Jacky Wu (吳宗憲), who's made a career as a TV comedian, dropped probably the biggest joke of his life last week when he announced his possible contention on an independent ticket for a legislative seat to represent Taipei's southern district in elections set for November. The only things holding him back at this stage, he told media this week, were his father's and wife's objections.
As for his colorful record of public philandering and most recently driving drunk without a license, these don't seem to raise any questions in his mind about possible doubts voters may have about his trustworthiness when it comes to formulating national policy and handling their tax money. In fact, he has a couple of policy ideas of his own. He's quoted as telling media that his first mission, if elected, will be to get all paparazzi kicked out of Taiwan, singling out Next Magazine (壹週刊) and Apple Daily (蘋果日報) as targets of his impending media purge.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Part of what prompted his legislative bid is Jacky's current court case against a fan named Linda, who revealed an affair to Next Magazine, she alleges to have had with the TV host. So far, the case remains undecided, but if that one fails, there's always the one brought by his wife against Linda, who once wrote a song for pop singer Elva Hsiao (蕭亞軒), that accuses Linda of trying to harm the Wu family.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
This week Ella of the pop group S.H.E. spent several days refuting a report on a Chinese Web site that "revealed" that she was previously a boy until a sex change made her a girl. Responding to the minor storm kicked up over the report, she told the Liberty Times (自由時報): "Yeah, I'm a boy. Why don't I just pull it out right here and pee on the floor?" She was joking, of course, but the tom-boyish Ella has been deflecting rumors about her sexual orientation since the group was formed a couple years ago.
More sex organs were in the news this week when Hong Kong singer/actor Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒) was reported to have had a diamond stud penis ring. In an odd echo of Ella's comment, Nicholas sarcastically quipped to The Great Daily News (
Tse is currently in Beijing on the set of Chen Kaige's (陳凱歌) next film The Promise (無極), which will also star his erstwhile lover Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝). According to the Taiwan Daily, Cheung will mark a first in her film career in this movie with two full nudity scenes that she insisted on filming herself instead of having a body double. Tse won't be the man shooting the nude scenes with Cheung, though. That task will fall on the broad, tanned shoulders of South Korean actor Jang Dong-kun (張東建) and Hiroyuki Sanada.
Last week, TV hostess Big S proved that it's not just poor people who play the lottery when she hit a jackpot worth NT$140,000. It wasn't the NT$900 million that was up for grabs, but it still made her feel rich enough to give assistants at the studio NT$20,000 and use the rest to take her long-time boyfriend Lan Cheng-long (
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
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