At our wits’ end at the year-end

Friday, 10amish. The very dead deadline for my Best & Worst 2007 Western and Eastern entertainment wraps is dusk; I am very brain-dead; I have warned a sub that my stories might be very late and she has warned me that she might have to kill me. Clock is ticking. Brain is deading. I have to complain to someone.
“I don’t know how to write! How to Best & Worst gossip? What’s good gossip what’s bad gossip it’s either exciting gossip or boring gossip what! What five Bests what three Worsts everything is the worst what!”
“Have you told Meigao?” (Meigao is Ms M’s Mandarinised nickname for the ed.)
“Can’t be bothered.”
“I love your attitude.”

Friday, 4pmish. Ms H and I are worrying about other people’s wraps when I should be writing mine.
harry potter not in book wrap!
i know, i know. n lust caution not in film wrap!
sicko, death proof, were they even shown in sg. no 881! but sam has it in his music wrap
sam is good. but alamak. book wrap no harry potter. film wrap no lust caution. wheres the zeitgeist? talk to dt?
i cant get through to him
i try?
“Eh eh eh I kaypoh ah. Your best-movie wrap…Sicko and Death Whatever shown here meh?”
“Yes they opened here lah.”
“Meh? One week? Two days? Your list sounds like you hid in your home and saw lots of ang mor DVDs leh.”
“No they opened here lah.”
“Okay.” (Ms H was right. You can’t get through to DT.)
i tried. he said they were shown. shall i say something to the supes casually?
no need. put them in ur ent wrap so i can put them in my preamble? u can save the paper from irrelevance!
i try i try

Friday, 7pmish. My stories have gone to Meigao. The worst has come to the worst.
“Are you saying Anna Nicole Smith’s death is a good thing? I’m not comfortable with it.”
“Well, in death, she won? Front-page treatment, thoughtful essays, she got an Economist obituary, remember? XY wrote about that? In Culture Vulture?”
“Don’t remember…I’m not comfortable with it.”
“Er” (eating my words and my attitude) “what’s the Best gossip? What’s the Worst gossip? Best to whom? Worst to whom? Paris Hilton in jail, I turned that into a good thing, should that be turned into a bad thing now? We don’t have enough Bests.”
“One year and there are not enough Bests?”
“Er. Britney is not a Best? Lindsay, is that a Best? Amy Winehouse, is that a Best?”
“No. Amy Winehouse is bad. ……… Do celeb babies?”
“Er. No one new was born this year?”
“Do celeb babies.”
“Okay.” (Relevance shrelevance. Hey I only work here okay?)

Today, 8amish. The clouds of sleep are clearing and I think I hear… “Eh I saw three of the five best movies leh,” Fei is saying somewhere in the house. (He is up? Who else is up?) So DT has made Fei’s day with his fanboy’s wrap; I can’t complain about that; my mind hazes over with more sleep.

Idol drama

What sets a singer apart from a truly talented KTV warbler is interpretation. The singer sings somebody else’s song as if it is his own, as if he has never heard the original – and I know as a karaoke enthusiast just how hard that is.

Taiwan is KTV country so maybe more Taiwanese, coming to a talent contest, are able to appreciate how good a contestant is when he sings a familiar song very, very differently. Of course, they then go try the song they have rediscovered at karaoke, trying their best to sound as good as the contestant.

And this year everyone, from the man in the night market to the comic from Everybody Speaks Nonsense, wanted to sing the Gary Chaw song Betrayal very, very sadly – as popularised by Aska Yang, the contestant from One Million Star (click here).

I don’t know how he does it and I don’t know how much of it is instinctive but he somehow opens up the song and lets in a lot more emotional colour. Okay, in English: When he sings it you feel it. Surely the Taiwanese were feeling it (one of his nicknames is Yang-tsung Wei, Onion Wei, a play on his Chinese name and his talent for reducing them to tears) and singing it (Betrayal is No.1 in the KTV charts this year). It helped that there then came Jam Hsiao, a PK contestant who challenged Yang with his very own Broadwayish version of Betrayal; out of the blue there were not one but two interpretations to admire and aspire to (click here). (Onion? Jam? Yes, and there is also a Yoga Lin.)

For coming close to beating Yang, Hsiao became a star overnight. (Okay, over three weeks in the contest.) The 20-year-old has done a duet with A-mei and will release his own record next year. Yang went on to quit the show when he was found to have lied about his age (29, not 24) and faked a Xerox of his IC. Had he stayed in the contest, he would have won it, not that he needs to. He is so preposterously popular now, a capacity crowd would want to hear him sing phone numbers – very, very heartrendingly.