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Weeper of myth -TUESDAY, Oct. 14, 2008 - Lucy Gardner Anderson (Old Walter Berndt comic strip about a teen / Harsh Athenian lawgiver)
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Relative difficulty: Medium
THEME: INTERSTATE / NINETY-FIVE (20A: With 59-Across, highway that goes through the 15 places indicated in this puzzle, in order, north to south) - 15 different state codes found in circled squares on each of the 15 rows of the puzzle
This is the kind of theme that must have fallen in the constructor's lap, which is not to say that it was easy, but once you learn of anything that has fifteen elements in it, there is some part of your brain (if you write puzzles) that thinks "crossword." When I first did the puzzle, I didn't fully read the theme clue, so I discovered on my own that there was one state on each line and that they were ordered north to south. I enjoyed discovering that. Then I noticed that the puzzle had discovered it for me.
Today is my wife's birthday, and also I have exams to write/give, so I have things to do. Thus, I am going to blow through this puzzle if you don't mind (and even if you do).
Theme answers:
- 6A: Netting (ME sh)
- 14A: _____ water (facing trouble) (i NH ot)
- 19A: Epps of TV's "House" (O MA r)
- 22A: Ice Capades venue (RI nk)
- 24A: Asset in answering the question "Does this dress make me look fat?" (ta CT
- 26A: Bruce or Kravitz (Len NY)
- 38A: "Dueling _____" (ba NJ os)
- 40A: Longtime "S.N.L." announcer Don (PA rdo)
- 43A: Do lexicographical work (DE fine)
- 48A: Online health info site (Web MD)
- 50D: Cole Porter's "Well, Did You _____?" ("E VA h")
- 56A: Final Four org. (NC AA)
- 63A: Mideast missile (SC ud)
- 67A: Nintendo rival (se GA)
- 71A: Skedaddles (FL ees)
Rest:
- 18A: Y's guys? (Elis) - I was thinking only of the Village People. I remember being Traumatized in 6th grade when I was told that the Village People were all "gay," which was about the worst thing you could be in elementary school in 1980 in Central California (Fresno!). I just remember thinking "... but I love them."
- 47A: Harsh Athenian lawgiver (Draco) - the only "lawgiver" I could come up with at first was SOLON, but he was not "harsh," or at least not harsh enough to have an adjective made out of his name. I'm going to start using "SOLONIAN" to mean ... what, wise? "Don't you mean "SOLOMONIAN?" "No. No I do not."
- 52A: College town near Bangor (Orono) - it's Bangor's week to shine! "Bangor? I hardly know her."
- 8D: Old Walter Berndt comic strip about a teen ("Smitty") - None of this makes any sense to me. I thought I knew at least the titles of most notable comic strips, but I guess not. Here's a couple choice pics for you:
- 48D: Like sheets after bleaching (whiter) - better than the original clue, [Like teeth after brushing, say], which is mostly just false.
- 53D: Butcher's byproducts (offal) - the plural clue + non-plural answer here is weird. Not awful. Just weird.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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75 comments:
Happy B-Day to Sandy! The puzzle was amazingly easy for me -- I did it last night and was a bit sorry to see it go so fast. BANJOS was fun, not seen as often as UKE and AXE... but enough of Nancy Drew's fictional author, KEENE!
Losing the Blogger ID again -- maybeI need a "tec" to get to the bottom of it?
∑;)
Also, it should be noted that I-95 goes through both Bangor and Orono.
Given this blog maligns most Tuesday puzzles, we need to applaud this one. Harder than a Monday. Not as hard as a Wednesday. Not too much tired fill. A creative theme. Bravo!!!
Since I've driven said interstate through the states in the upper half of the puzzle many, many times, and since I got the theme right away, this was a breeze for me, too--an exception being the very center, where it took me far too long to see BON MOT (but loved the answer all the more for it). Yes, I95 does not meander through all parts of the country as the theme abbreviations do, but that's what one expects from a 15+-part theme. I loved the clue for 24A TACT. In short, a really great Tuesday puzzle.
Ahhh...good to be back and Happy Birthday to Mrs. Rex! Won't ask the number.
Liked this puzzle a lot even though I found it easy for a Tuesday. Sorry Rex didn't have time to find a clip of Don Pardo. That would have been great.
