Roman foeman / SAT 9-5-20 / Dice in slang / Source of brachiocephalic trunk

Constructor: John Guzzetta

Relative difficulty: Medium (8:01)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ATHOL Fugard (42A: Playwright Fugard) —

Athol Fugard FRSL OIS (born 11 June 1932) is a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director widely regarded as “South Africa’s greatest playwright.” He is best known for his political plays opposing the system of apartheid and for the 2005 Oscar-winning film of his novel Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood. Acclaimed as “the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world” by Time Magazine in 1985, Fugard continues to write and has published over thirty plays. Fugard was an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. He is the recipient of many awards, honours, and honorary degrees, including the 2005 Order of Ikhamanga in Silver "for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre" from the government of South Africa. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was honoured in Cape Town with the opening of the Fugard Theatre in District Six in 2010, and received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011. (wikipedia)

Sometimes puzzles have no dramatic flaws but still come across as listless, like they were spat out by a computer armed with a prodigious word list. There's just an Uncanny Valley quality—yes, these are all words and phrases, and they are mostly reasonably familiar, but somehow it still doesn't feel like a flesh & blood human being made this. I think I just want to see more obvious humanity in, well, everything, and I expect Fridays and Saturdays to fairly teem with it. BUREAUCRAT and ACCOUNT REP are just deathly to joy in general, and then many of the longer answers, while Just Fine, don't really sing. Don't have flair. Don't seem daring. Maybe you love Gilbert & Sullivan and so thought PIRATE KING was keen, ok. But by the end of this thing, the only things I looked back on with any fondness were MEDAL HUNT, OPEN LETTER, and RAINMAKER. The rest feels like a robot or a Martian or a robot-Martian made it. I mean, a well-trained, highly observant robot-Martian, one who had been studying the ways of humans and their language for years, but still. I also just really didn't like the structure of the grid—I always find highly-segmented puzzles annoying, as cut-off corners tend to play like entirely separate, often much harder stand-alone puzzles. With only one tiny route in, the NW and SE corners like that—the rest of the grid is more open, had a nice flow, wasn't a slog. But then there were these tight 3x10 (roughly) corners and they felt slightly suffocating. Maybe this entire puzzle rests on PIRATE KING. Certainly if I'd known it, the SE would've been much easier, and maybe if I were a Gilbert & Sullivan fan, I'd've felt that PIRATE KING and MUSICAL were sufficiently delightful distractions. But I doubt it.