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SATURDAY, Oct. 11, 2008 - Pete Mitchell (Old-time actress Haden / Two-time NOW president Eleanor / Anne Rice's Brat Prince)
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
THEME: none
Well, there is a kind of theme: proper nouns. I'm not sure I have ever seen a puzzle with such a high percentage of them. And not just proper nouns, but people's names in particular. The puzzle is packed to the gills with them. Maybe it's not their number (my recent VP debate-themed puzzle, for instance, had 14 names by my count), but their length. We get all of
- WAYNE GRETZKY (19A: Winner of eight consecutive M.V.P. awards)
- JOAN JETT (28A: One of only two women on Rolling Stone's list of "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time") - the other is Joni Mitchell
- ENRIQUE IGLESIAS (35A: Singer with the 1999 #1 hit "Be With You") - the song sounds like this:
... but all I could hear in my head was this:
- MAE WEST (8A: Who said "A man's kiss is his signature") - this is where I started the puzzle. I knew this almost instantly, not because I'd heard the quotation before (I hadn't), but because the phrasing of the clue seemed deliberately gender neutral, so instead of some noted lothario like CASANOVA or VALENTINO or whatever, I thought woman - and the Only woman I thought of was MAE WEST. Probably because she was always highly quotable. With MAE WEST in place, the NE fell in about ten seconds.
Round-up:
- 17A: Play or movie starring William H. Macy ("Oleanna") - absolutely no desire to see this, though I am, in general, a Mamet fan (see yesterday's clip from "Glengarry").
- 18A: The Green City in the Sun (Nairobi) - no idea. Crosses made it easy.
- 23A: It was made to fall in 2001 (Mir) - took me many stares and puzzled, head-cocked looks to figure out.
- 26A: Southwestern resort community (Taos) - like the TAOS WACO pairing on this line (27A: Dr Pepper museum locale). WACO is famous for some crazy @#$#.
- 37A: Anne Rice's Brat Prince (Lestat) - he's the prince of German Sausage?
- 38A: Active Ecuadorean volcano (Cotopaxi) - winner of today's "Mash Face Into Keyboard" Answer of the Day Award.
- 39A: Where you might be among Hmong (Laos) - since FRESNO wouldn't fit, this was the next logical answer.
- 41A: Every, to a pharmacist (omn) - o man that's terrible as an answer. Almost as bad as JQA (32D: First three-letter White House monogram).
- 44A: Two-time NOW president Eleanor (Smeal) - you know when you know a name - well - and then you are asked to recall it and you can see the face and hear the voice but Can't Remember The Name At All? Yeah, that's what happened here.
- 51A: Bachelorette party attendees (gal pals) - I abhor "Sex and the City," but I love this answer. Every bachelorette party should be required, by law, to play "MR. LEE" (43D: 1957 hit for the Bobbettes) - a song on the "Stand By Me" soundtrack, which I now realize was hugely influential on my musical tastes. It spurred a nearly two-year boycott on my part (in the mid-80s) of nearly all contemporary radio. I spent my junior and senior years listening almost exclusively to stations that were, even then, considered "oldies" stations.
- 56A: Where Arabic and Tigrinya are spoken (Eritrea) - a country whose existence I learned of from crosswords. Sad but true.
- 58A: Reversible silk fabrics (damasks) - a Shakespearean-sounding word that I got quickly, despite knowing crap-all about fabric.
- 1D: 19th-century abolitionist (Stowe) - piece of cake ... OK, maybe I needed one cross, but that's it. She wrote the most popular novel of the 19th century.
- 2D: Shakes in the grass? (hula) - awesome clue.
- 6D: "_____ Pow! Enter the Fist" (2002 spoof film) ("Kung") - that just hurts. Why? Why would you go there? That movie ("film," HA ha) was well and (mercifully) gone from everyone's consciousness.
- 8D: Cousin of a cockroach (mantis) - are there non-praying MANTISes?
- 10D: Ballet dancer Bruhn and others (Eriks) - like COTOPAXI, neh-ever heard of him.
- 12D: Old Far Eastern capital (Edo) - not a unit of currency, thank god.
