Great singer.

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Wow. I started playing the video a split second before it came on the news.

It's sad that you actually hear "real" news outlets announcing her death and almost in the same breath gossiping about why she was with Ray J. They gotta get the breaking news first.

Whitney fought the demons for quite a while. I really hope that her death wasn't caused by those demons.

No one can touch or even come close to that rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. I get goose pumps everytime I hear it.

The worst thing that ever came into her life was Booby Brown. THAT was her demon.

They were a bad combo, together.

Cp, I hope so, too. I was lucky I won the battle with my demons over 20 years ago.

My initial reaction of outrage was just to post the name Bobby Brown and let it go at that. After some thinking, though...

I had hoped to get here before anybody blamed Bobby Brown, not because I have anything good to say about him, but because it's always just a little more complicated than that.

The horror is that she was attracted to Bobby Brown. That came from some unhealthy need in her. As I remember it being described, she made herself smaller so he could be bigger. She did it. She stayed. It was something in her. If it had not been him, it would have been someone else.

She was a huge talent, but flawed in ways that hurt her so so badly. May any of us attracted to unhealthy people recognize it and heal ourselves!

Amen to that.

The other side of the coin is that both her and Bobby Brown may have avoided that train wreck had they never hooked up. Had either met up with a even slightly better person things could have been very different.

Sometimes its not 1 person or the other but the combination of the two.

A sad note on a very cold and chilly night. A few years ago, I walked into a local popular restaurant on a friday evening. The place was packed with obnoxious teenage girls and their families because a cheerleader competition was going on.

I was by myself so I went and sat at the bar next to this burly African American gentleman, a guy whose stare could probably break you in two. We started chatting and he said he was here for the cheerleader competition in a "security capacity"

He was very vague about who he was here with or what he did, but after talking for 30 minutes, he finally admitted that he worked for Whitney and that her daughter was a cheerleader and here for the competition.

I guess he felt comfortable telling me this after we had been talking a while, he was a real nice guy. It's sad because the CNN report states that she was found by her bodyguard, just wondering if it was him. He had been with Whitney for years, we talked about her pilgrimage to Israel and a few other things.

Sad that addiction is a beast that often gets the better of us.

crack is wack!

I worked as an A/V guy by day in Los Angeles and worked at the Palace in Hollywood and another place (Sachs? Saches?) near Hollywood in the early 80's as a bouncer.

I can tell you some stories about crack. It was sad to see many friends get on it and self destruct. I know from personal experience it is a "dance" you don't want to do. When I left CA and moved back to Sarasota the wave spread there. Different state but same M.O. Friends of mine would try it, get hooked and then their lives went over the cliff. A few weeks later they would stop by my car audio shop and give a variation of the "mom's in the hospital and I just need enough gas money to go see her..." story. Their teeth looked like crap and their eyes were glazed and they needed a bath but it didn't matter. All they wanted was the next score.

So much talent out there and so much of it lost to drug addiction...

I havent seen where it was ruled drug related. May be jumping the gun there. But, still very likely given the history of the demons.

She was photographed extensively at some sort of pre Grammy party on Friday night. Her and her entourage went in to the place and she looked good. Several hours later, she looked pretty F*&ked uo when they all walked out. And who knows how much partying she did after that. But I guess at sometime she went to a hotel in B.H to sleep it off and died at 3:30pm the next day.

At 48, that kind of rock star partying takes its toll, but I'm guessing that she had to much of a mix in her bloodstream and it took her out. But again, that's just a guess.

When I was in the military a fellow airman from my hometown would ride from our base to our hometown with me on weekends. We were stationed about 3 hrs from home. I knew he partied pretty hard and I was no angel. A few months after my discharge I heard he was found dead from suffication in his bunk. His buddes had taken him back to the barracks and laid him on his bed, face down. It's not always an overdose, but situations caused by the drugs that no one foresees. I quit partying hard over 35 years ago.