Caskets On Parade
The Contest Philosophy
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The necessity for a page like this became obvious
during the ongoing debates over our inclusion of
death row inmates in scoring consideration.
Current Entrants and potential Contest Entrants have repeatedly tried to
convince the Contest's ruling body, the Audit
Committee, to exclude them. We finally decided to write this little ode
to help explain what our mindset is, and why we won't be excluding any
category of potential stiffs from scoring consideration. When the Contest was originally conceived in the late summer of 1977 several issues needed to be hashed out before issuing a call for Contest participation. The first consideration was whom should be scoreable when they died? The discussion came down to what categories, if any, of the deceased should not be allowed — really old people, really sick people, people with diagnosed terminal illnesses, and death row inmates, to name a few. In every scenario it was determined that not a single potential category was a guarantee that the people in it would die within a year. Some categories might seem to be a little "distasteful," but come on ... it's a Dead Pool Contest. At already starts with a slew of pejoratives dangling from it's neck! Since some categories of potential stiffs do offer higher general likelyhoods of death we decided to establish a large submission list size; a list of ten or fifteen names of geezers or death row inmates could be hard to beat, but a list of forty or fifty would be [1] hard to compile, [2] have lots of dubiously notable names, and [3] have lots of poorly researched non-death row inmates. A large, poorly-selected mortfolio would not be a winner, even if it had a few "sure thing" names on it. Not realizing what a pain to maintain it would become in later years we set the list size at 75 names, a number that has never been changed. Another bone of contention that was avoided — who decides which deaths should be counted and which ones not scored. By putting that task off to "the media" we removed any temptation for favoritism by Contest organizers. If "the media" report the death, they count. Period. We also decided that the game should reward the research & selection of younger and lesser-known individuals. To that end the scoring formula, which had originally been set up as a simple lookup table for the 1978 Contest would be changed to an actual formula that would pro-rate by age (in favor of youth). And, the extra Uniqueness Points were added to reward the selection of lesser-known individuals. With a mix of "sure things" plus the lesser-known "gee, I wish I'd though of him" types the Contest becomes a real horse race. (Almost) Everybody scored on the Pope; only one or two entrants will try to score on the guy that invented the twinkie. You only need to browse through our Book of the Dead database to see how varied the selection history of most scored Kills has been (and the "what might have been" individuals that died without notice). So, the Contest's philosophy could best be described by the definition of the term mortfolio — the diverse collection of multiple categories of individuals who's age, occupation, health history, legal history, chemical usage, erratic proclivities, and other factors; that share the common element of presumed imminent death (within the coming calendar year). Make the whole planetary population fair game, don't pre-exclude anyone, use a non-partisan external validating body ("the media"), and offer plenty of scoring opportunities. So far it has worked well for our regulars. We think it can work well for you, too. And, if you don't agree with us, you are still free to scour our databases for great names to fill your mortfolio & enter any of the other contests on the 'net who's rules philosophies match your own competitive sensibilities.
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