The Modern Prometheus
If you could magically meet someone from history, whom would you choose? For Dave, Mary Shelley would rank near the top of the list. She led quite the remarkable life. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a women’s rights advocate who died shortly after Mary’s birth. Mary was raised by her father, political philosopher William Godwin, who provided her with a rich if informal education.
A genius in her own right, Mary Godwin fell in love at age 17 with another genius, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. The couple, with Mary’s stepsister in tow, ran off together, fleeing England for what became a truly romantic – and tragic – life on the Continent, marrying each other after Percy’s first wife committed suicide.
The most famous part of Mary Shelley’s literary legacy is, of course, the novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Her story of a scientist who “stole fire from the gods” by reanimating a corpse – and suffered the dreadful consequences of doing so – has remained with us through countless retellings. We enjoyed including the film Ex Machina, resurrected in Clue/Answer A, along with such other Frankenstein-themed elements as horrified, Ingolstadt, and nightmare, among others. How many did you spot?
Oh, and as for Answers B and D, we just couldn’t resist bringing Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman back to life:
Anytime I come across the word, ABNORMAL, I immediately think of Abby Normal, from one of my favorite films. Thanks for the clip. With the talented cast, the numerous gags and one-liners are indelibly written in my memory. As always, I’m impressed with the many quote-related clue/words. For anyone interested and in the area, the San Francisco Ballet is again offering “Frankenstein” this spring season: https://www.sfballet.org/productions/frankenstein/
I’ll be seeing it again.
I read the novel decades ago in high school and saw the Mel Brooks movie a few years later. Both were memorable (in quite different ways, of course).
“Young Frankenstein” had some terrifically funny moments – the “Walk this Way” scene and the way the horses would whinny in terror at the mention of Frau Blücher’s name come to mind. But the funniest one, which I was reminded of when NPR’s “Fresh Air” replayed an interview with Teri Garr (who played Inga) shortly after she passed away last year, is the “proportional body parts” scene:
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41yRZjIM_80
Great fun, as always. I am still trying to work out whether the answer to I (“Long Island archetype …”) is a themed element. Chuckled when I was reminded of the hours I once wasted trying to come up with a rhyme for that place.
Rob, and others who know us, may know Dave was born and raised in Levittown, New York. Dave, in any event, doesn’t exactly believe that William Levitt created a monster when he conceived the planned communities known as Levittown. He does agree that hardly anything can be made to rhyme with that place.
Hmmm— Levittown might be closer to home.
Simply electrifying. Thanks for another fine Acrostic.
Another wonderful puzzle and commentary (and reader comments). I also loved the sly references to Young Frankenstein.
As we speak, some highly gifted scientists are working on the 21st century version of a type of Frankenstein’s monster. Well, not exactly. It’s an inquiry into abiogenesis: how life got started on earth 3.8 billion years ago. We know that some bit of inorganic matter, somehow, twitched into life at that time, but we don’t really yet know how.
One of the fellows conducting lab research on this fascinating subject is Jeff Shostak at Harvard. He believes his lab is maybe four or five years away from creating a primitive proto-cell that could survive, reproduce and be subject to the same evolutionary forces that created our world. (The dude is no slouch, having bagged a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on telomeres.). Similar work is ongoing at a handful of other labs across the globe, including one at Cambridge.
Shostak opined that the three greatest mysteries in science were how the universe began, how consciousness evolved, and how life emerged from lifeless matter. He thought he was best equipped to tackle the last of these.
Rehair? Nice puzzle, on the easy side but a lot of fun.
Yes, we string players need a “rehair” every few months; the hair on our bows (which comes from the tails of horses) gets slick after too much use. This clue/answer combo may have come off the cutting room floor from the previous (violin-themed) puzzle.
I started out with few answers on first pass (I’m especially mortified that I blanked on LEVITTOWN), but though I didn’t know the German medical school answer, I had the ones around it so the clue itself plus the STE_N below were enough to get me the author and source, and that helped enormously…a lot of fun!
Sorry for the newbie question:
Each square in the raw pattern has a number and a letter e.g. 1 B or 2 M. What does the letter signify?
The letter of the clue.
After my first pass through the clues, I had only MACHINA, YOUNG, and EHUD. With those meager results, I planned on my second pass to try out some others I’d been unsure of: NEWBIE, LEVITTOWN, TWO-HEADED, and NIGHTMARE. But that turned out not to be necessary: when I looked at the author/title line, I saw M__Y_____E_…., and all was revealed – having in mind the helpful hints from the clues, too. I can’t remember another acrostic where I solved so many clues from having just the first letter + the theme – it was a lot of fun to write them all in, from HORRIFIED to EUPHORIA to ELECTRIC to SCIENTIST. You do such a nice job of melding quote and clues!