- 13D: Person in a tree, briefly (sib) - saw through this "tree" very quickly, just as I can now see through the trees out my window - brilliant orange but sparsing up fast.
- 25D: Martini's partner (Rossi) - easy, but just now it occurred to me that OLIVE would have fit too.
- 34D: Runabout or Royale (REO) - hmmm, they sound like olde-fashioned car models. Three letters = REO.
- 45D: It's north of Libya (Malta) - my thought: "lots of things."
- 50D: Old-time actress Haden (Sara) - no idea. None. I'm sure she's been in the puzzle before, but clearly I've forgotten about her.
- 53D: Sch. whose teams play at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center (LSU) - on my list of least fav. abbrs. -> "sch." Just seems so unnecessary.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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59 comments:
I have to love a puzzle by anyone, but especially a guy, with Ellie SMEAL, JOANJETT and Harriet Beecher STOWE. Sure, I guess they fit well, but you just don't see it every day.
I missed WAYNEGRETZKY, which I should have got since he was a household name growing up--the top third of the puzzle was my undoing and the only place I had to call upon the internet deities.
Plus: bonus! More esoteric blogging topics with the Red Sox.
This was way, way easier for me than yesterday's puzzle--could do it w/o googling (needed assistance from PW with GALPALS, though). The mediterranean SE got me started--I know by now the "Italian capital" trick, Malta is not far away (BTW it has the same "capital"--the Euro--now as Italy), and Eritrea was once an Italian colony. All of this topped by shrimp scampi. I was off to the races.
We may get into this TEUT/GER thing later today--I don't feel like a rant right now--just too happy with something political I read on a blog.
I would have said it was medium, until I reached the NE, when I ran into a brick wall. I even guessed ERIK. But I was misled by a couple of errors I didn't want to give up on. The worst was DROPS SPIN for "Prepares to put it on the line." I know I should have seen from the clue the word order was wrong, but I thought it was a political reference. In the end, I Googled to get NAIROBI, and the rest fell.
Loved this puzzle, but maybe that's largely because I rocked right through it.
I actually liked JQA, as it opened up the middle of the puzzle, which is where I started. Never would have thought you could stack JOAN JETT on top of ENRIQUE IGLESIAS. Brilliant. (Not sure Joan would go for that, though.)
Only small snag was wanting A LONG look, but it wasn't HARD to see the error of my ways...
Well, I knew it was ENRIQUEIGLESIAS I just didn't know how to spell IGLESIAS which wreaked havoc here. NODSPEED made no sense so I Googled the spelling and it all fell into place. Then I had GRETZKY with an "S." Guessed ERIK, got MAEWEST and eventually that corner. I also had LOL instead of AOL at one point and I thought ALLPALS sort of worked. Not! All in all it was a good Saturday brain exercise for me, certainly not easier than Thursday or Friday. I liked it.
along with @ultrav I did not get Gretzky until I had about 90% of the fill.
The Mae West quote was great as my lovely wife often complains about bad kissing. I never want to hear about her research, however, it seems she has a robust sample.
had ssr instead of MIR so I spent considerable time trying to figure out the scaling tool and the volcano.
a two espresso beverage puzzle made humorous when I spelled PLUNDER as blunder and could not figure out what a GNb was.
Off to play outside.
Thank you Pete and it is too bad the BSOX's traded the Baby Ruth... but New Englanders are a forgiving lot and we are over that now.
Cotopaxi was one of the gimmes for me and that alone probably took it from medium-easy to easy in my rating. I knew Cotopaxi only because my wife took a three-week trip to Ecuador shortly after we met and climbed the volcano and came back with lots of pictures and stories, all of which get hauled out with little or no provocation. My kids will probably have as one of their earliest memories/nightmares mama's story of the giant spider she saw eating a bird.
I wouldn't have guessed either of the female rock guitarists--I'd have been thinking Chrissy Hynde or whichever of the Wilson sisters plays guitar. But my infatuation with Joni Mitchell is right up there with my infatuation with Emmylou Harris. Ethereal chicks with long straight hair and gorgeous voices who play guitar, and throw in a beret sometimes . . . hey, I'm there.
