Someone, that is, in New York, where someone is always doing something peculiar. I dare say that at this very moment, a group of New Yorkers has gathered around a candle-lit table with a dead pig in the center, not to eat it but to pray to it. It is a city open to all faiths — and, certainly, new ideas.

     The problem is that every so often, like the occasional loon from a funny farm, one of New York's new ideas gets out and wanders about the rest of the country. One such new idea was the recent and infortunate one of the Yuppie, which was carried out into the rest of the United States last spring by careless political correspondents departing the New York primary. Mental Health inspectors should have checked their luggage.

     The idea of the Happy New Year death list is one which I suppose is being carried forth into the nation by this column, which occasionally appears in Dallas, Kansas City and other metropolises on the cutting edge of America. I see it as a public service for those with enough sense to move to Canada.

     Though the death list is certainly not my idea. It's that of a group of New Yorkers so trendy they don't even dress alike, and would never be seen in anything so callow as a World War II bombardier's flight jacket, an improbable garment first spuriously sported by New York male models and now all the rage even in Columbus, Ohio. These death list New Yorkers are people who discovered baseball to be a chic, highbrow pastime many seasons before the Yuppies and 20 million soon-to-be-fooled instant Cubs fans did. These New Yorkers are people who early on discovered that the game Trivial Pursuit actually is trivial, and so never bothered with it even when it wasn't yet fashionable.

     But now they're into death, and with a relish. One of their number — a New York friend of mine who dresses like Rudyard Kipling and discovered early on that VCRs would surpass cable television because cassette movies are easier to schedule dinner parties (not to speak of pig worshippings) around — explained it all to me over refreshments in the Oak Bar of the Plaza. The refreshments — your ordinary Bloody Mary — ran about six smackers apiece, but this caused no consternation because he paid for them with the new New York official currency, the American Express card. If American Express should somehow go out of business, you would see hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers begging for food in the boulevards because no one has told them about cash.

     But, back to death. The game is simple, he said. One simply draws up a list of 10 individuals one thinks will kick the bucket during the coming year (something Jeane Dixon never dared do).

     Then one finds someone who has drawn up his or her own death prediction list, and bets large amounts of money (I'm sure they'll accept American Express) on which list will prove the more prescient. The one with the most casualties at the end of the year wins.The only criterion is that the prospective decedents must be important enough to be written about on the New York Times obituary page.

     This qualification is not as restrictive as it might seem. The New York Times often runs the obituaries of archeologists who discovered that ancient civilizations may have used bee pollen to clean cooking pots.

     My friend's list thus far includes no archeologists but does include a couple of aging politicians, a Palm Beach matriarch and an aging in-law of the British Royal Family who has been on such death lists for years and survives. My friend was gnashing churlish about an eccentric Chicago millionaire on his list who unfortunately expired a few days before the New Year began. Worse, he ghoulishly asked me if I had any hot prospects. As my name is not Tony Accardo, I could only shrug.

     I have qualms about all this (as I do about almost everything). This game could spread. Iowa has never shared New York's enthusiasm for Lisa Minnelli, nuclear holocaust hairdos or nouvelle cuisine grasshopper eggs on toast. But Iowa comes into sufficient amounts of death to at least rate notice in the Des Moines Register. What's to stop Lem and Clarence down at the grange from drawing up their lists?

     Also, this could get complicated. My friend talked of establishing a postyear end draft, in which those with lists that performed poorly could have first pick of the most likely to shed the mortal coil in the new year. This smacks of baseball and football, which smacks of big money. What if one has so much riding on his or her list that, if too many have failed to expire by New Year's Eve, one decides to take fate — and a .357 Magnum — in one's own hands?

     Actually, I probably wouldn't mind. As long as the victims were wearing World War II bombardier's flight jackets, or at least were New Yorkers.