Why's It Called the "Page Six"?

by Crazy Ivan


As a general rule, any time I hear the same Myachi related question 3 times, I write a blog about it.  I just figure that if there are three people curious enough to seek me out and ask me about it, there must be a few more who are at least curious.

So this one comes to us from the recently extensively reviewed series 5.2.  Among the sacks offered in the series is the one pictured below, known as the "Page Six".  So the question, as you've probably guessed since it's the title of the blog entry, is why did we choose that name?

Pages 1 through 5 not pictured.

Well, it all started over the summer at the Cabin of Skills.  It might surprise some people to know that we actually start setting up the new series that early, but we were already choosing colors for this series in June of last year.  By late July we'd finalized the colors and fabrics, but we were still debating names.

Myachi Man had swung out to Gatlinburg where Pinky, Bones, Rush, Kore, Lucky, Bamboo and I were staying during our Dollywood gig and we start going over the various prototypes and trying to select names.  Some of them were easy (the Red Dragon, for example) and some of them were hard, but the Page Six up there was giving us the most trouble.

We were down to the wire on this because they were going to start printing the packaging a few hours later and Myachi Man had to finalize the back.  So we debated.  We've done a lot of plaids in the past and they were all named "Highlander something" or "Tartan something" or "Lumberjack something" or "Braveheart something".  So the obvious choice would be to do the same with this one.  But what color is it?  There's no dominant color on it, so it couldn't be the "Highlander White" or the "Lumberjack Red" or anything like that.

We knew we had to go a new direction here so as we're discussing it allowed I say, "So what's black and white and red?"

For those of you who know that old joke, you'll see where I'm going right away.  For those that don't let me take a full paragraph to explain a stupid joke that isn't even funny.

The joke is "What's black and white and read all over?" and the answer is a newspaper.  Because it's black and white and people read it.  But when you say it allowed you hear "Black and white and red all over" instead of "read all over".  So you think I'm talking about a color.  And I'm actually cleverly sneaking in a past-tense verb.

For some reason, despite not being funny, that joke persists enough that more than half the people reading this are familiar with it.  So when I asked that, we all got it right away and started trying to think of newspaper related names to give it.  If we called it, for example, the Herald or the Post, people could ask why and we could say "because it's black and white and red all over", and if they knew the old joke, they could not laugh (because it's not funny).

But then as we talked, the joke kind of got lost and Myachi Man settled on the Page Six because of the coloration of Page Six in the NY Post, which is black and white and red.  We kind of end in a spot that's twice removed from the joke so there's really no reason to stammer through it in the explanation, but I figured if I just said, "because page six is black and white and red", you'd be no closer to understanding why we chose it.

Of course, if I wanted to abridge the story, I could have just as well said, "because we only had three hours left to get the names in"...