Misstarts for today:
BOYS for ELIS
MEDMD for WEBMD (simple brain hiccough)
BANTER for BONMOT
Always like to see Draco show up...and especially Don Pardo.
As for I-95, great theme, but I haven't missed driving on it. But, now back in the northeast and will be driving it a lot in the next few weeks. Alas.
Very easy for oldsters like moi, born and raised and schooled in MA, before the Interstate system was a reality.
Love this puzzle! The theme is awesome and well-executed. PuzzleHusband and I solved this one together, which means there was much cursing of Will Shortz involved (PH doesn't quite ... get the whole crossword thing), but also means that it was a stroll instead of a sprint and my appreciation of the theme unfolded slowly. What fun!
Loved BANJOS, WEBMD, DRYOFF and OFFAL ... don't believe I've seen that before in the grid. Fun, easy puzzle and I agree with those who think it a true Tuesday treat.
@rex: BANGOR will never quite sound the same .. hope you have a great birthday celebration day!
Just got back from taking my high-achieving daughter from a college visit at Yale, and voila, ELIS is in the puzzle. While this is a legitimate nickname for the students of Yale, during the tour, no one referred to Yale students as Elis. They did use the term Yalies frequently. I think Elis is mostly sportswriter usage (shorter headlines). I also thought it would have been even cooler if the circles followed a continuous curve down the right side of the puzzle, but I guess you can't have everything. It was pretty cool as it was.
When I started I didn't really check the grid so I thought something along original 13 colonies. Then when I got to 20A it was pretty much finished in my head.
Fun puzzle!! Interstate 95 is no fun at all. I am on it almost daily...too many cars-not enough road.
@wade from late yesterday. loved the name of your mexican restaurant. lol
@steve 1-- If your daughter is applying to Yale, the very best of luck to her! I loved being there, way back when... I wasn't in the graduate women's dorm, just a creaky apartment next to the campus, and wonder now if it was just a figment of my imagination that the dorm was known as the "Orr House", after the architect?
∑;)
Good Tuesday puzzle with a few surprises.
Didn't know Elmo or Hosea but guessed correctly. Don't recall seeing offal lately. Not my favorite food (mostly awful IMO) but cool word.
One question - What am I missing in 2D? Anent? New to me.
I think of OFFAL as a hybrid sort of noun. Offal is many things (plural) in itself. In English supermarkets (Sainsbury's) there is a meat section with the sign "OFFAL", singular looking, but there is a lot of offal there.
I had the same cobweb hiding Draco and perhaps because the word draconian has separated itself from the man or because we hear it more often as a constellation. Has anyone seen a DRAY lately?
Bruce or Kravitz--for LENNY. I love to see clues like this one, where you get two examples and have to figure out the commonality. This one, though, was very easy, befitting, of course, a Tuesday puzzle. Would like to see more of these clues, later in the week.
@artlvr--If she gets into Yale, it'd be great. I'm not sure they'll take her, but we'll see.
artlvr,
I think Orr did the President's House on the Yale campus and many other buildings in town. I don't recall a woman's dorm, but he was President of the AIA and remodeled the White House. He also built The Eli, home of the local phone company. We can rely on Urim and Thummim to reveal the truth.
/miguel
Just wanted to give credit where credit is due. Great Tuesday puzzle.
This was a wonderful Tuesday puzzle.
Yesterday was Thanksgiving, today is Election day - we're just early on everything up here. So what do we do in November? I'm going to Florida so will likely be on I-95 at some point. Maybe I'll just drive north and see Cheryl Tiegs in Bangor.
OFFAL is an awful word.
Happy birthday Sandy!
Happy birthday to Sandy!
Long ago, while traveling through New England,we celebrated my 40th birthday by dining in a huge Chinese restaurant in Bangor, Maine. I think it was called Sing's.
