Constructor: Scott Earl
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: LAURA Bassi (7D: ___Bassi, first woman to earn a doctorate in science (University of Bologna, 1732)) —
This was good. Like, aggressively good. Like, really coming at you with all the sparkling fill. A totally bedazzled puzzle. Do you remember the Bedazzler?
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After this, it was all downhill (in the sense that things got easier, not in the sense that things got worse ... it's not the greatest metaphor). Only one other thing about the grid gave me pause, and it's exactly the thing you'd expect would give me pause if you've been reading me for any length of time—it's a potentially problematic crossing. Of not-universally-famous proper nouns. At the vowel. True, DIANA Taurasi is very famous if you follow basketball (I knew her name), and NIALL Horan was a member of an *extremely* famous band (One Direction). But still, for many a solver, crossing their names at that "I" is gonna cause some slightly nervous guessing. Now, DIANA> DEANA and NIALL> NEALL, so the "I" seems like the most reasonable guess by far. So I think the cross is fair, ultimately. This felt like a close call, though, because I can imagine someone guessing "E." When you cross trivia at a vowel like this, no other vowel besides the correct vowel should be truly plausible. So even though I knew "I" was right there, that cross HIT A NERVE. I'm OK now, though. And as I say, this puzzle was overwhelmingly delightful.
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Word of the Day: LAURA Bassi (7D: ___Bassi, first woman to earn a doctorate in science (University of Bologna, 1732)) —
Laura Maria Caterina Bassi Veratti (29 October 1711 – 20 February 1778) was an Italian physicist and academic. Recognized and depicted as "Minerva" (goddess of wisdom), she was the first woman to have a doctorate in science, and the second woman in the world to earn the Doctor of Philosophy degree. Working at the University of Bologna, she was also the first salaried woman teacher in a university. At one time the highest paid employee of the university, by the end of her life, Bassi held two other professorships.[3] She was also the first woman member of any scientific establishment, when she was elected to the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna in 1732 at 21.Bassi had no formal education and was privately tutored from age five until she was twenty. By then she was well versed in major disciplines including sciences and mathematics. Noticing her ability, Prospero Lambertini, the Archbishop of Bologna (later Pope Benedict XIV), became her patron. With Lambertini's arrangement she publicly defended forty-nine theses before professors of the University of Bologna on 17 April 1732, for which she was awarded a doctoral degree on 12 May. A month later, she was appointed by the university as its first woman teacher, albeit with the restriction that she was not allowed to teach all-male classes. Lambertini, by then the Pope, helped her to receive permission for private classes and experiments, which were granted by the university in 1740.
Bassi became the most important populariser of Newtonian mechanics in Italy. She was inducted by the Pope to the Benedettini (similar to modern Pontifical Academy of Sciences) as an additional member in 1745. She took up the Chair of Experimental Physics in 1776, the position she held until her death. She is interred at the Church of Corpus Domini, Bologna. (wikipedia)
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So, yeah, like that, but in puzzle form, and slightly less tacky. It's stridently feminist and has a great sense of fun. The colloquial phrases are the real highlight of the day. I was completely sold very early on with "I COULD EAT," and luckily that wasn't just a one-off; we also get "WELL, OK" and "CAN WE TALK?" All the long fill is at least solid—merely solid in the NE, a little livelier in the SW, and then just flat-out fantastic in the NW and SE, to say nothing of the center stack, which is wonderful. Any issues I had with the puzzle (don't worry, I'll get to them! :) were small. Overall, this puzzle is exactly what a Friday should be: playful, polished, and sassy.
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| Bridget Riley, "Shadow Play" (1990) |
It was also easy to move through, *except* when I tried to move out of that NW corner and into the rest of the grid. I finished off that corner, but as you can see, there are just two teeny tiny exits from that corner, both of them the width of one square. So I threaded PUKA SHELL through one of the exits (after having changed it earlier from PAWA SHELL ... "Pawa" being a misspelling of "Paua," the Maori (and general NZ) word for abalone ... whose shells surfers don't generally wear around their necks ... sometimes being married to a Kiwi can create language confusion). And I guessed that LAUR- was a LAUR*A*, but neither that "A" nor the HELL dangling out of the NW corner down into the center of the grid was any help getting further traction. This is because I couldn't figure out 22A: Partner of day (AGE) from just A- and I really couldn't figure out 25A: Spirals out over the winter holidays? (HAMS) from just H- (needed every cross for that one and only then remembered that a spiral ham (?) exists ... I don't eat HAMS). So, tiny exits = total stoppage. End of flow. This is why I am not a big fan of the tiny exits. Further aggravation: in trying to get some traction with the short stuff, I ran into not one not two but three "?" clues in a row. That HAMS clue was bad enough, but then to have the next two clues I looked at (26D: Had quite a trip? / 38A: Stub hub?) do that same coy winky "?" thing to me, blargh. Space these "?" clues out, please. Anyway, stuck, here:
But I rebooted fairly easily in the SW with ANI RICA AGATE ANSEL etc., and once I brought that corner up into the cent of the grid and knit it with the "HELL" that was dropping down from above, I was in business, and things really took off from there. Since I had the first letters in place, that center stack fell quickly, bam bam bam. Here was the first bam:
