2003-12-08 - 11:58 p.m.
We subscribe to the Celebrity Deathwatch Mailing List because we want up-to-the-minute coverage on the deaths of famous folk. Why, you ask? Because I and a few mates of mine share an extremely tasteless idle ongoing hobby: we run a "Celebrity Dead Pool." There are either five or six participants in the pool, depending on who you ask, and each of us entered the pool with a list of three celebrities we'd chosen. The first among us to have no living celebrities left on his or her list receives $25 from each of the others. (I will not post the most interesting part -- the actual celebrities each of us have chosen -- because even celebrities may sometimes google their own names and I can't think of anything more depressing and quite possibly offensive than discovering that one is included in the "Dead Pool." Only very few celebrities, I think, would be twisted enough to think this kind of interesting and mildly flattering, and none of them are on the list, I assure you. Email me if you simply must know and I might tell the awful secret of Who My Friends Believe Will Die Soon Enough That They're Willing to Stake Twenty-Five Bucks On It in private correspondence.)So, needless to say, we like the moment-to-moment updates. A new mail is sent out for each celebrity who joins the choir invisible, and I tend to glance at the subject-line on each to see if it's one of the pool choices. (Update, incidentally: Gandalf and I are tied at the moment, down to two out of three on both our lists, while the rest of the contestants' lists are as yet unvisited by the hoary scythe-bearing villain. This has been going on for roughly two years -- not a game for the impatient. And, I suppose, not a game for the tasteful either.)
I don't normally have MSN Messenger up in the background while I'm doing other things, but this evening while doing some writing I had it running, and as users of the program know, a small popup invades your screen whenever a new email arrives in your Hotmail inbox. Typing away at somethingorother, I noticed a popup telling me I'd received an email from the Deathwatch list. I clicked on the popup, viewed the message, and then deleted it. Mere minutes later, another popup appeared, announcing another message from the Deathwatch list. My tasteless but slightly-amusing-to-me-alone thoughts at the time? "Sheesh -- they're dropping like flies."
I think one of my fellow Dead-Poolers might have made some kind of deal with Death, while playing chess or something, but didn't provide the names on the lists, so the reaper's cutting a strangely wide swath now, trying to mess with the results.
Anyway, and I swear by all that's holy, while typing the first paragraph above, explaining the rules of this sinister little over-beer game we play, I received a third mailing. My tasteless thoughts then, of course: "well, they say these things come in threes."
Yeah, I know -- it even made me groan, and I thought it...
