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[POP STOP]

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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.

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