Today marks the first time in K&K’s long, champagne-soaked tenure at the Courier that its print edition will not run a table of contents page. “What gives?” all eight of you are probably saying. “We’ve come to rely on the page three index to help us navigate our way through your tome’s multitude of inky pages like Marlow making his way down the Congo in Heart of Darkness, lest we be forced to read our way through the paper blindly without any preconceived notion of what to expect besides stories on residents who aren’t happy with the city’s development plans, a disgruntled off-leash dog owner and some columnist railing against neocons.”
The simple truth is the Courier is not a magazine and our editor decided that page three is valuable real estate that would be better served with editorial content, such as said stories about unhappy residents and disgruntled off-leash dog owners. While we would agree with this assessment, we will miss the platform an index page provided for all the pun-filled headlines, song titles and pop culture references that we weren’t allowed to use in the rest of the newspaper.
The fact that you're reading this online means you and your fetching Google Glass probably don't give two hoots about table of contents anyway.
Nonetheless, as a final hurrah, we’re going to list the headlines we would have liked in this issue’s index page, if it still existed. RIP page 3 table of contents.
• For the Courier’s profile on VPD Const. Steve Hanuse who’s been the department liaison on the Musqueam reserve since 2009, we would have gone with either “Put your Hanuse up” or more likely “An officer and a gentleman,” because we effin’ love that movie.
• Apparently there’s 10 new tennis courts in the city. What’s cooler than that? How about the headlines “If it pleases the court,” “Causing a racquet,” “Millions served” or something about balls.
• If you like the downcast lyrics of the Smiths and the sweetness of Vancouver’s burgeoning chocolate scene as described in Eagranie Yuh’s Sweet Spot column, feast your eyes on “How Soon is Cacao?”
• For Cheryl Rossi’s story on the upcoming antiquarian book fair, the choices were endless: “Revenge of the nerds,” “Paper pushers,” “Paper chase,” “Prints charming,” “Book ’em, Dano” and, of course, “Page against the machine.”
• At the risk of getting too meta, we’ll finish by suggesting a few page three headlines for this K&K column on page three headlines: “Untitled,” “Night of the headline hunters,” “Turn the page,” “Loss for words” and, sniff, sniff, “The pun also rises.”
