Representative John Murtha is dead. The Pennsylvania Democrat, 77, died in an Arlington, Virgina hospital after complications following gall bladder surgery.

The "real Timothy McSweeney" has died.

David Brown, film producer, magazine editor, short story author, and husband of Helen Gurley Brown, died in New York yesterday. He was 93.

Reclusive author J. D. Salinger has died. He was 91. Salinger, creator of Holden Caulfield and the Glass family, was an unofficial spokesman for every alienated or precocious teenager in the English-speaking world.

Howard Zinn, historian and author of A People's History of the United States, has died of a heart attack. He was 87.

Louis Auchincloss, whose austere novels exposed and defined the cloistered world of white coastal privilege in which he was raised, has died following a stroke.

George Leonard, former journalist, author, civil rights activist, fitness buff, and an honorary founder of the countercultural/ new-age mecca Esalen Institute, has died at 86. He generally lived as an uncompromised intellectual hippie superstar, so good for him. [NYT, Esalen]

Glen Bell, who founded Taco Bell in 1962, has died at the age of 86. He's at least the seventh fast food mogul to die at an extraordinarily old age in the past two years. Cause-effect? Deliciously circumstantial!

Sexxxy R&B singer Teddy Pendergrass, who started out singing for the Blue Notes and went on to a successful solo career creating your go-to good lovin' music, died of cancer yesterday at age 59. We know you by now, Teddy.

Holocaust shooter and neo-Nazi weirdo James Von Brunn died in prison. In additional being a killer, he was a known "multiculturalist." Cause of death is unknown, though it may have something to do with getting shot, or being 89. [TPM]

Oral Roberts has finally been killed by God for not raising enough money.

After a flurry of rumors and counter-rumors, it appears that Ken Ober, the former host of MTV's Remote Control, has in fact passed away at age 52.

Claude Levi-Strauss, famed French structural anthropologist who influenced subsequent intellectuals from Foucault to Derrida, has died at the age of 100.

Troy Smith, founder of the Sonic Drive-in chain, died this week at the age of 87. He's at least the sixth fast food mogul to die of extraordinarily old age in the past two years. One cup of grease, please.

Vic Mizzy, author of the Addams Family and Green Acres theme songs, gone at 93.

Billionaire Lazard chairman and New York magazine owner Bruce Wasserstein, who was hospitalized with heart trouble last weekend, has died at the age of 61.

Well, there was an interesting life. Nat Finkelstein, Factory photographer, is dead, at 76.

"Volare" singer Al Martino who played the Don's godson, Johnny Fontane in The Godfather, has died at the age of 82. Friend Jerry Blavat described Martino, who got his start in 1952, as "the last of the show business legends."