Sunday, July 10, 2011


By: Francis Heaney Difficulty: 3/5 Enjoyability: 4/5 Theme: Drop science on 'em

Theme

Cutesy theme. Add 'ology' to a word phrase, and you have made it into science!
  • 61A. What the constructor had to do to create the theme entries in this puzzle (boyeee) (DROPSCIENCEONEM)
  • 17A. Passed a certain medical school exam? (BEATEN PATHOLOGY)
  • 24A. Item used to settle disputes about mathematical connectedness? (TOPOLOGYGUN). Nice, but I was hoping for a Top Gun reference.
  • 38A. With 42-Across, what people who study living creatures are? (BIOLOGY), and 42A. See 38-Across (CURIOUS). "Biology Curious" is funny, but it doesn't have any connection to the "un-scienced" term, Bi Curious.
  • 53A. Study of how to fight in very low temperatures? (WARCRYOLOGY). My favorite of the themed answers, because WAR CRY and CRYOLOGY both tie in with the clue. Fighting in very low temperatures made me think of the polar bears from the His Dark Materials series. They were one of the more fanciful inventions of the series, and definitely captured my imagination better than any other part of the story. Oh, especially those horses with wheels and elephant trunks from the last book. Dumb.

What I learned

  • 50D. Endangered ungulates (RHINOS). Ungulates are cloven mammals! If you got hooves, you're an ungulate.

What I liked

Paired, sequential clues:
  1. 57A. Sound heard in a Lamaze class (HEE)
  2. 58A. Cells contributing to the need for a Lamaze class (OVA)

  • 18D. Muppet prawn introduced in 1996 (PEPE).
    Pepe is who prompted me to write today. He was a late addition to the Muppet roster and as a consequence I'm not that familiar with him. (I initially tried to fill him in as Tedd or Theo for some reason.)

    When I was reading about him, I discovered this hilarious source of his speech pattern.
    Puppeteer Bill Barretta, who created the character, based the accent on his wife's aunt, who is known in the family as "Maria Teresa Okay".
    He ends every other sentence with "okay."

    I also discovered he plays a big role in the Playstation video game, Muppets Monster Adventure, which I promptly downloaded and have been playing in a Playstation emulator on my MacBook.


    It's fun, and it has rekindled my interest in visiting and playing old Playstation games that I didn't get to enjoy when they first came out.