I'm gaining on Jackie Robinson!

I didn't know that Linda Lovelace was dead.

For those of you old enough to remember, Linda Lovelace was the star of Deep Throat, unquestionably the most talked-about porn film of the 1970s.

And guess what? She lived exactly 10 days less than I have. How ABOUT that?

Welcome to one of my addictions. It's a web site called Dead-or-Alive-Info.org. This web site can tell you whether almost any famous or once-famous person is alive or dead, and if they're dead, it will tell you when they died and sometimes, how.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It sounds ghoulish, doesn't it? You're thinking I'm some grown-up incarnation of the character Bud Cort played in the film Harold and Maude. Remember that one? Until he meets Ruth Gordon, he's a kid so relentlessly morbid that his hobby is attending funerals.

I encourage you to visit Dead-or-Alive-Info.org. But unless you have a thick skin, don't question the accuracy of anything you read there in anything so froward as an e-mail. The webmeister is a guy named Kent. I have had some dealings with him. "Prickly" would be a charitable way to describe Kent. He usually responds to corrections with snarky replies. He LOVES being right, and if you turn out to be wrong, he'll tell you so in very nasty tones.

That said, I occupy a distinguished position vis-a-vis this web site. Kent has a standing offer for all of his cyber-visitors: if you can catch one famous dead person before Kent does, you'll win a $10 reward.

As far as I know, I'm the only one in the history of this website who has actually won the ten bucks. One day I came across the obituary of Mercedes McCambridge, the great actress, then checked the site and Kent had her listed as alive. I informed him of this, and he sent me the $10.

But this is how prickly the guy can be. In a subsequent e-mail I made reference to having won the prize. He quickly came back with "You didn't win it, you earned it." How prickly can you get?

Kent's website doesn't just list dates of births and deaths. It has other swoopy lists like "People Alive Over 85," "People Who Lived to 100" and "Put 'Em In Order Quizzes." (Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Tsar Alexander I, and so on.)

Not too very long ago Kent added a wrinkle that I find barrels of fun: "Who Have You Outlived?"

Now, this is cool. You poke in your own date of birth, and then the website tells you how many days you've been alive. Then, listed above and below you are the names of famous people who, respectively, lived fewer days than you have, and lived more days than you have. These are the people you have to catch up with.

Another cool twist. You can set "Who Have You Outlived" for high, medium or low, which gets you paired up with "A" List Celebrities, "B" List Celebrities and finally, people like Sonny Tufts and Julius LaRosa, whom nobody remembers anymore.

This morning, for example, learned that I, at age 53, have lived 19,470 days, and I have outlived the following people on the "A" List:

Grace Kelly (171 days)
Judy Garland (2,291 days)
John F. Kennedy (2,492 days)
and...
Elvis Presley (3,909 days)

Now it gets really cool. If I live another 155 days I will have lived as long as Jackie Robinson did. If I make it another 1,369 days I catch up with Humphrey Bogart. And after that I'm breathing down the necks of Richard Burton, Clark Gable and Truman Capote, the last of whom I don't think I'd particularly want to be caught breathing down his neck.

On the B List I have outlived:

Gene Siskel (87 days)
Maurice Gibb (of the Bee Gees) 91 days
Jerry Garcia (104 days)
Lou Costello (115 days)

Those on the B List I still have to catch up with include:

Cleavon Little (32 days)
Jim Henson (122 days)
Vivian Leigh (132 days)
Warren Oates (160 days)
and...
John Denver (174 days)

John Denver (whose real name, by the way, was Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr.) occupies an honored position in my pantheon of famous dead people: he died on my birthday. Denver crashed his plane into the Pacific Ocean on October 12, 1997, the day I turned 42.

Now, on to the nobodies...This will test your knowledge of famous people you never heard of.

I have outlived:

Cornelius Gunter (8 days) (He was a member of the Coasters, and he was murdered.)

The aforementioned Linda Lovelace (10 days -- seems I didn't "choke." Sorry.)

Mohammed Amin (Kenyan journalist, also murdered insofar as he was aboard a jetliner that was deliberately crashed into the ocean) (25 days)

Mary Ford (1950s singer and wife of guitar virtuoso Les Paul) (27 days)

On the C List, there are a cluster of names I'll be catching up with very quickly:

Terence McKenna (drug guru) and Spike Jones (bandleader) (27 days)
Jack Wild (remember him on H.R. Pufnstuf?) (40 days)
Jim "Catfish" Hunter (42 days)
Vic Morrow (47 days)

Baseball fan that I am, you'll have to forgive me for being thrilled. This is as close as I'm ever going to come to matching records set by the likes of Jackie Robinson and Catfish Hunter.

Hey, I take my achievements where I can get them. Is it my fault I'm healthy?

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to dig up (get it? "dig up?") the Washington Post obituary page and see if I can cadge another 10 bucks out of Kent.