Is it just Pop Stop, or do the local celebrity rags seem starved of hot gossip recently? Gone, it seems, are the halcyon days when Hong Kong celebs had photos of their sex capers posted across the Internet, or when Taiwanese starlets blushed after being busted for getting high.
And so it goes that this week the paparazzi dug up the old “Alan Luo (羅志祥) and Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) are a couple” chestnut. This moribund morsel of showbiz life, which first saw life years ago, is being rehashed because the two pop stars were spotted together in Japan. Tsai’s agent, however, scotched the rumors by saying that the two celebrities were — here comes the classic PR rebuttal — “just friends,” and the fact that pair took the same flight and booked into the same hotel was mere “coincidence.”
Speaking of friends, Chen Chin-yi (鄭進一) seems to have quite a few. The Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) implied, in a half-page spread complete with supposedly incriminating photos, that the 53-year-old composer is a three-timing womanizer.
He was first papped one afternoon entering a hotel and then leaving a few hours later with what the paper described as a “well-endowed” woman. Though Chen later denied any illicit rendezvous had taken place, the photographs showed the mystery woman walking past Chen’s car carrying his latest CD.
Evening the same day brought the alleged Casanova to Yangmingshan, where he dined with a female reportedly half his age. This snippet was disingenuous rumor mongering, though, as other dinner guests included another couple old enough to be the young woman’s parents. The evening ended after Chen’s girlfriend picked him up at 10pm. The verdict? Although bed-hopping makes for good headlines, in this case res ipsa loquitur.
Meanwhile, actor Tuo Tsung-hua (庹宗華) is living up to his reputation as a hell-raiser. But rather than sinking one too many on a plane, as he did a few years ago on a flight from Hong Kong to Taiwan, and then upon landing made a staggering fool of himself at Taoyuan International Airport, he got wasted at a KTV in Tamsui (淡水) and roughed up a fan, reports the Liberty Times.
The evening started out innocently enough when an admirer surnamed Wang (王) struck up a conversation with the Golden Bell Award-winner while the thespian’s friends tried to use Tuo’s fame to dodge the bill. But the KTV staff was having none of it, and Wang stepped up and paid the tab, which came to a whopping NT$1,900.
The situation got ugly when Wang, in an act of quid pro quo, asked to take have his photo taken with Tuo. The entertainer, inexplicably roiled at Wang’s request, caught the startled fan in a headlock and aggressively wrapped him on the noggin a few times with his knuckles. But it didn’t end there. Wang’s friend saw the ruckus, ran over, and landed a few punches on Tuo, which was enough to knock the actor back into reality: He apologized to the injured party for his violent behavior.
Wu Bai’s (伍佰) wife and agent Chen Wen-pei (陳文佩) is getting a reputation of her own as a sulk, if the Apple Daily is to be believed. The tabloid’s intrepid reporters caught up with the pair earlier this week at the American Institute in Taiwan, where they were applying for visas.
The paper wrote that Chen became petulant during the interview. This “incident” falls on the heels of an earlier run-in with authorities, when Chen got into a verbal altercation with a cop. That scuffle ended with the police officer calling Chen “penis pubic hair,” which is tantamount, in Mandarin, to childishly calling her a “James Blunt,” in Cockney rhyming slang.
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
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located