All manner of life lurks inside clippings folder!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Yep, rip it out.  My hands twist and move with the skill of familiarity, as I tear the newspaper story out neatly.

Well, there’s a smudged Marmitey thumbprint on the top left corner but this is not a museum piece. It’s just another cutting heading for my clippings folder.

One of the security blankets of a columnist, having a mixture of tiny stories tucked away helps you sleep at night. Plundered from random newspapers, in the regions of pages 14-21, they offer either underreported horrors or perplexing and astonishing truths.

Off to the office, armed with Bernie Ní Fhlatharta’s piece from this noble rag last week about Galway’s inestimable writer Walter Macken, along with the article by Charlie Brooker in The Guardian’s G2 that I’ve just ripped out.

Brooker was splattering his particular own brand of disdain toward Apple software updates and U2.

“Then Apple comes along and slings them under your nose like a bowl of bum soup you didn’t order.”

Like so much in this ancient and wielding clippings folder, it’ll never be used.

Mind you, I just wrote about it, so hang on in there, you other little stories of old. There may be hope for you yet. These cuttings don’t tend to be used because with the wondrous human race, there’s no shortage of material. Yet it’s good to know all those embryos are in that file, desperate to be reborn in column inches.

Some of them are outdated, others unattributed, but each has for some reason caught my eye, raised an eyebrow –

– oh, okay, that was a mistake. Big mistake. I dared to look; to go into the folder and dig out some of those stories. That was hours ago. The day is nearly gone and my mind is spinning with madness, tragedy and hilarity.

Don’t know which paper or when, but a story by Miriam Elder reveals that Russia is going back to paper. Elder explains that the Federal Guard Service (FSO), a “…powerful body tasked with protecting Russia’s highest-ranking officials…” have decided that they can no longer trust either digital or electronic communications.

Ever since Dmitry Medvedev was ‘listened to’ while attending the G20 Summit in London, the Russians have been on their most paranoiac post-Soviet tippy-toes. Even though Edward Snowden and the Wikileaks affair did plenty to harm their enemies, the Russians’ eyes have been opened to the vulnerability of microchip culture.

Never backward in coming forward in matters of security and confidentiality (read ‘KGB intimidation’) the Russians are now distrustful of progress. The FSO, like Putin himself, now yearns for yesteryear, doubtless to a time when the Soviet Empire was a mighty beast.

Ah, those were the days.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune