While Jay Chou (周杰倫) basked in the music industry limelight with a batch of nominations and gongs at the 19th Golden Melody Awards (第十 九屆金曲獎) on Saturday, his former girlfriend and rival, Jolin Tsai (蔡依林), has hit the skids.
She failed to receive one nomination in any major award category, despite the critical success of her Special Agent J (特務J) album, which was released in September of last year, and she was the subject of an all points bulletin issued by the fashion police for turning up to the awards ceremony in a NT$200,000 dress by Giambattista Valli, in which, according to Chen Wan-ruo (陳婉若), the former general manager of the Eelin (伊林) modeling agency, she looked like a barbeque-ready squid on a stick.
Worse still, her new album, Etude of Love (愛的練習曲), which was scheduled for a February release, is being held up by EMI for reasons unknown, and this has cost her, according to Next Magazine (壹周刊), an estimated NT$20 million in lost earnings.
The diva’s romantic life lies in tatters, after her mother and former beau Eddie Peng’s (彭于晏) manager put the kibosh on the pair’s blossoming relationship.
But, despite past bad blood, it looks as though Tsai is finding moral support from old boyfriend Chou, who is encouraging her to follow his example and start her own production company. The pair got into some tit-for-tat sniping over the sales figures for Special Agent J late last year, with Chou claiming they had been inflated, and that his own album, On the Run (我很忙), released at the same time, had really outsold Tsai’s.
Tsai’s good friend Little S (小S) is having no trouble getting satisfaction, or so it seems from reports received from sources, who revealed to Next Magazine that the mom-of-two and TV show hostess is a frequent visitor to her neighborhood sex shop.
She strongly recommends the Ribbed Bullet, to many of her friends, reportedly, although she has yet, as far as Pop Stop is aware, failed to, publicly, er, plug the product on her show. The device, according to the packaging, makes use of “HS III” technology that “allows you to choose vibration speeds and thrilling motions to create pure ecstasy.” This is probably not something that Peng could do, even on a good day, so Pop Stop would advise Tsai to follow her friend’s advice, although in the interests of full disclosure, Pop Stop cannot vouch for the product’s claims.
While Tsai may be fretting over the millions of dollars she is losing because of EMI’s prevarication, Chang Yun-ching (張芸京), the winner of SetTV’s talent show Super Idol (超級偶像) is pulling her hair out over the cash that has reportedly been skimmed off her income by her agents, which has left her without enough even to pay the rent on her NT$5,000-a-month room.
Next Magazine reports she has yet to receive her prize money, and her agents are netting 60 percent of all her other earnings, leaving the former graphic designer with little more take-home pay than she had received from her office job. For all the smiles, it’s a tough world out there in showbiz land, and wannabe celebrities need to hone their survival skills to make it through the snake pit of corporate interests behind the cameras, just as they need to impress the judges in front of them.
Every now and then, it’s nice to just point somewhere on a map and head out with no plan. In Taiwan, where convenience reigns, food options are plentiful and people are generally friendly and helpful, this type of trip is that much easier to pull off. One day last November, a spur-of-the-moment day hike in the hills of Chiayi County turned into a surprisingly memorable experience that impressed on me once again how fortunate we all are to call this island home. The scenery I walked through that day — a mix of forest and farms reaching up into the clouds
With one week left until election day, the drama is high in the race for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chair. The race is still potentially wide open between the three frontrunners. The most accurate poll is done by Apollo Survey & Research Co (艾普羅民調公司), which was conducted a week and a half ago with two-thirds of the respondents party members, who are the only ones eligible to vote. For details on the candidates, check the Oct. 4 edition of this column, “A look at the KMT chair candidates” on page 12. The popular frontrunner was 56-year-old Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文)
“How China Threatens to Force Taiwan Into a Total Blackout” screamed a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) headline last week, yet another of the endless clickbait examples of the energy threat via blockade that doesn’t exist. Since the headline is recycled, I will recycle the rebuttal: once industrial power demand collapses (there’s a blockade so trade is gone, remember?) “a handful of shops and factories could run for months on coal and renewables, as Ko Yun-ling (柯昀伶) and Chao Chia-wei (趙家緯) pointed out in a piece at Taiwan Insight earlier this year.” Sadly, the existence of these facts will not stop the
Oct. 13 to Oct. 19 When ordered to resign from her teaching position in June 1928 due to her husband’s anti-colonial activities, Lin Shih-hao (林氏好) refused to back down. The next day, she still showed up at Tainan Second Preschool, where she was warned that she would be fired if she didn’t comply. Lin continued to ignore the orders and was eventually let go without severance — even losing her pay for that month. Rather than despairing, she found a non-government job and even joined her husband Lu Ping-ting’s (盧丙丁) non-violent resistance and labor rights movements. When the government’s 1931 crackdown
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