Tuesday's column, co-authored with the help of Leroy, a Brittany Spaniel, reported the launch of Canberra's first donations-for-dogs bin.
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Installed in front of the supermarket at Ainslie shops, it invites donations of dog foods and treats, which will be passed on to ACT Rescue and Foster (ARF).
No one will, no one should, put donations of peanut butter in the Ainslie bin but Cleveland-based dog-loving and fun-loving photographer Greg Murray has created a series of portraits of dogs that have just eaten peanut butter and are wondering what they think of it. Of course dogs really can and do disgustingly eat everything first and then think about it later, sometimes with just these sorts of unconsciously comical expressions (the frowns of bewildered gourmets), on their faces.
Murray was careful as we all must be not to give dogs peanut butter containing artificial sweeteners.
There is a gallery of the pictures and an interview with Murray via the always-engaging Bored Panda blog. http://www.boredpanda.com/hilarious-expressions-of-dogs-eating-peanut-butter/
Dogs chase, chew and eat tennis balls (Slazengers are their favourites) and will always enrich an afternoon of social tennis, given the chance.
There are no dogs in Augustus Jones' circa 1900 photograph taken at the tennis court at Lade Vale in the bush somewhere near Yass. But the travelling professional photographer took necessarily formal and highly-posed pictures that careering free-range dogs would have disrupted, and it wouldn't surprise if on this afternoon there were players' dogs nearby, straining at tethers.
This is another of the works of Augustus Jones to which Ray McJannett, a native of the Gunning region, has alerted us. He came across an amazing collection of 360 glass plate negatives of Jones' photographs of the people of our region. They belong to Daphne Hjort of Yass, Jones' granddaughter.
McJannett advises that this very tennis court is still there today, unused and mouldering away.
Few ruins are more evocative than an old, abandoned tennis court, the ghostly silence contrasting with the gay noises (tennis players are famous for their gaiety) with which the premises once rang.
McJannett says that there is not now and probably never was a hamlet at Lade Vale, so this rough facility (look at its primitive lines made of rope or tape) was always remote. He is sure that people who met to play tennis there probably had to make considerable horse-enabled pilgrimages.
Look at the gut-strung racquets the size and shape of snowshoes! Look at the cumbersome, flesh-hiding clothes the women had to play in! But as McJannett has previously pointed out, there was an element of dressing-up in one's finery for appointments with Jones and his camera. Notice how the gentlemen players are all wearing neckties. So perhaps after Jones had packed up his instruments these damsels, these bush Sharapovas, were able to shed at least their spectacular bonnets before they got into a serious afternoon's tennising.
Tennis is in the doldrums in Australia, and so it comes as no surprise that the Infinity Towers project at the Gungahlin Town Centre (the subject of Wednesday's towering column) will not have tennis courts among its glittering facilities. It will of course as reported have one of those swish infinity swimming pools, creations not dreamt of in the imaginations of Augustus Jones and his tennis players.
In Wednesday's item, in which we rejoiced at just how un-Canberranly towering the Towers will be, we ran out of room to explain that this is not really, alas, a portent of skyscrapers to come. Geocon managing director Nick Georgalis explained to us at Tuesday's launch that the Towers are able to be so lofty (20 and 22 storeys respectively, and reaching to 692 metres above sea level) only because when the site was purchased five years ago there were no height restrictions at Gungahlin. Today there are restrictions, meaning that Gungahlin will never have a Manhattany look.
But, continuing to chase and to fetch today's doggy theme, Geocon advises that the Towers will be "pet-friendly". This is great because while not all dogs are fond of peanut butter, they are all fond of sweeping views.
Those of you furnishing your apartments at Infinity Towers might like, for attention-grabbing pictures on your upmarket walls, some of the classy photo-compositions of Freddy Fabris.
His Renaissance motor mechanics, arranged in poses made famous by the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rembrandt, are especially wonderful. Today's column reproduces, with rapt admiration, his midwest garage workshop version of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam.
His midwest garage workshop version of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper may make the Vatican gasp, what with its last supper foods being chips and hamburgers, and Our Redeemer's head being framed by the "halo" of a hub cap.
There is a gallery of Fabris' Renaissance mechanics and an interview with the artist online at My Modern Met.
