Last week Jay Chou (
The news may or may not be true, but it helped boost the bets currently being made on-line about the longevity of the so-called "Chou-Hou love." Total bets on the PTT bulletin board system have broken NT$500,000, with most people betting the couple's already broken up but the news has yet to leak out.
Jerry Yan (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
The director of the TV show Friends, Roger Christiansen, was in town this week to check out the set of Taiwan's version of the popular American series. Though he can't speak a lick of Chinese, Christiansen gave the show, which will air on SETTV with a title that translates into "Living on the Left, Living on the Right" (
The controversy over remarks by Hong Kong superstar Jackie Chan (成龍) following the presidential election last year ridiculing Taiwanese politics was refried last week when the singer announced to reporters while basking under the Cannes sun that he will not be coming to Taiwan until the current president serves out his term, despite the fact that it wasn't the president who took exception to his comments and the possibility that the same thin-skinned bureaucrats will be in office in four years' time.
The non-story got some extra traction, though, when straight-talking director Hou Hsiao-hsien (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
The best headline this week in regional pop news went to our friends at the China Post for a story about Zhang Ziyi's difficulties starting a career in the US. "Hollywood hard for Asians, Says China's Zhang Ziyi," read the headline. Indeed. How else can one explain Bai Ling (
DJ babe and beauty queen Stacy Hsu (
Hong Kong beauty Michelle Lee (
PHOTO: AFP
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
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