I bought a copy of the Toronto Sun

Normally, I don't read The Toronto Sun. In fact, I can't stand its fascist diatribes. But I don't mind other people reading The Sun at work. In fact, I think it's rather amusing that the guys I work with seem to think I'm bothered by something as tame as the Sunshine Girl.

But when I was working on Saturday night / Sunday morning, I ended up with nothing to read ... except The Sun from the previous Wednesday. I flipped through it quickly, trying not to let my fingers touch too much of it, only to discover that the National Job Fair will be held in Toronto this Wednesday and Thursday. The advertisement also mentioned that there would be a 20 page insert about the Fair in the Sunday Sun.

Oh, great. Just great. I hadn't seen any advertisements about the Job Fair in either the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star. Now, in all fairness, I didn't read both papers every day last week, so I might have missed something. But neither paper mentioned it in the Saturday editions, either, that I saw.

So, I went into the convenience store Sunday morning on my way home from work. I approached the newspaper rack and, automatically, my hand reached out for the Globe and Mail ... but the Globe doesn't publish on Sundays and I'd already read the Saturday edition! My stomach churned with embarrassment as I reached down for a copy of The Toronto Sun -- on which I had (years before) bestowed the cognomen The Toronto Stunned. I felt like I was betraying literate people everywhere.

I grabbed it and went to the cash ... better to get out of here quickly before someone I knew saw me with this rag in my hand. Why, oh why didn't I think to go out of town to buy this?

Gritting my teeth, I got to the cash.

"Pearl," piped up the cashier, accepting my money, "why aren't you getting the Star or the Globe?" (Just my luck that I get the one clerk who knows my buying habits.) Then I flipped through the pages, grabbed the insert about the Job Fair, and asked the cashier to throw the rest in the garbage.

The paper had, finally, been marginally useful.