The show is some weeks away but we mention it now for two good reasons. One is an inability to resist bringing you this exciting picture of "Elvis" (it's four metres wide and a metre high) juxtaposed with its creator LEGO professional Ryan McNaught.

The other is that Canberra's Brick Expo is always so fabulously popular that organiser David Boddy wants us to warn LEGO zealots that to get in to the event they must buy tickets, pronto. LEGO and its creations have an eerie allure for people of all ages. They flock to LEGO extravaganzas and last year people just showing up without tickets had to be turned away, a harrowing thing for them, especially when they'd come a very long way.

"In 2013 we were overrun," Boddy recalled on Wednesday.

"Tickets sold out weeks in advance."

This year's Brick Expo will be on August 23 and 24 at the Hellenic Club, Woden. Tickets are now on sale. All proceeds from the Brick Expo go to support PaTCH – Paediatrics at The Canberra Hospital.

Everything about Expo ticketing is at www.brickexpo.com.au

One of Floriade's many weaknesses (for this columnist, not a fan of the lurid, unAustralian festival) has always been its ruthless exclusion of dogs.

We smuggled our dog into last year's Floriade (see picture). But other than his secret romp not a single exuberant, spontaneous dog has cheered up the tightly corseted artificiality of the dog-unfriendly festival since fences were put around it in 1999.

And so we pricked up our ears (a little pun there, for the column's brighter readers) at Wednesday's announcement by Minister Andrew Barr that this year the RSPCA will be one of Floriade's charity partners. Surely, we thought, this must mean a relaxing of the ban on dogs.

Alas, all it turns out to mean is that dogs will be allowed in for just one day, a Dogs Day Out at Floriade on Tuesday 7 October.

But RSPCA ACT’s contribution to this Floriade will include a Reflection Memorial, allowing visitors to pay tribute to pets that are now in Heaven.

Tens of thousands of mature-age Canberrans will recall finding true love (that many-spendoured thing) at the Starlight Drive-In at Watson.

Alas, all that remains of that institution now is its picturesquely decaying sign, artfully immortalised (in our picture) by Trevor Dickinson (another candidate, we think, for the award of the Keys to the City).

But now, at last, the fabled drive-in has been immortalised in fiction. It is the subject of Sean Costello's latest Capital Yarn, freshly posted on his Capital Yarns blog.

Because we love this city we have been eloquent in praise of Capital Yarns at which Costello invites the challenge of our flinging him three Canberra things to weave into a short story. In this case he was given "Starlight Drive in at Watson + 70s Valiant + Car Load of Kids." From this he has woven, cleverly and humanely, the story How I Met Your Grandfather.

Columnists don't cry but some of the wussy among you, your heart (and all your other giblets as well) warmed by How I Met Your Grandfather, may need a tissue when you read it.

Meanwhile the author is at work on our own challenge to him of a story that embraces CSO maestro Nicholas Milton, CBR Brave goalkeeper Petri Pitkanen (two more worthy candidates for the Keys to our grateful city) and our faunal emblem the Gang-gang cockatoo.

Give your search engine "Capital Yarns" and it will take you to that highly readable place.

We take Canberra's and Australia's black swans a bit for granted, unlike the first Europeans to see the sooty species, which astonished 17th-century Dutch matelots arriving on our continent's west coast. They thought a black swan as improbable as a blue moon, and suspected witchcraft.

Here from the restlessly updating, Canberra-promoting Human Brochure website is Housh Fallah's recent portrait of a Lake Ginninderra swan. It reminds us of how wondrous Cygnus atratus is and of why they would have startled the Dutchmen. One wonders if any of the sailors, like today's shameful Dutch footballers, fell to the ground, writhing, feigning more horror than they really felt.

There was an early appreciation of the swans in our own region. In 1867 squire Campbell of Duntroon (perhaps thinking all black swans were his in the way that all white swans in England belong to the Queen) put an advertisement in the Queanbeyan Age seething that "one of my black swans was shot on the river [the Molonglo]".

"I hereby offer a reward of one hundred pounds for information that will lead to the conviction of the miscreant."