Channel swimming makes no special splash these days, so Australia's Linda McGill, 21, showed up in France with a new gimmick. A free-spirited Olympic swimmer who was banned from competition after riding a bike into the Japanese Imperial moat, Linda announced that she would tame the Channel clad only in goggles and bear grease. When the Channel Swimming Association frosted the idea, Linda added a red one-piecer to her attire and plunged in. She lost her goggles three-quarters of the way to England, then stumbled on the rocks at the finish and badly gashed herself above the left breast. But her time of 9 hr. 59 min. broke the women's record by 25 min. (and was 4 hr. 32 min. faster than Gertrude Ederle's unprecedented swim in 1926), and she missed the men's mark by only 24 min.

The racket reverberated briskly from an article in the magazine Washingtonian contending that there were seven good tennis players in the Senate, only one of whom--New York's Jacob Javits, 63--is a Republican. When Pennsylvania's Democrat Joseph Clark saw fit to mention the matter on the Senate floor, Tennessee Republican Howard Baker netted five other tautly strung Republicans for doubles duty in something called the U.S. Senate Tennis championship. The Washingtonian knew what it was talking about. Democrats Clark and Claiborne Pell (R.I.) knocked off Illinois' Charles Percy and South Carolina's Strom Thurmond with loveless abandon. Massachusetts' Edward Brooke and Baker bounced back for the G.O.P. against Walter Mondale (Minn.) and Joseph Tydings (Md.), but Democrats Ernest Hollings (S.C.) and William Spong (Va.) swept through top-seeded Jack Javits and Peter Dominick (Colo.) to take the title. Moaned Javits: "As a lawyer, I'm dismayed that Republicans couldn't win when we brought our case to court."

In a nation noted for its scarcity, Spain's 7 billion gallon surplus of sherry and domestic table wine would seem to be a bonanza. Not so. The average Spaniard scorns the local elixir in favor of spectacularly overpriced bottles of Scotch. Now Spain's Agriculture Minister, Adolfo Diaz-Ambrona, 59, has appealed to his countrymen to ease "the problem of domestic underconsumption." Noting that the Spaniards consume only half as much wine per capita as the Frenchmen, the government is starting a huge advertising campaign for wine--and doubling the import duties on Scotch.

It is bound to be the most joyous evening that Washington has never experienced. For a tax-deductible contribution of $25 a head, 7,000 elegant socialites are being given an unprecedented opportunity not to attend a charity ball that will not be given this month by Mrs. John Sherman Cooper, wife of the Kentucky Republican Senator. The notion for the no-ball came to Lorraine Cooper as she brooded over ways to cut down the expenses that inevitably erode the take at charity affairs. Having hit on the ultimate cutdown, she sent out embossed non-invitations describing the charitable work being done by the no-ball's beneficiary, the Cooperative School for Handicapped Children in Springfield, Va. More than a thousand delighted naysayers have already sent in checks with their most gracious non-acceptances.

"I have been a special correspondent for so many years," said Italian Author Alberto Moravia, 59, "and now I wish to be recognized as a journalist like all the others." In bureaucratic Italy, though, even the nation's leading novelist (Women of Rome, The Lie) must have a junior high school diploma to be certified as a professional journalist, and Moravia was a dropout at 16. The author dutifully rapped out a two-hour examination essay on his "general cultural interests," while embarrassed officials poked their heads in to ask: "Maestro, do you need anything?" Moravia next submitted himself to an oral exam (sample question: "Discuss modern Japan"). He still faces an 18-month probationary period before authorities will feel justified in issuing his press card.

It started off as the most sincere tribute that any girl has ever paid a vacation resort. For her first vacation `a deux with Fiance Chuck Robb, 28, Lynda Bird Johnson, 23, honey-talked the captain into spending six days at Acapulco, the site only nine months ago of her well-glamorized romp amongst the Beauty People with Actor George Hamilton. Photographers crowded round to record the sunny hours as the young couple (with chaperones) bunked in at a flower-decked house overlooking Acapulco Bay. Right then it started raining. It poured; it stormed; it was the worst deluge in the resort's history. Except for one dash downtown, Lynda and Chuck were housebound, running movies on a home projector and portable generator after the electricity conked out. Three days ahead of schedule, the dampened enthusiasts slogged off to the airport, making it just before a landslide washed out the road.

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