Just before the keenly-awaited collision of the CBR Brave and Melbourne Ice ice-hockey teams, ACT Minister for Education and Training, Joy Burch, teetered out on to the ice on a red carpet. A tiny figure next to the towering Vikings of the two respective captains, she performed a symbolic dropping of the puck.

Quite why she was there was not clear at the time. It was announced, but it is typical of the characterful decay of the stadium that nothing ever announced on its ancient and inefficient PA system is intelligible to the average ear.-sr Perhaps it is in Finnish, in honour of the Finnish imports that grace the Australian game.

But whatever her reason for being there (and the Minister's office has since explained to us that as Minister for Education and Training she is the minister for the Canberra Institute of Technology, a sponsor of the Brave) the chanters were taking the opportunity to call for a new rink. The present one is an old, small and dilapidated.

This gives it a kind of special, almost Queanbeyanesque shabby charm, but it is increasingly an embarrassingly unCanberresque facility in a city, a national capital, that bristles with swish and glittering new venues. Much more typically Canberran are, say, the brilliant purpose-built stadium used by the Canberra Cavalry baseball team and the new state-of-the-art Woden Athletics Field.

Can we look forward to the promise of a new rink, one where the PA system speaks to us in clear English instead of in quaint Finnish, as a government or opposition election promise as the 2016 elections loom?

Necessarily cold at the Phillip Ice Rink it is Siberianly cold outdoors in Canberra at this time of year. And in celebration of our city's unique frostiness we bring you on today's page Gina Kikos' atmospheric picture of frost in action. When the poet Coleridge wrote of how "the frost performs its secret ministry" this is what he was describing.

Gina Kikos reports "I took this photo .... on a frosty Sunday morning at the Yacht Club. It was minus 5C at 7.30am that morning. It had warmed up to 2C at 9am when I took this photo."

Canberra's all-powerful Powerful Owl, its feathers brilliantly insulating it against the worst a Canberra winter can fling at it, has been much-reported and much-depicted here (often with grisly pictures of it with its latest kills). But here is a little story of a powerless owl.

Some Holt householders have sent us a photograph (alas, unreproduceable) of a big, cement, garden ornament owl in their garden, with, perched on its big head, a real live magpie.

Noting the way in which the Turner 'Powl' hunts and kills possums (lots of the grisly pictures have been of the owl, high up in a tree, juxtaposed with gory possum remains) the Holt folk wondered if the installation in the garden of a big garden-ornament owl might scare away their home's persistent, troublesome possum.

This was an inventive experiment "But it didn't work," our Holt correspondent confesses.

"The possum brushed past it where we left it on the porch rail. And obviously [a magpie perched on its head] it holds no terrors for the magpies either."

Perhaps, though, a better owl might work. Doing a little research we find that the online garden owl industry is varied and considerable. Just as there are bobble head Jesus dolls (we have one) there are even (as pictured here) alive-looking head-swivelling electrical garden owls.

While with raptors, your columnist has just been to old haunts in England's lovely East Anglia. Visiting the fabled Castle Museum in Norwich to look at exhibits about the famous dead, and especially Queen Boadicea, instead I got distracted by living things.

A peregrine family (of the same falcon species that enriches the ACT) is nesting nearby, high up on Norwich's soaring Norman cathedral. A camera beams all-day live coverage of the sites' goings-on down to a big screen inside the nearby castle. This is, with at the moment two fluffy chicks in the nest and with the dashing parents coming and going, transfixing in the extreme.

Might an ACT peregrine eyrie, be, somehow (it's true location kept a secret), beamed to us?

But back to Canberra, the Norwich of the South, where Monday's column's diatribe against Canberra's residents' groups (wondering why they always whinge and never rejoice) has proven very popular with readers.

This hardens my resolve that when by popular acclaim I am swept to the Editorship of this major metropolitan newspaper, we will ignore everything that residents' groups do or say, at least until they grow up.

One suspects that their memberships are tiny and unrepresentative, that the activists are just a few arch FWWs (First World Whingers).

Here is an idea for residents' groups like the Kingston/Barton Residents Group, currently in the news for feeling outrage about the Manuka Oval attracting crowds that make crowd noises (horror!). Why not revamp, renaming yourselves as something like the Kingston/Barton Appreciation Group? If you issue, say, 10 press releases a year, making six or seven of them paeons of grateful praise of the many life-enriching things about your bailiwick, then the other three or four a year that point to any genuine concerns will be more likely to be taken seriously by us all.