I have on your behalf been reading Peter Mandelson's 560-page autobiography, The Third Man, and have reached the end. Before that, I finished the book. I want some credit for this.

The work has widely been reviewed for its entertainment value – as a bonus bout of knockabout knife-fighting following the formal end of New Labour rule. But – I grow old, I grow old – a drowsy numbness pains my soul at yet another vignette of vicious friends skulking the shadows for a passing back to drive a dagger into.
Still, Mandelson chose a perfect title for his tome.
The Third Man was a classic film noir, maybe the best British movie ever made. Set in post-war Vienna, it was directed by Carol Reed from a script by Graham Greene and starred Joseph Cotton, Trevor Howard – and Orson Welles as Harry Lime, the 'Third Man'. Lime is a brilliant, stylish, fascinating, amoral wheeler-dealer in the anything-goes city divided into separate zones of corruption between the Russians and the Allies. He's on the lam for having sold dodgy penicillin to desperate hospitals. The great Dilys Powell – film critic of the Sunday Times back when the Sunday Times was a great newspaper – described the character: "No mere rascal, or persona non grata, but an appalling ingrate, a ruthless, unregenerate, incarnate force of evil."
Having misused and manipulated people who foolishly loved him and lied and cheated and calculated every human situation for what personal profit it might bring him, Lime breathes his last after being shot in the back by a journalist as he tries to clamber out of a sewer. You have to admit – Mandleson to a T.

Amazing the things you learn while zonked out on good sounds.
Dropped round to Joe Mulheron's moral bar one recent Wednesday night to hear Johanna Fagan's new band with Paul Cassidy, Bodhicitta.
Considering the wonder-woman warrior sound of Ms Fagan at full tilt, you might assume, as did I, that Bodhicitta is a cool version of the name of that big-breasted Brit battleaxe (I mean that in a good way) who smote the Roman forces of savage Suetonius before falling in the epic encounter at Mancetter near Nuneaton in AD61.
However, I am roughly informed when I advance this theory that bodhicitta refers in fact to the highest level of spiritual attainment within the disciplines and teachings of orthodox Buddhism. I am thus led to the Little Book of Buddhist Wisdom which tells that "Moments before you develop bodhicitta you can be the most evil being in the whole universe, but the moment after you develop bodhicitta, you instantly become the most noble, kind and precious being in the whole universe."
The Provos achieved the same transformative effect by signing up to the Good Friday Agreement.
Remember the name. Bodhicitta.

I had hoped to be in southern Lebanon by the time you are reading this, showing a film about the Raytheon 9 and telling how Derry was cleansed of the US arms company's presence. It was the 2006 Qana massacre by Israel using Raytheon bombs which prompted the first trashing of the Derry plant.
But our Lebanese hosts decided on the day of the latest cross-border Israeli attack that the time wasn't ideal. Maybe in October. Or maybe by then Israel will have become so emboldened by US and European acquiescence that nowhere within range of its WMD will be safe for anyone – certainly not for misfortunate souls actually living there.
The European Union, including the Republic of Ireland, has not only been complicit but encouraging with regard to the crimes of the Zionist regime. The union dispatched a team of diplomats to report back on breaches of international law in the Russia-Georgia conflict in 2008 and last year demanded an independent inquiry into alleged human rights violations by Sri Lanka in the war against the Tamil Tigers. But the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza perpetrated by Israel in broad daylight did nothing to deter the union's head of foreign policy Javier Solano from declaring in Jerusalem last October that "Israel is a member of the European Union without being a member of its institutions... Israel is an integral part of all EU programmes."
Short of nuking a refugee camp, it seems there's nothing Israel might do which would give western governments cause to stop and rethink. And even then, no guarantee.
But check out the nonpareil Patti Smith's 'Qana':
Water to wine
Wine to blood
Ahh qana
The miracle
Is love

What a splendid chap that actor fellow John Hurt turns out to be. In an interview with The Times marking his 70th birthday, he remarks that: "It's so fascinating to have lived in a period when religion has taken the thrashing it deserves. Not that it has entirely. We still have a few religions knocking around, doing exactly what they've done through the ages, which is fucking up everything."
Which reminds me that I was reminded by Big Scots Frank the other night of the time Buddha, Jesus and the Hindu god Ra went to a swingers' party but since they were all imaginary nobody fucked them.
And the Jehovah's Witnesses have dropped their teaching that only 144,000 of the most fervent believers will ascend into heaven. The lifting of the limit followed complaints from a growing number of their six million members.