Goodbye yellow brick road, hello hip hop.
Elton John tells Rolling Stone magazine that he wants to record a hip-hop album with Grammy-winning producer Dr. Dre.
"I want to work with Pharrell, Timbaland, Snoop, Kanye, Eminem and just see what happens," the Rocket Man says in the Sept. 7 issue. "It may be a disaster, it could be fantastic, but you don't know until you try."
The 59-year-old says he is a fan of Blackstreet's No Diggity and Tupac Shakur's California Love.
"I want to bring my songs and melodies to hip-hop beats," John says. "I love these beats, but I have no idea how to get them."
Sir John performed Eminem's song Stan with the rapper during the 2001 Grammy awards.
His new album, The Captain and the Kid, is due in September.
Another star who seems to have lost touch with reality, Tom Cruise, has a new award from Australia to add to his collection -- for being the most sexist celebrity.
About 400 of Australia's most powerful women gathered in the New South Wales state parliament late Thursday to decide on the winners of the 14th annual Ernie Awards which are handed out for the worst derogatory public statements.
The awards were named after a trade union leader called Ernie whose union members included sheep shearers. He once famously said: "Women aren't welcome in the shearing sheds. They're only after the sex."
The Ernies have an international flavor -- and Cruise was awarded the 2006 Celebrity Ernie.
Dumped by Paramount Pictures for his erratic behavior, the kooky star won for a comment he made about his pregnant partner Katie Holmes: "I've got Katie tucked away so no one will get to us until my child is born."
The political award went to Bill Heffernan, a member of Prime Minister John Howard's conservative government in a hotly contested field.
Heffernan chastised opposition Labor MP Julia Gillard for being single and childless. "Anyone who chooses to deliberately remain barren ... they've got no idea what life's about," Heffernan said.
But the Golden Ernie for 2006 went to cruise liner company P&O for an advertising campaign that included postcards featuring bikini-clad women and the caption: "Seamen wanted."
The company has subsequently apologized for the campaign.
Another celebrity diaster in the making is Kevin Federline, who has been trying his hand at signing and acting.
The 28-year-old dancer who married singer Britney Spears will be shuffling over to the small screen where he will appear in an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation this fall, People magazine reported.
Although Federline and Spears ventured into TV with their reality show Chaotic, which aired on UPN last year, this will be his first venture into acting.
Britney's boy started filming this week in Los Angeles. He will play a menacing, arrogant teen who harasses investigators Nick Stokes (George Eads) and Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan) on a job.
The episode is tentatively scheduled to air in October.
Mr. Britney Spears recently performed at the Teen Choice Awards where he rapped one of the songs on his upcoming album Playing with Fire.
Introduced by his wife, who was dressed in a cleavage-baring mini-dress despite her late pregnancy, K-Fed stalked about the stage with attitude.
"Don't hate because I'm a superstar! And I'm married to a superstar! Nothin' come between us no matter who you are!" he declared, as dancers pop-locked as his side.
It was the most anticipated performance of the night -- and the most ridiculed. The next morning, videos of it were splashed on Web sites like YouTube.com and various blogs, accompanied by catty comments mocking both Federline and his wife.
If the Web world isn't exactly accepting of Federline's rap-star ambitions, the hip-hopsters are even less so.
Elliot Wilson, editor in chief of XXL magazine, called it a "YouTube disaster" -- something to be laughed off in hip-hop circles.
"I just think we ignore him," Wilson said. "He's a joke, basically."
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
The March/April volume of Foreign Affairs, long a purveyor of pro-China pablum, offered up another irksome Beijing-speak on the issues and solutions for the problems vexing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back From the Brink” rang the provocative title, by David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi (王緝思). If one ever wants to describe what went wrong with US-PRC relations, the career of Wang Jisi is a good place to start. Wang has extensive experience in the US and the West. He was a visiting
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