The South China Morning Post pushed the dragon boat out this year. Quarry Bay has a team T-shirt to prove it. Those other hard-rowing heavyweights, RTHK, would have been on the water too, but for a small administrative error. The trouble is, while we in the print media take the written word seriously, the denizens of Broadcast Drive are sometimes prone to extemporise. That is all very fine on the radio. It's not so good on an application form. Presenter Harvey Crump submitted the paperwork for the RTHK dragon boat team. He was supposed to apply under the expatriate men's section. He applied for the expatriate women's category. An understandable mistake. The RTHK crew, like ours, was supposed to be a mixed team. But check out the rules, and what do you find? A men's team is allowed to include have women, but a women's team may not sneak in any muscular chaps to help power the boat on its way. (A task here for the Equal Opportunities Commission, once Commissioner Fanny Cheung Mui-ching decides what its job is). Still, all was not lost. The truth is the RTHK staff couldn't get a boatload together anyway and had to advertise on air for volunteers from the public. And what a response they got - most of it before they discovered the mistake, and had to turn all the men away. In the end the Lamma Ladies, (a certified women's team - but without their boat, sunk by men friends out for a spin) heroically jumped in to filled the gap, with a token RTHK lady or two on board, just for form's sake. Journalists invited to a promotional lunch by Philips, the Dutch electrical and electronic goods people, were all given little boxes containing one of the company's electric razors. All, that is, except the one female reporter present. Not wishing to imply she needed a shave, sensitive organisers supplied her with a more feminine alternative. It was a Special Azur 60 iron. Just the thing for a career woman. Apparently the sexual-stereotyping was noticed with embarrassment by Philips managers attending the lunch and humble apologies were duly offered. Has China quietly unveiled a new secret weapon? A press release from Beijing doing the rounds in the West states that 'China conducted a unclear test on 8 June 1996'. It might have been nothing more than a typing error. However, the release then refers to 'unclear weapons' throughout. Perhaps they have developed something we don't know about. He may not have handled last year's nuclear tests too smoothly, but France's President, Jacques Chirac, is a politician to his fingertips, as one of his aides made clear the weekend European summit Florence. Asked if Chirac would tune in to the television relay of the quarter-final of the European Football Championship between France and the Netherlands, the official's reply was: 'If we win, he'll have watched it.'
