In our picture the imprisoned Rapunzel (Nicolette Suttor) languishes not in a tower, as she does in the Grimms' unimaginative version, but, because this is Canberra, on the top floor of "an abandoned multistorey office block".

Memorable literary flourishes in National Library librarian Sonja Barfoed's script included a frustrating search for something being "like hunting head lice in a preschool". Then, as the earth rumbled magically at the foot of Rapunzel's office block "the ground was starting to tremble, like a pimple on the verge of popping".

This Rapunzel was staged by The Library Tribe in support of the library's Nicolette Suttor. She really does have Rapunzelish knee-length hair (unseen in our picture, but in the play a voluminous "fire-hazard" filling the cell behind her, so that the only room left for her is at the cell's window) she will soon have shaved off for the Leukaemia Foundation's World's Greatest Shave. Go to worldsgreatestshave.com to see how you can help this fine charity.

Mention above of literary flourishes paves the way for an excuse for a quotation from a "Banjo" Paterson ballad.

Doting readers will remember how Friday's column dwelled upon an ancient ballad The Shearing At Cuppacumbalong, published in the Queanbeyan Age in 1876. Canberra folk music ensemble Hither And Yon has just set it to music. The ballad is about shearing and contains the sentiment that in the Cuppacumbalong "no man might tomahawk" and that if he did he got the sack.

Hither And Yon research has revealed that to "tomahawk" was to shear sheep in a careless, slapdash way. On Friday we had fun with this lovely old expression, urging its restoration for use in our own times. A dog groomer might advertise himself as someone guaranteed never to "tomahawk" a client's precious english springer spaniel.

All this tomahawking rang some bells for some readers and they point us to Paterson's clever and charming shearing shed ballad Those Names. It opens thus:

The shearers sat in the firelight, hearty and hale and strong,
After the hard day's shearing, passing the joke along:
The "ringer" that shore a hundred, as they never were shorn before,
And the novice who, toiling bravely, had tommy-hawked half a score.

Moving on, let us drink to the chances of Hither And Yon singing The Shearing at Cuppacumbalong as Australia's entry in Eurovision 2015 (for if we're not pro-active about this we'll get the insufferable Kasey Chambers singing an Australian song in a fake Texan voice). And let us drink that toast using Trevor Wilkinson's new, much-praised-here Canberra bus shelter mugs.

But even as those iconic wondermugs go on sale (we know of one devotee who has just bought four of them!) we have had two more reports of how the newer, Adshel bus shelters can be a hazard for birds.

Wilkinson's mugs are endearing representations of our old, iconic, squat, round, concrete bus shelters. The newer, characterless shelters, which one can't imagine giving any inspiration to artist Wilkinson, are glassy and transparent. As previously reported readers are finding bird corpses at the shelters. Fowls are flying helter-skelter into the glass.

Now a reader reports being in one of these bus shelters near the University of Canberra when, "suddenly there was a very, very loud bang behind us, just as if someone had kicked a football into the glass".

Everyone in the shelter spun around, "and there lying on the ground was a crested pigeon. The poor thing had obviously flown into the glass at top speed. It just quivered for a while and then the poor thing died."

Of course urban living is full of unavoidable hazards for wildlife and we are not about to use this awesomely powerful, opinion-forming column to call for the replacement of the shelters. But we have asked the office of Shane Rattenbury, the Minister for Bus Shelters, if anything can be done, in what is after all a bird-rich city, to make the shelters' glass walls look less invitingly invisible. Perhaps, too, extra thought can be given to their siting so that they're not put in front of somewhere birds might want to zoom to.

Canberra's crested pigeons are, by the way, like Canberra's koels, a good example of how some bird species will drift into bailiwicks they've never lived in before. Your columnist is so old and gnarled that I can remember not only when there was no Canberra Raiders football team but also when there were no crested pigeons in Canberra. The first glimpses of the pigeons here (methinks in the early 1980s) caused great excitement among the twitching classes. Now these attractive fowls are everywhere in Canberra, sometimes occurring as victims and meals in our popular occasional series of readers' pictures of birds killing and eating things.

The twitching wisdom in the 1980s was that these pigeons were once creatures of the west and never got any closer to Canberra than, say, Cowra. Then, it is said, drought drove some of these seed eaters in our direction and they began to show up in Canberra, first at places like stables where (joy!) there was some spilled grain.