Instituted especially for the 1999 Atwater season, in what we’d naively hoped at the time would be the last word on the whole question of what makes a dead person an actual celebrity, is The Andy. Named for the stricken toddler son of a football player who passed away (the son, not the football player), it specified that a death must be reported AS AN ACTUAL AP OBITUARY in order to qualify for our games. The intent here was to raise a little higher the standard that had been set by The Mack Robinson Revision a year earlier. Lots of deaths, it turns out, make the AP wires (like Andrew’s) — not all of them get obits (he didn’t). A subtle distinction, perhaps, but one we’d hoped would be enough to steer Poolsters away from selections like little Andy. Now, we don’t begrudge those players who did their research the credit they got for nailing the little guy. Heck, no. We say do whatever it takes to win, as long as you stay within the rules. It’s just that we didn’t get any pleasure out of trying to write a snotty little obit for a three-year-old.

What you must understand, if it isn’t already clear to you, is that stiffs.com is not, and was never meant to be, about the glorification of death, per se. Dying sucks, especially when it happens to you or someone you care about. The primary objective of this website is to deflate, poke fun at, or otherwise un-deify those over-paid, over-indulged, over-worshipped people we call celebrities. If you ask us (and nobody ever does, which is another reason for the website), there are far too many people expending way too much energy on a bunch of media-generated, human products they’ve never met, and know very little about. So, while the cameras are focused on these phony idols, we want to take advantage of the good lighting and give ’em both barrels. Death, a subject so powerful the very word jars people, makes good ammunition. It’s definite, it’s final and it attracts attention. It is a tragic cost of the war on fame that while we’re blasting away at the gaudy and glamorous, people like Andy sometimes get caught in the crossfire. We created this rule (and the exceptions that followed it) in an effort to protect such innocents. Clearly, it wasn’t enough. Now, perhaps, The Kim Perrot Renovation will make dying safe for little boys again. We can only hope.