The intriguing picture emerged during a current archaeological dig into the archives of The Canberra Times. Your dear daily newspaper is about to undergo some announced changes of and improvements to its looks (in particular we are going from being a burly broadsheet to being exquisitely compact). And so there has been some nostalgic newsroom fossicking into this paper's past.

The British government gave us a gift of $500,000, to be spent on a carillon, to honour Canberra's 1963 Golden Jubilee. A design competition for the carillon structure ensued. The winner, the shy, plain design of the Australian firm of architects, Cameron, Chisholm and Nicol of Perth, was announced in April, 1968.

Now our archaeological dig in our newsroom library has found that The Canberra Times has pictures of the losing designs. All of the images prepared by the entrants show the imagined design flatteringly in place, juxtaposed with the lake and sometimes with the lake's Canberra surrounds. Six designs were entertained. The pom-dominated panel of judges was Lord Holford, a past president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Sir John Overall, Commissioner of the NCDC, and Eric Bedford, chief architect of the British Ministry of Public Building and Works.

Had the winner been a "people's choice" instead of an experts' choice the amusing "beehive" entry with its sci-fi qualities might well have won. We will probably never know why the experts rejected it but it wouldn't surprise if it had something do to do with its quirkiness and showiness. In the 1960s (as today) everything in the national capital must err on the side of the unobtrusive and dignified. The "beehive" would have been a thing to go "Gosh!" at whenever seeing it, enhanced by a certain slant of light on a foggy Canberra morning.

Perhaps it's just us but as fans and champions of fine street art, fine mural art, we think that the plain concrete flanks of the National Carillon cry out for some fine decoration.

Of course, given that this is an important public building, and a gift, we can never unleash just any old fly-by-night feral street artist on the Carillon (although as a general rule we are supportive of fly-by-night feral street artists).

Instead, a Gang-gang government, swept to power at October 15s ACT elections by popular acclaim, will invite a street artist of proven greatness to decorate the Carillon. One candidate invited will be the Belgian genius Smates and it is his recently completed, underwater, diving dog, giving glory to a four-storey wall in Mechelen in Belgium, that decorates today's column.

We found it first at BowWow Times http://bowwowtimes.com the popular online magazine for dog lovers, and our excuse for using it here today is to mention this weekend's major BowWowow event in Canberra.

This weekend, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, sees the Advance International Dog Weekend extravaganza. One organiser (and breeder of God's chosen breed, the English springer spaniel) Dogs ACT's Fiona Quinlan pants that "Never before has an event like this been staged in Australia, let alone in Canberra".

All happening indoors at EPIC there is to be a prestigious series of events which include three International conformation dog shows, Flyball tournaments and much, much more. Dog lovers would be barking (and drooling) mad to miss it. Information about the event is unleashed on the Dogs Act website www.dogsact.org.au

As just mentioned we expect there to be a Gang-gang government after the October 15 ACT elections but when you, the people, turn out to vote for us you won't expect to have to queue to do it. Nor will any of us expect to have to queue when on Saturday we turn up early to put Senator Zed Seselja last, doing it early so that the pleasure this gives lasts us all day.

But in the US, Deborah Friedell relates in a just-published essay,* queueing and voting are inseparable. She has become a British citizen and we imagine that the Brits are the planet's quintessential queuers, but her experience has been that there is no queueing to vote in Britain. Meanwhile in the US, she reports with a blizzard of statistics, millions always wait more than an hour to vote.

"Just recently in Maricopa County, Arizona, people waited more than five hours to vote in the primaries.

"But that's hardly a record. In 2004 students in Gambier, Ohio, queued for more than 10 hours. In Cobb County, Georgia, in 2008, people waited 12 hours; a woman collapsed in the sun."

She finds that at US elections many of those who end up not voting do in fact show up but then with lives to live get tired of waiting. In the 2012 presidential elections it's thought that at least 700,000 voters gave up because of queuing fatigue. Multitudes of Americans don't even turn out at all, sure from experience that the queues will be dauntingly long.

Australians are not a queueing race, and to have to queue to vote would be, for a people already so cantankerous about its politicians, an insult added to the injury of having to vote at all for these slithering, wriggly, narcissistic things.

The London Review Of Books, June 2, 2016.