CELEBRITY encounters continued.

David Speedie in New York recalls many years ago bumping into legendary baseball player and Marilyn Monroe husband Joe DiMaggio in an airport who had a reputation for not giving autographs. Undaunted, David's wife went over and nervously blurted out: "Mr DiMaggio, you're a great fan of my son."

He found that so funny he immediately gave her the autograph.

Wool found

THE teacher who had to decipher when the pupil wrote "Jookabuloo" that he had in fact visited the home of the Duke of Buccleuch reminds former Denny headteacher Margaret Cook of when a youngster wrote he had been given an Old Saishon dog for his birthday.

Up the Khyber

WE mentioned schoolteacher turned politician Norman Buchan bringing protest singer Pete Seeger to Glasgow. Douglas Gordon tells us: "I was assisting a friend, Ian Moonie, to fly-post for a Seeger concert organised by Norman. We pasted the posters outside the Cosmo Cinema, and hurried to Norrie's locked van, and while he looked for the keys two policemen appeared. Ian lived in Partick and when asked his address replied: "Dalcross Pass - pass as in Khyber."

"The polis licked his pencil and asked 'how do you spell Khyber?'. We were later fined, and did not let Norrie forget this when he later had ministerial responsibility for the police."

Ignorance is strength

A READER swears to us he heard a teenager on his train into Glasgow tell his pal: "I had to read George Orwell's 1984 for English. You wouldn't believe how strange the world was back then."

Off message

OUR story about sportswriter Ian Archer reminds Jim Crowe in Letchworth, Hertfordshire: "Ian once told me about an English and a Scottish sports journalist discussing spectator behaviour and the Englishman complaining of an international football game being spoiled for him by the Scots fans chanting 'We hate the English'. The Scot, seeking to excuse the behaviour, said they were probably just caught up in the heat of the moment.

"However the English journalist replied, 'The game was between Scotland and Germany'."

Artistic licence

SOME of our bad gags had encouraged Peter Kerr in Strathaven to tell us: "I had been to the Turner Seascapes exhibition and left, puzzled by some of the items on display. I told my brother-in-law there had even been sea-monsters in some paintings. "Oh", he said, "that must have been a pigment of the artist's imagination'."

Bird-brained idea

THE row over Scotland's national bird, continued. Alan Barlow in Paisley says: "Could I suggest that Frank McAvennie be given the task of finding our nation's burd?"

Spitting images

IT was vile of fans at the Aberdeen v St Johnstone league cup game to have spat at fellow spectator, Celtic manager Neil Lennon. No excuse for such behaviour.

We have often wondered though if footballer turned commentator Gary Lineker did actually say, as he is often quoted as doing, that: "If somebody in the crowd spits at you, you've got to swallow it."