Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.
That's the gaelic inscription on Spike Milligan's headstone. It means: "I told you I was ill". On the poet British John Keats's grave are the words: "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water." Singer Dean Martin's epitaph simply says: "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime". There's more at The Epitaph Browser.

Why the links to Amazon.co.uk on this site? Because there's no Amazon store in Australia, and the UK store has an amazing selection of books, CDs, DVDs and other merchandise that can be sent to wherever you are in the world. And, to be honest, if you buy via this site you pay no more but I get a small commission. That's the theory, anyway.

If you've followed the "Theatre" link of the menu of this page, you'll have already discovered my Brisbane Theatre Calendar. While it lists a lot of the major arts performances, it's still incomplete. If you are involved in a theatrical production that's not listed, please submit the information by email. Remember to include all the dates (not just opening and closing night) and booking details.

We Will Rock You may not have been the most successful musical to hit the stage of Brisbane's Lyric Theatre, but the English love it. The West End production of the Queen-Ben Elton joint venture is colosing after four successful years and embarking on an extensive British tour. After that, it's expected to return to London.

According to the Hillbilly Name Generator, my Hillbilly name is Jed West. Or Hunter Walker. Or Slick Houston. Or Henry Lee Hill. Or Clitus Rambler.

I'm not prepared to admit I was wrong last year when (on Radio 4BC) I criticised We Can Be Heroes as cultural cringe comedy, but I do congratulate its creator Chris Lilley for selling the show to the UK.

If you were listening to Spencer Howson's 612ABC breakfast show about 7.25am today, you would have heard the first "Brett's Brisbane" broadcast. Spencer has asked me to join the program every Friday morning to speak about issues raised here on this blog and other Brisbane-related business. Today we spoke about my Celebrity Deaths Archive and the issue of misplaced apostrophes. Spencer has asked listeners to email him examples of apostrophes in the wrong place. Here are my contributions, taken from a packet of cheese and a sign outside a pub in Edward St:

Powderfinger frontman Bernard Fanning's solo single, Wish You Well was tonight place No. 1 on youth radio station Triple J's Hot 100. Program director Richard Kingsmill said: "As soon as he strummed those three chords of Wish You Well at one of his first preview shows for the solo album, I knew the song was going to be a huge hit." Another Brisbane success story ... but what will it mean for the future of the 'Finger?

Bravo to Henry Tefay, the head of production at the State Government's Pacific Film and Television Commission, for his personal views expressed to Mike O'Connor in The Courier-Mail yesterday. Tefay argues that the government funding of films is often "supporting filmmakers rather than supporting audiences". He says: "In other businesses which are making things for their customers, the customer is king. In the film industry, the filmmaker is king." The same logic, of course, can be applied to a lot of arts funding, where individuals are given quite substantial amounts of public money to write books nobody reads or plays nobody sees. As taxpayers, we should be asking whether we are giving money to art for the benefit of all or simply to i

What a difference a moustache makes. 612 ABC's Warren Boland has shaved his off for the first time in several decades. Here's the result.

Perhaps this is the perfect sequel to yesterday's item about Gilbert and George. Frenchman Pierre Pinoncelli, 77, has been fined $A350,000 for attacking and damaging Fountain, a urinal declared a work of art by Dada pioneer Marcel Duchamp. In his defence, Pinoncelli, who has attacked the work twice before, said: "This was a wink at Dadaism. I wanted to pay homage to the Dada spirit."

Back in 1965, satirist Tom Lehrer observed: "It is sobering to think that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead a year." While Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did pass away at 35, he left such an enduring body of work that we're still celebrating a quarter of a millennium later. Mozart would have been 250 this year, and The Guardian has devoted this special report to him.
PS: Tom Lehrer's now 77, and his music is also living on. The Melbourne Theatre Company is presenting Tom Foolery in Sydney and Melbourne in November this year, starring expat Queenslander Gerry Connolly and Rhonda Burchmore.

Gilbert and George are taking the piss aren’t they?
Gilbert and George are taking the piss.
What could be more British than here’s a picture of my bum?
Gilbert and George are taking the piss.
That's a few lines from Billy Bragg's Take Down The Union Jack. If you want to know more about the artists Gilbert and George, the UK Telegraph has an article here (link may require registration). Among other gems, it reveals that they like to question religion (although "we don't bother with the untroublesome ones - Buddhism and Hinduism"); and "after all these years, it still gives them a frisson of excitement to include f-words, turds, semen, their own pallid bodies and other affronts to bourgeois sensibilities" in their art.

I was sad to hear today, via Paul Dellit, of the death of Neville Jones, who was a stalwart of the Brisbane showbiz scene. In recent years, Neville has managed both the Rialto and Tivoli theatres, but his involvement with the stage goes back much further than I can remember. I will post more information when I hear it.
Update (January 26): Neville's funeral will be held tomorrow (Friday) morning at Mt Gravatt.

You can't keep a goood playwright down. Playbill reports that Neil Simon has three new plays ready for the stage, including an adaptation of his own memoir Rewrites, and is working on a sequel to his hit The Sunshine Boys. What the story doesn't say is that Simon, the author of dozens of hit plays and screenplays, is 78.

Among the additions to my Celebrity Deaths Archive over the past week was R&B singer Wilson Pickett, of Mustang Sally fame. The Sunday Mail's rock writer Ritchie Yorke has penned his personal memories of the great man, and they can be read online here.

The 1pm news bulletin never happened on Brisbane's 4BC today. All I heard was the top-of-the-hour pips, the station's new news theme and then nothing. After a few seconds, there was some interrupted audio from a news story, followed by more silence, then part of Gangajang's Sounds of Then and another song before announcer Moyd Kay apologised for technical problems and promised all would be back to normal by 2pm.
PS: The current front page of 4BC's website has a link to "Fidler on the Roof". It's actually a reference to the musical Fiddler on the Roof, but for a minute I thought it might have something to do with Richard Fidler, who works for rival talk station 612ABC.

Copyright is soon to run out on JM Barrie's Peter Pan, meaning the loss of much-needed royalties at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. The solution? Commission a sequel. Written by Geraldine McCaughrean, it willl be called Peter Pan in Scarlet, and it will featured the much-loved characters from the original. The motives may be piure, but is it a matter of tampering with a classic? As the many writers who've tried to write Sherlock Holmes stories since to death of Arthur Conan Doyle have proven, there's nothing quite like the original.

What if Charlie Brown grew up to be the coolest, meanest kid in high school whose sexual conquests included his childhood nemesis Lucy? What if Linus became a stoner who smoked the remains of his security blanket? What if Snoopy got put down for killing Woodstock? All these questions and more are explored in Dog sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, an unofficial Peanuts parody now playing off-Broadway. The official website is here and the New York Times review is here. Sounds like the perfect play for some enterprising Australian company to pick up.

Breaking news (on ABC News Online - where else?): ABC managing director Russell Balding has resigned to take up a job with the Sydney Airports Corporation. Stay tuned for a huge political bunfight over who gets his job.