Sanity Clause / TUE 7-24-18 / Caesar's assassins / Thick Japanese noodle / Friday 13th New Beginning / Cuisine tom yum soup / McCarthy aide Roy / Need You Tonight

Constructor: Jonathan Kaye

Relative difficulty: 6:12



THEME: DNA— If you solve in the app (iOS or web), there's an animated [58A: Shape of 7-Down]: DOUBLE HELIX at [7D: When the ends of each of its letters are connected to those above and below, a simplified schematic of a famous structure]: {see screenshot above, which doesn't do it justice, and I can't figure out how to embed a gif in a Blogger post}

Word of the Day: DORA (58D: Picasso muse ___ Maar) —

Maar, whose real name was Theodora Markovic, was born in Tours, France, on Nov. 22, 1907, and spent her childhood in Argentina, where her father, a foreign-born architect, was working. Arriving in Paris around 1925, the beautiful dark-haired young woman was drawn into the world of photography, first as a model for Man Ray and others and then as a photographer.

     In the 1930's, with Andre Breton and Georges Bataille urging her into the Surrealist movement and encouraging her to paint, she joined the Union of Intellectuals Against Fascism and was active in other anti-Fascist groups. After meeting Picasso, she helped him set up his studio at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins, where in 1937 he painted ''Guernica,'' a process she recorded in photographs. [New York Times obituary, 26 July 1997]

As I'm writing this, the animated DOUBLE HELIX at 7D is twisting gently in the grid on my iPad. This is a fantastic use of technology to enhance the solving experience, and I'm curious if this was something that the constructor had in mind when he constructed the puzzle, or if that feature was developed later. [Update: A twitter exchange just confirmed that he did not, and the feature was added to the web- and app-based solving interfaces by the tech team.] We've seen other gimmick-y puzzles from this constructor before (I remember liking a "hook" puzzle that used the letter J a couple years ago), all on Thursdays -- so it's interesting to find this one on a Tuesday; it had a Thursday "feel" (though I didn't solve in a Thursday time).

Theme answers:

• [20A: What 7-Down is]: BIOCHEMICAL
• [58A: Shape of 7-Down]: DOUBLE HELIX
• [11D: Creatures with 23 pairs of 25-Down]: HUMAN BEINGS
• [25D: Genetic bundles]: CHROMOSOMES
• [66D: Subject of this puzzle]: DNA

One would expect the fill to suffer in order to get that 15-letter center entry of Hs and Xs -- but I don't think the entries that intersect 7-Down are out of the ordinary for a Tuesday. Maybe [62A: McCarthy aide Roy]: COHN is not so well known if you haven't seen Angels in America eleventy-billion times. Elsewhere, Word of the Day [58D: Picasso muse ___ Maar]: DORA is some varsity-level art history trivia. (I keep looking back at that rotating DOUBLE HELIX. That is just so cool.) I'm not crazy about [5D: Lucy Ricardo, to Ricky]: TV WIFE; do we think of TV HUSBANDs? Maybe I've seen TVDAD or TVMOM. Also, there is an abundance (and by abundance I mean more than one) of acronyms for government and other agencies: CDC, OSHA, NLRB, AFLCIO. Ugh, DITS. I diss DITS. And you've got your common fill beginning with E: your EPEES and your EONS and your ELAL and your EOS and your EXPO and, hey, [54D: Jazzman Blake]: EUBIE! We don't see him as much in grids, so why don't we have him sing us out:


Signed, Laura, Sorceress of CrossWorld
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