NOT for us those appalling comic books full of women with big thighs wearing long silver boots. Absolutely not. But there was lots of other interesting stuff at the Book Fair, scene of the Great Comic Book Riot of 1993. There is a stall from the China Olympic Publishing Company, a firm set up purely to publish books about the Beijing Olympics in 2000. Among its titles: a large, glossy book about Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee. It is titled Samaranch: a true friend of China and has calligraphy on the title page by Deng Xiaoping. Mr Samaranch is no doubt very tired of getting copies from well-meaning relatives who spot it on bookstands and think he might want one as a present - particularly given that it is not impossible that the Beijing authorities may have given him one already. The cover, for some reason, is red instead of brown. If Sydney gets the games, this is a company that could face something of a product development problem. There were also the yellow-robed Buddhist monks from Taiwan of the Ch'an sect, a Chinese counterpart to Japan's Zen Buddhists, whose merchandise included an $18 key-ring that played Buddhist chants if you pushed a button. ''It's good for beginners,'' we were told by one of them, Man Hsueh, who was over from the group's temple in Los Angeles. It allows you to practise on the bus, she says. On our usual blue-and-yellow contour-hugging missile the engine noise is too loud to hear anything less than a full nuclear strike on Victoria Harbour. Still, we have no difficulty feeling close to our Creator. Folly of the dolls THE Buddhist gadget has one of those pre-programmed noise chips used everywhere from talking birthday cards to adult games and which look identical when they come out the factory. We thought the inevitable had happened last Christmas, when the English newspapers reported that the Willis family of Peterlee, northern England, were horrified to find they had given their daughter a talking doll that said ''Mama, mama, **** off, ha! ha! ha!''. However the shop told them they had misheard. The ''**** off'' was a ''giggle with a Chinese accent''. Double Dutch BEIREN Printing Machinery Holdings' record of sending 11 copies of a fax has been soundly beaten. A friend of ours in Beijing came to work yesterday morning to find his office carpet invisible thanks to a letter faxed 20 times. Thank you, Greenpeace's head office in Amsterdam. Some furry animal lost its home to make that fax paper. Is this a record? Aeroflotsam THE three Russian aircraft carriers which may be used as accommodation for workers on the airport project have created a lot of interest, with some of the territory's brightest brains thinking up other possible uses. Don Mudd of Mui Wo says: ''I'm surprised you did not comment on the other reason - namely in the event the airport is not open in 1997 these carriers can be used for take-offs and landings.'' His suggestion would allow Governor Chris, the last emperor, to fly out from Chek Lap Kok as promised, even if the dolphins still swim where the new departure lounge should be. Bit of a drip DOUGLAS Cameron popped into the toilets at Bentley's fish basement (the men's probably, although his note does not make it clear) and emerged very wary of his fellow diners after reading the sign: ''Caution. Do not touch. Clement still wet.'' Double jeopardy NO wonder the market was down nearly 80 points yesterday. Our broker rang us to say Deng Xiaoping's double was ill. Incidentally, David Linehan, fund manager for the Kemper International Fund, a US mutual fund, offers the following analogy for the Hongkong stock market: Did you know that a goldfish's brain is so small that each trip around the bowl seems like a new experience? This quip has a certain familiarity, but we still found it funny. Dialogue THE new mobile telephone service from Hongkong Telecom, called GSM, offers a neat service. If you can't get through to someone, you can leave a recorded message with a voice-mail machine, which will call him or her later. The recipient, meanwhile, can have his messages picked up by machine. If your line is busy, he can then reply to you by voice-mail recording. In other words, two people can have an entire telephone relationship without even speaking directly to each other, with the machines acting as go-betweens. We are reminded of a cartoon we saw in The New Yorker: a small, embarrassed-looking household robot is holding a phone. ''Oh it's you,'' the robot says to the person on the other end of the phone. ''I was expecting the machine.'' Hot number THE Environmental Pollution Advisory Committee earlier this week approved plans to build an explosive magazine store on Lantau. If someone knows the title and publication date will it be possible to borrow copies? After-life INCHCAPE'S Gary Henderson was an avid reader of the Gulf Daily News when he was Bahrain earlier this month. ''It appears that in Israel they take the enforcement of the law seriously,'' he said after reading an item which stated that an Israeli court had sentenced two Palestinians to ''life plus 10 years''.
