Alexandra Dixon
San Francisco, CA
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San Francisco, CA
So, as an Eli who was at Yale during bladderball days ... it was crazy! The bladderball was huge, I don't know where it was stored but once a year they would inflate it and roll it out onto the Old Campus a huge green in a quadrangle surrounded by freshmen dorms. All Yale undergrads were affiliated with one of the (then) twelve residential colleges, and there were some rivalries. So the actual bladderball event basically consisted of masses of people, some in t-shirts affiliated with their colleges, shoving this massive ball around. I think the eventual goal was to roll it all the way to the President's house, about 1/2 mile away. In my time there was a rivalry between my college (Saybrook) and the next college over (Branford) in which, on bladderball weekend during brunch, some Branford students sneaked into our dining hall and opened the windows looking out onto the Branford green, where Branford students with fire extinguishers filled with fish juice were waiting to spray the concoction into the dining hall. I remember our Master and Dean and several other people got splashed. I got fish juice on my favorite winter coat! The following year, a group of 12 Saybrook students took revenge, but they went way over the line (I'll spare you the details); I think all were suspended, a couple had lawyer parents and sued, and it was a big mess. That was around 1977. So, not the proximate cause of Bladderball being canceled in 1982, I don't think. "Fun" memories!
OMG I love this so much. I was missing 53D, 61D and 62D when I gave up and said "Reveal Puzzle." Even then I didn't get why Y=X. I love that "how we treat peers" is "AS EQUALS." I'm not even mad that I didn't figure it out. Because it's so gorgeous. The fact that it was the CLUES not the ANSWERS that needed to be changed, is extra. One of my all time favorites.
I love this theme! Great puzzle. Not a fan of the top middle section however. Three answers crossing each other that I didn't know, all proper nouns or acronyms.
Really nice puzzle with lots of good clues. I got off to a good start with 1Across because I'm a Yale alum - thanks Jacob!
@Darren I'm a Libra but that didn't help with "Galactic scale" - it was one of my last fills.
@Kate ditto!
@Another Eli As an old-time Eli I was there when bladderball was still around, but looked at the same Wikipedia article and was surprised to find that it had been canceled and also that students had stealthily tried to bring it back but were foiled by the New Haven PD. I mean, they should try doing it on another weekend, not the traditional one! But that reminds me of another event, Burning Man, which started on a beach here in San Francisco. I don't know which beach but when I found out about it, it was at Baker Beach (on the ocean side of the city) which is controlled by the National Park Service, and the Park Police don't play! The organizers of Burning Man thought that by having it early that year they could have the burn on the beach and the police wouldn't know about it. But ... they showed up, AFTER the structure had been doused in flammable fluid, and put a stop to the burn. One fanatic attendee tried to run forward and set it on fire but was tackled IIRC. Anyway I always wondered about the advisability of hauling away a ton of fuel-soaked wood, wouldn't it have been safer to just burn it? They moved to the Nevada desert after that, and Burning Man as most of America knows it, was reinvented and endures.
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