Shaggy Dog Comments...

Vintners in the Californian wine making area the Napa Valley, famed for its wines made from Pinot Blanc, Pinot Noir and Pinot Grigio grapes, have developed a new hybrid grape that acts as an anti-diuretic. It is expected to reduce the number of trips people have to make to the bathroom during the night. The new wine will be marketed as Pinot More.  

This is Shaggy's last column for some time. We're off to Sydney for six months - partly because we have another project to work on - a restaurant guide - but more importantly, Mrs Shaggy is about to throw a litter and since the kennel is in Sydney, we need to be there. No doubt you'll hear about the pup when they turn up and we'll try and pass on a bit of gossip from the big smoke down in Sydney. In the meantime, take care and be nice to each other.

New faces join the Echo team

Two new faces have joined The Echo team in 2005.

Anita Morton is our new gardening columnist. Anita was born in rural Western Australia, and has gardened her way across the nation. She is now living on five acres of rainforest near Uki. Anita's passion for gardening was sparked by her family's experiments with self-sufficiency in the 1970s, which have also led to her special interest in growing fruit and vegetables. She has also developed an interest in rainforest trees and enjoys the challenge of trying to grow plants from both the tropics and the temperate zone in her sub-tropical garden.

The Echo's new editorial cartoonist is David Pope, better known by his signature Heinrich Hinze. David has been drawing cartoons since the mid-1980s. His work has appeared in The Canberra Times, The Sun-Herald and each of the annual reviews of political cartooning produced by the National Museum of Australia.

David has received four 'Stanley' Awards for Media Art, for humorous illustration and editorial/political cartooning. He has also won four Rotary National Cartoon Awards, including 'Cartoon of the Year' and the 'People's Choice' in 2003, and best cartoon with a political theme (2001, 2004).

A bigger, brighter world

Shaggy's always had a soft spot for Big Things (our 2004 highlight was visiting the Big Lobster in Kingston, SA). Sports journalist David Clark has captured our obsessions with an amusing book that chronicles our national pastime of creating overgrown tourist attractions. Among the 120(!!!) Big Things he charts, the Northern Rivers features prominently - not only for the Big Prawn, but also for Nimbin's notorious Big Joint.

"The peripatetic Big Joint barely rated a mention when the Nimbin Chamber of Commerce and Lismore City Council teamed up recently to launch a new tourism campaign for the town. How dopey can you be?" he writes rather cheekily.

Clark also tells the intriguing history of the Big Prawn over four glorious pages. Council received 167 objections in the 1980s, but it was approved anyway. Clark cites Lismore architect James Lyon as a trenchant critic who said it would hit visitors "like a baseball bat between the eyes", and Ballina councillor Keith Johnson, who retorted "I'm quite sure they didn't have architects sitting in judgement on the Colossus of Rhodes, and if they had, there's a pretty fair chance they would have rejected it on the same grounds they rejected things like the Big Prawn."

Clark quotes the current owner, Sabto Panisi, saying the prawn is "a headache. It's not practical and it's good for nothing."

But then, the Greeks probably said the same thing about the Colossus of Rhodes.