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Matching celebrity athletes with potential endorsement opportunities is often difficult. Yet there are easy-touse survey-based methods available. Based on a survey of the general public in New Zealand, this study uses both Ohanian's source-credibility scale and a constant-sum scale to help brand managers, player agents and advertising practitioners select good celebrity athlete-product fit. Four New Zealand athletes (two males and two females) and several products were included in the test. Results show that the female celebrity athletes outperformed their male counterparts as potential endorsers. Use of Ohanian's multi-attribute scale yields a level of richness and insight, prompting us to advocate the use of both scales in the pursuit of endorser-product congruences.

REGULAR READERS of this column will have noted, perhaps with relief, the self‐restraint I have applied in recent months in connection with the game of cricket, not a word about which have I imparted to you throughout the summer.

CHRISTMAS is coming, and the year is nearly done. On the whole, a good year, I think—at any rate for realism. No doubt we shall have our (by now) customary industrial fun and games during the winter, with lights going out, rubbish piling up in the streets, and the car‐workers continuing to perform their slow‐motion, ritual suicide. But it is becoming appreciated that inflationary, pay increases simply spawn unemployment.

THERE MUST BE, I think, some sort of automatic professional override‐switch which cuts in on lawyers and slows them down to a pace not exceeding two yards per hour whenever two parties to a proposed agreement indicate that they wish to complete a deal with extraordinary swiftness.

I DON'T KNOW whether you are yet straight in your minds about the present location of the various parts of my erstwhile, present and embryonic business empires, but it will certainly clear my mind of confusion if I try to set it down here once and for all—and you are welcome to photocopy it (without comeback) for the edification of your colleagues!

SINCE I have spent the better part of fifteen years parading in the public arena the superiority which attaches to me by reason of not possessing a television set, I had better now come clean and reveal that immediately before Christmas my wife and I changed our minds and rented one for a trial period of six months.

Taekwondo (TKD) is a weight‐classified combat sport. Athletes are required to make weight in order to compete in their chosen weight division. However, the weight management strategies that are often employed are frequently at the expense of nutritional health and sporting performance. The purpose of this study is to investigate eating behaviours and general practices used by Taekwondo (TKD) athletes in order to make weight before competition.

A total of 30 male, international and national, TKD athletes (average age: 23.4 years±4.6) were recruited from a known TKD Club in London, UK. Weight management behaviours, beliefs and attitudes were investigated with the use of a specially designed questionnaire.

A total of 87 per cent of the TKD athletes surveyed stated that they would try to reduce body weight before competition to make weight classification and 47 per cent of the athletes reported that, in their effort to reduce weight, they would use a combination of restricting energy and fluid intake and increasing energy expenditure. A total of 80 per cent of the athletes stated that they would attempt to make weight on average six to nine times a year.

Food and fluid restriction in combination with increased energy expenditure were the preferred methods of weight loss employed by TKD athletes in the sample.

IT WAS in the mid‐1970s when, having been in the habit for a year or so previously of commenting on public library authorities' annual reports in a partially analytical manner, I observed a decline in the arrival of the same in my post. A decline which has been maintained, I may add, and which has led me to the conclusion that, while it is OK on the sender's part if I remark how splendid has his service been, he would nevertheless be happier if the ammunition was withheld for me to observe that his annual loans cost x‐pence more each than those of such‐and‐such an authority!

IT IS BY direction of NLW'S Subscription Department—to whom I have the good fortune to have been married for nigh on 16 years—that I open my first column of the new year with a lot of gubbins about subscriptions and their administration. Do please read it and, if appropriate, take action, or I'll never hear the end of it.

PROMPTLY UPON the ending of the seemingly interminable Christmas/New Year holiday—I just had to go back to work between the two, because another plate of cold‐turkey‐plus‐cold‐Xmas‐pud would have driven me insane—there landed upon my desk the first issue of the LAR vacancies supplement, a sheet of job advertisements which is to be issued fortnightly while publication of the Times literary supplement Is suspended, and may even be continued thereafter on a permanent basis if demand warrants.