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BIOCHEM 212 
TUTOR WANTED 
Text Judy 
(312)‑678‑6736 

By Morton J. Mendelson
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/30/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

10/30/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, October 30, 2019

ACROSS
1 Gets misty, with 
“up”
5 Salon treatment, 
briefly
9 Benjamins
15 Curly coif
16 Popular river 
name from the 
Welsh for “river”
17 They’re 
exchanged in 
Hawaii
18 Nonstick 
cookware product
19 Religious season
20 “Don’t take the 
blame”
21 Risked it big-time
24 Cooler filler
25 Chinese zodiac 
critter
26 Approximate nos.
27 MN and NM
30 Puts (in) 
tentatively
32 Bad-mouth
33 Word before bug 
or ant
34 Prov. bordering 
four Great Lakes
35 Hairpiece
36 Hazardous gas
37 Risked it big-time
42 Parrots geese
43 Fill up on
44 Nero’s 91
45 Exclusive
46 Part of UNLV
47 Wore
51 BB-shaped 
veggie
52 Coll. Board 
exams
53 “I’m sorry, Dave” 
film computer
54 “__ you serious?”
55 Risked it big-time
59 Compensate for
61 Short hoppers?
62 Hall of Fame 
pitcher Randy 
“The Big __” 
Johnson
63 Hairpiece
64 Pennsylvania 
county
65 5 for B or 6 for C
66 Coffee and wine
67 Lairs
68 One logging on

DOWN
1 Fistfight souvenir
2 __ hours
3 Second 
Commandment 
adjective
4 Footprint maker
5 Silicon Valley 
city
6 Pentathlon’s five
7 “That’s a no-no!”
8 Where losers 
of a race may 
be left
9 West Point 
students
10 Gravity-powered 
vehicles
11 Classic video 
game
12 Reaffirming 
rebuttal
13 __ chi
14 Boomer that no 
longer booms
22 Screwdrivers, 
e.g.
23 Give approval 
online, in a way
28 Slacks, briefly
29 Email status
31 Far from self-
effacing

33 Mystic on a bed 
of nails
35 Comforted
36 Soda since 1905
37 Explore 
OfferUp
38 Hue
39 Prohibited
40 “Awesome!”
41 Wide-open 
spaces
46 Coffeehouse 
orders

47 Sure winner
48 Contaminates
49 White-coated 
weasel
50 One with bills to 
pay
52 Look of disdain
56 Hockey’s Phil, to 
fans
57 Sped
58 Waikiki bash
59 Needing no Rx
60 Egg __ yung

6A — Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

King Princess’s album promo video for Cheap 
Queen is pure satire. King Princess is in drag as 
she goes off into crisp banter with comedian 
Kate Berlant. The promo masterfully captures 
the intersection between women being clever 
and being sexy, the perfect introduction to the 
focal points of King Princess’s debut album. 
The album promo, along with cover art 
that features King Princess in a burlesque-
inspired outfit, immerses fans in the wonderful, 
underrepresented 
space 
of 
women 
being 
exceedingly funny without being labeled as 
annoying or trying to get in your bed. Burlesque, 
according to Wikipedia, is work “intended to 
cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or 
spirit of serious works. ” It has always been 
controversial, especially with its connection 
to strip clubs. With one quick Google search 
you can find an article titled, “Is Burlesque 
empowering or demeaning for women?” King 
Princess takes any notion of this condescension 
to those involved with burlesque and reverts it 
with Cheap Queen. The debut album is literally 
a vintage-inspired, empowering strip tease that 
sits at the intersection of comedy, sexiness and 
class. 
Among the satire in the album promo, King 
Princess weaves in small, quotable odes to the 
energy that guided this break-up album. At one 
moment she stares stone-cold at Kate Berlant 
to say, “Do you like my leg hair through the fish 
nets?” The next moment she acknowledges the 
liberating space she creates for her fans: “To 
see that my concerts like provide this space 
for young queer kids. Especially for dykes, it’s 
like, there has to be some sort of kind of haven 
to fucking rage. There’s something church-like 
about it.” 
Sexiness through mockery is completely 
authentic to Mikaela Straus (the real name 
behind King Princess). Watch any interview 
and you feel your panties drop while she mocks 
herself or boring music. In this way, her debut 
Cheap Queen feels completely authentic. She’s 
vulnerable in her authenticity and sadness, and 
that’s at the forefront of this debut. With Cheap 
Queen, King Princess takes the pressure away 
from being a hyper-feminine Instagram baddie 
and instead grasps the sexiness that lies in 
comedy and humility. It’s a lesbian heart-break 
album that crushes and empowers its listeners 
simultaneously.
This 
retro, 
going-backwards-to-move-
forward sort of female empowerment is woven 
throughout the listening experience of each 