Liked the puzzle a lot. I couldn't help thinking of the classic TACTless response: "No, your FAT makes you look fat."
two ponies, ANENT is a word that means, well, [Concerning]. kind of like IN RE. i believe it's somewhat archaic, although it appears that m-w disagrees with me. well, they're the dictionary and i'm just some guy, but i've only ever seen it in crosswords. in fact, i think this is the first time i've seen it in an actual crossword. previously, it had only ever shown up as suggested fill when i've been constructing.
oh yeah, the puzzle: loved it. i'm a little surprised to to get INHOT water instead of our old standby DONHO (we couldn't get a RONALDINHO shout-out? or at least a hyperbolic trig function of some sort?), but all of the other state abbreviations are well-done. i especially liked WEBMD.
extremely easy -- not medium -- even for a tuesday
Really good Tuesday puzzle, with a clever theme, and some unusual fill.
My wife had a cat named SCUD, a stray who showed up at her door during the Gulf War. He died a couple months ago after a long and happy life.
Nice puzzle. Scanning the clues, the first answer that I entered was OMAR and followed it with PARDO. So I had MA and PA and wasn't thinking state abbreviations. Then NY fell into place, and like thomas, I figured the theme was the 13 colonies.
Just a word on "Well, Did You Evah?" which seems to appear with some regularity in the grid. This comes from the 1939 Porter musical DuBarry Was a Lady which starred Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr. The song was introduced by Betty Grable (before Hollywood glory) and Charles Walters.
It's a great example of the naughty Porter who loved to shock modern sensibilities by sneaking in sly sexual references and scandalous gossip, often with a wink and a double entendre, which would "go over the head" of the public, but be picked out by clever sophisticates.
Examples from the song at hand:
"Have you heard? Professor Munch
Ate his wife and divorced his lunch.
Well, did you evah?
What a swell party this is!"
or...
"Have you heard that Mimsie Starr
Just got pinched in the Astor bar?
Well, did you evah?
What a swell party this is."
I know, this is completely tame by modern standards, but in 1939?...Tsk, tsk, tsk.
It was a fun puzzle, easer than usual for a Tuesday for me. It was actually my best Tuesday time ever. I was surprised because when I saw the clue for 20a, being Canadian, I thought I might have a problem but everything fell into place.
The clue for 67a should probably be "former" or "erstwhile" Nintendo rival, but that is my only carp, since someone already mentioned the Carolyn Keene thing.
Again, very enjoyable.
To add: I wish we could edit our posts so that when I do stupid things like spell easier without an I, I could fix it.
Also, maybe I should start to use the preview tool, so I don't sound like one.
Very fun Tuesday. 15 states plus two entries for I-95. Well done! Didn't know ANENT of NIOBE, but they were easily gettable.
That second Smitty cartoon scares me. Did Smitty's dad take him to Jamaica to learn how to roll da ganja, mon? And I don't recall ever seeing my dad don a grass skirt. Maybe I had a deprived childhood.
Rex's joke is even funnier when said with a Downeast accent: AH replaces R. Thus, it would be Bang-ah, I hardly....
Route Ninty-five tracks Route 1 and when you get to Maine the old road (Rte 1) is much more fun.
Once before we have had the syndicate writers discussion for Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. The story of the Stratemeyer Syndicate is very interesting.
The puzzle was more than fine Tuesday fare for me.
Easy puzzle once you get the theme, but unfortunately I-95 doesn't go through Pennsylvania. It goes down the west side of New Jersey and at the mouth of the Delaware River hops right over to Delaware.
I-95 goes through DC, but it is, as with it's periodic bids for statehood, completely dissed.
@ joon, Thanks. I could have looked it up but it's more fun to hear someone's personal take on a question.
Enjoyable at the least. miriam b beat me to my favorite tactless response to the question any success husband has answered far too often. Do these pants make me look fat? It aint the pants honey. My wife is border line super model thin so I get away with it – come to think of it I don’t get that question anymore.
Love Rex’s Bangor retort. Love it.
The Village People are gay? :-O
jack...12:56
Dude, I-95 is right outside my window here in Philly. What are you talking about? We even have 695 and 495 Loops. We also have I-76 since we are so Patriotic.
I still don't get "elis" for Y's guys. ?
I'm newbie at doing the puzzle on line, and whatever I did, opening the puzzle with KrossWordz app for Mac, I could not see the circles (any Mac experts, I'm open to advice).. So, I had a sense of incompleteness, as I was solving.
But I still enjoyed the puzzle and thought that it was full of very interesting clues and answers. ANENT gave me pause, everything else seemed straightforward yet fun.
