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Pop Stop

Model and author Hsiao Chiang was embarrassed by signs of equine titillation at a press conference. PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES

Last week were the Golden Bell Awards, which means it was a time for joy and comradery in the TV industry, unless of course you didn't win an award, in which case it was a time for pointing fingers and proving oneself to be a pathetic sore loser.

The Pop Stop award for shrillest loser goes to the vaguely simian-looking, gerri-curled Zhang Fei (張菲) whose weekly program was overlooked for the award for the best variety show. That award went to Kevin Tsai (蔡康永) for his show on TVBS-G. In the Friday edition of The Liberty Times (自由時報), Zhang and his producer are quoted as saying Tsai's show was just "a smut show," and that its "puny budget (of about NT$100,000 per episode) makes it incomparable" to Zhang's show (filmed at over NT$1 million per episode). At the post-awards ball Zhang was reportedly complaining non-stop about having lost and finally capped off his tirade by concluding, "Although we didn't win, we're the real winners!" Why would he care who won anyway? He didn't even go the award ceremony. Instead he was at home watching Taiwan get trounced by Japan in baseball.

After the Zhang row, one might be tempted to sympathize with TVBS-G, but they did something naughty last Wednesday when the station's show Entertainment News (娛樂新聞) invited singer-songwriter Melody Chiang (江美琪) as a special guest. Everything was going fine, up until the part of the show where everyone was supposed to guess why Melody "is unable to become a big star." The possible answers were: she's ugly, she's awkward with the media, she's unlucky, she sucks onstage and she doesn't have a distinctive voice. Thoroughly humiliated all Melody could do was to turn her back to the camera and sob into her hands. Her label EMI called a press conference on Friday to accuse the show's producers of being "shameless."

Nature played a dirty trick last week on the model and author Hsiao Chiang at the release of her new book, which is billed as a self-help treatise on how to stay beautiful into middle age, like herself. She appeared at the outdoor press conference on a horse, but what caught everyone's attention wasn't Hsiao, but rather the stallion's enormous erection. China Times Weekly (時報週刊) had a field day with this story, suggesting rhetorically that Hsiao had excited the horse by showing off her famous cleavage and wantonly spraying around pheromones.

Rene Liu (劉若英) also chose to ride onto the set of a public appearance in Ximending last Saturday, not on a horse, but on a camel. The bewildered animal was led through the equally bewildered throng of fans with Renee riding on its back squawking like a six-year-old girl learning to ride a bike. The camel stunt is part of the Xinjiang theme of her upcoming album My Failures and Achievements (我的失敗與偉大), set for a Nov. 21 release, the single of which is already seeing heavy rotation on MTV and features her traveling among the exotic natives of far-western China in scenes that would make Edward Said despair. But then, Said was never very big in China.

Hsiao wasn't the only one having problems with horses recently. According to the Apple Daily, Takeshi Kaneshiro (金城武) last week was reportedly thrown from a horse and injured his leg on the set of Ambush from All Sides (十面埋伏), the upcoming kung-fu flick by Zhang Yimou (張藝謀) also starring Zhang Ziyi (章子怡). The movie, being filmed in Ukraine, has seen a rash of injuries, with Takeshi's only the most recent of many. Previously Zhang Ziyi received a nasty gash on her forehead.

Mayday (五月天) finally released its new album Time Machine (時光機) Tuesday, which meant that two members of the band -- Monster (怪獸) and Masha (瑪莎) -- had to go streaking through Taipei for losing a bet with their bandmates that it wouldn't come out on time (well sort of on time -- the album release had been delayed twice already). A blurry picture of the two bare-assed band members racing down the street appeared in the Tuesday edition of the Taiwan Daily (台灣日報). They reportedly only streaked about 200m and did it in an abandoned area of town.

In case anyone in Taiwan was wondering what happened to F4, they're still really big in Southeast Asia, so much so that the boy band's front-stud Jerry Yen (言承旭) met with Philippine President Gloria Arroyo and triggered a political firestorm. Members of the political opposition in that country accused Arroyo of staging the televised handshake between Jerry and her to try to attract young people's votes in the current campaign cycle. Yen was in the Philippines to promote a scheduled F4 concert in Manila at the end of the month.

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