Like to spend Xmas with the Mother of God?

Cost you £1,740. About two grand in Eurodisneys. But hey. The Mother of God!
Queen of Peace Pilgrimages offers a “chance to spend Christmas with Our Lady on the day she gave birth”. The deal includes a guaranteed 30 minutes in her hyperduliac company: she will be in the guise of Our Lady of Medjugorje. Not that you’ll have actual face time. What you’ll see is the visionary Jakov Colo and him seeing her. This will be “an astounding experience”.
Gone are the days when the six winsome visionaries from the small fascist town saw the Mother of God in a nicely-situated corner of the Church of St. James every day at 6.40pm local time. Now it’s only once a year for Jakov which, to be fair, gives him time to tend the business interests which he says he has been “blessed” with, including a share in the new local luxury hotel, the Two Hearts.
For “a low additional cost” you can stay on in Medjugorje and take in Mirjana’s annual apparition, set for January 2. This appearance had originally been pencilled in for January 1, a Friday, but has been put back to the Saturday “for practical reasons”.
I’d have thought that the Mother of God’s schedule wouldn’t have been affected by practical considerations. Maybe she doesn’t like giving up her Friday nights.
There are scores of Medjugorje Centres across Ireland, and many thousands of believers. They look just like the rest of us. Maybe that’s one beside you right now. Move.

A mighty night in Sandino’s a couple of Sundays ago as T-Model Ford shifted the emotional axis of the decent-sized audience with an hour and a half of deep-down, dirty-as-it-gets Delta blues.
T-Model has been twanging the blues since shouting his way into the world in Forest, Mississippi, 88 years ago. He’s been a farmer, a truck-driver, a fighter, spent 10 years on a chain-gang for murder. “I could really stomp some ass back then. I was a sure-enough-dangerous man.”
He has one of those grainy voices of soulful suffering and proud defiance which he can modulate to near-falsetto when he fancies, and the easiest guitar style this side of the Big Muddy. Seems scarcely to brush the strings as he fingerpicks intricate patterns while hammering out chords in percussive combinations.
Spent the entire set surveying the audience with twinkly, lascivious eyes. “I think he’s asking me if I’m up for it,” confided a woman a quarter of his age, archly. 
T-Model made his first recording in his 70s. There’s still time. And for music, too.

Who’ll lift the lid on the wheelie-bin scandal?
Carndonagh man Fiachra Ó Luain was an Independent candidate for North West in last June’s European election. He discovered after the count in Castlebar that 3,000 of his votes had been allocated instead to Declan Ganley. The misplaced bundle was found in one of the wheelie-bins used to store the ballots.
Fiachra was campaigning for an end to the Shannon stopover, the preservation of Tara, curbs on carbon emissions and so on.
A vote or even a bundle of 100 votes might find their way innocently into the wrong pile. But 3,000? More than three months on, however, there’s been no progress towards discovering how this huge error happened.
The officer placed in charge of the Garda investigation is a Sgt. Hanley - the man who had been in charge of the count centre when the votes went awol.
The official supervising the count, Returning Officer Kieran McDermott, has declined - as is his right - to make a statement.
Thus, 3,000 votes for the least well-resourced candidate were transferred to the total for the best-resourced candidate - and nobody in authority seems to think this worth getting to the bottom of. 
It could be there’s nothing sinister in any of it. Maybe somebody did just pick up a bundle of thousands of votes and unthinkingly place it in the wrong bin. If that’s what happened, we should know so.
If this isn’t what happened, all the more reason...
Fiachra has written to the relevant Minister, John Gormley, asking him to order a departmental investigation. So far, no response.
When the Greens don’t give a monkey’s about the principles they were elected on, I suppose it’s unreal to expect them to be concerned about whether elections are fair.

I am told that the Poetry Chicks tore the place apart at their Unitarian Church gig on St. Stephen’s Green last month. On no account to be missed if they come your way. Poetry hasn’t been this sexy since Byron.

A London magistrate refused to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli war criminal Ehud Barak on his visit to Britain in September. This was a personal disappointment, given that the Raytheon 9 were acquitted last year of trashing the arms company’s Derry premises, having convinced a jury that Raytheon had been aiding and abetting Israel in committing war crimes in Lebanon.
There will, however, be another day.
Meanwhile, I see that the Dublin singer Bono has been hanging out with liar and war criminal Tony Blair in the US and telling anyone who’d listen that the mass killer is a fine fellow.
In New York on Sunday, September 21, the capitalist crooner walked the killer to church.
There’s no excuse for it I can think of.