Today’s Saturday Stumper

In childhood, I would have called today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Brad Wilber, “medium.” Not too difficult, not too easy. “How was the test, Michael?” “Medium.” But wait a sec — in childhood I wouldn’t have been venturing anyway near this crossword.

Today’s puzzle has a number of surprising answers. They go with these clues:

1-A, 8 letters, “Bring pressure to bear.” I can’t recall seeing the answer in a puzzle before.

1-D, five letters, “Biggest performing rights group.” I’m married to a member.

11-D, eleven letters, “Efficient clamps.” Yow!

12-D, four letters, “One in an Old Time Radio lineup.” Clever stuff.

21-D, six letters, “Period of petitioning.” Something to do with an election year? No. A really smart clue and an unusual answer.

24-D, eleven letters, “British dessert.” I was hoping for SPOTTEDDICK, which I know about from a Henry Threadgill tune.

41-A, ten letters, “Attired, as circus chimps.” Wonderfully weird.

45-A, eight letters, “Diligent.” This answer strikes me as a word one might see in a dowdy academic’s letter of recommendation.

65-A, six letters, What Every Mother Should Know author (1914). I guessed right.

And now back to words from my childhood.

“Medium” is not a synonym for Goldilocks’s “just right.” Indeed, there’s a crossing in this puzzle which seems to me ridiculous: 14-D, four letters, “Forest*A*__ (online woods management guide)” and 16-A, six letters, “Like tangerines.” The problem, as I see it: 14-D is painfully obscure. And because that’s the case, an apt answer for 16-A is not likely to look like a wrong answer. Indeed, that wrong answer, to my eyes, is a better answer, a cleverer answer, than the correct one. Caution: if you plan to do the puzzle, stop reading here.

To the left, the original. To the right, my suggested alterations:

G E C K O S     G E C K O S
O R A N G Y     O R A N G E
T E N O R S     T E N O R A
    I B E T         I T E R

I’ll grant that TENORA (clued perhaps as “Voice of Catalonia”) and ITER (“Brainy passage”) are a bit out of the way. But ORANGE, noun and adjective, is wittier than the variant spelling ORANGY, and as for Forest*A*SYST — jeepers.

No other spoilers: the answers are in the comments.