AUTHOR Jenny Colgan's dog attracted the wrong sort of attention yesterday.

"A complete stranger just picked up my dog, nuzzled him, then declared he still had 'that new puppy smell'," Jenny told her 25,000 followers on Twitter. She added: "Dog owning is weird."

WE asked what conceivable smells could be marketed by footballers seeking to launch their own fragrance.

Russell Smith believes there's a market for a sour-grapes fragrance in Scotland regarding any success of England's national team.

Not content with that, he also offers:

* 'Grapes of wrath' fragrance for any future Rangers-Celtic encounter

* 'Sold a Lemon' fragrance, for use by anyone involved in the transfer market

* and a "pear-shaped" scent to commemorate Rangers' failure to gain promotion recently.

DAVID Donaldson, meanwhile, insists: "Friends who know about these things tell me that there are plans afoot for Wayne Rooney to launch a male scent called 'Granny Magnet'."

DAVID, incidentally, also touches on Kingsley, the scary new Partick Thistle mascot designed by artist David Shrigley.

"Shrigley is quite a literate sort of artist," he says, "so maybe he had the medical uses of thistle in mind when he came up with the Kingsley mascot for Thistle."

He thoughtfully encloses a passage from Wikipedia, which records that medieval writers thought that thistle could return hair to bald heads. In the early modern period, it was believed to be a remedy for headaches, plague, canker sores, vertigo, and jaundice."

Not that he's implying anything about Maryhill, mind ...

FURTHER to our story about the Glaswegian and the Norwegian tourists, John Cameron says the late, great Cliff Hanley was a wonderful font of knowledge on Glasgow inebriate banter. One story relates to Cliff emerging from a pub at chucking-out time and observing two inebriates in the adjacent lane. One was gripping the other firmly by the lapels and hissing threateningly: "Listen Wullie, if I've told ye once, I've told ye a hundred times - there are over thirty islands in the Japanese archipelago."

UP near Strachur, the fur has been flying.

The 'modern Scottish' Inver restaurant, on the shores of Loch Fyne, has been winning remarkable accolades, including a great review from our own Ron Mackenna.

A critic from a London-based newspaper raved about the place, too. She did, however, include a colourful reference to the "three women behind us, gingerly nibbling at their food with mouths like cats' a****." If they'd been expecting the menu from the building's former restaurant occupant, she added, they were "likely to have their world well and truly rocked."

Cue the following strongly-worded response on the paper's website: "What a lot of tosh! Cat's a*** women! what kind of a comment is that? (sexist git) I am one of these 'local women' and I can tell you, that what existed before was far superior to the pretencious [sic] and ludicrous bland mush that is being ladelled out ..."

We may not have heard the last of this one.