What better way to cap off a nice evening at the movies with a close friend than to strangle a reporter from the Apple Daily (蘋果日報) in a parking lot? That's what Jason Hsu (許孟哲) of 5566 got to do last week and surely Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒) and other reporter-bashing pop stars blushed when they saw the pictures in the paper the next day.
There was 19-year-old Hsu, straddling the poor reporter, his hands firmly wrapped around the man's neck and seemingly wrenching at his trachea. Not long ago, 5566 was held up as a paragon of adolescent boy bands, but more recently its members have scuffled with the media and basically outed themselves as a bunch of hotheads.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Predictably, Apple reported the confrontation as an outrage and raised the specter of lawsuits. Hsu, along with all his bandmates, felt compelled to make a public apology on TV the next day. Looking glum and penitent, he made the ritual deep bows and promised to rein in his temper in the future. Hilariously, Apple said they felt his apology didn't look sincere enough, so it was still considering filing suit. Sounds like an out-of-court settlement in the making.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
If actress Suzanne Hsiao (
Now to the long-rumored romantic relationship between Jay Chou (
After Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino was so inspired by his brush with the martial-arts genre that he now plans to film a kung-fu flick entirely in Mandarin, according to Hollywood media. The film, which is still only a glimmer in Tarantino's eye, will reportedly be dubbed for English audiences, but the dubbing will be intentionally of poor quality to mimic the bad overdubs of 1970s martial-arts movies. Whether the lines will be re-dubbed in Mandarin for Chinese-speaking audiences was unclear.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and