to the still-lively doomwatch at Stiffsville, aka Death Central, aka “the Home Of The Celebrity Dead Pool” (since 1996).
There are no fewer than 851 people waiting to pop off in the current “Lee Atwater Invitational Dead Pool”, as they call it (Al D’Amato, Al Davis, Al Franken, Al Goldstein, etc, etc), and players pay $15 to pick 10 of them in the hope that enough names on their list will be culled by next December 31 that they’ll nab the $2,005 first Prize.

Finally, if you’re not famous enough to be on the list and dislike the raucous ribaldry that comes with group ridicule, you can spend time contemplating your own forthcoming departure in the quiet privacy of DeathClock.com.
An anonymous engineer at Macromedia has set up this interactive little beast to allow you to calculate the exact time of your final breath. It’s “the Internet’s friendly reminder that life is slipping away”, he sez, and although there are links to sites offering advice on healthier living (and thus longer lifespans), he does get some heavy stick from visitors.
“Look, i dont know who u r or where u come from,” writes a woman who dislikes capital letters. “hopefully you will give up tryin to fill in for God. If this a person tryin to be God thanx because when God comes back ill be able to live in eternity w/ him! Get your mind right and follow God or its hell for you buddy!”
“I think that your death clock is terrible,” thinks another guest. “Say that someone dies and you say that there going to die in twenty years time there family will get very upset. You are a sick person and a very sad one as well. every time i do my date of birth its always a different date that im going to die. Theres no need for you. get your site off the internet. and im sure other people will agree with me wont you. bye, bye sicko”
The “Death Clock”, as the site’s creator calls himself, wins no new fans by replying, “bye bye wacko!”, but then he is also given to frothy rants (on unrelated subjects) elsewhere on the website.
There is, he acknowledges at the outset, nothing scientific about his mechanism. Although you’re asked whether you’re a pessimist or an optimist – or a sadist (!) – and whether you smoke, basically you enter your age and it subtracts the average lifespan, converting the number of years into a rapidly dwindling number of seconds.
There have been no fresh letters, nor webmaster rants, since spring 2003, so we may be looking at another premature demise here. But the “clock” still works, and I’m pleased to announce that I will be puttering around this planet until … what, no drum roll? … Monday, May 6, 2030. I have something like 760 million seconds left, which I fully intend to stop wasting just as soon as I finish typing this sentence.

Damn, I still haven’t told you about Britney Spears, and it’s Britney, so obviously this isn’t a waste of seconds. Death Clock says “each of the celebrities below have had their birthdays programmed into our system so that you can estimate how long they have left to live”. Unfortunately, Britney’s the sole soul. Keep an eye on her — she’s only got until February 13, 2061 (there’s one Valentine’s Day she won’t see).
There’s another section called “political elections”, but it too sputtered out after George Bush (doomed: September 10, 2014) beat Al Gore (doomed: who cares? Oh, all right, June 5, 2016).