rivettingKateTaylor

The best medicine is hearing people laugh out loud. Really, really laugh. From the belly. The kind of laugh that makes you smile in spite of yourself.

The Tom and Jerry cartoon has my kids doing just that this morning. The two of them are having their Saturday morning relaxation in front of the box (relax, they are only allowed TV on the weekends) guffawing with laughter every 10 or 20 seconds.

And it is fantastic.

I am on the deck with a coffee and the Saturday morning paper (although it took me longer to read the Dymocks book brochure that it did to read HB Today). Sarah and Lachlan have run out a couple of times to regale me with tales of something that happened (as if I have not seen them many times before in the old World of Disney at 6pm on a Sunday!!!!)

While I am fresh thinking about HBToday, an old colleague of mine called Roger Moroney had a great twist to an Erebus story on the front page today. He had interviewed Don Wood, whose parents perished in the crash of Air NZ flight TE901 at Mount Erebus 30 years ago.

Mr Wood has the watch his father was wearing on the plane and it hasn’t gone since the crash… until yesterday.  No, not a story from the Twilight Zone, Roger reported. Mr Wood had taken the watch out, as he had done many times before, and placed it on the table. Roger wrote:

Don agreed for it to be used in a photograph, and after that he placed it back on the table and began talking about how he lost his parents on that flight. After a couple of minutes, he stopped talking and simply gazed down at the watch. “It’s going,” he said quietly. His wife Cheryl came in and told Don his hands were shaking. “That hasn’t gone for 30 years,” he said, pointing at it. Understandably it took a few minutes for him to get his thoughts back together as he watched the thin seconds hand of the watch go round.He said he had had the watch out many times through the years, and had once even tried to get it to go – but the winder appeared not to work and its hands had never moved. Until yesterday.

Freaky aye!

And last on my musings for today is the 40th celebration on TVNZ on Thursday of the introduction of One Network News (funny to watch TV3 by mistake last night (forgot to turn it over after Home and Away!) and see it was celebrating 20 years since its inception).

The old newsreaders reading the news were cool – especially Dougal Stevenson.

I loved this comment on a blog in the Dominion Post this morning (and on stuff.co.nz) by Jane Bowron. 

My favourite of the roundabout is Dougal. His voice is still authoritative. If there is an end-of- the-world broadcast kept in readiness for the final moments on Earth, I hope TVNZ has chosen Dougal to announce it. With his sense of humour he would probably add the codicil that, post-apocalypse, normal transmission will resume as soon as possible.

Very cool.

Enjoy your weekend – I plan to!