For all the time I spend online, and for all the magazines and other newspapers we get, why is it that the one publication fading fastest is most compelling? Could it be for the chance to wonder why an item on a new restaurant did not have to mention it is opening in the tax-dodge Taj Mahal off Times Square? Or the laugh I got on realizing the latest food editor had erred just like his predecessors in dissing the Cafe Regret? (Wonder if he’s been backtracking because the prince in stocking feet dropped a sandwich on his desk to make clear just how far he had overstepped his bounds.) Oh, why am I even dithering? It has to be for the new painful treat I have just discovered: reading and pondering the index every Wednesday. In an A section designed to drive the reader batshit insane with international/national/metro stories jumping to hell and back, why do they waste space trying to lure readers to other sections with verbiage that a robot with dying batteries could have generated? As dull to annoying as the actual section is, the come-ons are like the 40-year-old virgin attempting foreplay. Salt: Like breasts of sand. Slog to D1.