My problem with the Ozempic thing is that I’m not sure what the point of view is. Is it that using Ozempic to fast without suffering misses the point of the fast? Maybe! But I had to work a bit to find that meaning.  Was it a joke about marketing?  Maybe!

The opposite of the weather where you live.

Obama once said something that stuck with me.  Something along the lines of: if you and I can’t agree on a common set of facts, we have no chance of making progress together.

There’s literally nothing a conservative can say that’s so stupid and demonstrably false that he won’t double down on it when called out. There’s literally nothing a conservative can say that’s so stupid and demonstrably false that he’ll be punished for it by his own constituents. This is the reality we live in: a…

It think it’s pretty clear at this point. Also explains why the Ochiba wants Toranaga gone.

Calling it: Toranaga is the heir’s true father. The show has gone to great lengths to explain how the Taiko couldn’t father a child with any of the other wives. It wasn’t them, it was him. Lady Ochiba knew she only had one chance to produce an heir and turned to the man who put Taiko on the throne, or straw mat, or…

Dear god, the way she speaks it’s like she try to seduce and strangle you at the same time. 

This was another wonderful episode. The show does a great job of foregrounding women, and the different ways they can exert influence in this particular patriarchy without lapsing into ahistoricism. Incredibly tense scenes between Mariko and Blackthorne at the brothel. I did wonder if the mention of ‘doomed lovers’ by…

Yeah, the way it’s described in the book is that Blackthorne thinks of aging a bird as a kind of trial-and-error thing as opposed to an exact science, so that if the meat goes off too quickly, you shrug it off. He just didn’t communicate that very well. 

In the book, Clavell writes that the Japanese do not eat meat, only fish. This isn’t strictly accurate, but Clavell wasn’t always very careful in his research. 

And Fuji had to order it. Theirs is a harsh village (though Yabushige seems to encourage that in his holding)

“English cuisine is crap.” — Absolutely.

Blackthorne explicitly says it is a rabbit stew.

According to the novel a big bulk of the population didnt eat red meat.

“...wondering if that means Mariko has been to Blackthorne’s bed. (We’re wondering, too, after the last episode.)

The images of the pheasant from the day after the dinner scene made it appear to me that some of the pheasant had been removed…it looked like the breast meat may have been taken, so I think they were implying there was pheasant in that stew.

“and the sweet old gardener Uejirou takes that task upon himself, thus dying (I think by seppuku)“

He said it was ‘English Rabbit Stew’ (where he got a rabbit I don’t know). Given the earlier scene where Fuji is instructing people to get Blackthorne his own knives, and to make sure the food he prepares doesn’t touch any of their cooking surfaces I think they’re just trying to show that he’s a terrible cook who uses…

I was not going to mention it in last week’s review because, well, I guess words do matter and I did not want to seem like I was picking on the reviewer. But how is it uncertain that Mariko slept with Blackthorne in the prior episode. She did. It’s not a mystery. You could see it was her. And, of course, their…

He was indeed attempting to age the bird, which was the old school way of tenderizing meat in the 1600s.