One traveler who never blends into the landscape is ex-President Lyndon Baines Johnson, currently vacationing in an Acapulco villa with his own supplies of bottled water, tapioca, steak and ketchup. When a dinner invitation came from Acapulco's social pinnacle --the white marble mansion of Actress Merle Oberon and her Mexican industrialist husband Bruno Pagliai --L.BJ. said no thanks, he'd drop by afterward. Lady Bird demurred, but Lyndon isn't about to do anything he doesn't want to do these days. "Bird," he said, "you know I'm not goin' to eat anywhere but here."

"I think the BBC has done us a favor," said ex-Beatle Paul McCartney. The favor: banning Paul's first protest song, which he wrote with his wife Linda after Londonderry's "Bloody Sunday," when 13 Irish were killed by British bullets. The somewhat less than incendiary lyrics:

Give Ireland back to the Irish

Don't make them have to take it away . . .

Tell me, how would you like it,

if on your way to work

you were stopped by Irish soldiers;

would you lie down, do nothing,

would you give in, or go berserk? -

The Russians were thinking about victory and politics. Bobby Fischer was thinking about victory and money. So U.S. Challenger Fischer's choice of a city for the world championship chess match this spring was Belgrade, which offered the most cash--$152,000. Russian Champion Boris Spassky, nixing Belgrade for political reasons, picked Reykjavik, Iceland. When neither side would give in, Max Euwe, president of the International Chess Federation, took his cue from King Solomon and split the difference: twelve games in Belgrade, then twelve in Reykjavik. "It's a mistake," said Fischer. "You will have double the problems. People are going to be confused, moving around, and it will seem like a road show. I don't like it." But Bobby wasn't really angry. The Reykjavik money wasn't bad--$125,000. "It's going to be over in a couple of months, and then I'll be champion," said Fischer.

Archie Bunker with a Negro niece?

Not exactly. It's Archie's real-life version, Carroll O'Connor, and the pretty 19-year-old black girl he is introducing around Hollywood as his "niece" is really the daughter of one of his "oldest and dearest friends," New Jersey Obstetrician and Gynecologist Dr. Eric Williams Jr. When O'Connor heard that Richelle ("Ricky") Williams wanted to be an actress, he suggested that she come right out to Hollywood. "All

I can do, as much as I love her, is to give her a start," says O'Connor. "Then she's got to do it all for herself." Asked what having a black protegee might do to Archie's image, he replied: "I don't think anything can change Archie's image."

A preview peep at Washington under a woman President was provided by Manhattan Democratic Representative Bella Abzug at a conference of the National Organization for Women. "President Shirley Chisholm," she said, fantasizing freely, "is seriously concerned about the rising adult male delinquency rate, especially among retired Defense Department officials and Pentagon generals. The President is thinking about instituting some play-therapy groups, in which they could work out their aggressive feelings. Anti-machismo Secretary Gloria Steinem proposed that we convert the Pentagon into housing for the elderly and play centers." Later, Congresswoman Abzug reported in her dream of the future, she "returned to Capitol Hill, where we're still deadlocked on the bill proposing amnesty for Henry Kissinger."

James Earl Ray, the murderer of Martin Luther King Jr., is spending 30 days in a disciplinary cell to contemplate his losing ways. Ray's latest fiasco: a botched attempt to cut short his 99-year sentence at Tennessee's Brushy Mountain Penitentiary by carving a hole through the ceiling of a room near the auditorium. Last year he tried to make it through a steam tunnel which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be too hot for him.

Singer-Actor Paul Robeson--a popular idol in the '20s when he introduced Ol' Man River in Showboat, then a popular villain in the '50s for his espousal of left-wing causes--is becoming respectable again. Now 72 and ailing, he has had a student center named after him by Rutgers University, where he played All-America football and earned a Phi Beta Kappa key as a member of the class of 1919.

Skiing's super-schusser, Karl Schranz, 33, who was barred from skiing with the Austrian team in the Sapporo Olympics on the grounds that he had repeatedly broken the amateur regulations, has announced that he is going to give up Alpine racing, though he is not yet ready to become a full-fledged professional. "I should like to end my career in dignity, and not as an outlaw of international sports politics," said Schranz, who in 18 years of competition has won three world championships, two World Cups, eleven Austrian championships and eight firsts in the famed Arlberg-Kandahar race.

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