[johnfowles]

I understand that Whitney Houston died the other day.
Over the weekend before last we found ourselves surrounded by the funeral because the memorial service on Saturday was televised from Newark and the burial on Sunday was in Westfield both locations being within about a 6 mile radius of our house
Yes we watched the full 4 hours of the funeral.For me the highlight if there can be such a thing on such an occasion was Kevin Costner's emotional speach.
If you did not see it here it is (highly recommended watching)

I was doing some related reading on wikipedia and somehow found myself on:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Lightfoot
where I read something that I had long forgotten about:-
"In April 1987, Lightfoot filed a lawsuit against composer Michael Masser, claiming that Masser's melody for the song "The Greatest Love of All"—recorded by George Benson(1977) and Whitney Houston (1985)—stole 24 bars from Lightfoot's 1971 hit song "If You Could Read My Mind." The transitional section that begins "I decided long ago never to walk in anyone's shadow" of the Masser song has the same melody as "I don't know where we went wrong but the feeling's gone, and I just can't get it back" of Lightfoot's song. Lightfoot later stated that he did not want people thinking that he had stolen his melody from Masser."
the story is in fact repeated on corfid at:-
http://www.corfid.com/gl/biography.htm
the relevant section starts at about 1:15 in this youtube video

The biggest surprise I had over this period was the revelation at the Grammy's that Jennifer Hudson when not believing (as in her current television commercial) that she can watch her weight can really sing rather well. Her tribute to Whitney through a rendition of I Will Always love You showed that she is far more than a failed American Idol as I had previously thought.
there is also a nice video of her Grammy's performance on youtube