@fergus from last night, I will keep you posted on whether I wind up doing the puzzle on line on a regular basis. I like the routine of solving with a cup of coffee (my only one of the day) and being away from my computer for at least that tiny part of the day.
I loved this puzzle!
I unfolded the theme easily and had a lot of fun going north to south. I use the I-95 every day and have always wondered how long would it take to go through it all, north to south (I guess it's easier to picture the end of the line on a nice, hot tropical place).
Thanks for the clip for Deliverance. I was actually thinking of that same scene as I filled out the dueling BANJOS. That is a movie that changed my perspective of the US while growing up in a different country.
@foodie,
I have a mac and always open the crosswords with AcrossLite, where you can see the circles and all.
@bt: "Y" stands for Yale ... where the Elis go.
An aunt of mine often said "anent", and I always thought it sounded awfully affected.
@anonymous 1:01. I-95 goes around DC, not through it. You need to go on I-295 to get into DC from I-95.
@mexicangirl: Seems like you spent your formative years out West, where they might say "the" I-95 (if it existed there). But here in the East, we say just "I-95," or just "95," or whatever the section of it is called locally: Cross Bronx Expwy, New England Thruway, NJ Turnpike, CT Turnpike, etc.
Foodie, the Across Lite version available via the NYT site is your best bet for non-paper crossword solving. If you go to the Litsoft site, I think you wind up with an older version of AL.
Philly, maybe Jack was confused by the fact that I-95 indeed leaves Jersey and joins the Delaware Expressway, it's just that the Delaware Expressway is in Pennsylvania. Along with the Ohio river and Mount Washington and California and Indiana Universities...
I left PA to go to C. (C's hes are the KNIGHTS.) Several of my friends went to Y, though more for grad school than undergrad. One of the best greeting cards my M ever sent me is here.
Well done Lucy Gardner Anderson!
This would be an excellent puzzle for kids to learn geography!
(And the state postal code abbreviations).
Altho a small piece of me misses the days where you had MINN instead of MN or OKLA instead of OK...esp bec I get all out of whack trying to figure out is AK is Alaska or Arkansas or whatever.
Btw
Didn't Tony Orbach and Patrick Blindauer have some magnificent puzzle some recent Sunday where all the states were clued East to West Coast, in this same style?
ps Birthday wishes to Mrs Rex, he's lucky to live with a Libra!
(The only man I have ever lived with is also Oct 14th!)
I'm the 18th and was treated to a marvelous (early) birthday dinner last night by Ashish who was in town...
He's such a brilliant constructor and we had a long talk, of course, about Rex, the blogs, Will, being a solver vs a constructor first (I'm the former, he's the latter), Monday vs Friday construction, etc.
(In between more personal discussions of family dynamics and rescued German shepherds)
Even the foodies would have kvelled. We were down in North Beach and had a Mozzarella appetizer to die for and fresh calamari, followed by pumpkin ravioli and tiramisu...all of which I will try to squeeze into a puzzle sometime soon!
(Unless Ashish beats me to it!)
steve l, it's not just "the west." i think saying "the (insert highway number)" is specifically a socal thing. in the bay area they don't do it: "101," "80," "280," etc. in socal it's "the 101," "the 405," etc.
95 vis-a-vis PA/NJ is certainly confusing enough that i can understand where jack is coming from, but phillysolver is right. 95 does indeed go through philly and up the west side of the delaware river (i.e. the PA side) up to trenton. to add to the confusion, on the NJ side, the NJ turnpike is also 95 north of exit 6. however, south of exit 6, the turnpike is not the same as 95; it parallels 295 down to the delaware memorial bridge. so if you are coming up 95 from delaware and want to head into NJ, you have to exit onto 295 to cross the bridge, and won't rejoin 95 until exit 6.
i can't pretend to understand (let alone explain) what the deal is with 95/295 around bordentown. i think 95N is actually the same as 295S for some stretch.
around DC (my hometown), 95 does indeed go around the city, following the eastern half of the beltway (495). 295 and 395 are the only parts that go into the district itself, and those only just barely. most of the district is interstate-less.
Didn't know ANENT of NIOBE!
@acm, where did you eat in North Beach?
