I’m participating in a Celebrity Death Pool at work. Yesterday each of us turned in a list of 50 people who we are betting will die between now and September 30, plus a $10 contribution to the pool. Scoring is as follows:

125 minus the age at death
+ 25 for exclusives (no one else in the competition has them on the list)
+ 10 for accidental/violent death
+ 5 for Republicans/evil

And wouldn’t you know it? Today someone died whom I almost put on my list: Dale Messick, creator of “Brenda Starr,” at 98. (As the organizer said, I’ll almost get points, then.)

My original plan was to use the first 50 names from this chart. But then I figured that people who are already way above the age of average life expectancy must be particularly hardy and would probably be less likely to die in the next six months than people who are closer to that life expectancy. So off from the list went Dale Messick and some others, in place of some slightly younger people. (I also took her off because I hadn’t heard of her. But duh — now that she’s died, I have heard of her.)

Anyway, here’s my complete list. I was also going to include Michael Schiavo, but I forgot.

Brooke Astor
Peter Jennings
Phyllis A. Whitney
Gerald Ford
Oleg Cassini
Lady Bird Johnson
Norman Mailer
Rosa Parks
Art Linkletter
Milton Friedman
Michelangelo Antonioni
Jane Wyman
Ralph Edwards
Kurt Waldheim (evil)
William Westmoreland
Norman Lloyd
Ruth Hussey
John Kenneth Galbraith
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Simon Wiesenthal
Harry Morgan
Herman Wouk
Ernest Gallo
Yitzhak Shamir
Peter Rodino, Jr.
Phil Rizzuto
Eugene McCarthy
Luise Rainer
Robert McNamara (evil)
Walter Cronkite
C. Everett Koop
Daniel Schorr
Olivia de Havilland
Kitty Carlisle Hart
James Doohan
Beverly Cleary
Paul Harvey
Joseph Barbera
Arthur C. Clarke
Mitch Miller
Gian Carlo Menotti
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Ingmar Bergman
Kirk Douglas
Don Pardo
Sherwood Schwartz
Shelby Foote
Karl Malden
Billy Graham
J.D. Salinger

Matt and I have become quite taken with Walter and Perry, characters from Cartoon Network’s TV show, “Home Movies.” Here’s an excerpt from an interview in which creator Brendon Small explains their strangely clingy relationship:

Robot: What’s up with Perry and Walter, who are they, why are they there?

Small: Who are they? What do they actually reflect, sociologically?

Robot: Yeah, who are these two kids who are so funny all the time, who have to be together all the time –

Small: They’re loving, they’re in love. Not necessarly that they’re gay, or in or out of any closet. In a child’s world, if you truly love somebody, it doesn’t matter at all. These two kids, I think would actually die for each other. And I think they’re probably the most happy of any of the other people. These kids are dreadfully honest to each other, which is something you didn’t realize kids are, and adults wish they could be. It’s funny, some people love Walter and Perry, they go crazy for them, but some people fucking hate them, get them off, get onto the next scene as quickly as possible. My dad hates them, he’s absolutely annoyed with them, but my mother loves them. But me and Jon Benjamin do the voices of Walter and Perry and we’ll probably go off for forty minutes in those voices and get the giggles ultimately and not be able to finish.

Best tidbits from the obituary of Prince Rainier of Monaco (widower of Princess Grace), who died today:

The fairyland he was groomed to take over had been in the Grimaldi family since 1297. It became a Grimaldi holding not because of any act of chivalry performed by a remote ancestor and rewarded by a king. Rather, it occurred when Francesco Grimaldi of Genoa, leading a group of men dressed as monks, appeared at the front gate and told the guards they were tired and hungry and needed shelter for the night. The guards, who were also Genoese, felt sorry for the monks and let them in.

But the men in robes, who belonged to no religious order at all, immediately drew their swords and slaughtered their hosts. Grimaldi then became known in Italy and France as Francesco the Spiteful, and the bloody event that made him a prince became part of the Grimaldi family’s coat of arms, which to this day shows two men who look like monks holding swords.

“Francesco the Spiteful.” I like that. I’m going to start calling myself Tin Man the Spiteful.

And:

In 1996 Princess Stephanie, then 32, quickly divorced her husband and former bodyguard, Daniel Ducruet, after celebrity-hunting Italian photographers spotted him hugging a former Miss Bare Breasts of Belgium in a rented villa on the French Riviera.

Hee hee. Those Belgians.