track. Most notably, the title track “Cheap 
Queen” incorporates audio from an old-timey 
female movie, woefully spilling lyrics in the 
background like: “Smiling for the audience” or 
“cheap queen.”
One of my favorite tracks is “Hit The Back,” a 
dance track that’s clear and direct about exactly 
what her lover is missing now that they’re no 
longer together: “Ain’t I the best you had, and I 
let you throw it down, hit the back.” The Playboy 
School of Pop video that’s set to the tune of 
“Hit The Back” is even better; it displays King 
Princess dressing as a hot version of every high 
school trope, from cheerleader to basketball 
player. She’s anything she wants to be. She 
liberates her fans to feel the same. 
King Princess’s journey started when she 
exploded onto the scene after Harry Styles 
tweeted about her hit single “1950.” Now only 
20 years old, she’s on the rise, making music 
for “the queer kids in the front,” as she says. In 
the music video for “1950,” she rocked a small 
drawn-on mustache. Now, for Cheap Queen, she 
draws on fully arched eyebrows in full glam. 
She’s exactly what pop needs — she exists in a 
space that’s undefined and sexy as hell. King 
Princess writes catchy love struck tunes to 
female lovers. She’s always specific, always 
daring and never holds back. Fall on your knees, 
the reign of King Princess is here.

King Princess has arrived

SAMANTHA CANTIE
Daily Arts Writer

COLUMBIA RECORDS

ALBUM REVIEW

Cheap Queen

King Princess

Columbia Records

Twenty years ago, Mike Judge created “Office 
Space,” the perfect distillation of the nine to five 
ennui that can sometimes veer into the surreal, all 
borne out of being trapped in a cubicle for most of 
the day. It was an unglamorous era for the humble 
programmer, before the excesses of the following 
decade set in.
Years later, Judge returned to a similar theme 
after the successes of his following projects with 
the HBO series “Silicon Valley.” The bleak dystopia 
is (seemingly) flipped on its head in the show’s 
titular location, with the bleak gray interiors of 
Initech replaced by the colorful, open office layouts, 
all-you-can-eat lunches of Hooli. Characters like 
Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch, “Tag”) 
are trying to escape their jobs not out of extreme 
boredom, but rather the possibility of becoming 
the next iterations of the CEOs of the companies 
they work at. “Passion” and “energy” become 
the buzzwords of the day, with the “worthy” 
deservedly capturing the fruits that capitalism can 
endow.
Reading between the lines, however, one 

can come to realize that the world portrayed by 
“Silicon Valley” is its own type of dystopia, with 
the real-life effects of the real-life equivalents of 
the personalities of the show becoming a larger 
part of the national conversation. The brash, 
uncontainable ego of characters like Hooli CEO 
Gavin Belson (Matt Ross, “American Horror Story: 
Hotel”) are some of the best bits of the series, 
but when we see some of those elements in the 
Zuckerbergs and Bezoses of the world that Belson is 
presumably a caricature of, the consequences are a 
bit more dire. Or when the cartoonish greed of Russ 
Hanneman (Chris Diamantopoulos) is reflected in 
the Adam Neumanns of the world (who get billion 
dollar payouts to leave their companies while their 
employees lose their jobs), the utopianism that 
many companies, venture capital firms and other 
cogs of the tech ecosystem try to spread seems more 
and more like the front to ever-growing grifts.
Yet it is always difficult to not cheer for the 
protagonists of the series, however flanderized 
they’ve become. Maybe in their early days, this 
was itself the attitude towards the now despised 
Facebooks and Amazons of the world. One of the 
frustrating parts of the show is that since Pied 
Piper (the startup in the center of it all) never really 
passes the startup stage, we never see how the 
transition into potential global behemoth affects 
the attitudes and relationships of the characters (a 
la “The Social Network”).
“Silicon Valley” returns for its sixth and final 
season this week, and despite the relative downturn 
in quality of the previous two seasons, it is set up 
with a lot of promise for a final season to match 
the high bar set by its first few. Even between 
when it started five years ago and now, perceptions 
within and without “The Valley” about the societal 
impact (mostly negative ones) and responsibilities 
of the behemoths in the Bay Area have changed 
drastically, and the quirks of the characters that 
made them so endearing are not as funny anymore. 
There is a lot of room to explore these ideas as well 
as analyze the changing landscape in the tech 
world with the trademark wit and precision which 
Judge has shown time and time again.

