I have, since I was the proverbial paperboy in a small town, read the daily newspaper. It’s a habit that has once forced me to spent $10 on the New York Times in Winnipeg. I’ve bought the daily papers in Las Vegas and read them in front of a slot machine, I’ve read a left behind Globe and Mail in a skating rink while my sister was skating up some sort of figure skating award, and I have paid for government drivel in Beijing. It’s relentless. Next to CDs, it’s the only form of collectism I exhibit.

I have favorites.

• The weekend lifestyle section in the Globe and Mail which is full of Toronto Canadianisms like maple syrup marinades for salmon.
• The Saturday Night insert that the National Post used to have that was the most brilliant periodical I’ve read in real time.
• The stupendously large Sunday New York Times full of personally inconsequential minutia such as what roads are under construction in Brooklyn, offerings for condos in Manhattan, and how one graduate of an East Coast Ivy League University wooed a girl through their mutual love of the Simpsons, Greek dining, and vacations in Southern Florida.
• The weekly crime report in the Virden Empire Advance, a weekly from my small hometown. I cannot have enough information about where beer bottles were thrown.
• My current favorite, the daily inanity of celebrity sex photos, bridges to Macau, and the continuing plight of Disneyland that is Hong Kong in the South China Morning Post.

Why? It’s because it’s there, really. Cheap and available. It’s better than the back of a cereal box. I would read anything in front of me, so it’s a bonus if the thing I’m reading has some approximation of depth.

Another reason is it gives me a feeling of knowing what the people of the city have on their minds. If you sold a paper of record reviews of jazz music to the least jazziest city on Earth (Ulan Bator in Mongolia), you wouldn’t sell any papers. So it is reasonable to assume that the literate populace of a city has its interests written about in the daily papers. This is my lazy way of doing social archeology. The newspapers tell me that people from Council Bluffs, Iowa, are worried about the size of their Wal-Mart and the weather. Hong Kongers worry about property and food. Koreans worry about Korea. The Vancouver papers, and, I’m to assume, the people, really like trees.

So, the daily paper is liked by me.