rachlan wrote: 
Maybe the police should be looking at her as a suspect in both deaths?

 BillnDollarBaby wrote: 
I kinda have no idea who she is but I saw an interview with him and her mother.   seems like they all have some kind of deep dysfunctional connection with being sick and using huge amounts of pharmaceuticals.    her mother will be dead soon too.

And now five months after her death, Brittney Murphy's not-much-older-than-she-was husband is dead, too.  Maybe this belongs in WTF??!!  Weird.

Dr. Fritz Sennheiser, audio pioneer, dies at 98

A true audio innovator known mostly by the general public for the headphones that bear his name, he was also critically influential in many audio engineering areas.

John Shepherd-Barron, Developer of the A.T.M., Dies at 84

By JULIA WERDIGIER, The New York Times

LONDON — John Shepherd-Barron, a Scotsman credited with inventing the automated teller machine in the 1960s, died on Saturday in Scotland. He was 84 and lived in Portmahomack, a Scottish coastal town.

His death, after a short illness, was confirmed by a funeral director, Alasdair Rhind, who said he did not know the cause of death.

Inventors from across the globe were working simultaneously to come up with a working cash dispenser machine in the 1960s. Multiple patents were filed, but Mr. Shepherd-Barron’s machine became generally known as the first cash dispenser when it was installed at a Barclays bank in a suburb north of London in June 1967.

Customers were able to withdraw a maximum of $14 in cash per transaction from their own accounts with a specially impregnated check and a personal identification number. The machines were an immediate success. Today there are more than 1.7 million A.T.M.’s across the world, according to the ATM Industry Association.

In 2005, Mr. Shepherd-Barron was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his services to the banking industry “as the inventor of the automatic cash dispenser.”

Mr. Shepherd-Barron was born June 23, 1925, in India to Scottish parents. He worked for De La Rue Instruments, which prints and provides the paper for many of the world’s currencies, when he had the idea for a cash dispenser. He was unable to cash a check at a local bank branch because he arrived after it had closed for the day. He had to ask his local garage to cash his check instead.

“That night I started thinking that there must be a better way to get cash when I wanted it,” Mr. Shepherd-Barron told the BBC on the 40th anniversary of his invention. “I thought of the chocolate vending machine where money was put in a lot and a bar dispatched. Surely money could be dispensed the same way.”

In an interview in 2007, Mr. Shepherd-Barron predicted that cash would all but disappear within three to five years and that customers would swipe their cellphones at cash registers to pay for things. He is survived by his wife, Caroline; their sons, Nicholas, James and Andrew; and six grandchildren.

Mr. Shepherd-Barron was known for his understatement and sense of humor. Asked whether there were any health risks related to the mildly radioactive coating on the checks he created to get cash from his machines, he said he had “worked out you would have to eat 136,000 such checks for it to have any effect on you.”

Mr. Shepherd-Barron continued with his inventions long after the A.T.M. became a global success. Two years ago, at the age of 82, he invented a machine that imitated the sound of killer whales to scare off seals that were raiding his salmon farm. But Mr. Shepherd-Barron acknowledged that, unlike the cash dispenser, it was not working very well.

Guru Passed Away After Hard Battle With Cancer, R.I.P.

He was a brilliant man and pioneer.  I loved his Jazzmatazz stuff. 

RIP Dixie.

 winter wrote: 

 Hairfarmer wrote: 
I know... She was such a good actress.. I started watching her on "The Edge Of night"  soap opera when I was a teenager and my mom would watch..

 Hairfarmer wrote: 
Now I'm depressed. I had SUCH a crush on her back in her "Designing Women" days. A very talented actress, and by all accounts a very classy lady.

RIP, Dixie.

 buzz wrote: 

With my family history, 69 will be a record.

 Hairfarmer wrote: 
you may think differently during your 69th year.

 lily34 wrote: 
70's not a bad run.

i wonder what happened. she was too young to go. anything i've read is not saying what happened.

 sirdroseph wrote: 


Very sad news.

 sirdroseph wrote: 


Yes, she was :(

 Hairfarmer wrote: 
She was one classy lady. RIP

Dixie Carter

Goodbye Malcolm, and OY! Thanks!

Meinhardt Raabe, Famous Munchkin, Is Dead at 94

By MARGALIT FOX, The New York Times

As coroner, I must aver
I thoroughly examined her.
And she’s not only merely dead,
She’s really most sincerely dead.

Meinhardt Raabe holding the death certificate for the Wicked Witch of the East in “The Wizard of Oz.”

When Meinhardt Raabe, an unknown 23-year-old from Wisconsin, sang those lines in his first and only Hollywood feature film, he little suspected that they would shape the course of his life for the next seven decades.

The lines, of course, belong to the Munchkin coroner in the classic 1939 movie “The Wizard of Oz.” Mr. Raabe’s brief appearance in the film — about 13 seconds of uncredited screen time — made him an internationally recognized pop-cultural figure, if not precisely a household name.

Mr. Raabe, who was also a wartime aviator and the first Little Oscar, the mascot of the Oscar Mayer meat company, died Friday in Orange Park, Fla., at 94. Bob Rigel, president of the Penney Retirement Community in Penney Farms, Fla., where Mr. Raabe had lived since 1986, said that the cause had not been officially determined but that it was presumed to be a heart attack.

At his death, Mr. Raabe was one of a handful of surviving Munchkins from the film.

With his high-collared indigo cloak and curly brimmed hat, Mr. Raabe’s character was known to generations of moviegoers for his official proclamation, sung in warbling tones as he unfurled an outsize death certificate: The Wicked Witch of the East was dead, the victim of blunt force trauma from an errant Kansas farmhouse.

At four feet, Mr. Raabe (pronounced Robby) was among the taller little people, or midgets as they were then known, hired for the film’s Munchkinland scenes. Though more than 100 Munchkins appeared on screen, his role was one of just a few with dialogue — lines he obligingly repeated, month in and month out, for the next 70 years as a motivational speaker before school groups, Rotary Clubs and Oz conventions.

(Full story)