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Each participant gets one wild card per year worth five points no matter how old the deceased. Gamesters generally pick one-pointers for their wild card to get four extra points. Last year, most picked Bob Hope. When he died, one Gamester said, “My father was shot during World War Il. While recuperating in England, Mr. Hope came up to his bedside and stuffed a half-dozen golf balls into his [own] mouth. It cheered my old man up.” Deaths become official when mentioned in the New York Times or any two major newspapers. One player “is extremely frustrated,” | was told. “He has Idi Amin, who is on life support in a Saudi hospital. Now there have been death threats, and armed guards have been posted.” Since the listees are all on various rungs on the ladder of celebrityhood, The Game is understandably rife with abstraction. “After all, the dead pool has probably been around since the phenomenon of fame itself,” write Gelfand and Wilkinson in the book Dead Pool. “\t has certainly been around as long as gallows humor has. In the heyday of hard-boiled journalism (the Front Page days of the 1930s), reporters who covered a country ravaged by organized crime and engaged in a world war found respite in the dark humor of the dead pool. Even HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015275