Drinking, singing and dancing are expected to take place deep in the mountains of Miaoli and Hsinchu when the "Ritual of the Little Black People" (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
This week, the government announced that electricity prices would not be raised for the next six months. Taipower had proposed raising the rates a mere 0.07 percent. The reason given for the rejection of the new rate was that the tiny increase would not cover the administrative costs of making the adjustment. Moreover, Taipower is finally making money again after five years of no profits. Those of us who from time to time pay attention to the government’s decisions to subsidize utility prices were a bit bemused by this strange logic. Surely, it’s reasonable to suggest that if the rate hike
April 5 to April 11 During the final months of his life, Kuo Hsueh-hu (郭雪湖) repeatedly asked his children to bring him down the mountain back to Fanzaigou (蕃仔溝), where he was born on April 10, 1908. The centenarian had been living near San Francisco for decades, but as his condition worsened he began to think that he was on Guanyinshan (觀音山), which overlooks his childhood stomping grounds along the Tamsui river. Kuo is one of Taiwan’s best-known painters, bursting onto the scene in at the age of 19 as one of the “Three Youths of the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition” (台展三少年)
Over a million years in the making, the outdoor playground that is Kaohsiung’s Shoushan (壽山), commonly known as “Monkey Mountain,” is a rich geological and ecological resource that visitors to the city should be sure not to miss. Many are familiar with the area’s hiking trails and resident monkey population, but even locals may be surprised to learn of the extensive system of caves here, full of classic examples of speleothems like stalactites, stalagmites, draperies and flowstones, as well as cave-dwelling fauna. These caves are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of erosion slowly dissolving the mountain’s limestone.
It’s official: Trees are good for the mental health of city dwellers. According to a study published in Scientific Reports at the end of last year, individuals living within 100m of a high density of street trees in Leipzig, Germany, were prescribed antidepressant prescriptions at a lower rate than those who didn’t have many trees in their neighborhood. The study noted that more distant clusters of street trees didn’t appear to have any impact on antidepressant use, and that, even at 100m, the correlation was merely “marginally significant.” However, the researchers found, for individuals with low socio-economic status, trees no more