Theorbos eg / FRI 3-10-17 / Covent Garden architect Jones / Shia who's not muslim / Pioneer in heliocentric theory / Euro forerunner

Constructor:Pawel Fludzinski

Relative difficulty:Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day:LABEOUF(11D: Shia who's not a Muslim) —

Shia Saide LaBeouf (ⁱ/ˈʃaɪ.ələˈbʌf/; born June 11, 1986) is an American actor, performance artist, and filmmaker. He became known among younger audiences as Louis Stevens in the Disney Channel series Even Stevens, a role for which LaBeouf received a Young Artist Award nomination in 2001 and won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2003. He made his film debut in Holes (2003), based on the novel of the same name by Louis Sachar. In 2004, he made his directorial debut with the short film Let's Love Hate and later directed a short film titled Maniac (2011), starring American rappers Cage and Kid Cudi. // In 2007, LaBeouf starred in the commercially successful films Disturbia and Surf's Up. The same year he was cast in Michael Bay's science fiction film Transformers as Sam Witwicky, the main protagonist of the series. Despite mixed reviews, Transformers was a box office success and one of the highest-grossing films of 2007. LaBeouf later appeared in its sequels Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), both also box office successes. In 2008, he played Henry "Mutt Williams" Jones III in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth film in the Indiana Jones franchise. His other films include Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), Lawless (2012), The Company You Keep (2012), Nymphomaniac (2013) and Fury (2014). Since 2014, LaBeouf has pursued a variety of public performance art projects with LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner. (wikipedia)

A mix of wonderful and godawful. On the one hand, DUMPSTER FIRE—nice (32A: Unmitigated disaster, in slang). On the other hand, no one wants to see ETERNE and OID and KIP and AT IT and ECU and ACAN and EEE. Like, ever. I solved this upon waking *and* it was out of my wheelhouse (in several places); neither one of those facts was conducive to smooth solving. Every trick clue got me. I actually finished the puzzle thinking that LABEOUF was a word for some strange type of Muslim, and *baffled* they hadn't used the actor in the clue. Yes. It was *that* kind of solve. And then, later, the SE was a total, let's say, DUMPSTER FIRE for me. Couldn't get into it at all. Blanked on Nash's field of mathematics (GEEE-OMETRY!?); couldn't remember which one "cosmology" was, the universe one or the beauty school one; couldn't make sense of 67A: Went door to door? (SIDE-SWIPED) until the bitter, bitter end because it crossed LUTES (???) DO LOOP (???) and ELI (??????). I like the SIDE-SWIPED clue, but I've never heard of ELI (as clued—63D: "My God!," as cried by Jesus), never heard of "Theorobos" (thought he might be a LUTER) and never ever heard of DO LOOP (47D: Bit of computer programming executed repeatedly), which was the one answer that was the biggest problem because of its prime, corner-rounding position. I dropped ETERNE and STAYED easy, but without DO LOOP, the SE was unenterable. I should've gotten ARI for the Cardinal home when STL didn't fit. I just wasn't firing on all cylinders.


Anyway, I forget the rest of the puzzle, but it seemed fine. Oh, and the big big problem, beyond DO LOOP, for me, was that I couldn't get MALL (51A: D.C. tourist destination). Two issues. One, thought it would be abbr., like "D.C."; and two, I think of destinations as actual places (museums, monuments, etc.), not just a giant strip of land. "Does D.C. have a MOMA?" was an actual question I asked myself.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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