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.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built