Longtime grandmotherly General Hospital actress / FRI 2-19-16 / Town hear Ireland's Shannon airport / Short-beaked bird / NBA coach Spoelstra / Danny's love in Ocean's Eleven / Town near Ireland's Shannon airport / Engineer Gray who co-founded Western Electric / View from UN memoirist / Port alternative

Constructor:Jacob Stulberg

Relative difficulty:Challenging


THEME:composers inside composers— composers whose names end with the names of other composers—so one composer clued as two:

Theme answers:

• 17. & 18A: Italian-born composer (MONTEVERDI) (i.e. MONTEVERDI *and* VERDI)
• 34. & 35A: German-born composer (OFFENBACH) (i.e. OFFENBACH *and* BACH)
• 59. & 60A: Austrian-born composer (SCHOENBERG) (i.e. SCHOENBERG *and* BERG)

Word of the Day:ELISHA Gray(46D: Engineer Gray who co-founded Western Electric) —

Elisha Gray (August 2, 1835 – January 21, 1901) was an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. Gray is best known for his development of a telephone prototype in 1876 in Highland Park, Illinois. Some recent authors have argued that Gray should be considered the true inventor of the telephone because Alexander Graham Bell allegedly stole the idea of the liquid transmitter from him, although Bell had been using liquid transmitters in his telephone experiments for more than two years previously. Bell's telephone patent was held up in numerous court decisions. (wikipedia)

This was way outside of my comfort zone, so I ended up with a time well north of my normal *Saturday* time, nowhere close to my average Friday time. To be honest, I only know half these composers. I mean, OFFENBACH and SCHOENBERG and BERG are names that I might recognize as composers if you schoewed them to me, but ... I couldn't name anything by them. Also, I honestly didn't understand the theme for the longest time, and the cluing seemed both trivial and hard. Whole NW was a wash for me the first time around. Only got a toe-hold in this thing because of COLA / COKE. After that, the NE came together pretty quickly, but that helped hardly at all.

Eventually worked up and over to the VERDI part, but ... no idea about the first part. Couldn't remember VERDI's first name, then sort of thought it was "Giuseppe" (which it is), but that didn't fit, and since FIAT (1A: Order) and ENNIS (13A: Town near Ireland's Shannon airport) and TIT (4D: Short-beaked bird) and (obviously) FEMBOT (1D: "Austin Powers" villain) were (at that point) beyond me, I was just stuck. Had to start over completely in the SW, with (I think) LITE EEKS ERIK SANS. That got me the symmetrical counterpart to the part I'd filled in up top, but again, no further. All themers, and both NW and SE, still mostly empty.

Please note that by this point I had managed to ditch the incorrect DR. EVIL but had decided that ORFF was one of the composers, and maybe the center themer was ORFF 'N' BACH (?). Oy. Also, note the BAA (as in "BAA BAA, black sheep"). I have never thought of "BYE" as a "cry," so ... yeah. I was just screwed. What are the roman numerals of Pope Benedict? Not me? Did you know POPE FRANCIS fits in that space? It does. Pulling teeth, I tell you. Pretty sure that TIE RODS was the answer that finally got things going in the NW. The SE was definitely the last thing to fall. GORSE ELISHA TESS ANNALEE ... I couldn't do anything with this puzzle. I think the concept is cute, but between my not really knowing so many of the names, and some occasionally icky answers like SRIS and OBLADI, and the pretentious faux-Latin plural SYLLABI (41A: Class lists?) (I am a longtime hardliner on this issue: #TeamSyllabuses), I just didn't enjoy myself much. Today, though, I think the problems are mostly mine, not the puzzle's. My struggle with composer names is especially ironic tonight, as I literally just got home from ... the opera. The first opera I've ever attended in my life. The director (Warren Jones) is a reader of this blog and offered me tickets to opening night and I thought "Sure, why not?" Got to see Menotti's "The Telephone" followed by Bernstein's "Trouble in Tahiti"—really wonderful, funny mid-century stuff ... but none of it helped me solve this puzzle.


Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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