Are you one of those good-natured solvers who claims to be “glad to learn about” some proper name or obscure fact that made some crossword difficult or impossible for you to complete? As a solver myself, I don’t share this gladness: I am never glad to learn, for example, that the actor who portrayed a character I’ve never heard of on a TV show I’ve never wanted to watch has such-and-such a first name. But as a constructor, I am, like all constructors, in debt to such solvers: and whenever I’m attacked for obscure crossword fill, I’m happy to claim that I’m just telling people things that they are, or should be, “glad to learn about.”
If you’re one of these easily gladdened solvers, I apologize for what may seem a certain lack of educational fill in this puzzle. There’s a writer at 67 Across and a Spanish word at 46 Across, but both are pretty well known. I’ll make up for this lack, however, right now, by telling you four things about “aces” I just learned myself from the internet.
1. The University of Illinois calls its College of Agricultural, Consumer & Enviornmental Sciences “ACES.”
2. A military airplane pilot qualifies as an “ace” only after destroying at least five enemy airplanes.
3. Some psychologists refer to adverse childhood experiences as “ACEs.”
4. Ace Hardware was founded in Chicago in 1924 by Richard Hesse, E. Gunnard Lindquist, Frank Burke, Oscar Fisher, and William Stauber.
Are you glad to have learned about these things? Well, I confess that I am not—but I am glad that there are people in the world who are.
