Fresh from being crowned the “king” of the Mando-pop charts, Jay Chou (周杰倫) was unceremoniously usurped last week by Mayday (五月天). The pretty-boy rockers announced that sales of their latest release Poetry of the Day After (後青春期的詩) totaled over 1.3 million copies, and noted that they edged past the Chairman’s Capricorn (魔杰座), which just broke the 1 million mark.
Chou’s record company JVR Music (杰威爾音樂) took the announcement as a dig. Instead of congratulating the competition, the company issued a long-winded, huffy response that ended with, “there’s no need to brag,” reports the Liberty Times [the Taipei Times’ sister paper].
The hoopla left Mayday’s lead singer, A-hsin (阿信), exasperated. “[Chou] is using Rubik’s Cubes [to sell records], we’re doing concerts — it’s a lot more tiring,” said A-hsin, referring to the Rubik’s Cubes plastered with Chou’s face that are being offered as a freebie with his new album. But he quickly composed himself. “Whoever’s number one is not important. The most important thing is for everyone to have good sales.” That is, just as long as Jay isn’t number one ...
Only the Apple Daily can turn a pop idol’s mundane shopping trip into a lost-love-drove-her-to-drink-narrative. One of the paper’s ace reporters spotted Elva Hsiao (蕭亞軒) at the Breeze Center’s (微風廣場) supermarket, where the 28-year-old singer was looking for a bottle of wine. Since Hsiao appeared “melancholic” and was lingering in the alcohol section, she obviously intended to drown her sorrows over male heartthrob model Leandro (李安卓), who got “snatched” out of her arms by model Liu Zhen (劉真).
Hsiao’s agent insists that Leandro is “just a friend” and Hsiao has plenty of prospective beaus lined up at the door — she just “hasn’t made her decision” yet. As for the wine, Hsiao and her mother regularly enjoy a nightcap. And who doesn’t? The photos accompanying the Apple Daily article are worthy of mention for the play-by-play captions that would make any stalker proud.
8:43pm: The store manager shows Hsiao a bottle of wine. 8:45pm: Hsiao is pictured with her brother, and she’s using a credit card to buy a bottle of red wine, which costs NT$2,100. 8:52pm: She’s in the Fendi store. She’s been looking at bags for what seems like an eternity. But in the end, she didn’t buy one.
German film director Wim Wenders was seen wandering the streets of Taipei earlier this week, on a visit with young filmmaker Arvin Chen (陳駿霖) [see Highlight on Page 15]; The director of Paris, Texas and Buena Vista Social Club is serving as executive producer for Chen’s upcoming film First Page Taipei (一頁台北). The Liberty Times reports that Wenders’ hosts took him to the Shida night market (師大夜市), where they frequently lost sight of the auteur, only to find him photographing scenes that caught his eye: a hardware store; an NT$10 discount store; and elderly shopkeepers.
A night market is an unlikely place to spot Japanese singer Ayumi Hamasaki, who performs tomorrow and Sunday at Taipei Arena. But if the demanding pop diva makes any public appearances, her assistants will have to be ready for anything — and that could mean having a toilet brush at hand.
A China Times article earlier this month relayed this past tale: on an outdoor photo shoot, Hamasaki told a male assistant she had to go to the bathroom. His immediate response was to find the nearest public toilet, scrub it clean, and make sure the coast was clear so the pop princess could have the facilities to herself.
Taiwan is one of the world’s greatest per-capita consumers of seafood. Whereas the average human is thought to eat around 20kg of seafood per year, each Taiwanese gets through 27kg to 35kg of ocean delicacies annually, depending on which source you find most credible. Given the ubiquity of dishes like oyster omelet (蚵仔煎) and milkfish soup (虱目魚湯), the higher estimate may well be correct. By global standards, let alone local consumption patterns, I’m not much of a seafood fan. It’s not just a matter of taste, although that’s part of it. What I’ve read about the environmental impact of the
It is jarring how differently Taiwan’s politics is portrayed in the international press compared to the local Chinese-language press. Viewed from abroad, Taiwan is seen as a geopolitical hotspot, or “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth,” as the Economist once blazoned across their cover. Meanwhile, tasked with facing down those existential threats, Taiwan’s leaders are dying their hair pink. These include former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) and Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), among others. They are demonstrating what big fans they are of South Korean K-pop sensations Blackpink ahead of their concerts this weekend in Kaohsiung.
The captain of the giant Royal Navy battleship called his officers together to give them a first morsel of one of World War II’s most closely guarded secrets: Prepare yourselves, he said, for “an extremely important task.” “Speculations abound,” one of the officers wrote in his diary that day — June 2, 1944. “Some say a second front, some say we are to escort the Soviets, or doing something else around Iceland. No one is allowed ashore.” The secret was D-Day — the June 6, 1944, invasion of Nazi-occupied France with the world’s largest-ever sea, land and air armada. It punctured Adolf
The first Monopoly set I ever owned was the one everyone had — the classic edition with Mr Monopoly on the box. I bought it as a souvenir on holiday in my 30s. Twenty-five years later, I’ve got thousands of boxes stacked away in a warehouse, four Guinness World Records and have made several TV appearances. When Guinness visited my warehouse last year, they spent a whole day counting my collection. By the end, they confirmed I had 4,379 different sets. That was the fourth time I’d broken the record. There are many variants of Monopoly, and countries and businesses are constantly
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