Last week Carina Lau (劉嘉玲) and Tony Leung Chiu Wai (梁朝偉) exchanged marriage vows in Bhutan. A wedding on the following day, which one might have expected to upstage an event taking place thousands of kilometers away, didn’t. Terry Gou’s (郭台銘) marriage to dancer Delia Tseng (曾馨瑩) managed to totally underwhelm the media. Perhaps that was intentional, for the event at the Grand Hyatt Taipei was billed as “environmentally friendly and of the common people.” It may come as something of a surprise to Gou to learn that most people don’t spend upwards of NT$20 million on their wedding, but compared to the NT$220 million that the Lau-Leung nuptials cost, it is, as they say, small potatoes.
Unfortunately, Gou simply comes across as being a tad cheap, which reflects badly on him after his unsuccessful pursuit of A-listers like Lau. But the most notable aspect of Gou’s wedding was not the guests, who included local celebrities Chang Fei (張菲), Chang Hsiao-yen (張小燕) and Kevin Tsai (蔡康永), but those who were not invited. First among the omissions was supermodel and former Gou inamorata Lin Chih-lin (林志玲), who is regarded by many as the matchmaker behind the Tel and Delia pairing. Gou, it seems, does not like to be reminded of his failures — another mark against someone who tries to come across as debonair.
And all may not be rosy in the house of Gou. The tycoon’s younger brother Gou Tai-chiang (郭台強) missed his sibling’s wedding, preferring to holiday in Kyoto instead.
Meanwhile, Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) is without a clearly designated “friend,” and, according to her favorite fortune-teller, this has everything to do with the color of her hair, Next Magazine reports. Tsai’s tresses recently went from brown to black, and while this hasn’t done anything for her love life, it may, or may not, have helped bag her a lucrative contract for promoting hair care products, reportedly worth NT$24 million.
Lower down on the celebrity food chain, model Song Hsin-ni (宋新妮) has found that the most effective way of moving from page to screen is to get her kit off, and has achieved a victory of sorts in squeezing out rival Lee Yan-jin (李妍瑾) as the celebrity spokesperson for Ankh Clinic Beauty Therapy (安蔻美容醫學中心), where she had become a regular client.
Still further down the food chain, Sung Chien-chang (宋健彰), better known as band Nanchuan Mama’s (南拳媽媽) Tantou (彈頭), may be faced with a shotgun wedding as girlfriend Pipi (皮皮) has, reportedly, got a little Tantou in her tummy. The pretty boy’s rather short career as a man about town seems to be drawing rapidly to a close.
And so as Pop Stop bottoms out, the only way to go is up. Well, perhaps not. Jam Hsiao (蕭敬騰), whose self-titled debut album remains unremittingly at the top of the music charts despite no evidence of originality or talent, is hereby formally admitted into Pop Stop’s Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame after he was charged with burning a piano in a conservation area. Alas, this is no Jimi Hendrix at the Monterrey Pop Festival during the Summer of Love, and without any regard for the saccharine music video that resulted from this publicity stunt, the Taichung County Environmental Protection Agency slapped a NT$100,000 fine on Hsiao’s production company for, first and foremost, transporting the piano to the Kaomei Wildlife Conservation Area (高美野生動物保護區) and, quite literally, frightening the animals, and then for burning it in an area in which fires are prohibited.
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