And so I leap to urge The Canberra Times to imitate the New Yorker magazine and appoint a suitably qualified COVID-Vaccine Ethicist. He or she would authoritatively address readers' dilemmas.

Here's the helpful kind of advice being dispensed in the New Yorker's ethics page. A reader in Buffalo writes:

"Dear COVID-Vaccine Ethicist,

"My father is seventy-four years old [and unwell]. Clearly, he is in a high-risk group. Yet he refuses to get the vaccine, saying that he doesn't believe it's safe. I would like to rent a windowless van and recruit some friends to stage a kidnapping - snatching my father from the street, pulling a hood over his head, and driving him to an abandoned warehouse, where he would be injected with 'truth serum' (i.e., the COVID vaccine) before being dumped back where we found him and warned to keep his mouth shut. My wife thinks someone could get hurt. I think the benefits outweigh the risks. Who's right?"

"I'm with you," the Covid-Vaccine Ethicist reassures.

"If your father won't listen to reason, abducting him and injecting him under duress during what he believes is a kidnapping is the next logical step. As the population ages and more of us are forced into the role of caretaker, I'm afraid such difficult choices will only become more common. None of us wants to shove a terrified, elderly parent into an unmarked vehicle driven by masked strangers. But sometimes love leaves us no choice."

Meanwhile I'm indebted to another New Yorker columnist for his brilliant proposal, "Let's unleash the pharmaceutical industry [getting it to produce vaccines against] societal ills that go way beyond the coronavirus."

Few of his New York-centric suggestions are appropriate to Canberra and Canberrans (although his proposed vaccine giving the rest of us herd immunity against "Karens" would be a boon).

And so, parochially, for us I urge Big Pharma to work on vaccines that would resist the viruses that cause NIMBYism (a cruel affliction of so many bourgeois Canberrans) and that will enable anxious older Canberrans to fight their phobic fears (for example of the expansion of light rail) of 21st-century change and progress, of alterations to the way Canberra was before self-government.

Go to it, Johnson & Johnson! Get a wriggle on, AstraZeneca!

Mention above of ethical dilemmas brings me to a fraught ethical dilemma of my own.

I ask guidance from this column's ethically-astute readers. Here is my letter to you.

Dear reader-ethicist,

Always a poor sleeper, I am especially sleepless at the moment as I agonise over the scandal-driven plights of the beloved Morrison government and of the beloved Royal Family. Usually I would go back to sleep after an hour or so of worry but presently my leafy, aspirational neighbourhood is being rocked all night by two Boobook owls relentlessly shouting "Boobook! Boobook!" to one another (how banal and impoverished their conversations!) for hours on end. I swear the closest owl makes as much noise as a barking dog.

I am usually a bird lover, and usually treasure the fact that this city is a Bush Capital alive with native creatures. But with these owls robbing me of my essential sleep I wonder if I might be morally/environmentally forgiven if I try to drive them away (there is ample woody bushland up on nearby Red Hill where they would be just as happy as they inexplicably are in my cul-de-sac) with a campaign of shouting at them, shining torches on them, throwing things (nothing sharp, only soft toys, say, or underwear, or soft tennis balls) at them, training a hose on them?

What can I do?

Yours wearily and sincerely,

Wide-Awake in Woden.

Wide-Awake In Woden's passing mention of the scandals tormenting the Morrison government enables me to segue to how in the media reporters are somehow never able to report that Christian Porter is denying the allegations him of rape without reporting that he is "strenuously denying" them or "vigorously denying" them.

Quite apart from the clichéd uses of these hairy old adverbs there is the implied idea that a denial made with some muscular oomph about it, a clanking, steam-powered, stampeding rhinoceros of a denial, is somehow especially impressive and more likely to be sincere than less demonstrative, more softly-spoken denials.

But is it?

What if an accused is someone by nature shy and retiring, someone not given to shows of emotional oomph, of fervent fireworks.

Some of us, resisting terrible accusations but being temperamentally incapable of carrying on like pork chops or Hooray Henrys, would be seen and heard to be only shyly or quietly or demurely or meekly denying them.

Would this, in the court of public opinion, stamp us as being as guilty as hell? I fear it might.

Funnily enough, although Christian Porter's denials are now always being reported as strenuous and vigorous ones in fact the only public denials any of us have seen him give, those at his now famous press conference, did not look and sound strenuous or vigorous at all.

Their tone misreported, they came across as the diffident and shy, even meek denials of an unhappy man anxious not to be seen to be showing any unattractive cocksureness and swagger.

Sometimes, alas, journalists do not have vocabularies generous enough to enable then to properly describe anything that is nuanced and complex. I wonder if one day there may be a vaccine to help them overcome that affliction?