Ever since the Paris house of Balmain made her wedding dress 17 years ago, Thailand's Queen Sirikit has been true to the designer in her fashion. The results have been dazzling for both. For six years, the Queen was listed among the world's ten best-dressed women. For his part, Balmain now picks up about $500,000 in annual business from Sirikit, a fact that rankles the house of Dior deeply. Last week, when Sirikit and King Bhumibol paid a state visit to the Shah of Iran and Empress Farah Diba, Dior dispatched six of its staff members to study Sirikit's tastes in couture and see if they couldn't recommend a few designs that she might buy on a Paris spree later this spring. "I prefer Balmain because I happened to know him before I knew Dior," Sirikit kept insisting to friends. Evidently Dior will have to content itself with fashioning glad rags for Farah Diba, who spends a mere $80,000 per year on such vanities.

The morning was interminable, a horror. They did not even joke about the approaching ordeal. No one was sure of election but that the possible rejection of some chum cast its gloom over the day.

--Stover at Yale

The Tap Day ordeal is not quite so horrible these days as it used to be. Still, all the Yalie juniors were holding their breath somewhat as the tappers fanned out from the windowless "tombs" of Yale's secret senior societies to perform the annual laying on of hands to select new members to their august company. Elihu, Scroll & Key, and the other four recognized societies chose more than 100 third-year men. Like Dink, Olympic Swimming Champion Don Schollander, 20, who brought back four gold medals from Tokyo in 1964, was tapped for Skull & Bones. In grateful awe, he accepted.

Political Gagman Art Buchwald got the star billing, of course. But still, Bill Moyers, 32, won his share of the laughs when he rose to address the Women's National Press Club in Washington. Now working as publisher of Long Island's Newsday, which is owned by Captain Harry Guggenheim, Moyers told the "true inside story" of how he came to leave the White House. "The President called me in one day and said: 'Bill, when you took over as press secretary, the polls were 60-40 for me. Now they're 40-60 against me. In those days the credibility gap was just a line in one of Everett Dirksen's sonnets. Now it's a national issue. What do you think?' When I said I thought I'd better call Harry Guggenheim, you know what the President did? He gave me a dime."

In January, a group in Harlem invited the young Brazilian to be their guest of honor at luncheon as "the most popular man of the Negro race in the world." That was a touch of hyperbole, although there is no doubt that Edson Arantes do Nascimento, 26, otherwise known as Pele, is the most famous athlete in the world--at least outside of the U.S. His soccer team, Santos, was in New York when the Harlem invitation came, Pele explained in a TV interview last week in Sao Paulo. "I learned that this had connotations of the racial struggle in the U.S.," he said, "and I made one condition to accept: I would come only if all the white players on the Santos team were also invited." In a curiously segregationist mood, the hosts refused, and so, said Pele, "I just thanked them for the thought."

In 1959, California Writer Harry Squires wrote to possible presidential candidates asking what they thought of the curious fact that from 1840 onward, no U.S. President elected in a year ending in zero had lived out his time in the White House. "Dear Mr. Squires," came one reply. "I feel that the future will have to answer this for itself--both as to my aspirations and my fate should I have the privilege of occupying the White House. I daresay, should anyone take this phenomenon to heart, anyone, that is, who aspires to change his address to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that most probably the landlord would be left from 1960-64 with a 'For Rent' sign hanging on the gatehouse door. Sincerely, John F. Kennedy." Last week New York Representative Seymour Halpern, who had acquired the letter from an autograph dealer, donated it to Manhattan's new Library of Presidential Papers.

Three-time All-America Bill Bradley, 23, the greatest basketball player that Princeton ever produced, flew home from Britain, where he has been grinding away at philosophy, politics and economics as an Oxford Rhodes scholar, to sign a contract with the New York Knickerbockers. He learned his economics well: the four-year agreement will pay him some $500,000. Actually, it wasn't the money, says Bill. "I found that I really love the game," he explained, "and that I want to test myself against the best." Bill's old coach Willem van Breda Kolff, 44, who engineered Princeton's basketball renaissance for five years, is also leaving to confront the best. Next season he will take over as coach of the lackluster Los Angeles Lakers, who won 36 while losing 45 this season.

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