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.
May 18 to May 24 Pastor Yang Hsu’s (楊煦) congregation was shocked upon seeing the land he chose to build his orphanage. It was surrounded by mountains on three sides, and the only way to access it was to cross a river by foot. The soil was poor due to runoff, and large rocks strewn across the plot prevented much from growing. In addition, there was no running water or electricity. But it was all Yang could afford. He and his Indigenous Atayal wife Lin Feng-ying (林鳳英) had already been caring for 24 orphans in their home, and they were in
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
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