Waco has a bunch of Texa-centric museums. It also has one for the Texas Rangers (the governor's police force, not the baseball team) and Texas high school football. One bottling company, in Dublin, Texas, which is just west of Waco about seventy or eighty miles, has the right to make Dr Pepper with cane sugar as opposed to corn syrup. It's supposed to be distributed only within X number of miles from Dublin, but "Dublin Dr Pepper" gets bootlegged all over the place. You can get it in Houston, which is well outside the area of legal distribution. I've related that information before, I know. But if crosswords are going to keep using the same answers, you're going to keep getting the same commentary from me.
Can someone explain the German: Abbr = TEUT? I think I've seen it before but I didn't understand it then either
I had BROWN, as in John Brown, instead of STOWE like a fool which prevented me from the North East.
@Thomas: We may as well get started on this. TEUT is short for teutonic.
I've come to expect "teutonic" to be used at least once in articles published in the NYTimes Review of Books about something translated from German, and it always connotes something convoluted, ponderous, witless. Hence my unhappiness with anyone equating Teutonic with German, which looks to me like racial stereotyping. The Teutons BTW were a Germanic tribe that invaded the Roman empire and was subsequently wiped out by the Romans.
I must admit, though, that in a recent online debate about the Teutonic/German connection, it was pointed out to me that "teutonic" is sometimes being used in a more positive sense. I can't deny this, but I've never seen it. End of rant.
Super puzzle in many ways, though I had a number of stumbles along the way. I started well with STOWE, SHRIMPSCAMPI and GODSPEED. But then in the mid-Atlantic area I wanted PITON with MPG which would not make sense anyway -- we'd be raising the auto standard, not causing it to fall.
GNP in the SW was promising, but gave NOTTRUE rather than NOSIREE on top of PLUNDER for a short while... In Calif. I had JOANBAEZ for starters (big fan), instead of JOANJETT, but JQA helped fix that.
And in the NW I wanted OCEANIA, corrected with KUNG, but I overlooked the HUCAS I had left as [shakes in the grass] = HULAS, -- and that was a really great clue, darn it. One silly error at the end, after all the brain-strain, but no googles! Not bad.
∑;)
@ ulrich -- thanks, I didn't realize the Teutons were wiped out so long ago!
@ulrich--It is suggested in the Wikipedia article "Germanic People" that "Teutonic" may derive from the same source as "Deutsch." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_peoples
For the rest of today I'll be hearing "I Love Rock 'n Roll" in my head. But I never knew that Joni Mitchell played guitar. Thank you, Rex.
For a hot second I was afraid 23A was WTC, and I was pissed at the coldness of the clue. The World Trade Center appeared in a decent new show the other night---Life On Mars---and it still moves me when I see it, and remember....
Doug
@ulrich: My apologies, but when I see/hear Teutonic, I immediately think of Blazing Saddles, with Hedley Lamarr telling Lili von Shtupp to "Shut up, you Teutonic twit", only it wasn't quite "twit".
Would you like another schnitzengruben?
My first answer, 1D, the abolishionist, was my undoing. I immediately put BROWN in, thinking of John at Harper's Ferry. I was rewarded when the "W" hooked up beautifully with WAYNE GRETZKY and was sure I was on my way. But, no. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Yeah.
Here's a super clip of Jimmy Fallon's opening of the MTV Movie Awards, with a great ENRIQUEEGLESIAS bit, among others. His singing is about as good as Will Farrell's, if you get my meaning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4wvnBRogS0
"Uncle!" What's OMN?
Got WAYNEGRETZKY and confidently put in Brown (my own name) where STOWE should have been. There are just so many 19th century abolitionists, how do you pick?
Wade, send your wife over here to tell us all the story of the giant spider eating a bird. That's a story I need to hear.
COTOPAXI was in a Sun "Weekend Warrior" crossword this Sept. 19. Might've killed me last night otherwise!
@artlvr: And it happened BC to boot! The invading tribes were defeated by Caesar's uncle, Marius.
@steven I: That may be true, but as orange has pointed out on numerous occasions, the etymology of a word is often a poor guide to its current meaning and connotations.
@hudsonhawk: See why I hate the equation German=Teutonic?
