Local media have dubbed four-piece boy band Fahrenheit (飛輪海) the new F4 after it proved adept at raking in foreign currency from neighboring Asian countries. Reporters calculated that the group’s newly launched Web site (www.fahrenciti.com) successfully netted roughly 3,000 paid memberships in its first five days. Around 500 fans flew in from Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore to meet their idols in person at the site’s launch party held at Nangang Sports Center (南港運動中心) last weekend.
Fahrenheit’s band members, who are also known by their temperatures (“cold, cool, warm and hot”), did their part and turned in emotional performances to ensure the get-together was worth the flight. Reportedly moved by the band’s success, Wu Chun (吳尊, 59°F), the sappy one, took the initiative and turned the celebration into a tearjerker by sobbing uncontrollably. Wu’s fellow crooners followed suit, finally reaching a climax that involved a group hug and four blubbering pretty boys.
Having had a taste of sudden media attention following her arrest for smoking marijuana, starlet Pei Lin (裴琳) has found a new way of commanding column inches after being discharged from the jug. The vernacular press is salivating over Pei’s alleged lesbian relationship with makeup artist’s assistant Lo Ya–wen (羅雅文), who was caught smoking pot with the star during a police raid last year.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Next probed Pei’s queerness by investigating how she spent her time in jail, and uncovered salacious details of the young star slurping up freshly squeezed orange juice and chomping on sticky rice desserts handmade by admirers. Pop Stop is outraged.
Pei denied all the above but said she would have batted for her own team if she had stayed at the women’s prison any longer.
Former beauty pageant winner Yuni Li (李妍瑾) returned to the media’s attention not for her famed “chocolate nipples,” but her budding amour with a guitar player known as Hantan Yeh (寒單爺). Li broke up with Shin (信), of Shin Band (信樂團) last year.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Members of the press pack wondered whether Li has a predilection for broke rockers. The Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) unleashed its intrepid showbiz reporters on the story, who revealed that the guitarist comes from a well-heeled family and that playing in an underground band is just one of his pastimes.
Li brushed off reports that the rocker spent more than NT$10 million winning her heart and insisted that the strummer is just a typical angry musician who runs amok at bars.
Much to the delight of the Hong Kong paparazzi tailing pop idol Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒), who is shooting the sequel of Storm Riders (風雲) in Bangkok, Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝) made a surprise visit to the set last week, along with the couple’s baby boy and a troupe of assistants.
After the Edison Chen (陳冠希) sex-photo scandal, the disgraced actress and wife has allegedly resolved on following extreme methods to save her marriage with Tse. From reportedly begging for forgiveness, making suicide threats to attempting to get pregnant again, Cheung is said to be sticking close to her husband and deploying every trick in the book.
According to Liberty Times and Next, Tse was indeed surprised by Cheung’s unannounced visit, though not necessarily in a pleasant way. Photos from the scene show a sullen Tse sitting next to Cheung and their baby in a car.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
This is a deeply unsettling period in Taiwan. Uncertainties are everywhere while everyone waits for a small army of other shoes to drop on nearly every front. During challenging times, interesting political changes can happen, yet all three major political parties are beset with scandals, strife and self-inflicted wounds. As the ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is held accountable for not only the challenges to the party, but also the nation. Taiwan is geopolitically and economically under threat. Domestically, the administration is under siege by the opposition-controlled legislature and growing discontent with what opponents characterize as arrogant, autocratic
June 16 to June 22 The following flyer appeared on the streets of Hsinchu on June 12, 1895: “Taipei has already fallen to the Japanese barbarians, who have brought great misery to our land and people. We heard that the Japanese occupiers will tax our gardens, our houses, our bodies, and even our chickens, dogs, cows and pigs. They wear their hair wild, carve their teeth, tattoo their foreheads, wear strange clothes and speak a strange language. How can we be ruled by such people?” Posted by civilian militia leader Wu Tang-hsing (吳湯興), it was a call to arms to retake
When Lisa, 20, laces into her ultra-high heels for her shift at a strip club in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, she knows that aside from dancing, she will have to comfort traumatized soldiers. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, exhausted troops are the main clientele of the Flash Dancers club in the center of the northeastern city, just 20 kilometers from Russian forces. For some customers, it provides an “escape” from the war, said Valerya Zavatska — a 25-year-old law graduate who runs the club with her mother, an ex-dancer. But many are not there just for the show. They “want to talk about what hurts,” she
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