Eleanor Lawrie, Author

Well, tonight I sat in my comfortable recliner in the living room and went through Friday’s and Saturday’s newspapers.

It’s not a long task, since the articles in our local paper often don’t absorb me for long. The editorial page used to be fun when they still published letters from readers, but those appear only rarely now. We need a full page of those, come on, Editor of the St Catharines Standard, give us back our letters from readers!

Oh, and while I have your ear (if I do, that is), could you please find a way to organize the pages so that the paper is in the same order every day? And out of respect for the seriousness of birth and death notices, will you kindly refrain from mixing them into classified ads and\or sports pages? And worse still is your habit of printing them on the extra ad page that annoyingly folds itself across about 9 inches in front of a couple of sections. Awkward, unwanted, quit doing that. Keep ads with ads. If I have to abide those horrible stuck-on partial pages, have the courtesy to exclude any ‘news’ so I can toss the useless unmatched thing aside without looking at it.

The local arts don’t get much more than a blip in the ‘Substandard’ (sorry, but it’s well-known by that name), so if you want to know what’s going on you better find another way. A listing might be included in the DO-IT column, but since that’s now plastered over several pages, playing a squeaky second fiddle to quarter-page ads, it’s a mind-boggling undertaking to spot something of interest. I gave up on it long ago, it’s visually annoying and shouldn’t include extra future dates. Keep it short, neat and readable, please.

As I turn through the so-called sections (which are endlessly different for each issue), I separate the pages containing the Sudokus and occasionally the L A Times crosswords. Let me tell you why it’s only occasionally. Most of the time the L A Times puzzle is so blown up that it covers more than a quarter page. My eyes and my neck hate the amount of travelling to and from the clues, which is why is I do not indulge in the large weekend crossword. It’s too _____ big!!  Tone it down a little!!

Anyway, tonight I found the L A Times taking up a perfect quarter page in the Friday paper. Now that’s late enough in the week to be fun to do (hate the early-in-the-week easy ones, put me right to sleep) so I folded it easily on the original folds and set it aside with the Sudokus.

Imagine my smile when the Saturday issue also yielded the L A Times on a quarter page. Although this time some edified layout person managed to squeeze it vertically to be almost a quarter inch shorter than it should be to make squares in the grid. In case nobody noticed, I would like to point out that the clues were now crushed together with only tiny horizontal gaps between them. More eye strain, but I decided to do it anyway.

So, well and truly puzzled about an hour and a half later, 2 Sudokus, 2 Jumbles, and both L A Times are filled in.

And I didn’t do much reading of the newspaper.