Last weekend's Golden Melody Awards was a meticulously scripted, bland affair, which is why about the only remarkable event all night was when a thuggish looking young man who had snuck his way into the photographer scrum right next to Pop Stop suddenly lunged onto the carpet in a futile attempt to get to the Korean singer Boa. He didn't get anywhere close to the singer before security guards tossed him backwards and headfirst into the photographer lineup, sending people toppling like bowling pins over step ladders. The guards got in a couple punches and then the man simply rose to his feet, turned around and walked off into the crowd. He's lucky he did, because within a minute a gang of truly menacing youths turned up trying to spot him.
As for the ceremony, Jay Chou (
Overall, the show stretched far beyond its scheduled ending time thanks not to interminable acceptance speeches, but to verbose announcers hogging the spotlight. Foremost among these was TV show host Kang Kang (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
It wasn't until Sunday that Jacky called a press conference to apologize for driving drunk and for not having a license, despite being a self-professed car lover and owning five cars, including a Rolls Royce, a Porsche and a Mercedes.
The strangest scandal to emerge in the past week, however, involves the model-cum-actress Candy Lee (
another woman. Now, she said, she needed to come clean about the affair for fear that she would go to hell.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and