This was much easier than yesterday. The quote just sounded so Mae West. I had my guessing mojo back, which left me yesterday and sent me way off in every possible way!
Can someone please explain OMN to me? is it the Latin root?
I've been in ten weddings so far and I started refusing to go to bachelorette parties many years ago. Same for wedding showers. The only thing worse than a wedding shower is a dry baby shower.
-becky, the worst bridesmaid ever
@Becky, ditto your sentiment on dry parties.
@ulrich, thanks for the TEUT nod.
Entered this puzzle with SMEAL and worked backwards. Got JELLO and wanted to squeeze some iteration of JONIMITCHELL in there (another someone I have on vinyl, sheesh!)
@Rex, your trees are "sparsing"? I am unfamiliar with the term.
There was an echo in this puzzle from comments on this blog, starting with SHRIMP SCAMPI and the IMP rebus from Thursday. NO SIREE seemed to come out of a recent discussion, too. Then you add the references to Damasks (Foodie) and Mantis, two most eloquent commenters, and I was sensing some deja vu. TREYS, again???
I blundered twice geographically due to brash fill of open space. Seattle for NAIROBI, even though I knew it was wrong, and Tunisia for ERITREA just because Tigrinya sounded as if it should be from that northern part of Africa, not along the Red Sea.
The long across answers made the puzzle a little too tractable for a Saturday, I thought, but the cool array of letters still leave me with the impression that this was a very fine construction.
(GNP now seems sort of archaic; it's been replaced by GDP, which doesn't include net exports.)
This kind of puzzle is usually my undoing, because I'm terrible with sports and proper nouns in general. But like Ulrich,I got a foothold in the southeast. It was a combination of mediterranean and Red Sea clues, my neck of the woods.. DAMASKS (from my home town, Damascus), LIRAS, ERITREA (I was tempted by SOMALIA for a while), MALTA and lovely SHRIMP SCAMPI. But the top half got me and I needed to cheat and get WAYNEGRETZKY before it opened up. Still, I feel this puzzle is very well done, and a normal person (i.e. not me) would find it very gettable for a Saturday.
TREYS, which confused me yesterday, showed up again today! At least I knew it this time, thanks to fergus' response to my query.
@Rex, I really like your use of "sparsing". It's not quite kosher, right? But it's definitely needed, I can't think of a perfect replacement without using a phrase. I'm going to start using it in science (where you can easily introduce terminology), as in: "Severe stress will cause sparsing of neuronal dendrites."
This was a solid Medium for me, as I got completely stuck in the deep SW. Galpals! The NW wasn't easy either, since I tried to put Marilyn and Marlene in Mae's spot, erasing wary and Edo twice....
I got Wayne Gretzky via husband. We once saw him in a steakhouse in NY, all alone at a big table, and he seemed shorter than I had imagined. I liked shticks, brines and damask, butg I also had "not true", rel for sib and I was thinking of an entirely different booty.
Thanks, Pete, for a good Saturday workout.
@foodie, can I tell Mr. Fikink that his memory is sparsing?
@Rex
my guess is the Mon thru Thur non readers are still in what I call the "look it up" phase, i.e., they are lazy and use the blog to get some traction at the end of the week. Enlightenment most assuredly will follow once they happen upon this section of your teachings (you edit, ergo,you teach) and they will join the rest of us and drink from this fountain of knowledge.
much easier than yesterday. Did anyone google "the Green City in the sun"? I did and there was a book written by none other than Barbara Wood!!! the author ...not the chef
@foodie- was going to tell you that a trey in cards is a three and then it appears again today.
Had Jelly instead of jello..we still don't know what omn is.
@Rex thanks for Mr Lee
@all who asked,
OMN = omni nocte = every night. At least according to my beautiful bride, the nurse.
I may have spoken too soon. OMN = omni. Period. Omni means "every" in latin, I guess.
Whew - after yesterday I never thought I would get through today's puzzle. Had to ask spouse about Joan Jett, but otherwise I was proud of figuring out both Mae West and Wayne Gretzky. omn is used on doctor's prescriptions for every, as in i omn hr = 1 every hour. I only knew this from working for doctors for years. Now I work for lawyers. Hmmm. You pick.
