Newspapers make me happy, sad and insane!

Apparently, if you’re under 25 years of age, you rarely if ever buy newspapers, preferring either to read them online or just watch the TV news.

What a world you are missing out on! Yes, you can click random links as you surf the web, but that in no way compares to the experience of physically holding a paper in your hands, and turning to pages far away from the front page headlines.

Buried in any newspaper’s hinterland, from page 6 onwards, there lurk two kinds of news: important stories that remain under-reported for reasons that keep conspiracists awake at night, and the bizarre little stories that make my eyebrows rise and my head spin.

Tearing both types of story from the newspaper, I build them into little piles on the bed in my office (it doubles as a guest room) alongside other more dishevelled piles of scrawled often illegible notes.

Loopy I may be, but thankfully, I’m not as bonkers as these stories. How could I be? Yes, there have been insane moments in my life (the time I awoke unexpectedly in New Zealand springs to mind) but in comparison to the bad craziness hidden in my little piles (behave!) I’m as sane as a lump of granite.

Trouble is, these clippings betray in their lunacy snapshots of how far we have lost our way. They act as micro-metaphors for our condition as a supposed civilization.

On top of the pile to my right at the moment is a tiny torn story about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed planner of the attack on the Trade Centre Towers.

According to The Guardian’s Washington Staff and Agencies, while at a CIA prison in Poland, Mohammed was forced to stay awake for 180 hours and endured 183 instances of water-boarding. Popular with international intelligence forces these days, water-boarding is a form of torture that replicates in your mind the feeling that you are drowning.

Ever precise with their very few words, the CIA describe this process as one

“… designed to psychologically dislocate people.” 

The CIA use torture because it works a treat, but sadly their - what do you call people being tortured? ‘Subjects’? ‘Prisoners’? I’m tempted to say ‘victims’ but Mohammed is a self-confessed mass murderer, so I’ll settle for that disgusting 21st century euphemism - ‘clients’ often end up schizophrenic and post-traumatic. The CIA’s own medical records suggest nobody makes it out with all their noodles intact.

When the Polish prison was closed in September 2003, Mohammed was moved to another CIA prison in Romania, where his captivity was less aggressive. A request arrived at CIA Headquarters from that secret facility in Bucharest. Mohammed, who had been reading the Harry Potter novels, was asking for permission to design a vacuum cleaner.

My tiny brain can only imagine the conversation which then took place at CIA headquarters, but a short time later a CIA manager called their prison in Romania, approving Mohammed’s request:

“… in the hope that it would help preserve Mohammed’s sanity.” according to an ex-CIA official.

Stables, doors, bolts and a little bit late for compassion, you might think.

For the next three years Mohammed worked on his vacuum cleaner design, but nobody will ever know how it looked, if it worked, or indeed if it really was a vacuum cleaner rather than perchance a craftily-disguised jet pack, which he was planning to strap onto his back before flying away.

Sorry, had to pause there for a moment. I just saw a white-robed bearded devout Muslim climbing high into the Romanian sky, clutching a rocket-powered ‘vacuum cleaner’ like a 21st century Dr. Strangelove, while down below be-suited be-shaded CIA agents wave their fists in the air and shout:

“Damn you, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed! You may have outwitted us this time, you dastardly devil, but look out, we’ll not be so dumb again. We’ll be ready for you next time!”

Sadly, life is neither a comic book nor a movie, and in 2006 the Romanian CIA prison was also closed down, which resulted in Mohammed being transferred to that testament to moral low ground, which every anti-American terrorist in the world exploits as justification to attack: Guantanamo Bay. He is still there to this day, being held along with many others who are doubtless far less guilty of such heinous crimes as his.

The reason these obscure newspaper stories mean so much to me is not because they entertain me, on a facile level, but because there’s inevitably something within them that gives me a chill. Somebody is always saying something that makes me fear for our collective sanity and safety.

In this instance, that role is fulfilled by Mohammed’s military lawyer, Jason Wright, who is quoted in this tiny hidden-away newspaper story, trying to explain why he was not allowed to discuss his client's interest in vacuum cleaners.

“It sounds ridiculous,” he said, “but answering this question, or confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design, would apparently expose the US government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger.”

From mass murder to the absolutely absurd, via Poland and Harry Potter, one tiny supposedly insignificant corner of a newspaper page has taken us to vacuum cleaner design, through CIA torture and Guantanamo Bay, ending up, tragically yet inevitably, with a global superpower so entirely wrapped up in the fetid blankets of its own paranoia that it can see neither the inanity nor the insanity of its own methods.

Newspapers are great. I’d much rather have the torn corner of that page from The Guardian than an ignorant troll ranting at me online.

©Charlie Adley

13.09.13.


News is news and facts are facts, but squishing truffles is much more fun!

