Sunday Paper
I love the idea of the Sunday paper, so much so that I'm willing to risk my neighbors catching a glimpse of baggy PJs and scary pillow hair so I can retrieve it from the driveway while the coffee brews. There's comfort in sitting in bed with this fistful of stuff at the ready. But maybe it's time to see it for what it is: a mass marketing RPG fired at your house in an ecologically disasterous housing.
You developed invisible habits from reading the paper for so many years. The eyes slalom through advertisments, sidstepping mindless drivel, the fingers yank through pages of nothingness until you settling on the occasional piece of interest. But if you look at the paper with a beginner's mind it is mind-boggling how vacuous 90% of it is. There are, of course the bone-headed ads ( today Radio Shack implores you to Protect your Valentine from ugly overages). The propoganda leaflets that fly out of the comics section represent 45 places to buy a plasma TV. But even more insidious are the fluff news stories.
I'm starting to catalog the topics that make up today's mainstream news. Without trying too hard, here's a list of topics I don't need constant updates on:

• The Michael Jackson trial
• The Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• Charles and Cammilla
• The Pope's health
• Anything relates to the Catholic Church
• Romney, Kerry, Dean, or anything else about the 2008 election
• Stories about TV shows
• The business side of sports
  
• The Grammys

Actually's the Grammys, like the paper, would be a lot more interesting if the focus was taken off the mass media and shone on the little-known. I'll bet the first hour of the event is much more fun that the last.

If I could have a copy of the paper tailored for my needs, here's what would lie therein:

• Opus
• The Ideas section
• The magazine section (only for the crossword)
• Obituaries.
• All the stories after page 10