The love triangle between Mando pop diva A-mei (張惠妹), basketball player Sam Ho (何守正) and airline hostess/wannabe star Lin Pei-yao (林佩瑤) died a death this week as Taiwan's leading superstar quickly saw off her rival after members of the paparazzi caught Ho having a secret tryst with Lin last week.
Currently in Tokyo playing the role of Princess Turandot in a Japanese production of Turandot, A-mei publicly acknowledged her relationship with Ho for the first time by admitting that they had daily phone calls after the gossip gristmill went into overdrive.
Contrary to celebrity watchers' portrayal of Ho as a rake who sought warmth in the bosom of a maid while his belle is away, the basketball player is, in the diva's understanding, a hard-working lad who takes his profession seriously. As for the suspicious date in the park, A-mei brushed off the press pack's eager questions by proclaiming everybody has the "right to make friends."
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
One Million Star alumnus Aska Yang (楊宗緯) has found out the hard way that there is such a thing as bad publicity. The unlikely star, who built his entire career on a reasonable voice, unverifiable rumors and a slew of publicity stunts, has been put under the microscope. While appearing on the TV variety show Temple of the Spicy Queen (麻辣天后宮), hosted by transsexual celebrity Li Jing (利菁), two nightclub employees insinuated that Yang took a drunken girl to a love motel after a night of clubbing, Yang reportedly faces the loss of several product endorsements.
The crybaby crooner's agent promptly issued threats to take the matter to court. The two so-called witnesses subsequently apologized, and the TV station promised to edit out the whole sorry scenario.
Hostess Li, however, decided to play dumb by saying that she failed to remember anything due to the brain surgery she had underwent earlier this year.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Taiwan's veteran beauty Stephanie Hsiao (蕭薔) was spotted entertaining two Japanese distributors along with local director Alice Wang (王毓雅) last week at a Cash Box KTV (錢櫃) in Taipei's East District (東區). The gathering further makes Hsiao a favored candidate to star in Wang's latest film project tentatively titled The Story of Taiwanese Presidents (台灣總統的故事) as the nation's first lady-to-be Chow Mei-ching (周美青).
Presenting her credentials to the press, Hsia, a spokesperson for luxury and extravagance, said she had worn the same pair of white sneakers for eight years. The implication, supposedly is that makes her the perfect character to play Chow, a down-to-earth, makeup-free first lady.
In the aftermath of Edison Chen's (陳冠希) sex-photo scandal, Hong Kong actor and singer Nicolas Tse (謝霆鋒), now better known as the ill-fated husband of Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝), is being depicted by paparazzi as a husband and father sent mad by the affair and running up and down on the streets of Hong Kong like a lunatic.
Clearly, Hong Kong's observant reporters decipher a daily jog as aberrant human behavior. Watch out president-elect Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
As for the now best known and most admired fellatio "artiste" in the Chinese-speaking, Chen is keeping his promise to leave the entertainment business in Hong Kong indefinitely by starting his career afresh somewhere else.
The star has been reportedly offered several new movie projects, his agent said this week. One of them is a romance flick co-starring Shu Qi (舒淇) with funding from Singapore and the US.
If everything goes well, women and gay audiences will soon be able to fantasize about the star again on the big screen.
When life gives you trees, make paper. That was one of the first thoughts to cross my mind as I explored what’s now called Chung Hsing Cultural and Creative Park (中興文化創意園區, CHCCP) in Yilan County’s Wujie Township (五結). Northeast Taiwan boasts an abundance of forest resources. Yilan County is home to both Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area (太平山國家森林遊樂區) — by far the largest reserve of its kind in the country — and Makauy Ecological Park (馬告生態園區, see “Towering trees and a tranquil lake” in the May 13, 2022 edition of this newspaper). So it was inevitable that industrial-scale paper making would
July 21 to July 27 If the “Taiwan Independence Association” (TIA) incident had happened four years earlier, it probably wouldn’t have caused much of an uproar. But the arrest of four young suspected independence activists in the early hours of May 9, 1991, sparked outrage, with many denouncing it as a return to the White Terror — a time when anyone could be detained for suspected seditious activity. Not only had martial law been lifted in 1987, just days earlier on May 1, the government had abolished the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist
Hualien lawmaker Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) is the prime target of the recall campaigns. They want to bring him and everything he represents crashing down. This is an existential test for Fu and a critical symbolic test for the campaigners. It is also a crucial test for both the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a personal one for party Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫). Why is Fu such a lightning rod? LOCAL LORD At the dawn of the 2020s, Fu, running as an independent candidate, beat incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) and a KMT candidate to return to the legislature representing
Asked to define sex, most people will say it means penetration and anything else is just “foreplay,” says Kate Moyle, a psychosexual and relationship therapist, and author of The Science of Sex. “This pedestals intercourse as ‘real sex’ and other sexual acts as something done before penetration rather than as deserving credit in their own right,” she says. Lesbian, bisexual and gay people tend to have a broader definition. Sex education historically revolved around reproduction (therefore penetration), which is just one of hundreds of reasons people have sex. If you think of penetration as the sex you “should” be having, you might
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