There it was, on page 30 of the Irish Daily Mirror, Friday, October 12, 2007:
Life, and all the emotion that is in it.
The bottom half of the page showed a photo of Thornton's chocolatier Barry Colenso proudly clutching an Easter egg, beside the headline:
"Grabbed by the truffles - top Chocolatier caught squishing rival's treats!"
Mirror writer Brian Roberts explains that Barry, evermore to be dubbed 'Willy Wrongka', was caught behaving bizarrely on CCTV in a store run by Thornton's main rivals, Hotel Chocolat.
Apparently he was "methodically gripping several chocolate sections."
A spokesman for Hotel Chocolat said
"Mr Colenso admitted 'handling' products in an 'inappropriate' manner. This was an extraordinary act of truffle squishing. We can only guess at what provoked it."
If this is fact, what might be 'surreal'?
If Barry's squelches were an "extraordinary act of truffle squishing", then what, one wonders, is 'ordinary' truffle squishing?
Above this gripping (ha!) tale, the Mirror ran a photostory showing hundreds of bloated wildebeest carcasses floating down a river.
The recent destruction of nearby forest has corrupted weather patterns in the Masai Mara, and 15,000 wildebeest have died in the rivers that now rage with an intensity matched only by that which impels the Wildebeest to cross.
Finally, on the left-hand side of the page, Greig Box-Turnbull's story relates how Bryan Drysdale had turned to the police, and called the health service complaining of a nervous breakdown; a feeling of 'his head cracking'; paranoid episodes in which he thought he was being targeted and heard voices in his home; worries that he might have HIV; and fears that he might take his own life.
When his car was later hit by a train on a level crossing, six people died.
Page 30 of the Daily Mirror, and what do I get? Only the entire gamut of human emotional response.
I am horrified that nobody listened to Brian Drysdale's cries for help; tormented by those avoidable deaths; disgusted by our uncaring society.
For those wildebeest, lost to the excesses of our needs, I am filled with guilt, compassion, sorrow and rage.
As for the truffle squishing, I'm thankful that not all news is a matter of life and death; shocked by this decadent act of wanton chocolate sabotage; and naturally, I am highly tickled.
But all we have considered are emotions.
What of fact? Do we care if these stories are true?
Fiction can be fun, but news is news, and never the twain should meet.
Not a journalist, I am merely a blabbermouth who is paid to give opinion, so I have the utmost respect for those professionals who take seriously the matter of accurately reporting news.
Those who leave their arse-groove in newsroom seats have to check their facts. They live by the rules of 'Who?' 'What?' 'When?' 'Where?' and 'How?'.
A few months ago I contacted a local journalist, who had reviewed in print a You Tube movie showing teenagers driving recklessly in a Galway car park.
Communicating privately, I told him that I had been approached by parents of teenage children who were furious about his coverage of this life-threatening activity.
He said that his journalistic responsibilities were intact, as all the facts were true.
My heart sank. There is far more to journalistic responsibility than fact. Integrity and social responsibility rate pretty highly too.
Facts are indeed the building blocks of news.
That's why it is so dangerous to run a front page lead story about asylum seekers and hotels when facts have not been checked. By the time your correction appears, the damage has been done.
The racist responses an erroneous story and patronising editorial evoked are already embedded in the Galwegian psyche.
I was shocked to find behind the correction of last week's story another editorial about how a recent murder victim's parents are waking up in Galway, when in fact, at that time, they were not in Ireland.
Yes, I know I am being petty, but a newspaper editor must check facts.
The Galway Advertiser is a vital and impressive part of Galway life. There cannot be a person under 40 in this city who has not queued on a Wednesday for the Accommodation Lists. When I want to find a job, I go to Business and Appointments in the Galway Advertiser, and then, when I realise I am not qualified for very much, I go to Situations Vacant.
The Galway Advertiser is an advertiser, and as such it is excellent. But there is a massive difference between a free advertiser and a newspaper that is paid for by the reader. Within these pages (save for this colyoom) you read stories that will have been robustly checked and well written.
Of course, nobody's perfect. Mistakes will be made and clarified . But if you want news, buy a newspaper, and if you want to find something to buy, pick up an advertising free sheet.
Despite persistent rumours of the end of all newspapers, you can in Galway now pick up a different paper each day, from Monday to Friday. More than anything, this glut of advertising shows only that there is still much cash in the coffers of local companies.
There is one matter it is important to clarify.
Figures appearing in two free local papers recently declared massive circulation rises, as compared with the sales figures of the rags of this Noble House.
Certainly, circulation of the Galway Advertiser has risen at my address by 200%, as where we used to receive nothing, we now have two copies put through our one front door every week, anytime between Thursday and Sunday.
When Galway First was launched, we had to call and ask them to take away a bundle that had been dumped at the end of our street.
A friend who lives in a block of 15 flats claims his building took delivery of 50 Galway Advertisers last week.
If we gave away this Noble Rag, and filled empty swimming pools with bundles of unread papers, we could 'circulate' more copies than any paper in the world.
If you want to believe what you read, try one paper per household, paid for and read from cover to cover.
And never forget, beyond all those depressing headlines, there may well be some truffle squishing going down!

Double Vision

Caricatures Ireland

What a relief! The Sun has solved Pi!

