RENOWNED French art and design connoisseur Alain Weill was turfed out of David Tang's Cohiba Divan Cigar shop in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel recently for daring to smoke a cigarette.
The shop's manager was presumably unaware that Weill, a friend of Cuban cigarophile Fidel Castro, had recently been the subject of a six-page feature in Cigar Aficionado magazine - the bible of cigar smokers. Weill, who was visiting Hong Kong on his way to open a design museum in Japan, said: ''I was glad to be thrown out of such a pretentious shop. What kind of cultural fascists allow cigar but not cigarette smoke?'' SPEAKING of designers, flamboyant Philippe Starck, something of a maverick in the field, demonstrated his eccentric tendencies when his blueprints for the dining tables at The Peninsula's opulent new Felix restaurant had to be sent back to Paris.
The tables were, reportedly, breathtakingly beautiful - and only 45 centimetres high. Starck, who is also working on a gene manipulation technique to produce cubic oysters, has apparently returned to the drawing board.
BACK to nicotine briefly. Word comes our way of a well-known tobacco company which recently sponsored a smoking competition in a remote part of southern China. The winner managed the lung-blackening feat of something like 100 in an hour.
Sadly, the gentleman had so little oxygen left in his bloodstream by the time it came to receiving his trophy, that on lifting it over his head - to the delighted cheers of his fellow villagers - he collapsed and died.
IT MAY be a little early to be pondering such matters, but if your thoughts have turned to Christmas presents, here's an idea: for a mere $2.6 million you could do worse than buy a Lamborghini Diablo, one of the world's most expensive cars.
Health club entrepreneur Eddie Phillips, owner and managing director of Phillip Wain International, is flogging his - one of only four in the territory - for $1 million less than its showroom price despite it having just 3,200 kilometres on the clock. Apparently, Phillips, currently holidaying in Australia's playground of the rich, Byron Bay, has a habit of changing his cars every year. He has been through Rolls-Royces, Jaguars and Porsches but this year plans to buy a Bentley Continental, the sportier version of the Bentley Turbo which already occupies one of the two garage spaces at his Bowen Road home.