Oh, I liked Rene Auberjonois. 
Oh no Big Bird and Oscar where my favorites when i was little. The loss makes me so sad.
He began training his Big Bird replacement many years ago. Holding one arm straight up in the air to work the head/mouth isn’t easy on the body, and he wasn’t getting any younger, so they started preparing for the transition early and slowly. There was a great documentary on him - his life and that role - that I saw on Amazon a few years ago.
Found it!
It was free with Prime when I saw it, but sadly, isn’t now.
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I was meaning to watch it back when it was free on Prime a few years back, but might have to give it a rent now.
It would be worth a rent. In a couple parts, the childhood memories really come flooding back. When I watched it, I only meant to preview the first few minutes, then queue it for later if it was good, but I got rapt up in it and stayed up later than indented to watch the whole thing.
I was 4 years old when Sesame Street first aired and my mom says I watched the premier episode live.
I was set to watch the Carroll Spinney documentary a few years back figuring it was something I could watch with my then ten-year-old daughter, but she stated that she hated Big Bird and refused to watch it so I found something else to watch.
Roxette singer Marie Fredriksson, 61
After a 17 year battle with brain cancer.
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Crap! I’ve still got a lot of Roxette songs on my favourites list.
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So do I mate… so do I. 
If you saw Hudson Hawk, the part about Tommy “Five-Tone” Messina surviving the car crash came about from Aiello objecting to his character dying. Watching Bruce Willis’ trying to sell the believability of air bags doing that gets more hilarious if you know that.
Unless they bounce back very quickly, we’ll soon be saying goodbye to Fry’s Electronics.
For the past few months, their stores around the country have become more and more barren as they weren’t restocking shelves after items were sold. It’s been looking like what a store does that’s having liquidation sales after declaring bankruptcy, except that with those sales, as enough items are sold, what’s left is consolidated towards the front. What’s left at the Fry’s closet to me is still scattered about the empty shelves throughout the entire store, the cafe is shut down, and I saw only about four employees. You have to walk through this huge, almost completely empty building to see if there’s anything left.
The various websites that have info about this give the same kind of response. The company says it’s not shutting down and employees either say something along the typical lines of it’s all status quo, or they’ll say Fry’s is looking for new vendors. The website looks the same as it always have. One comment a person left is they might be self-liquidating. Another said this is what you see happening when a company is having cash flow problems.
An article on the PocNetwork site from last month provides an explanation: Fry’s is switching from a retail sales model to a consignment model. Instead of buying from the manufacturer and then selling it, the manufacturer ships product but Fry’s doesn’t pay for it until it’s sold. If it doesn’t sell, it can be returned. Walmart and Best Buy do this.
Seeing as how it’s been about four months since the shelves starting getting bare, Fry’s may not have had much luck getting manufacturers to switch to consignments. Unless it’s happened since I stopped in there about a month ago and the customers have rushed back to a full or mostly-full store, the Fry’s are done.
I take it that the Fry’s brand is quite an old brand?
These days it’s a dog-eat-dog situation in business.
If you have a shop that sells common stuff like food/electronics/whatever then you’ll have to bust your ass to keep your business viable and attractive to customers.
Businesses that operate in niche markets don’t have this kind of worry, but they also have to keep on their toes.
They started in 1985. It was a really good place to buy components for building your own computers, home entertainment systems, and other things. You could even get individual parts like resistors and diodes if you were building your circuits and projects.
I think the closure has officially started. They already announced the Palo Alto store would be closed when the lease ended next month. The Wikipedia article says the Duluth, GA store was suddenly closed and it’s gone from the store locator page on the website. Looks like that happened right around the first of the month.
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Interesting. I haven’t been to a Fry’s in months, perhaps a year. When I drive by, though, it seems like there are always a good number of cars in the lot for the time of day.
Last year my friend was redoing the drywall in his house and decided to wire the whole place with CAT6 while the walls were open and asked me to help him. We went down to Fry’s to get everything we needed. I hadn’t been in there for a couple years and when we walked in, it was as you describe, but with the shelves at least stocked. We picked up all our hardware and I remarked about how the place was a shell of its former self.
I swear since the one in Indy opened it’s always looked like a half empty flea market. If it looked as described I’m not sure I’d notice.
Fry’s never really got to the East coast. We took a work trip to one when I was out in Phoenix last year and was disappointed. It looked like an old CompUSA which was the East coast chain filling the same niche, but it never had a rep for selling components or being technically savvy; they also went out of business years ago.
The Fry’s pretty much had the usual consumer shelves of cables and such. Nothing great. A lot of stuff was empty, and that was nearly a year ago.
We used to have CompUSA here, too. Their stores were way smaller than the Fry’s we have here. But our Fry’s carry a whole lot more than just computers and components. Ours have TVs, stereos, cameras, small and large appliances, movies and music, office supplies, gaming systems, security systems… they’re huge. The one closest to me is in an old Builders Square location. I’m pretty sure the one in Webster/Clear Lake (where I bought my plasma TV!) was purpose built.
The view from the overpass…
One local (Maryland) CompUSA became a vet clinic. It was a good-sized CompUSA with garage bays and extra area for classrooms and staging (they offered techs for business project work) and has become a gigantic animal hospital space (multiple specialty clinics).