Well, almost nothing, really, except that in recent days both of these young people have kindled adulation in the bosoms of the Canberrans who have rocked up to see them.

This columnist, watching the duchess (and her duke) at close quarters last week, and then the Pitkanen-enriched CBR on Saturday night, felt no excitement at all over the royals but (as the CBR Brave beat the Ice Dogs) extreme delight over the Finn. We all did. He'd kept the Dogs out. At the end of the game, with the Canberra fans in raptures, had I been able to get close enough (but he was mobbed) I might even have made a fool of myself by kissing his helmeted head.

The point of this meander is that we marvelled in Monday's column (to mixed reactions) at how it can be that the Cambridges have so much appeal for so many.

From the Canberra crowds attracted by them, people were calling out ''We love you!'' to the duchess and then gibbering among themselves: ''Isn't she beautiful!'', ''Isn't she gorgeous!'', ''She's so natural!'', ''So sincere!''. But it often seemed to this columnist that the women gibbering were at least as beautiful, gorgeous, natural and sincere as the upper-class object of their working-class adulation.

But there I was at the Phillip rink, gibbering, about a Finnish goaltender, sentiments only a teeny bit more blokey than ''Isn't he beautiful!'', ''Isn't he gorgeous!''

What this means, we level-headed diagnose, is that we can't manage to adore anyone only because, like Kate, he or she is famous. We do have an adoration gene, but to flick its switch in us, that certain someone has to be able to do something for us to admire or enjoy.

Kate has done nothing, really, save marry into a royal family. It's easy to like the gel (easier still to feel sorry for her; she has a degree from a very good university and might have had an actual career instead of taking the unfulfilling path she's chosen), but adoring her seems too hard. Pitkanen is accomplished in a thrilling sport, a bringer of great joy to sports fans. Adoring him feels effortlessly easy.

One of the many women we would gladly cross the road to meet (something we cannot say about the Duchess of Cambridge) is Canberra photographer and blogger Mel Edwards. Here, the latest addition to her blog, is her photograph of what she says in the caption is the ''NASA Communications Satellite Buildings, Echo Project, USA, August 1960''.

But wait! In her blog Nah, It's Canberra she explores Canberra's rich diversities, making the point that there are Canberra objects, places, phenomena and certain slants of light on winter afternoons that, when photographed, you'd swear were taken elsewhere in the world. And so, nah, this isn't the NASA Communications Satellite Buildings in 1960. ''It's the ANU's UNA, the astronomy-inspired sculpture [in the new science precinct] by Wolfgang Buttress, April 2014''.

The Australian National University campus, bless it, has become a fine sculpture garden. While in Canberra at large the philistines make a government-intimidating fuss every time a piece of public art is mooted, the ANU just quietly acquires works and installs them. It installs them often in obscure places where only the people who work nearby, or intrepid explorers, such as Edwards, or hopelessly lost arts undergraduates (known for their poor sense of direction) see them.

The two-tonne UNA, which few rank-and-file Canberrans will ever see, is discreetly exciting. It is described as ''a polished four-metre diameter, stainless-steel sphere, featuring 9000 laser and hand-cut perforations, which represent the stars visible to the naked eye in the southern hemisphere, sized according to their luminosity''.

Now that the richly plumaged Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have flown away to their natural habitat and we can all return to our senses, it is time to remind readers that 2014 is the year of the Gang-Gang survey. Even the birds themselves are talking about it.

The fabled cockatoo is the ACT's faunal emblem and its presence here in Canberra is, like the presence of the CBR Brave ice-hockey team, one of the unique blessings of life in this city.

Yet the species is enveloped in mystery (we don't even know if they nest in Canberra).

The Canberra Ornithologists Group is co-ordinating it all and every Canberran who sees any of the species can make a useful citizen-science contribution to the survey. Fly to the COG website canberrabirds.org.au, where you will find how the survey is going so far and how you can contribute to it. Please, though, when you are detailing where your sightings have been made (vital to the survey), try to be geographically specific. ''At my nan's'' or ''On my neighbour's gazebo'', is well-meaning but vague.