If any of you have not seen the movie The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and/or had an espresso at Café Trieste.. sorry
@bt, @joho answered your query. There was a cartoon in Playboy (I never read it, just ogled it) where a buxom lass stated to the young lad staring at the letter on her sweater "no not Tulane, I am at Yale"
Ms. Rex, Happy Birthday to you from me and my lovely wife.
found it! It even won an honorable mention prize from rex and Orange...
but it was in the WSJ:
Patrick Blindauer and Tony Orbach, 6/1 Wall Street Journal, Friday (Sunday-sized) - “Westward Ho!” - Patrick and Tony go west from Georgia (GA) to neighboring AL, turning “mind the GAp” into MIND THE ALP. In the next theme entry, AL is changed to MS, then MS to AR, AR to OK, and so on—eventually you’ve traced a westward course from Georgia all the way to Oregon. Elegant!
My youngest daughter, one of 2 Libras amongst my numerous offspring, shares your birthday.
So happy birthday to both of you.
Fun puzzle. And the Yalies/Elis at Yale are just off I-95 in New Haven!
Thanks for the birthday wishes. Rex and I are off to the woods with the dogs, if it doesn't rain. I have spend much of my birthday wondering at the genius that got millions of ordinary Americans singing along with 5 gay men from NYC in costume about the joys of the YMCA. And also laughing at myself for blithely writing in "ninjas" instead of "banjos". Ninjas duel, don't they?
@andrea carla michaels: happy birthday to you, too! Libra is a great sign, my mom being an amazing example. Oh, and don't foreget John Lennon. Aquarius and Gemini also have something special in the air.
When five or six my son responded to the famous question with "Ya, Mamma, it does." Still too young to be penalized for TACTlessness, I would say. Yet he was advised a little later that there is only a negative answer to that question.
I liked this real Tuesday puzzle a lot, ingenious with the N - S placement of the states, and some new-feeling words. How lucky that "evah" exists! Pardo, Elmo and hemi were new to me, but gettable. For webmd it first wanted Medco, and what is "dub" to make a knight? Actually thought it was something like duke - fist, another one I just learned about throught the puzzle.
I have a cookbook by a wonderful Brittish woman that has a chapter called "awful offal". Never tried any of it.
@Steve l: thank you so much for your wonderful explanation of grokking: I'm looking for the Heinlein book, Borders didn't have it.
@Fergus: we are in CT and call this highway I95 - to be avoided at most times. We take the Merritt.
I'm wondering how they refer to freeways at The Ohio State University....
@mac when the queen knights you, she says "I dub thee Sir so-and-so"
Dub has lots of meanings, that's just one...
rub-a-dub-dub
@mac, the ritual wherein the Queen touches the shoulder of her subject with the sword on each shoulder is called "dubbing" - She, thus, dubs him Sir Elton John.
Deborah, dubbed fikink
@karmasartre--I don't know about Ohio, but here in the NY metro area, we rarely refer to freeways at all. Interstates are expressways in the city, thruways or turnpikes outside the city. Parkways are highways with a lot of greenery where the speeds are a little lower and trucks are generally not allowed. Although I think there is no etymological basis for this, I think a lot of NYers are hesitant to call anything a freeway when there's a toll every 10 miles--or sometimes less.
Mac, It's been quite a while since I've had a rant about the definite article, whether it's dealing with freeways or certain midwestern universities, yet it was probably fixed in your mind that I perseverate (a word I learned from Meadow Soprano) on this issue. Joon made the clarification about the same issue fresh, which I couldn't have done.
On the matter of Libra birthdays, my firey, wild friend from Roma, Irina, has hers today. If there were anyone to belie the traits of a typical Libran, it would be her. I'm not sure that Andrea or I are such good representatives either.
"....er/or? I hardly knew her!" is an old shtick -- Google's first page for "I hardly knew her" includes Spitzer, minor, soccer, liquor (ouch), and even Windsor, and some years ago the Harvard student orchestra used the same tagline for Mahler. I do conjecture that Bangor was the original source.
