Yellow Pages: Ballast for my big blue bin

I walked out my door yesterday and found two Yellow Pages behemoths on my doorstep. Thankfully, someone came and stole one while I wasn’t looking. Perhaps one of my neighbours actually makes use of the Yellow Pages. I sure don’t. Who, in this day and age, makes their fingers do the walking through pounds of inky newsprint when you can find everything you need while afloat in the cloudlike ether of the Internet? I promptly put the Pages where it belongs—but not before discovering some truly stupid information inside, plus one very curious omission, which I’ll tell you about after the jump.

Before tossing it into the recycling bin, I flipped though to see if this thing might be of any use at all. There was a guide for visitors to Toronto. Perhaps they ought to plunk the Yellow Pages outside the door of every hotel room in the city. There were shopping mall maps, not particularly useful at home, and not particularly portable as I walk the length of Yorkdale. There were some useful emergency phone numbers and whatnot, stuff the city ought to include on the back page of its recycling calendar. The most fun I had was looking at the colour-coded seating charts for local theatres and stadiums—including the Air Canada Centre, the Hershey Centre in Mississauga, BMO Field, Massey Hall, the works.

Yet one venue was absent, the one stadium that hosts the only affordable regular attraction in town: the Rogers Centre, home of the Blue Jays. I don’t know why, but could it be out of petty rivalry? Rogers, after all, is Bell Canada’s main competitor, and the Bell logo is there on the bottom left-hand corner of the Yellow Pages cover, just above the words “Fully Recyclable.” Okey-dokey, then: off she goes into the black-hole bin.