So long Bea.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Beatrice Arthur, the tall, deep-voiced actress whose razor-sharp delivery of comedy lines made her a TV star in the hit shows "Maude" and "The Golden Girls" and who won a Tony Award for the musical "Mame," died Saturday. She was 86.

Here she is playing Cher to Estelle Getty's Sonny. She was one funny broad.

Right on Brother Young!

Neil Young Pulls Show In Support Of Strikers:

After his annual Bridge School Benefit Concert over the weekend outside San Francisco, Young was advised that the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) union, Local 33, planned to picket his show at the Forum. Striking workers at the indoor arena are engaged in a contract dispute with the venue's owner, Faithful Central Bible Church.

Young elected to cancel the performance rather than cross what IATSE told his representatives would be a picket line at his show. Young and his wife are honorary lifetime members of the IATSE.

Via

Drink, Feck, Girls!, Arse!

If you can make sense of the title of this post you probably watched Father Ted, an old British sitcom. It ran for only three seasons before Dermot Morgan, who played Father Ted, died of a massive heart attack. It was juvenile and irreverent and I loved it. It's back in the news.

Two islands off the Irish coast are at loggerheads, competing for a dubious prize - the right to compare themselves to Craggy Island; a bleak spot which is the TV home to three wayward priests and a sizeable Chinese community, and surrounded by a sea awash with nuclear waste.The feud has broken out between two of the Aran Islands, off County Galway, over who has the better claim to be the setting for the enormously popular Channel 4 comedy.

Shades of Black

Jennifer Wells on Shades of Black, airing tonight at 8 on CTV. It appears to capture Black's full-blown preposterousness and might be good for a laugh if nothing else is on.

The scene: Black is speaking to his secretary, Shirley, attempting to ask after her well-being, or possibly ask her out on a date.
Says Black: "I just didn't want you to think that I was insensate to your gallant ministrations here."
Poor Shirley. She is gifted a lesson on Napoleon's maxim — "force equals mass times velocity" — and corrected in her pronunciation of "tenebrous," which, says Black, should be "ten-E-brous." (Really? Not in my dictionary.)
Shirley marries Conrad but later falls for a priest, which I guess explains why she takes to reading a book entitled Liturgy Now at the breakfast table.
Shirley divorces Conrad, who turns to Barbara Amiel, offering this come-on: "I've been looking for a suitable companion in the wake of my own domestic disturbance and I can't help noting how very well the two of us get on."
One can only hope that March — and thereby the Black trial — gets here soon. In the interim the fallen titan has been reduced to a cartoon.