Looking back at ‘Silicon’

SAYAN GHOSH
Daily Arts Writer

TV NOTEBOOK

Earlier this week, I was talking to an old 
friend, and I told her that I had bought tickets to 
“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” for me and 
my whole family the instant they went on sale. 
She wasn’t surprised; I had done the same thing 
for many movies in the past, like “Star Wars: 
The Last Jedi,” “Beauty and the Beast” and 
“Avengers: Endgame.” I am what you would call a 
little bit obsessed with movie franchises, and my 
family — especially my sister — shares my love of 
Disney movies in particular.
However, 
during 
our 
conversation, 
she 
made an offhand remark asking me if I could 
remember the last Disney movie that I had seen 
that wasn’t part of a franchise or a reboot. I told 
her of course I could name one, and then I sat 
there in shock realizing that I couldn’t. I have 
since realized that, as far as I can remember, it 
was back in 2016 with Disney’s “Moana.”
By the end of 2019, Disney will have released 11 
movies in theaters (not including those of which 
are Fox properties, or Disney’s Fox releases): 
“Captain Marvel,” “Dumbo,” “Penguins” (a 
Disneynature 
film), 
“Avengers: 
Endgame,” 
“Aladdin,” “Toy Story 4,” “Spider-Man: Far From 
Home,” “The Lion King,” “Maleficent: Mistress 
of Evil,” “Frozen 2” and “Star Wars: The Rise of 
Skywalker.” The wide variety of movies looks 
impressive, but with the exception of “Penguins” 
(a documentary), there is not a single original 
movie in that list. Every single one of them is 
either part of a series or a reboot of a classic.
I personally love Disney films. It doesn’t 
matter to me if it’s a reboot or a sequel, if it’s 
animated or live-action: I love them all. But it is 
staggering to realize how many box-office hits in 
this day and age lack originality. All the Disney 
“Star Wars” movies are part of a larger franchise 
that began in the ’70s, and all the Disney Marvel 
movies are based on comic books dating back to 
1939. All the live-action, remade classic movies 
are based on old Disney cartoons. Even Disney, 
arguably one of the most imaginative and 
creative film companies, seems to be grasping at 
straws when it comes to moviemaking. They are 
sticking to franchises and reboots because they 
know that those are the kinds of movies that will 

get them a return on investment.
And to be fair, those movies are successful. 
Disney dominated the box-office in 2019; as of 
this week, the top six movies in the domestic box-
office charts this year are all Disney properties. 
They know what works to make money, and right 
now, it’s franchises and reboots.
Disney announced a number of upcoming 
films from 2019 to 2023 at its D23 expo earlier 
this year, and a majority of them fall under the 
franchise and reboot category. For instance, 
from 2020 to 2022, there are at least seven 
Marvel movies slated to come out, complete with 
release dates and everything. There are a few 
original movies sprinkled in, but not many. 
And with the addition of Disney+ (release date 
Nov. 12, 2019), even more franchise and reboot 
movies and television shows are to be released 
outside of theaters. Disney is really banking on 
the nostalgia factor and the franchise frenzy 
with a lot of the Disney+ content: a new “Lizzie 
McGuire” TV show, a “Star Wars” universe TV 
show “The Mandalorian,” a live-action “Lady 
and the Tramp” movie and a number of lower-
caliber Marvel heroes’ TV shows are just some of 
the new content to be added, not to mention the 
“oldie but goldie” Disney TV shows and movies 
that haven’t been on air or in theaters for years.
Disney is flourishing right now — that much 
is clear. But what will happen when the era of 
franchise and reboots finally ends? While they 
will probably always be a successful company, 
(how can they not be with entire theme 
parks based on their films?), they will have to 
understand their audience’s interests and make 
hasty adjustments based on what people want to 
see sooner or later.
Eventually, they’ll have to stop churning out 
sequels and remakes and finally create something 
new, something never-before seen. They’ve 
done it before: Back in 1950 when “Cinderella” 
came out, the scene where her ripped-up dress 
was transformed into her iconic ballroom dress 
amazed viewers, who had never seen animation 
like that. But that was 70 years ago. They’ll have 
to up their game a little, though I’m pretty sure 
they’ll catch up when the franchise era dies 
down.
In the meantime, I’ll still happily hop on the 
franchise train and see “The Rise of Skywalker” 
the night it comes out.

Disney has been very busy,
and the future looks bright

SABRIYA IMAMI
For The Daily

FILM NOTEBOOK

Disney is flourishing right now — that much 
is clear. But what will happen when the era of 
franchise and reboots finally ends?

It is always difficult 
to not cheer for the 
protagonists of the 
series, however 
flanderized they’ve 
become.