@doug 12:46 PM:
My name is Brown too, so it took me a while to get STOWE, especially with the help of WAYNEGRETZKY.
I thought the puzzle was sorta hard, but I stuck with it until I finally got SHTICK. I'd been thinking the answer had to be something along the lines of a daily grind rather than show biz routine.
My October Glory maples haven't started sparsing yet, in fact they're still mostly green. May I have that word for keeps, Rex?
Shakespeare used DAMASK several times but he used it to describe a pink hue.
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, Twelfth Night: II, iv
Is it usually spelled SHTICK or SCHTICK?
I started with MAE WEST too; but somehow I also knew the KUNG Pow movie. I kept looking at my partially filled in COTOPAXI thinking I had seen it not too long ago and I really should remeber it.
My little lesson on top scoring hockey players yesterday would have included WAYNE GRETZKY, but I thought why mention a name that will never be in the puzzle?
I raced through the top and middle starting at MAE WEST, then slowed to a crawl in the bottom.
I first had GOBSMACK for GODSPEED although that is no doubt wrong on many levels.
Not too hard for s Saturday, but I did make a mistake -- jelly/ymn. I couldn't make any sense of ymn so knew that something might be wrong here. The more I look at the puzzle, the more I admire the construction and some of the unusual (but quite gettable) fill.
I worked this one on paper today while manning the garage sale. Once again, I am forced to recognize that I often give up too easily when google is at hand.
My first entry was WACO, and I had the middle filled in pretty quickly. Then I had to chip away at teh corners slowly. They SW came pretty quickly. NW was next, with a nudge from my non-crosswordy wife who happened to spot STOWE (I couldn't see it even with _T_W_). After some struggling, I finally saw AMRADIO in the NE and it fell soon after. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon staring at a mostly blank SE. At first I tried Godspell, which led me to Liberia where ERITREA belonged. I still can't quite believe SMEAL is correct--the M was my last square. I eventually switched to GODSPEED, and many minutes later finally spied ERITREA. The rest didn't take long, though I didn't know if I was going to have to correct that M until I actually saw the "correct" message.
But it all came eventually without a google, as I said EARLIER. So I may not be ready for competition, but I can apparently solve the tougher ones if I just have a little patience.
My fave clue was the one for JELLO. Until I found the J in JOANJETT, I was wondering what they called those snakes they swallowed alive in the Indiana Jones movie.
Whereas I got DAMASK from another English poet. I was pretty sure it was Keats, but I was wrong about the Nightingale.
This is from "The Eve of St. Agnes," which is one lush and erotically charged poem. (Plus, you can see a lot of his other work dancing in and out.)
Stanza 24
A casement high and triple-arch’d there was,
All garlanded with carven imag’ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, 210
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Unnumerable of stains and splendid dyes.
As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damask’d wings;
And in the midst, ’mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, 215
A shielded scutcheon blush’d with blood of queens and kings.
... and while I'm obsessing on it, Damascene shows up as a suggestive adjective somewhere from long ago poetry readings. The Rubaiyat? Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell? I can't place it, and Google isn't any help.
For the record, you can all thank/blame Jim H, who inspired me to create this puzzle when he wrote: "I spent most of the 1980s in Edmonton where I got to watch the young Wayne Gretzky (a name whose unfortunate combination of letters means he doesn't appear in the NYT database). If that's not laying down a challenge, I don't know what is. :)
Thanks to all who have offered kind words. Will Shortz was responsible for many of the clues, so I cannot take full credit/blame for those you loved/hated.
Go Sox!
Does anyone remember the web site where we saw Rex running for president the other day? please let me know. Thanks.
@chefbea: Excerpt of a message of dk's this past Thursday:
Re: the election, check this out:
http://www.tsgnet.com/pres.php?id=46832&altf=Sfy1&altl=Qbslfs
1:26 PM
pete, if you're taking requests, i'd like to see the aztec smoking mirror god TEZCATLIPOCA in a crossword. :P
pete actually has a third reason to be happy today: today was pete mitchell day at the boston cru. we all got together and solved a couple of his puzzles and generally had an enjoyable time for a couple of hours. fine puzzles, too, including a themed puzzle that was substantially harder than today's NYT. (by the way, i found today's NYT slightly harder than yesterday's, but maybe i'm the only one?)
