aghst

It changed from palace satire to some kind of action/survival for a bit and then back as Elena regains power, plays ball with the Americans. Herbert took a shot to the face or head yet he’s perfectly embalmed or has been done up by a taxidermist like animal trophies? Will Tracy refers to the interrogations being inspired by Solzhenitsyn. Like viewers are suppose to recognize that? Probably some references to Ceaucescu and other Eastern Bloc figures too. Still not sure what to make of it.

Didn't Larry say something questioning whether phones really endanger airliner operation? They were just taxing but they could have had the plane do a temporary plunge like the Seinfeld finale and the cast panicking and turns out all of them turned their phones on. LD made some comments recently which showed where his political leanings lie. So this Georgia law for voter suppression of black voters is certainly a political statement. Instead of challenging the law, the trial was more about his character, which used to matter with politicians.

Trial was basically a relitigation of Larry’s antics over the years. Call backs going back all the way to The Pants Tent episode, the very first one. First thing, those earlier seasons the entire episodes had a plot with the payoff at the end. This season it seemed more about getting in as many scenes with celebrity guests. Many of the things they brought up made Larry look bad but there were often extenuating circumstances or misunderstandings like the bottle of water he hid in his pants or him trying to deflate the doll and Cheryl walks in on him seemingly humping it. If Larry is unapologetic about these situations, in many cases he has no reason to be. Certainly scamming the recipe from Auntie Mae isn’t good but rather than being about malevolence or being a bad person, it was more about own-goals or self-sabotage. Seinfeld characters were shown as being selfish people and were also hurt by being victims of circumstances. Did they deserve prison time? No way Larry, without a criminal record, should be getting a prison sentence. LD keeps saying his shows are not about lessons or character growth. Yet this season plot was loosely about an unjust law enacted for voter suppression, so it did have a political opinion being expressed.

I caught up to this show over the last week or two. I hadn’t watched because it had relatively lukewarm reviews, praise for Maya but not sure this was the best vehicle. Well I wouldn’t say it’s as good as The Good Place but definitely watchable. I couldn’t stay with Acapulco despite the rave reviews for that show. Nobody as good as Maya on that show or on Shrinking for that matter. Molly shows growth and comes to lean on the small staff at her foundation and they seem to like and want to support her. A bit unrealistic given the huge power imbalance dynamics. But it’s not so far fetched that you constantly roll Your eyes because Maya of course always portrays a winning, positive personality. The second episode of the second season where Molly and Howard sets up Sofia with the architect seems genuine or as genuine as a rom-com trope can be. Even though she’s pledged to give up all her wealth, they’re going to unwind the lifestyles of the rich and famous bits, the extravagant luxury, slowly it seems. Like how she downsized to an oceanfront mansion.

Milos is nice but it's not even the most popular Greek island. I guess they wanted to feature him with a tight group of people showing him around. He refused to eat the octopus. I thought it was a principled thing but it was more of a squeamishness thing, which he got over in the end. Maybe if they do more seasons, he'll go back to some of these countries but do other destinations. He's really improved since season 1 at getting into the experiences, seems more relaxed and natural at it but maybe had to fight some jet lag and fatigue.

Was it temporary graffiti or have they marked up one of their public spaces permanently with something done for a TV show?

The striking thing about this episode was how much young Columbians had absorbed American pop culture. It happens everywhere and probably TV, film and now things like Youtube reinforces their draw. I wonder if the choice of getting into break dancing was deliberately about doing something retro or it's something that was just only discovered there relatively recently. Even the graffiti artist who painted the puzzle they had to solve made it around an English phrase. Is there a delay in American pop culture reaching a relatively poorer nation like Columbia?

Second season seems to have been pretty well received. So I may move it up the queue.

So anyone watch?

Ohio to Bellarine Peninsula, Australia. A couple with two young children, one of them autistic, which requires the wife to be full-time home school teacher and caretaker. They're moving for the husband's job, which transferred to Melbourne. However he will also be working from home and she insists they be close to the beach if they're doing this move. So Bellarine Peninsula is 50-60 miles from central Melbourne and he needs to be near public transportation to make this work. She wants either beachfront or within walking distance. She promised the kids they'd go to the beach a lot. Their budget is $3000 a month for a home by the beach or within walking distance, 4 bedrooms because they need two office areas, one for the husband and one to home-school the 8-year old autistic son. Homes they saw are all some distance from the beach. The closest is about 15-minutes away. They choose budget and space which meets their space requirements, a home that is the furthest from the beach, because the reasoning is that they have to deal with the space every day and when they do go to the beach, they have to pack up a lot of stuff so they need to pack it up in a car anyways. This is a real move, says they've sold their home and cars back in small town/suburban OH. They're happy to get away from the winters.

