I subscribe to Newsweek, a fantastic publication full of interesting articles regarding the news of the week. It also features a name with two Ws and a K. Those are all good things.

But there is one thing about the magazine that absolutely perplexes me and makes me feel slightly dumber each week for not being able to figure it out–the page numbers.

Each page that has an article has a page number. They are on the lower left for left-side pages and the lower right for right-side pages. Full-page photos/graphics as well as ad pages do not have a number.

But the problem comes in how the pages are counted. The full-page photos that go with stories are counted in the page numbers, even though they don’t feature the number themselves. The page before might be 40, meaning the page after the photo would be 42. Makes perfect sense.

When it comes to the ad pages, things get squirrelly. (On a side note, the Myspace blog box has flagged “squirrelly” as a spelling error. I assure you, it is not). Some of the ad pages are counted like the full-page photos–they are counted in the page numbers but don’t have one on their page. Again, I’m perfectly fine with that system.

But then there are some ad pages that are skipped in the numbering. This system becomes especially troubling with the first pages of the magazine. Opening the cover this week, you find an ad that spreads across the entirety of the first two pages (the back of the cover and the first right-hand page). If you count the pages until the first one that has a number, you have to leave out the first page of that ad.

How can we operate under a system that counts half of an ad as a page but not the other?! It’s insanity. If you’re going to count ad pages as pages, fine. Count them all. If not, don’t count any of them. My head is on the verge of headache for no logical reason, and such a situation should not exist in a civilized world.