KEY POINTS:
Every industry has its own incontrovertible truths. In engineering, the bridges must stand up. In catering, the size of the bill must be in inverse proportion to the size of the meal. And, in journalism, the exception must rule.
It's the single disaster in a sea of uneventfulness
that leads the bulletin. Even the most junior of junior reporters knows that news is a remorseless chronicle of the woes of the world.
They know their superiors won't rush them to some remote location, the name of which none of them had previously heard, in order to stand before a peaceful scene and tell the nation: "All the cavers had a great time here today!"
That's not how news works. We're supposed to be alarmed by it. Left a little discombobulated. Yet, perhaps by design, more likely by accident, something strange and exhilarating has happened recently. Something guaranteed to put more joie in our vivre.
Here we are, 11 days into the new year and already there've been two news stories about which we can all feel rapturously happy.
Or three if you include the Australian cricket team very satisfactorily confirming our worst suspicions by cheating and whingeing their way to a victory they didn't deserve.
And while it may not be desirable for people to behave obnoxiously, we still derive shameful satisfaction when they do. Especially when we've predicted that they would.
So the Aussies have done us a favour. They've made us happy, simply by living down to expectations. To hear the pouting Ponting snivelling about sledging brings a perverse joy.
We all know that being bad sports is what Australians do best. We all know they've brought sledging of winter Olympic proportions into cricket.
Glenn Turner is just one who could confirm that. He endured revolting insults from some of Mr Ponting's predecessors, words much more wounding than anything Harbhajan Singh may have said.
And while times may have changed and our tolerance of vileness diminished, tricky Ricky would do well to remember how long Australia condoned what he now condemns.
As we would do well to remember every interminable, self-congratulatory movie awards show we've ever sat through merely because someone insisted on seeing what frocking awful clothes the stars were wearing when we contemplate - with unbridled glee - the marvellous news that this year's Golden Globe Awards will not be televised thanks to the Hollywood writers' strike.
And the $10,000,000 a movie actors who won't cross the $1,000,000 a script writers' picket line. Whatever you wish to call it - plastic surgery socialism or Mercedes Marxism - this truly heroic display of worker solidarity has not only cancelled the scheduled remake of masterpieces like Conan the Barbarian Vs Son of Batman 3 but also spared the rest of us the horror of watching a nigh indigestible show.
Indeed, with a little more match girl grit, we won't be getting the Academy Awards either! Oh, joy and wonder! Writers of the world unite. We have nothing to lose but our brains. Assuming you go back to work.
So please stand firm, good scribes in unity bound. Fight on - and fierce, forsooth - for the 2.3 per cent residual royalties on overseas DVD sales in markets such as Bangladesh that is your inalienable right.
More power to your fingers, brothers and sisters. Long may they stand idle and our screens remain empty.
Like the gates in Greymouth where once a War Memorial stood.
For it is there, a world away from the red carpet, that we find our third and final comfort. Provided, ironically, by people with no regard at all for tradition or history or, dare we say it, taonga.
Confronted with a tangible remembrance of real blood, sweat and tears the fine Mawherans displayed an exhilarating contempt for stereotype.
Instead of requiring that reverence for tradition and respect for the past (not to mention a little financial compensation for that which has gone), these liberating non-conformists did precisely what greedy, grasping developers have so often done before. They pulled the damn things down!
"Get rid of them!" they said. "They don't fit in with our new mall." Okay. Fair enough, Mr Mawhera. Bring the wreckers in at dawn. Chuck a bit of history in a paddock.
That's fine. You're doing the rest of us a favour. Your emancipated act has instantly rendered redundant the sort of cringing obeisance that's been endemic in Outer Roa for so long.
If you don't worry about the past, we won't either. Let's all bring in the bulldozers. Let's all be Hollywood writers and cast off the shackles of historic oppression. Let's all be Ricky Pontings and cast aside the spirit of the game.
And let's all count our blessings. Heck, we've had three in a fortnight.
And while that may be bad news for News Readers, it's great for us news readers!
