Proof the casting couch not only exists but is still popular came from China this week. According to actress Zhang Yu (張鈺) it's difficult to get ahead in the film business unless you are intimately involved with the director. She even posted a video on the yoQoo.com Web site of Jing Hao (金浩) measuring up a starlet under the covers. Zhang has previously exposed directors for taking advantage of actresses and perhaps this is why she has had to resort to posting videos of herself on the Web dressed in pajamas.
Related news was disturbing fans of "Ice Cream" this week. They learned Lin Chih-lin (林志玲), which sounds like ice cream in Chinese, hence the nickname, was melting under the pressure after learning that sacrifices she made to secure a part in a Hollywood flick had come to naught, or very little. To get the role in John Woo's (吳宇森) Battle of Red Cliff (赤壁之戰) Lin jumped the director at a hotel in Shanghai. Thinking she would have to get on a horse for the film she took lessons to conquer her fear of riding, after suffering a serious fall last year. Then Chinese media criticized her for sounding like a doll, so she did voice training and can now approximate the sounds of a normal human being.
Despite Lin's hard work, Apple Daily revealed it has seen the script and her only role is to look pretty, pour tea and say two lines. The paper is calling this her "vase crisis." A vase, in Chinese, is slang for pretty but useless. Even so, Ice Cream's fans were not too worried. They knew she would be having a word in Woo's ear this week, as he is a guest at the 51st Asia-Pacific Film Festival in Taipei. Lin is also one of the hosts at the awards ceremony tonight, having secured insurance cover of NT$20 million for a risque routine. Lin will swing in the air, bend over backwards and do the splits, according to Apple. Woo has, perhaps, seen all this before, but if it doesn't move him then presumably nothing will.
Except, possibly, big breasts popping out of bras. Pan Wei-ru (潘慧如) has bounced back into the limelight after her modeling career hit the skids a year or so ago. Then, as if by magic, her bust increased two sizes, her nipples were photographed saying hello at a press conference and she made it onto the FHM magazine cover. She now hosts a TV program and is said to be dating a rich man. Surely, Apple demanded, this fairytale turnaround was due to surgery? They even showed her a picture from seven years ago with crew cut hair and no visible breasts, which seemed to confirm they arrived later. "Oh come on, I'm just pushing them up," she replied, admitting however that she had undergone "minor" surgery some time ago.
Other actresses/models in denial include Little S (小S), whose convoluted explanation for her bosom enlargement was that a doctor gave her medicine for pimples on her back and six months later a miracle occurred when she became a 32C.
Chen Yu-han (陳瑀涵) went from 32C to 34D after eight months of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Amazingly she put on weight — all of it, apparently, where her breasts used to be. Not.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
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