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SCMP Reporter

FED up with all these best  quotes of 1992, awards and  so on?   Hongkong-based copywriter Alex Pithie suggested  that for a change, we extrapolate the quotes that people  didn't  say during the past 12  months, at least, not in public. His suggestions:   ''Ninety years between insults. I can live with that.''  - Nigel Rich, Jardine Matheson.

  ''So who is this Bonnie Gotsome?'' - singer Natalie  Cole.

  ''There's nothing like a good virus to save them treks to Sha Tin of a morning, to be sure, so it is.'' -  Irish racing guru Robin Parke.

  American humourist Art  Buchwald played a similar game in the International Herald Tribune:   ''That Woody Allen is the funniest guy alive. You  never know what he's going  to do next.'' - Mia Farrow.

  And here are some suggestions from us:   ''The new Governor looks like a harmless enough  gweilo.'' - Lu Ping.

  ''It's the Danes' turn to wield the rubber stamp. They're insignificant, anyway.'' - European Commission president Jacques Delors.

  ''If I slip a teeny suggestion or two into the middle  of my speech, I'm sure no one will notice.'' - Governor Chris Patten.

  ''I'm sure I heard an explosion coming from behind  that cloud, comrade.'' - An  aeronautical engineer at the  Long March satellite launch  site.

        Rain man  TALKING of messy desks,  John Richards, general manager of Sui Tai Constructions Materials of Sha Tin, pleaded guilty yesterday to being an offender on a  major  scale.

  ''I was recently cleaning  my desk for the first time in  some weeks, and I found my  mislaid umbrella,'' he said.  ''And it was open.''         Plastered  BANKERS taking their seats at the New Year's Eve  party at the Overseas Bankers' Club in the Landmark last week found a box of Tokuhon brand medical sticking plasters provided at  each dinner placing.

  In the event, the party turned out to be surprisingly  wild, but they did not actually beat each other up.

  They were bankers, after  all.

        Suckered  THE first thing we ever wrote for the South China Morning Post  was a missive  to the letters page. The MTR  Corp was making feeble suggestions to help people who  were embarrassed by the slippery seats. We suggested  passengers could just nail their heads to the window frame.

  Well, we hear from Ray  Dewhurst of Yau Yat Chuen  that a device based on the same principle has been invented in Japan.

  The Commuter Snoozer  is a lightweight hard hat that  you wear to help you relax  while travelling.

  On the back is a giant sucker which sticks to the MTR window.

  Once your head is strapped into it, you are held  firmly in position.

  This will also be useful to  stop sleepers' heads flopping  down on strangers' shoulders.

  On the front of the hat is  a write 'n' wipe notice-board  on which you write a sentence such as: ''Wake me up  at Lok Fu.''        Over board  RECEIVED the latest financial analysis sheet from James Capel's head office in  London. This contains a detailed examination of one of  the toughest financial challenges in anyone's life: playing Monopoly.

  Want to be the Li Ka-shing of the Monopoly board? Here are the recommendations:   The first thing you have  to do is pass the little blue  squares. Worth buying?   Yes. ''The rental yield is  between six and 6.7 per cent  unimproved,'' says the report. But once you own property on them, you can  get ''a return of 154 to 168  per cent on average capital  employed''.

  The two poshest properties (Boardwalk and Park Place in the American version, Mayfair and Park Lane  in the English version) are not such good investments.

  They offer ''a return on  average capital of between 109 and 145 per cent, with  only two-thirds the likelihood of being landed on''.

  Don't buy the railway stations.

  Don't buy properties indiscriminately in the initial  rounds.

  Invest in the light blue and dark orange groups of properties to put yourself way in front.

  If only James Capel's Hongkong office had heeded  this advice before its demise.

        Life of O'Reilly  HEINZ boss Tony O'Reilly,  whom we mentioned recently, once had to go into a Dublin hospital after a minor accident, we heard from  a reader.

  The nurse had to fill in  the social security forms.

  ''Do you earn more than  ?11,000?'' she asked him.

  ''Not every  day,'' he replied.

   Head hunt  EVEN the most serious of newspapers sneaks in wacky  headlines occasionally, we hear from Nissen Davis of McDonnell-Douglas.

  The Financial Times  ran  the headline: ''Virgin takes 1,000 bookings a day'' over a  story about Virgin Airlines offering a reduced fare.

  The Guardian  ran a story on economic revival in the capital of Albania. Headline: ''Tirana boom today.''           Good idea, not . . . Ralph Perry, boss of Caltex in Hongkong, was amazed to find that a petrol industry  journal has been launched called Wayne Worldwide.  This logo is remarkably similar to a highly fashionable  film called Wayne's World, all about some ''cool dudes'' with tiny brains and a tinier vocabulary. Ralph  said: ''Now here's someone who really has a self-deprecating sense of humour - or are so far out of it  as to be Neanderthals.'' Excellent. Party on. Like, it's  just totally awesome, man. Not.



Unspeakable responses to an annus horribilus