Dead or Canadian?
The apex of MTV’s pre-Real World foray into game shows, in your correspondent’s humble opinion, was the frisky Remote Control; and the best category, “Dead or Canadian?” a blissfully simple premise: contestants earned points by correctly responding to a name offered by the emcee, “dead” (if person named had passed away) or “Canadian” (if said person hails from north of the 49th parallel). For example: “Alan Young– Dead? or Canadian?”
Now, thanks to the folks at “Who’s Alive and Who’s Dead,” readers can play at home… all else one needs is an open connection to Wikipedia for a birthplace triangulation…
As we memento mori, we might use the pistols we drew yesterday in Annie Oakley’s honor to fire a birthday salute to John Henry “Doc” Holliday, the dentist, gambler, and gunfighter who is best remembered for his friendship with Wyatt Earp and his role in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and who was born this date in 1851 in Griffin, Georgia. Holliday’s story is a genuinely fascinating one, and sad. In an 1896 article, Wyatt Earp summed it up thusly: “Doc was a dentist whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long lean ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption, and at the same time the most skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a gun that I ever knew.”