Well if things went smoothly all the time, there would be no conflict, tension, drama. Bravo wouldn't want that. In fact most of the footage they record may be routine, unremarkable as far as nothing going wrong. But they want to show the things that don't go smoothly. And if things go smoothly too much, they are biased towards stirring things up, because they believe confrontations and how people react to stress brings ratings.

I've forgotten what the crime Toranaga is supposedly guilty of, punishable by death. First time we see him, he's in Osaka, there for a Regents Council meeting. Already they're making accusations, how he had Ochiba back at his castle, kind of to guarantee that the other Regents won't kill him. Vaguely that he's a threat to the Heir because his family line descends from the last Shogun so he's a threat to usurp power and destroy the peace imposed by the late Taiko?

BTW, the boy doesn't die in the books. But he apparently doesn't do much in the books either.

Whoever they get is someone who probably would have been auditioned and chosen by the producers. Then signed a contract. They're not getting some random person from a yacht staffing agency and then putting him or her on the show. So that's got to be some fiction. It would be irresponsible if they started filming a season without having one or two spares stashed nearby. These chronic crew shortages -- every season of every BD show usually has a couple of charters where they're short of the staffing levels they first started with -- is part of the drama, the season plot. Any replacement who comes on the show would have long-been vetted so it's not some employment brokers finding random people. Dylan, the new deckie, is working out whenever he can. There was another deck like that, always shown doing pull-ups, even when there aren't any pull-up bars. The casting people can't even find different types of people, they keep re-casting the same types. Did she ever opine on how other things should be run, like hotels or restaurants or maybe stores? Or maybe something beyond hospitality like a charity or maybe a hospital? So it would be on brand for her to pontificate like she's used to running yacht charters. Or the producers encouraged her to behave like that. Certainly they like her behavior to feature a lot of scenes of her telling the crew how things should be.

They need the brother's army to have a chance against Ishido. But since the brother has already aligned himself with Ishido, it sounds like checkmate unless deus ex machina and there's another hidden army which is loyal to Toronaga. Or maybe an even bigger earthquake in Osaka. Even if Blackthorne is the greatest naval tactician, how is one ship going to go up against thousands, many of them wielding arrows and probably some other range weapons? His ship would need an army to keep the enemy forces engaged so it can freely lob cannonballs at strategic targets. Cannon is not for taking out thousands of soldiers on foot, despite the scene earlier in the series, unless the soldiers are hiding in a fort and the cannon is mostly to knock out the fortifications.

Well they were killing people or their lackeys on earth were killing people, killing scientists to prevent them from doing certain research, etc. But considering how we're dealing with climate change, you wouldn't expect such urgency as depicted on the show. They would spend some money to try to organize a defense, to research the aliens more. Wade though seems to be getting a blank check -- not just money but powers -- to deploy whatever military assets he needs. Would all the global powers give one man all that power though? They don't explain his background either. You get some inkling of Benedict Wong's life but nothing on Wade, why he's so committed to the cause, even at personal sacrifice to himself -- I forget in which episode he announces his plans to be leading this planetary defense effort for a long time.

Never watched the RH shows. Apparently they wanted to feature her. She could say and do all those things but it's a choice to decide to air a lot of it rather than cut out her scenes. Also, the preference sheets, they seem to have professional headshots, particularly of Jill. Particularly from like 20 years ago or something when they were considerably younger. Maybe for TV, they put head shots on preference sheets so we can associate the faces with the names but most of the time I don't pay attention to their names until they make waves. It sounds like Jill's like this on the RH shows she's on but they must have prodded her to just comment and much as possible on her ideas of how services should be and so on. Presumably she wanted to enjoy the scenery, the water sports and the food but it seems like she wants to do a job as well. Why is Kerry blaming Anthony. He was there when the primary kind of yielded to Jill and let her arrange everything with Anthony. If he objected to them catering too much to Jill, he should have told them that right then. Fake drama to make the crew look bad. They definitely created this situation.

