Light, chocolate-colored nipples were the meal of the day in gossip pages this week. Former beauty pageant winner Lee Yan-jin (李妍瑾) got caught flashing a perky pebble at a press conference to promote bras. Lee and the company behind the bra were reportedly so keen to fluff up her female frontal flesh fins from a B-size to a D-cup they slipped out when her co-host flipped her over in a dance move.
Embarrassment all round. But worse was to come when commentators on local rags described her nipples as black. This would not be a bad thing in Africa, perhaps, but in Taiwan the use of skin lightener before bedtime is practically a religion for many women.
A mortified Lee insisted her nipples were “light, chocolate” in color and the reason they appeared to be black was because she had applied dark stickers to prevent them standing up and saying hello. She even called on her breast arranger (these people do exist) to confirm her nipples were the color she claimed.
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Pop Stop is in no position to bite the hand that feeds it, however Next Magazine plumbed the depths when it covered the Lee story this week. Its main picture was a shot up Lee's skirt, as she danced. This, in a story about breasts. It even enlarged the picture to focus on her panties. It was nasty and gratuitous — which is the best the magazine can do these days with its rehashed Apple Daily stories and mountains of ads.
Back to mammary news and the exuberant Xiao Shu-shen (蕭淑慎) was caught out this week when she appeared on ERA TV and experienced a “wardrobe malfunction.” The actress, singer and gangster's moll has lost weight and as a result her tits have shrunk from 32D to 32B. The tape used to maintain her modesty lost its stick under the arc lights and started to slip down, according to media reports. But the quick-witted Xiao managed to do a hand warming impression over her breasts and saved the day.
TV hostess Emi Lee (李明依) has been paying for her sacrilegious comments or her political beliefs, it's hard to tell. The fading star known for being a rent-a-mouth told reporters last week that Kevin Tsai (蔡康永) had lost her respect for allowing Hsu Chun-mei (許純美) on his show.
Hsu, you may remember, is the 48-year-old woman who came to national attention two years ago for abandoning her five year-old child in a shopping mall. Since then she has developed media attention deficit disorder and will do almost anything to appear on local TV shows. To be fair to the woman who even Ritalin cannot tame, viewers do tune in to watch her. Ostensibly she turned up on Tsai's program to show off her latest cosmetic surgery. But any excuse will do.
Lee contended Tsai didn't need to stoop so low to boost ratings, despite having invited Hsu onto her own show Super Sunday (快樂星期天) last year and getting a ratings lift as a result. Perhaps it was the blatant hypocrisy, or there is a crazed Hsu fan out there, local newspapers speculated, as someone left a death threat on Lee's Web site.
Lee, however, explained in Next the threat was most likely because she had written in her blog that she had contributed NT$100 to Shih Ming-teh's (施明德) campaign to oust President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).
Tsai's program last week also featured a girl picking her boyfriend's nose, licking his face like a dog and sucking feet to illustrate the (supposedly) liberal love lives of the young. Tsai defended the segment against critics who said he was low class with the retort he was merely reflecting reality.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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