@miriamb thanx for the link
Thanks, Joon, I found today's harder than yesterday's, too.
@Fergus: Rex's new verb, to sparse, gets lots of support from diamonded, garlanded and damasked!
Ok @chefbea1, read @ladel's post, this is why REx just has to win.
My brother and sister are a font, or stoup if you wish, of questionable humor and you can thank my sis SIB for the president link.
Thank you @miriamb (nee Brown) for the catch.
@viola: "Feed on her damask cheek"
Could that not mean "silky" cheek?
@joon & @pete m: I've always wanted a puzzle with the word AUSGEZEICHNET in it ... but that will never happen.
While I'm often suspicious of coinages that arise generally, I'm all in favor of clever transitions, like sparse, that come from a play on words, rather than the degradation of terms that is the usual case in the devolution of our language.
More precision and exacting terms; fewer catch-all phrases and less lenience for outright solecisms. That's my rallying cry, if I have any revolutionary fervor left to dispense.
@dk: You're quite welcome.
By the bye, je ne suis pas née Brown, je suis née un autre nom. That's OK.
@fergus and fikink, this was weird. when I started to type my comments, yours had not been posted yet. I got distracted by a call for a bit so there was probably a 10 min gap between when I started and when I published... So, it was weird to come back and read them now and realize that I had echoed something each of you had said. We're starting to think alike! Could be bad news...
@fergus, I'm Damascene and if you come to visit, I will cook Damascene food and serve it on a Damask tablecloth. So Damascene is more generic whereas Damask refers to material woven using a specific technique that was not invented in Damascus but was perfected there... (another Damascene material is brocade which I believe also shows up in puzzles).
@fikink, you can of course tell Mr.fikink his memory is sparsing. In neuroscience, we say that the brain is the second thing to go...
Alors bienvenue à notre grande famille - Les Bruns. Endiablé et folingue!
@joho: re. "ausgezeichnet". (I hope I'm forgiven for posting a fourth comment b/c it does not continue any private chatter I've been engaged in).
In Europe, the ambitious Richard Brooks Western "The Professionals" (Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, Claudia Cardinale, Robert Ryan, Woody Strode) and the much more modest "Chato's Land" are known as "Vietnam Westerns" b/c each shows in its own way, as the Europeans believe, what happesn if a country is invaded by people who do not understand it. I'm particularly fond of Chato's Land, in which Charles Bronson plays an Apache who has to flee a posse lead by Jack Palance (Chato's wife is gang-raped and brutalized along the way) and gets the best of them in the end. I saw it only in a dubbed version in Germany, and forever remember a shot where Chato (Bronson) peeks over a ridge, observing the posse, and says under his breath "ausgezeichnet!". I always wondered what he said in English (my hunch: "excellent!")
I saw the "TT" ending on the Rolling Stone guitarist clue and spent considerable time trying to jam "Bon(nie) Raitt" in there. Who woulda guessed that Raitt and Jett (two awesome female talents) had double t endings? Joni Mitchell was the other? Sorry, RS-very lame. She's an awesome writer and singer but hardly one of the greatest 100 rock guitarists of all time.
Again, not to get too Scrabbly, but I loved that it was all names that gave us JKQWYZ
(JOANJETT, ENRIQUEIGLESIAS, WAYNEGRETZKY) right over COTOPAXI
(I first tried COCOPELI which is sorta close to that flute guy we discussed, KOKOPELLI, no?)
superwell done, Pete!
Also, met an 11 yr old with 2 kitties named PELE and MIA at a bat mitzvah yesterday and I tried to explain to her about the whole PELE/HAMM thing in the puzzle the day before. She remained unimpressed...no future constructrix there I'm afraid!
awesome link to the bobbettes song mr. lee- saw stand by me but don't remember the song. Interestingly, joan jett doesn't play the solo in I love r&r - a groundbreaking artist to be sure, but so many talented female guitarists should have been placed in rolling stones list ahead of her.
yeah, how about Bonnie Raitt?
Susan Tedeschi??
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