Joon -- really, sinh or tanh on a Tuesday? I'd love to see one of these in the puzzle but it feels like late-week fill. Then again, with QUADRATIC crossing QED yesterday one never knows. Anyway there are lots of NH words, usually combinations (alpenhorn, coonhound, downhill, evenhanded, fountainhead, greenhouse, maidenhead, manhandle, panhandle, pinhead, pigeonhole, tinhorn, and many others) or en-/in-/un- combinations (enhance, inhale, unhip, unhappy, etc.), plus a few loanwords such as piranha. The joys of grep...
Oh yes, a clever and day-appropriate puzzle, even if the placement of the 15 state abbreviations is even more erratic than the route of the highway it represents.
NDE
Easy even for a Monday, but enjoyable and clever. FL beating MA so far today (baseball).
@fergus: I have to apologize, I directed a comment to you that wasn't meant to be to you.... I had your name in the margin of the page with the puzzle, and connected it to the wrong item. Sorry about that.
My offspring is a Libra as well (the 19th), and he gets along very well with his Aquarius parents. Since he is currently in New Delhi we will not celebrate together.
As we all know astrology is bullshit, yet that doesn't mean that it won't amply entertain all sorts of conjecture we might be too tactful to otherwise aver, or avow.
--
(No problem, Mac -- ever since my youth, I never wanted to have to say, like my my Grandpa, "Stop me if I'm repeating myself....")
OK...I'm a little weirded out by the comments that seem to legitimate astrology, but I guess it takes all kinds, so I'll go no further.
@karmasartre: When I was a copy editor (Palm Beach Post, Tampa Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer) I always losing when arguing that just because OSU wanted the capital-T "The" at the beginning of its name didn't mean we had to do it. There always seemed to be a more-senior editor who actually WENT to OSU who got his/her way. I always pointed out that Time magazine wants to be TIME Magazine, but no other media does that. Ahhhh....the good old days of geeky copy editor debates!
...I always lost...
(dang...maybe I wasn't as good a copy editor as I thought I was!!!)
Happy Birthday to Madame Rex and early Birthday to Andrea! Your dinner sounds fantastic, Andrea. I'd be jealous, except I just ate at Marcel's Restaurant (French Belgian) in DC. If you have some extra cash you'd like to part with, it's one great place to do it.
And thank you Mexicangirl and Orange for the tips re the on line version. I will proceed as advised!
Happy birthday to Sandy, hope you did everything you intended to do today!
The beauty of a roast chicken is that you can have several more meals out of the leftovers and the bones.
acm - I'll be a day afore ye for e'er. Gazos Creek, by Pigoen Point, south of Half Moon Bay, 4pm and after. ff
Happy Birthday, Sandy! Every Libra I know is a real peach, just as balanced as the zodiac scales would suggest.
Interstate highway numbers are for suckers. Here in Chicago, everything gets a name. We drive on the Dan Ryan (90/94 south of downtown), (Adlai) Stevenson (55), Eisenhower (290), Kennedy (another stretch of 90/94), and Edens (94). I still don't know who this Edens was. As even-numbered routes, 90 and 94 are technically east-west roads, but they're mostly north-south in Chicago. 55 is a north-south road that's more east-west in the city. This explains why it took me 40 years to remember that even/odd distinction.
@Orange, I thought of Anthony Eden, because he was around I think at the time of Stevensen and Eisenhower (?).
But then I realized it has an s at the end, so looked up Edens Expressway, and trusty Wiki says it's after William G. Edens a banker and early advocate for paved roads, who sponsored Illinois first bond in 1918.
I hope you can sleep better now. As for me, I'm procrastinating, when I should be putting the final touches on a talk for tomorrow... May be I can work Edens into it.
Orange - I know what you're talking about, having lived in Chicago until sixteen, and then moving to southern California, where all the names have lost their meaning.
On I-95 in Philly: Wow, you're right. I don't know know how many times I've gone down the road in car or bus and not noticed that on the short stretch of highway opposite Philadelphia there's a "2" in front of the "95." When you're going Dc to NYC or vice versa you have no reason to divert through Philadelphia as the highway goes right up the east bank of the Delaware until it gets to mid-state.
Well, learn something new with each crossword.
5wl...
Nice that we had part of our Theme answer of INTERSTATE NINETYFIVE revealed in clue 59A (95 backwards). Fun puzzle.
- - Robert
NSEC is bad crossword glue especially as it runs alongside CCLI. Quite good otherwise.
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