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I have been an editor for long enough now that I appreciate a slow news day.

Everyone’s relaxed. Nobody really cares too much if the placement of stories doesn’t quite work. Because none of the stories are breaking, you’ve got them all well before deadline. And in yesterday’s case, the only story worth having wasn’t ending until after midnight anyway, so there really was nothing going on.

So it’s nice. You get to catch up on your correspondence. Update blogs you’ve neglected for nearly a month. Bang your head against the wall trying to answer riddles on Sporcle. And generally try to will the time to pass, but in a good way.

The fact that it’s an easy day for me is one reason I’m a fan, but it goes beyond that.

I love slow news days  for the rainy day features that always find their way into the next day’s edition.

And I don’t mean stories about the damn rain, though there’s been more than enough of those hastily written this summer after a look out the window and a five-minute interview with Dave Phillips.

No, I mean the shove-this-onto-page-four-we-got-nothing-else stories that aren’t badly written but are either completely out of place, jarringly unnecessary or — most likely — something that exists because they couldn’t kill the page because they had already, blessedly, sold the ad space. They assign them at the beginning of the story, throw them in the can, and bust ‘em out on days like yesterday to plug the holes. I’ve written my share of them.

Without fail, on a day like today, you will find at least two of these stories in every daily paper. After a quick coffee and perusal of the dailies, here’s my top five from Toronto today:

5. The Nothing Happened Story: Dany Heatley DID NOT attend Jason Spezza’s wedding. Roy Halladay DID NOT get traded. There are always several of them — they’re what makes the slow news day happen. They go on the sked in the morning as ‘follows’ — the latest in what has surely been, or at least was supposed to be, a gripping drama recounted day-by-day in the local paper. But sometimes, sweet fuck all happens by deadline and because this is the era of the 24-hour internet news cycle, if something breaks the story will be right back on top again. So you can’t afford to ignore it completely, but you have nothing to report. It’s The Nothing Happened Story. The Garbage strike is tentatively over now, but if you look in a print copy of a Toronto daily today, you’ll see the Nothing Happened Story at work. The National Post’s headline first thing this morning, and I can only hope this made it into print:

Union ultimatum fails to result in deal, or end to talks

Now that, is a Nothing Happened story.

4. Tim’s takes Manhattan: This one makes the list because I knew, as soon as I saw it on the wire yesterday, that every Toronto daily — and nearly every daily in Canada with an AP feed — would scoop it. It’s been a few weeks since Tim Hortons showed up in New York. How’s it doing? Pretty well. Do we have a face to put on the story? Yup. Is he a Canadian who goes to ridiculous lengths to secure his Tim’s doughnuts and coffee over everything else? Oh hell yes. Gold. Use it huge on the business page. Big picture of timbits.

3. The Butler Did It: There’s a course. A course you can take to learn how to be butler. Apparently “People have this skewed image that we’re drunks making sarcastic comments and answering the door and throwing the soup down, when there’s really so much more that we do.” Right. Noted. Oh Ben Rayner, why are they wasting your rock-music-writing/encyclopedic-Simpsons-reference-dropping talents on this stuff?

2. Bikini-clad woman accused of carjacking: The Star’s solution to a slow news day, above, is to take a look at boring jobs that nobody cares about aside from those charged with actually doing them. It’s that whole ‘respect everybody’ thing at work. The Sun’s solution, however — ‘Hey, are we sure that no hot chicks committed any crimes today? Can we run a search for ‘model’, ‘bikini’, ‘Miss ****’ and ’sex tape’ quickly before we put the lineup together? — is more effective, if only because it shows that they understand their readership. They demonstrate further understanding by not even bothering with words to go with the pictures of the Raptors Dance Pak auditions. It’s a standalone of cute girls in the newspaper and a slideshow of cute girls on the website. A solid choice because do you imagine a Sun reader — or anyone, really — cares what these girls have to say?

1. Out of the office, into the pool: The Star takes the cake for their second piece in one edition explaining what somebody’s job — somebody that you don’t give a shit about — requires of them. While butlers, at least, are figures of quasi-mystery thanks to decades of cheap crime thrillers, you really can’t say the same for pool cleaners. I suppose that Desperate Housewives might have some sweaty fantasies about the cute poolboy, but imaging the hand reaching into that muck running down your thigh will probably cure them pretty quick. As the pool cleaner man says: “There are some disgusting smells. But you get used to it.” This story, by the way, is part of a series, called “Job Interviews” that will run periodically this summer in the Star’s GTA section. If you realize by now that periodically means ‘When we’ve got fuckin’ nothin’ and deadline’s a’loomin” … you win a prize.