Yesterday we in Hollywood learned of the death of Joe Barbera. He was 95 and he slipped away peacefully surrounded by his family and friends.

Joe Barbera was one of the best story artists in animation. With Bill Hanna, who died in 2001 at age 90, he made one of the greatest creative teams in film history. I worked for them on Scooby, Yogi's Galaxy Goofups, Superfriends, Godzilla, Jana of the Jungle, Challenge of the Gobots and Young Flintstones.It was a fun atmosphere where it always seemed to be someones birthday and free cake was around, and I once made it into the lunchtime poker game with Nick Nichols, Rick Leon, Bob Gogh, and Mother Mabel Gesner.

Tributes are pouring in from all over the animation world. There are some great anecdotes on Jerry Beck's Cartoon Brew and Mark Evaniers websites. I wrote a long tribute in the Animation Guild 839 blog. Check my links for how to get there.

For here, suffice it to say, from one former Flatbush native to another, ya did good Joe! Thanks for the memories.

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Birthdays:Edith Piaf, Cicely Tyson is 73, Sir Ralph Richardson, Robert Urich, Jennifer Beals is 43, David Susskind, Fritz Reiner, Darryl Hannah, Alyssa Milano, Bronwen Barry, Jake Gyllenhaal is 26

1914- Earl Hurd patented animation 'cels' (celluloids) and backgrounds. Before this cartoonists tried drawing the background settings over and over again hundreds of times or slashed the paper around the character and tried not to have it walk in front of anything. By the late 1990’s, most cels & cel paint had been replaced by digital imaging.

1918- Robert Ripley began his "Believe It Or Not" column in the New York Globe.

1932- BBC Overseas Service Radio broadcasts begin.

1971- Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ premiered based on a novel by Anthony Burgess. In America the film received an X Rating, more for the sex than the violence. Kubrick later cut some naughty scenes to get the rating down to R. The sensation over the film caused so many incidents of urban violence that it was banned in England for three decades.

1974- The first personal computer went on sale. The Altair 8800, named for the planet in the 1955 sci-fi movie classic Forbidden Planet. The computer came in a kit that you had to build and it cost $397. The next year two kids at Harvard named Bill Gates and Paul Allen created a programming language for it called BASIC.

2001- Peter Jackson’s film ‘The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring’ first opened.