Some injection of reality, though Elena thinks if the people see her, they will stop and not overthrow her. Will Tracy cites what Ceausescu was doing up to the last years but he says he reads about several authoritarians so Elena is kind of a mashup. Not too much dark humor in this one, just getting real as her dismissive but delusional view of her country and her people catches up to her.

Larry feeling a certain way about a fuck buddy from back in the day who has transitioned from Kendra to Ken. Also the masseuse is second Asian this season with that heavy accent. His views of Asians ability to speak English is stuck in the ‘80s if not older. If she’s Vietnamese, most of them would be second generation or later. They escaped Vietnam in the ‘70s so most of them the age of the masseuse would have been born and raised in the US. I can’t recall if he had other ethnicities with stereotypical accents, like the Palestinian Chicken episode. Episode was fun otherwise and it wasn’t a big parade of celebrity guest stars like other episodes this season. Also you don’t get Covid from sharing the same glass of water, but instead all the time LD and Bruce spent talking to each other close to each other. If they did infect each other. But they show Les getting on the bus and them shouting at each other in that bus.

Well supposedly they didn't know until like 60 years after Ye made first contact that humans are deceptive. They decide then and there that they can't live with liars. Judgey much? They ghosted Evans and then contacted Tatiana, who apparently is some super assassin, getting the jump on the secret agent type who was trailing Ye to China. They decided to taunt Evans on that jet, made him scared for his life. They have more human qualities than they like to admit.

They might have the brain as an amuse-bouche, a taste of what feast they have in store when they arrive on earth.

I think it makes sense for Ye to be religious. She made a leap as a young woman to invite them, offering to help them. She had a reason to have a chip against the world. And to carry that on for decades, through major life events like moving to the UK, having a child, you have to have some faith to sustain all of it. Evans wanted to save birds. I don't know why he'd think the San Ti would care about his concerns, which is roughly the environment? But apparently he inherited an oil kingdom and continued to let it make a fortune for him so that he could set up that tanker with all those people inside and a big dish to communicate with the "Lord." I don't know, that's a weird trajectory. Why did they become true believers. Would like to see a back story for Tatiana, the warrior for the cause, who's killed how many? What made her do the things she's doing now? I don't want it to become Lost, which spammed you with back stories just to keep the show going for as many seasons as they could for $$$. But they're trying to do some character development, why are these traitors so hardcore? What made them true believers? Because the San Ti might be like that mini series from the '80s, where the aliens promised to give humans cures and technology but it turned out they just wanted to feed on them. Did the San Ti make promises to make the world better? That would probably be deception, which they're not capable of doing, right?

I can see how they made Tatiana disappear from the security cameras, which will be revealed a couple of episodes later. But why didn't the Benedict Wong character not see Tatiana pressing Jack against the wall to floor windows?

Everyone was horrible. She did try to get him promoted but her wielding the knife and making him whimper wasn’t great either. She also made up the stalking story but her boss didn’t care as long as she made money for the firm. They probably knew they were a couple but didn’t care as long as she produced. It’s a cutthroat world and she learned to be cutthroat herself. Was she going to keep hiding their relationship? It looked that way until he couldn’t take not getting promoted and acted like a prick. Sure it could be seen as gender politics, male privilege and fragility. Or they’re just all awful people, willing to do anything for money.

Jonathan Haidt says teens started having emotional problems such as depression in 2010, which is when the smart phone became common. So he supports the bill DeSantis signed, banning social media until teens are at least 14. And flip phones until the same or similar age. But when did giving smart phones to kids, including kids under 10 years old, become a common thing? I was under the impression that parents were giving hand me down phones as they upgraded themselves. In any event, the iPhone came out in 2007. It didn't really take off, have big volumes, until iPhone 4 which was announced in June 2010 and started shipping in fall of 2010. Were parents giving their kids the newest, state of the art phones in 2010? I'm guessing it became more widespread, with kids having phones which had reasonable performance, not antiquated, more around 2015. Does that time line match when kids supposedly got more depressed? I agree that social media have made kids depressed, like girls with body issues. But it's not a new thing, weren't there depressed kids or girls with poor self-esteem and body-image issues before the 2010s? Now maybe Haidt would say those issues existed but the problem exploded in the last 10-15 years. I quickly Googled his name. It appears he's written books, given talks and interviews so it's his thing now, even though his day job is a professor at NYU business school.