2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner who founded the Green Belt movement / SUN 10-13-19 / Half-frozen Italian dessert / Swedish name akin to Lawrence / One honored March 8 per a 1977 United Nations resolution / Airport named for two Washington cities / Arthropod appendages

Constructor: Erik Agard

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (the "Challenging" part due almost entirely to 15-Down)

THEME: "Lines of Work" — Clues all start "Professional whose favorite movie lines might be..." and then there's a famous movie line, which you have to interpret wackily (i.e. as a pun):

Theme answers:

• SOFTBALL PLAYER (21A: Professional whose favorite movie line might be "There's no place like home") (from "The Wizard of Oz")
• GOATHERD (35A: ... "Here's looking at you, kid") (from "Casablanca")
• I.T. SPECIALIST (40A: ... "I wish I knew how to quit you") (from "Brokeback Mountain")
• SCHEDULING COORDINATOR (61A: ... "Go ahead, make my day") (from "Dirty Harry")
• ORTHODONTIST (81A: ... "Get to the chopper!") (from ??????????) [looks it up] (huh, "Predator")
• MAGICIAN (87A: " ... "Is this your king?!") (from "Black Panther")
• EPIDEMIOLOGIST (102A: ... "I'll have what she's having") (from "When Harry Met Sally")

Word of the Day: WANGARI MAATHAI (15D: 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner who founded the Green Belt Movement) —

Wangarĩ Muta Maathai (wà^ŋɡàˈɹɛ |m|ɑː|ˈ|t|aɪ; 1 April 1940 – 25 September 2011) was a renowned Kenyan social, environmental and political activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Prize. She was educated in the United States at Mount St. Scholastica (Benedictine College) and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the University of Nairobi in Kenya.

In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights. In 1984, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award. Maathai was an elected member of Parliament and served as assistant minister for Environment and Natural resources in the government of President Mwai Kibakibetween January 2003 and November 2005. She was an Honorary Councillor of the World Future Council. She was affiliated to professional bodies and received several awards. On Sunday, 25 September 2011, Maathai died of complications from ovarian cancer. (wikipedia)

• • •

This puzzle is funny. A little bit haha funny, but a lot curious funny. Take WANGARI MAATHAI (15-Down), whose life's work was truly impressive, but whom I learned about for the first time literally just now. Famewise, I'm pretty sure her name is going to be familiar only to a very small percentage of solvers, and since it's a non-western name and there are no other famous WANGARIs or MAATHAIs, you can't even infer it, or even parts of it. Is she worth knowing about? Absolutely. But it is weird to put someone this non-household-namey in such a long answer. I've definitely encountered longish names I've never heard of before, but usually it's because of some glaring ignorance on my part. Whereas in the case of Peace Nobelists, well, I doubt most people can name most Peace Nobelists from this century (or the last century, for that matter).

So the puzzle has made a very conscious choice to teach us about this woman, for which, I have to say, I commend it. It just makes the solve unusual, in that I spent what felt like half my time just in the NE section of the grid, trying to hash things out because that name was basically random letters to me. I sincerely forgot the theme by the time I was done sorting out the NE. So perhaps this is a roundabout way of saying the theme wasn't any great shakes. I'm far far far more likely to remember WANGARI MAATHAI than I am this theme ... which ... maybe Mission Accomplished? If not *the* mission, then *a* mission. But seriously, read more about her. She's fascinating.


My problem with the theme, aside from its basic corniness, is that some of these aren't really "lines of work" and some of the "lines" don't reeeeally go with the "work." Are there professional SOFTBALL PLAYERs? I get that it makes the clue about women, which is great, but women play BASEBALL too.


But at least with SOFTBALL PLAYER, the line ("There's no place like home") fits the job. Presumably, a SOFTBALL PLAYER wants to get home (to score a run). Whereas the line "I'll have what she's having" makes nooooo sense for an EPIDEMIOLOGIST, unless said EPIDEMIOLOGIST was really into *contracting* diseases (as opposed to studying them). And is a SCHEDULING COORDINATOR really a job title? I guess I could say the same about GOATHERD, but I know that that job at least existed at some point—maybe still, but definitely in the past. Whereas SCHEDULING COORDINATOR... ? Finally, is "Get to the chopper!" famous? It's the only line I didn't recognize. Apparently it's from "Predator" ... [cough] ... OK. I mean, how you have a puzzle like this and *don't'* have the exceedingly famous line from that other Schwarzenegger movie but *do* have the line from this Schwarzenegger movie, I do not know. I really do not. And wouldn't an I.T. SPECIALIST absolutely very much know how to quit (you)????


HEROIZED, LOL, what? I had HERALDED, which has the virtue of being a word one might use (12D: Placed on a pedestal). To the puzzle's enormous credit, HEROIZED was really the only non-theme fill that made me go "huhhh?" Not keen on cluing HOUSECAT via its pooping locale (STANK indeed!) but HOUSECAT is a fine answer, as are virtually all the other answers (75D: What goes in a box). A very well-made grid, but the theme was kind of hit-or-miss, and a bit of a SNOOZE, for me.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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