Though you do want the precise coordinates in your grid to be able to “resolve” the theme half (my software program does not present them—here is what the puzzle grid appeared like on-line):

Word of the Day: Dmitri MENDELEEV (32D: Dmitri ___, formulator of the periodic legislation) —

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (generally transliterated as Mendeleyev or Mendeleef) ( MEN-dəl-AY-əf; Russian: Дмитрий Иванович Менделеев, tr. Dmitriy Ivanovich Mendeleyev, IPA: [ˈdmʲitrʲɪj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ mʲɪnʲdʲɪˈlʲejɪf] (hear); 8 February [O.S. 27 January] 1834 – 2 February [O.S. 20 January] 1907) was a Russian chemist and inventor. He is greatest identified for formulating the Periodic Law and making a model of the periodic desk of parts. He used the Periodic Law not solely to appropriate the then-accepted properties of some identified parts, such because the valence and atomic weight of uranium, but in addition to foretell the properties of three parts that have been but to be found. […] A extremely popular Russian story credit Mendeleev with setting the 40% normal energy of vodka. For instance, Russian Standard vodka advertises: “In 1894, Dmitri Mendeleev, the best scientist in all Russia, obtained the decree to set the Imperial high quality normal for Russian vodka and the ‘Russian Standard’ was born”^[65] Others cite “the very best high quality of Russian vodka accepted by the royal authorities fee headed by Mendeleev in 1894”. // In truth, the 40% normal was already launched by the Russian authorities in 1843, when Mendeleev was 9 years outdated. It is true that Mendeleev in 1892 turned head of the Archive of Weights and Measures in Saint Petersburg, and developed it right into a authorities bureau the next 12 months, however that establishment was charged with standardising Russian commerce weights and measuring devices, not setting any manufacturing high quality requirements, Also, Mendeleev’s 1865 doctoral dissertation was entitled “A Discourse on the mixture of alcohol and water”, however it solely mentioned medical-strength alcohol concentrations over 70%, and he by no means wrote something about vodka.(wikipedia)

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[28D: Eliot Ness and co.]

Baffled by this—not a lot by the truth that you’ll go to all this architectural fuss for a thematic aspect that does not have an effect on the resolve one iota, however that the tip results of mentioned fuss can be so astonishingly anticlimactic. It’s like some sort of anti-puzzle, a joke about puzzles, a send-up of puzzles. Is it artwork? I do not know. I simply no that you just *advised me* that PLOT was what I might get if I plotted … so why … would I hassle … to plot, then? Couldn’t I simply take your phrase for it? There ought to, on the very least, have been *some* aspect of revelation to this factor—even when we do find yourself with some non-answer like “PLOT,” no less than Let *Us* Arrive At It. Make this a contest puzzle or one thing, the place solvers have to really *discover* one thing. This is like handing a child a connect-the-dots puzzle or a maze that has already been solved—have enjoyable, child! From the place I used to be sitting, this was simply an undersized, extraordinarily simple (i.e. non-Thursday) puzzle with black bars on two sides … for some motive. My software program was screaming at me “There are notes! We cannot replicate among the grid parts! Do it onliiiiiine!” however as normal I ignored my software program and plowed ahead, solely to seek out out that I did not want these grid parts At All besides to determine some post-puzzle factor that the puzzle had truly already discovered for me. Seriously, what are we doing right here?

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

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