This week's edition of TVBS Weekly broke some big news when it reported that Wu Bai (
The singer emerged to confirm their marriage, but corrected the report by announcing that the two actually tied the knot in Fukuoka, Japan, in 2003. The couple had kept their marriage a secret because, according to Wu Bai, "telling everyone wouldn't be fun." He denied, however, that the announcement was made because they were expecting a kid.
Last week the gossip rags in Taiwan and Hong Kong thought they'd struck gold when they released photos of Taiwanese pop diva Chang Hui-mei (A-Mei,
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Next Magazine (
Speaking of Tsai, she released a new album titled J-Game over the weekend. Ever since her emphatic split with Jay, when he was spotted in Japan with TV anchorwoman Patty Hou (
Finally, model fever in Taiwan has elicited a backlash, and leave it to bad boy rocker Chang Chen-yue (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
S.H.E. had a close brush with politics over the weekend, when a newspaper in Lanzhou, China, reported that the band had said that they weren't Chinese, but were Taiwanese. Not wanting to attract any part of the nationalist hysteria that's raged in China over the past several weekends, the girl band moved quickly to defuse the potential controversy by confirming that they had never been to Lanzhou and never been interviewed by any paper based there. They also noted in an open letter to the Great Daily News (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
With one week left until election day, the drama is high in the race for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chair. The race is still potentially wide open between the three frontrunners. The most accurate poll is done by Apollo Survey & Research Co (艾普羅民調公司), which was conducted a week and a half ago with two-thirds of the respondents party members, who are the only ones eligible to vote. For details on the candidates, check the Oct. 4 edition of this column, “A look at the KMT chair candidates” on page 12. The popular frontrunner was 56-year-old Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文)
“How China Threatens to Force Taiwan Into a Total Blackout” screamed a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) headline last week, yet another of the endless clickbait examples of the energy threat via blockade that doesn’t exist. Since the headline is recycled, I will recycle the rebuttal: once industrial power demand collapses (there’s a blockade so trade is gone, remember?) “a handful of shops and factories could run for months on coal and renewables, as Ko Yun-ling (柯昀伶) and Chao Chia-wei (趙家緯) pointed out in a piece at Taiwan Insight earlier this year.” Sadly, the existence of these facts will not stop the
Oct. 13 to Oct. 19 When ordered to resign from her teaching position in June 1928 due to her husband’s anti-colonial activities, Lin Shih-hao (林氏好) refused to back down. The next day, she still showed up at Tainan Second Preschool, where she was warned that she would be fired if she didn’t comply. Lin continued to ignore the orders and was eventually let go without severance — even losing her pay for that month. Rather than despairing, she found a non-government job and even joined her husband Lu Ping-ting’s (盧丙丁) non-violent resistance and labor rights movements. When the government’s 1931 crackdown
The first Monopoly set I ever owned was the one everyone had — the classic edition with Mr Monopoly on the box. I bought it as a souvenir on holiday in my 30s. Twenty-five years later, I’ve got thousands of boxes stacked away in a warehouse, four Guinness World Records and have made several TV appearances. When Guinness visited my warehouse last year, they spent a whole day counting my collection. By the end, they confirmed I had 4,379 different sets. That was the fourth time I’d broken the record. There are many variants of Monopoly, and countries and businesses are constantly