There is exciting news that chief minister Andrew Barr is flirting with the possibility of (at last!) allowing our drab-looking city to be decorated with some billboards.
At their creative very best billboards can be witty and startling works of art. They can cheer up an otherwise drab cityscape in the same way in which some jazzy earrings or a rainbow-coloured beanie can enhance an otherwise average human face and head.
Discerning billboard enthusiasts post galleries of great billboards online. Readers whose minds are ajar on this subject might like to begin their homework with the stimulating website 50 Extraordinary and Attractive Billboards.
The usual puritanical "keep Canberra the way it's always been and as little like a real city, especially wicked Melbourne, as possible" miserabilists have been quick to condemn the government's billboard flirtations.
The Greens' planning committee chair Caroline Le Couteur has moaned that "We love living in Canberra, it's the bush capital of Australia and such a liveable city. Not being bombarded with big business advertising 24/7 is part of what makes our city such a great place to live."
This newspaper's fogey-dominated letters pages are giving off high-pitched whining noises about what a catastrophe billboards would be.
The government should leap to defy fogeys and to reassure the rest of us by promising us the ACT's billboards will always all be creative rippers that enhance the city's looks.
Ms Le Couteur snaps at "big business advertising" but students of extraordinary and attractive billboards can report that major corporations can when required commission great billboards.
And so when you Google galleries of the great billboards you'll find Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Calvin Klein and the toiletries giant Ponds billboards among them.
A Chicago billboard for McDonald's fresh salads has the giant letters of the words "Fresh Salads" made of (surely synthetic) cabbages and lettuces.
Terrific Ponds' billboards in the USA and elsewhere include a towering "Cleans Pores – Fights Pimples" message. One engaging Ponds' "Cleans Pores – Fights Pimples" classic has, poignantly, an embarrassed, pimpled young woman pulling up a corner of the billboard, as if it is a sheet, to cover her pimpled face.
In the US there are Donatos Pizza billboards in which the portrayed piping hot pizzas give off actual steam!
Some of the great billboards do have a little cheerful vulgarity (a steaming pizza!) about them. But chaste and drab Canberra needs some vulgarity. Our repressed city is like a potentially beautiful young Amish woman forbidden to use even a little makeup, to wear even one modest item of bling.
Giant billboards advertising underwear featuring 20-metres-tall semi-naked men and women (Calvin Klein and our very own AussieBum company specialise in these) would enhance the average commute to work along, say, presently dreary Gungahlin Drive, Tuggeranong Parkway and Belconnen Way.
My enthusiasm for pulse-quickening billboards like these undies ones dates from going to see, in my impressionable pubescence, the just-released film Boccaccio 70.
Now acknowledged as a towering classic it features Frederico Fellini's surreal drama in which local wowser Dr Antonio makes a fuss about a newly-installed billboard. It displays a huge blonde bombshell (it is pneumatic blonde bombshell Anita Ekberg) using sex appeal to appeal to everyone to Drink More Milk.
One night she comes to life and, a 15-metres tall Amazon with a cleavage like a tantalising chasm of warm, Nordic flesh, pursues the tiny human moralist to tease, tempt and torment him. Serve him right.
In my wild erratic fancy I see fogey Canberrans objecting to the undie billboards. Then one night the lithe, pneumatic Goliaths and Goliathettes in the billboards come to life to good-naturedly startle and tease this city's anti-billboard, anti-progress Dr Antonios. And serve them (the Dr Antonios) right.