Thank goodness for the Super Soaraway Sun ! Why on earth do I buy a copy of Britain's best-selling newspaper only once or twice a year?
If only the world's greatest scientists and mathematicians had bought the same issue that I did, they could all be sleeping soundly in their beds tonight.
For centuries, aeons in fact, mathematicians, engineers, mystics and artists alike have wrestled with that old conundrum: the relationship between a circle's diameter and its circumference.
Could you put that more simply, my son?
Well, The Sun does 'simple' better than anyone. on page 6, they ran a fifty question quiz, rather ingeniously called 'Feeling Brainy?'
Possibly looking for their more cerebral readers, the quiz was placed opposite the paper's Editorial Comment, (which, by the way, read exactly thus:
"Load of Bull?
The search for Ireland's most beautiful cow was unveiled yesterday.
They might look the same to some, but for some a sprightly bovine can be moo-tiful.
But a sexy cow? Pull the UDDER one.")
Tempted to see if I qualified as brainy for a Sun reader, I stormed in, until I reached question 8, where I have to admit, I became a bit stumped.
'How many times does the diameter of a circle fit into its circumference?'
All power to the question setter. He or she could so easily have just asked
"Imagine you've drawn a line from one side of a circle right across to the other side. Now, how many of those wee lines do you think will fit around the outside of the circle?
But they didn't, because they want to believe that their readers are not idiots.
I didn't want to be an idiot. I didn't want to want to come up with the wrong answer, and a part of me just hoped it would suffice to say Pi, or even the symbol (¼).
Just how clever did The Sun want me to be? After all, from the little I understand, (or to be honest, just learned from the internet), as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter in Euclidean genome, Pi is a mathematical constant and a transcendental and irrational number.
Also known as Archimedes' constant and Ludolph's number, its exact size has never been ascertained.
On the 20th November, 2005, a gentleman called Chao Lu became the world record holder for reciting decimal places of Pi, having memorised it to a truly unbelievable 67,890 digits.
In September 2002, Dr. Kanada's team at the University of Tokyo calculated Pi to 206,158,430,000 decimal places, and still didn't get an answer.
Foolish ignorant men. If only they'd had half a brain cell to rub together, they'd have gone down the shop, bought The Sun, some tea bags, milk and a packet of chocolate digestives, and whilst dunking their biccies in their mugs, they could have found out that they had been wasting their time.
'Cos there it was, in the answers, upside down on the same page.
3.
That's how may times the diameter of a circle fits into its circumference. There is no need for decimal places. The Sun has released us from centuries of mathematical purgatory; delivered us from scientific torment and philosophical agony.
It's official. Pi = 3.
The Sun . We love It.

****

Actually, I'm being a little unfair to The Sun.
Now, that's a challenging concept!
Whilst that item about the cow was true, it did not run alone. Above it, the red top ran an editorial about the economic disparity enjoyed and suffered in unequal measure in our so-called Tiger Republic.
Running with figures recently released by the Central Statistics Office, the paper complains quite rightly that our society cannot be called 'fair' when the top ten percent of this country's earners bring home ¤2,233 each week after tax, while the lowest ten percent earn only ¤157.
What kind of boom is this, where the rich get richer and the poor become inexorably poorer?
Allow me to introduce you to the Thatcherite boom, just like the one Britain endured in the 80's.
Then, as now, small groups of people living within a tiny geographical area became immensely rich, while the rest of us were bombarded with propaganda about the economic miracle in which we were living.
Then, as Bertie and his PD charioteers do now,Thatcher encouraged the marriage of an unbridled belief in the beauty of the free market to a young and hungry population, greedy beyond all precedent.
Then, as now, all you end up with is the disgrace of a society we have today.
If you tell enough people how well off they are enough times, they will start to believe it themselves. They will go out and buy 46" HDTVs on their credit cards, and take on 100% mortgages, because they feel financially secure.
Sure, aren't we richer than we have ever been?
Watch and wait as the global corporate greed that encourages sub-prime mortgages begins to collapse, bringing us all down with it.
Before you can say 'Negative Equity', the two most dreaded words in a free market economy, the house you bought is worth less than you paid for it. Already I dread the start of house repossessions that I saw in mid-'80's England.
But more than that, I fear for those families (and don't forget, we're talking about 10% of the earning population here!) who earn only ¤158, and yet have to spend ¤217 each week to survive.
Before we become obsessed with interest rates, bricks and mortar, let's not forget our neighbours, who lie awake at night full of fear.
They might well be worried about their mortgages, but as their spending on simple groceries and utility bills sends them ¤3,000 into debt each year, they are, more than anything, worried about putting food into their childrens' mouths.
And there was me, thinking Ireland had left those dark days behind.
You might well laugh when I call myself a Socialist, but the trouble with Capitalism is that the philanthropic dream of a so-called Drip Drip Drip effect of wealth distribution never existed in the real world.
The rich became rich in the first place by hanging on to their money. The poor become poorer, and will stay poorer as long as we turn our heads, vote for the status quo, and sleep happily whilst not giving a damn.

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