Pop stop

Those who watched the Golden Bell Awards closely on Wednesday night may have noticed that there was one star who didn't amble down the red carpet into the venue. That was none other than cult hero (at least to some) porn actor A-hsian (阿賢).

According to Apple Daily, (蘋果日報) the male protagonist in the Taiwan Plumber (台灣水電工) epic had hoped for an invitation to attend the ceremony and enter, along with the other TV and movie stars, by walking the red carpet. But ETTV, which organized the event, took the wind out of his sails with an emphatic rejection. He wasn't even invited to enter through the side door.

Before he'd been turned down to appear at the awards ceremony, A-hsian had scrambled to find a suitable partner with whom to make his grand entrance. First he turned to Hsuan-Hsuan (宣宣), the female lead in the Plumber movie, but was curtly stiff-armed by her agency (the two haven't been on good terms recently) who are trying to bury Hsuan-Hsuan's smutty reputation so she can start a respectable movie and TV career.

Having been rejected by his former partner, he turned to two ladies who had their big break with their clothes off: Yu Jie (于緁) and Little Pan-pan (小潘潘). They both said no, though.

Maybe he should have looked up the Little Dragon Girl, who made the cover of Next Magazine last week. The former star has fallen on hard times and has returned to Pingtung County to till the fields. She was the magazine's girl of the week in its current edition.

Reacting to the triple snub and the lack of a forthcoming invitation from ETTV, he said he'd wear the NT$70,000 Gucci suit he'd bought for the occasion at the press conference for the release of his nude photo book.

Poor A-hsian seems like he's been singled out for exclusion from the Golden Bell Awards when considering the abundance of TV channels that have recently fallen afoul of Government Information Office regulations for unsuitable content. Two weeks ago Pop Stop reported on Momoko Tao (陶晶塋) having raised GIO bureaucrats' ire for the sexually explicit content of her daily talk show on Phoenix TV.

Meanwhile, in the world of Mando-pop, Taiwanese rock band Mayday succeeded in selling over 60,000 advance copies of its delayed new album Time Machine (時光機) weeks before it even hits the shelves this coming Tuesday and more than two months after the concert in Taipei that everyone hoped was going to coincide with the album's release. Mayday broke the record for the largest crowd at a concert in Taipei at that show, but former LA cop and pop singer David Tao looks set to shatter that record on Nov. 22 when he puts on a solo concert. Tickets are flying, but the ones that remain can be picked up at Era ticketing.