Constructor: Dan Caprera
Relative issue: Straightforward
THEME: PLOT (62A: What’s spelled out, appropriately, after mapping the coordinates indicated by this puzzle’s circled letters) — theme solutions include letter strings (in circled squares) that function plot coordinates, and people coordinates (N2, A9, D1, and K7) lead you to the letters P, L, O, and T, respectively:
Although you do want the precise coordinates in your grid with a view to “remedy” the theme half (my software program does not present them—this is what the puzzle grid appeared like on-line):
- STUNTWOMAN (16A: Lucy Lawless had one on “Xena: Warrior Princess”)
- CANINE TEETH (26A: Fangs)
- INDONESIAN (42A: Rupiah spenders)
- BREAKS EVEN (55A: Neither wins nor loses)
Phrase of the Day: Dmitri MENDELEEV (32D: Dmitri ___, formulator of the periodic legislation) —
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (generally transliterated as Mendeleyev or Mendeleef) ( MEN-dəl-AY-əf; Russian: Дмитрий Иванович Менделеев, tr. Dmitriy Ivanovich Mendeleyev, IPA: [ˈdmʲitrʲɪj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ mʲɪnʲdʲɪˈlʲejɪf] (pay attention); 8 February [O.S. 27 January] 1834 – 2 February [O.S. 20 January] 1907) was a Russian chemist and inventor. He’s greatest identified for formulating the Periodic Regulation and making a model of the periodic desk of components. He used the Periodic Regulation not solely to right the then-accepted properties of some identified components, such because the valence and atomic weight of uranium, but in addition to foretell the properties of three components that had been but to be found. […] A very talked-about Russian story credit Mendeleev with setting the 40% customary power of vodka. For instance, Russian Commonplace vodka advertises: “In 1894, Dmitri Mendeleev, the best scientist in all Russia, obtained the decree to set the Imperial high quality customary for Russian vodka and the ‘Russian Commonplace’ was born”[65] Others cite “the very best high quality of Russian vodka accepted by the royal authorities fee headed by Mendeleev in 1894”. // In reality, the 40% customary was already launched by the Russian authorities in 1843, when Mendeleev was 9 years outdated. It’s true that Mendeleev in 1892 turned head of the Archive of Weights and Measures in Saint Petersburg, and advanced it right into a authorities bureau the next 12 months, however that establishment was charged with standardising Russian commerce weights and measuring devices, not setting any manufacturing high quality requirements, Additionally, Mendeleev’s 1865 doctoral dissertation was entitled “A Discourse on the mix of alcohol and water”, but it surely solely mentioned medical-strength alcohol concentrations over 70%, and he by no means wrote something about vodka.(wikipedia)
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[28D: Eliot Ness and co.] |
Baffled by this—not a lot by the truth that you’d go to all this architectural fuss for a thematic factor that does not have an effect on the remedy one iota, however that the tip results of stated fuss can be so astonishingly anticlimactic. It is like some type of anti-puzzle, a joke about puzzles, a send-up of puzzles. Is it artwork? I do not know. I simply know that you just *advised me* that PLOT was what I’d get if I plotted … so why … would I hassle … to plot, then? Could not I simply take your phrase for it? There ought to, on the very least, have been *some* factor of revelation to this factor—even when we do find yourself with some non-answer like “PLOT,” a minimum of Let *Us* Arrive At It. Make this a contest puzzle or one thing, the place solvers have to really *discover* one thing. That is like handing a child a connect-the-dots puzzle or a maze that has already been solved—have enjoyable, child! From the place I used to be sitting, this was simply an undersized, extraordinarily simple (i.e. non-Thursday) puzzle with black bars on two sides … for some purpose. My software program was screaming at me “There are notes! We will not replicate among the grid components! Do it onliiiiiine!” however as normal I ignored my software program and plowed ahead, solely to seek out out that I did not want these grid components At All besides to determine some post-puzzle factor that the puzzle had truly already found out for me. Severely, what are we doing right here?
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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