KEY POINTS:
Great news, ladies and gentlemen! Fantastic news!! Tip Top is re-launching the Joy Bar!
Forget your flippin' floating icebergs, folks; the finest frozen novelty of them all is on the comeback trail.
Yup!! As they say in Carolina ... Nothing could be finer
For the cultivated diner
Than a J-o-o-oy Bar
Nothing could be sweeter
Than to see a senorita
With a J-o-o-oy Bar
And if they're saying it in Carolina then bet your bippy aficionados throughout Outer Roa are saying it too. Particularly in the south, where the Joy Bar has long been regarded as the acme of confection and its abrupt discontinuance clear evidence of a vile corporate conspiracy to impose foreign tastes on decent southern tongues.
But we take our pleasures seriously down here and the legend of the mythic bar has never died. "Remember the good old days when you needed a trailer to take a Joy Bar home? It'd feed a family of five and only cost threepence," folk regularly say in bars, woolsheds and abandoned raspberry plantations throughout the south.
"Yes," we reply, sobbing ruefully into our Big Nuts. "They don't make 'em like that any more."
Well, now they do - as part of Tip Top's 70th birthday celebrations, apparently - although the remorseless march of inflation and the tragic effects of global warming on the chocolate lakes of coastal Karjikistan mean the new Joy Bar will be slightly smaller than its predecessor.
Then again, any joy in a gloomy world is cause for celebration, especially here where our lawmakers seem determined to Bar Joy wherever it rears its lovely head. The fact there's been a small but welcome reversal of that trend behoves us all to grasp the wrapper, put aside the gnashing of teeth and start counting some of our other blessings!
Its not a long list, true, but there are some joys we should embrace ...
* By the end of today (assuming the High Court hasn't had a conniption) the whole Taitodium debate will be over and we will finally know, once and for all, maybe, perhaps, depending on what happens next, whether this giant erection so desperately desired by a whopping 36 per cent of Aucklanders (Thursday's Herald-DigiPoll) will rise like a phoenix to revitalise the CBD and send Maersk to Tauranga.
* And if it does, we won't need to worry about that enormous gummint surplus thingee ever again because it'll all disappear down a London-style hole and, boy, will that be a load off our minds!
* We may not actually need any local government at all.
Let's face it, if - as a majority of Auckland City Councillors apparently believe - the salvation of the CBD depends entirely on an idea they didn't think of in a place they don't believe is quite the right spot, then they should probably admit they haven't got a clue and go into voluntary liquidation!
* Which leads inexorably to Wellington and more joyous news.
See, if the salvation and revitalisation of Auckland's CBD (already made redundant by giant suburban malls) absolutely depends on a building that will get used for only 10 per cent of the year, it's reasonable to suggest there'd be a identical outcome if Parliament were closed for 90 per cent of the time too!
* Which means there wouldn't be nearly as many laws to worry about. Whooopeeeee!
* Although we will still be overjoyed when this anti-smacking bill goes through.
Giving parents any choice at all is a very dangerous thing, which properly troubles all those list MPs who couldn't win an invitation to a pre-selection meeting for a real electorate race.
Choice makes adults worry and that's not good. Best pass a law and have done with it.
* Imagine the joy parents will feel when they realise that the lovely Sue Bedford knows better than them.
* Not to mention the daily rapture they experience sending their 14-year-olds off to school, comforted by the thought that loving teachers may be putting put those same children on the Pill without their knowledge or consent.
Shame on all those namby-pamby, wishy-washy, spavin-gutted human rights wafflers who insist that parents should be consulted on such matters, particularly since they are legally obliged to send their offspring to schools where other people can exercise untrammelled influence on the young lives in their care.
That's the sort of nonsense that gave us democracy in the first place.
* The other source of joy if this anti-smacking legislation goes through is that we will be able to give them a smack too - at the next election. Not to correct behaviour, mind. That would be wrong. Of course it would.
But we will be able to do it in order to save them from harm - at the hands of angry voters, for example - or to assert the electorate's parental authority.
* Moving to the world of literature, booklovers will be overjoyed to learn that Our Hager whom art in heaven will be able to give us our daily dirt. And he must be equally overjoyed to discover that possible criminal acts are no obstacle to profit in a capitalist economy. If only poor old O.J. Simpson could enjoy the same opportunity - but, then again, not everybody can be as enlightened as we are.
* And if none of that warms your cockles or gladdens your heart, then do not despair.
Just reach for a Joy Bar and marvel at the fact that in New Zealand today our greatest pleasures can be found in the freezer.
