It’s often said that the entertainment industry is built on foundations of fantasy and hype, but some old-time entertainers understand the importance of putting their money into something that lasts.
In the case of Fei Yu-ching (費玉清), the younger brother of popular entertainer Chang Fei
(張菲), that’s bricks and mortar.
This week, the media was awash with news that the singer and TV host had spent NT$330 million on purchasing a property on Dunhua North Road (敦化北路).
According to the Apple Daily, Fei Yu-ching bought the property outright, paying cash up front for the 600-plus square meter commercial property.
Fei Yu-ching certainly has the money to spend, having grossed, according to the paper, a total of NT$186 million for concerts so far this year.
According to the Apple Daily, the singer, known for his mellifluous voice, low-key lifestyle and financial acumen, is careful with his money.
Another entertainer who is being careful with money is Lin Chi-ling (林志玲), who has decided to fight a tax claim of NT$8.19 million on her earnings from last year. The conflict centers on whether some of her earnings are regarded as income earned through her association with modeling agency Catwalk (凱渥) or personal income.
According to the tax agency, Lin failed to report NT$170 million in personal income between 2003 and 2005, which is the basis of its present claim.
Meanwhile, Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) is promoting a new album, which once again sees her flaunting her many physical assets in the media.
The album, titled Myself, has already generated much hype with rumors of steamy music videos.
The most recently released music video, Love’s Pupil (玩愛之徒), for which Tsai served as artistic director, is rumored to push the boundaries, showing off vast areas of Tsai’s well-toned body.
While Tsai revels in opening up on screen, she has said that she has had enough of unwelcome attention from the media, which has recently taken to shining the spotlight on her family life.
In a statement to the press, Tsai asked the media to stop bothering her family, and got decidedly tetchy when accused of lacking proper respect for family elders. “It’s not up to the media to define what constitutes respect,” she is quoted as saying.
In romance-related news, Sammi Cheng (鄭秀文) has, according to NOWnews.com, become the touch-paper of a breakup between Chinese singer Andy Hui (�?w) and Michelle Yu (余德琳), his girlfriend of three years.
Hui and Cheng enjoyed a high-profile and commercially successful personal and professional relationship in the first half of the last decade.
Cheng said in a statement that her relationship with Hui had changed over the past 10 years “from romance to friendship” (愛情變成了情誼), and that there was no basis for the pair getting back together.
Cheng begged the media to lay off the three principals of this drama, but in a slow news week, her wish fell on deaf ears.
TV personality He Yi-hang
(賀一航) has become a major focus of news after police busted a prostitution and drug ring midweek. Apart from being shown to have been a regular client of the syndicate, He stands accused of having trafficked cocaine and ketamine, which is likely to get him into much more trouble than the titillating reports that he engaged in threesomes with hookers.
Despite the lurid details that have been splashed across the tabloids, He’s fiancee, referred to in the Chinese-language media simply as Judy, is standing by her man, for the moment at least.
Their wedding, scheduled for the end of the year, is still on track. According to a report in the United Daily News, police said that He had been “very unlucky” (很衰), since their investigations had not been targeting him at all. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
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Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
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