Show Luo’s (羅志祥, also known as Alan Luo) new album Count on Me (有我在) is a bestseller, cementing his status as one of the country’s top hearthrobs, but the pop star and actor has an Achilles’ Heel: his foot fetish.
Luo is currently filming romantic comedy Heartbeat Love (再一次心跳) with his best friend and frequent acting partner Rainie Yang (楊丞琳). The two recently made a joint appearance on popular talk show Here Comes Kangxi (康熙來了). During taping, Yang taunted Luo for his interest in feet, announcing to the audience that her buddy loves looking at women’s toes. She even kicked off one of her pink high heels and shoved her bare foot into Luo’s face while he giggled hysterically and blushed.
Yang let slip that even though Luo loves looking at other people’s toes, he always keeps his own feet hidden away.
Photo: Taipei Times
“My toes are short, like tempura,” Luo confessed, adding that he always wears socks, even in the privacy of his own home. If he has to bare his feet when filming, Luo forbids close-ups of his tootsies.
Heartbeat Love is the third film that will show Yang and Luo swapping spit. The Apple Daily reported that when they first acted together three years ago, Luo bragged that Yang had declared him a good kisser. On Here Comes Kangxi, however, the two claimed that there was zero possibility of any romantic chemistry between them.
Meanwhile, some disgruntled fans took to Facebook to lodge complaints against Luo, but it wasn’t because of his foot fetish. A page was set up to protest Luo’s participation in the Golden Melody Awards (金曲獎), saying that his appearance would “defile” the “sacred” award ceremony. It denounced Luo’s promotional tactics, which included offering personal photos or hugs in exchange for album purchases at a recent signing event, and accused him of treating music like a “moneymaking tool.” So far, however, it seems like Luo is the one laughing all the way to the bank. The Facebook page has fewer than 200 fans despite media exposure in major papers like the Apple Daily and the United Daily News.
Gossip rags were also busy covering the continuing saga of Edison Chen’s (陳冠希) photogenic misadventures. The scandal-beleaguered star was rumored to have split up with model Cammi Tse (謝芷蕙) after he was spotted partying with 20-year-old makeup artist Suki Huang (黃雪瑩) at last week’s Coachella music festival in California. Huang posted photos on her Facebook, which quickly made their way to the rest of the Internet.
Chen has been hard at work trying to revitalize his career by recording a new album and working on a film in Beijing. His love life, however, continues to take center stage. One of Huang’s photos showed her soaking in a bubble bath. Though there was no proof, netizens wondered if Chen took the snapshot. Reporters have not been able to confirm a romance, but they have managed to suss out Huang’s alleged height (163cm), weight (46kg) and even her bra size (32B).
When not scouring the Web for Edison Chen photos, the media spent the past week diligently monitoring Stefanie Sun’s (孫燕姿) belly for signs of a baby bump. The singer has been married to Dutch-Indonesian Nadim Van Der Ros for a year, but has yet to announce a pregnancy. Van Der Ros recently participated in an environmental awareness event, vowing to film himself biking while wearing one of his wife’s dresses. Nadim kept his promise, uploading a video of him cycling while sporting a bright red dress Sun had previously worn to an awards ceremony, reported the United Daily News.
But the couple’s unique spin on drag racing only managed to distract the media for a little bit. Rumors have ramped up that Sun is pregnant and will give birth during the Year of the Dragon, but the singer has steadfastly kept mum on the matter.
Also keeping a low profile is baseball star Wang Chien-ming’s (王建民) wife Wu Chia-ling (吳嘉姈). Wang recently admitted in a press conference to having an eight-month-long affair two years ago, but said his wife had since forgiven him. Wu did not appear at the conference, but she was spotted by the Liberty Times, (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) dropping Wang off at a practice, where she hugged him and spoke a few words of encouragement before driving off.
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
The Venice Film Festival kicked off with the world premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia Wednesday night on the Lido. The opening ceremony of the festival also saw Francis Ford Coppola presenting filmmaker Werner Herzog with a lifetime achievement prize. The 82nd edition of the glamorous international film festival is playing host to many Hollywood stars, including George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Dwayne Johnson, and famed auteurs, from Guillermo del Toro to Kathryn Bigelow, who all have films debuting over the next 10 days. The conflict in Gaza has also already been an everpresent topic both outside the festival’s walls, where
RSS