Mr Wong's defence less than letter perfect

It is of considerable relief to learn that beleaguered Secretary for Housing Dominic Wong Shing-wah had absolutely, positively, no prior knowledge of the letter written under the name of his wife, Cecilia, to a Chinese language newspaper. Lai See seems to recall Mr Wong was in the not-too-distant past the director of the Department of Education. Our team of Chinese linguistic experts informs us there are at least three instances of incorrectly written Chinese characters in the correspondence. It would not be the done thing for a man once in charge of setting the educational standards for Hong Kong's future leaders to be fouling up with his own grammar. Reader Hans Bruggeman was watching cable channel HBO yesterday when an episode of that all-time kids' classic, Lassie flashed up on the screen. Hans was interested to note the warning at the bottom of the screen at the start of the latest instalment of the dog's adventures - 'Not suitable for children.' Wonder what the old dog was getting up to. News reaches us of the imminent sale of Number 9 Shouson Hill Road, near Aberdeen, for as much as $80 million. Nothing unusual in that, you might say, given the recent glut of horrendously high prices paid for properties. This particular sale gives a special reminder of a special figure in Hong Kong business history who has not been seen in these parts for some time. For the property is owned by the family of none other than Ronald Li Fook-shiu. Mr Li, if you recall, is the misunderstood former chairman of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange who spent 30 months in Stanley Prison after being found guilty of two corruption charges linked to preferential share allocations. Mr Li was also deported from Canada in 1994 after he started living in Toronto that year - although the deportation order was revoked last year. But it's hard to keep a good man down. Lai See's extensive network of informants tells us the former exchange chief is now residing mainly in Thailand, where he is vigorously pursuing his passion for golf, among other things. He has, however, scaled down his work-related activities, despite maintaining considerable property and business interests in Asia and North America. And with his fortune still estimated to be in excess of HK$1 billion, observers say he is wearing the smile of a man of leisure. Yesterday's item on the American Consulate's highly sophisticated voice mail system seems to have struck a chord with disgruntled phone users the territory over. Most of the grumbles have been about Hongkong Telecom's 1081 directory inquiries number - which appears to have been particularly clogged over the Easter holiday period. Frustrated callers have complained they continually got engaged signals - not even able to get as far as the recorded message on hold telling of the telecommunications giant's latest array of services. In the world of electronic mail, the humble office worker is meant never to have to leave the confines of his or her desk, and is also able to save rainforests by not using a single sheet of paper to transmit information. Well, that's the theory anyway. A reader recently filled in an Internet survey which posed a series of testers about doing things on-line such as buying goods electronically. As a mark of gratitude for its users' time, internet operator HKNet offered a small souvenir for filling out the survey. The funny thing is, you couldn't claim your prize by e-mail. Instead, our reader had to physically turn up at the company's headquarters at Tsim Sha Tsui - with a printed copy of an e-mail message from the company - to claim his prize. So much for the paperless office. Reader Ron Pattinson spotted an interesting editorial in the Taiwanese China Post last Friday on the visit of the Dalai Lama to Taiwan. The spiritual leader's visit was described as being 'filled with the warmest hospitalisation Taiwan has ever given to a visiting dignitary in recent years'. Sounds like a regular custom. From the global resources of the Lai See media conglomerate comes the story of a number of terminally ill patients who died in the same bed at the same hospital over a period of months. A pattern emerged, with many of the patients dying at a virtually identical time of the same day in different weeks. The source of the problem was eventually traced to an unexpected source. The resident cleaner was apparently unplugging the patients' life support systems in order to give the floor a thorough going over. Nury Vittachi is on holidays.