Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell. A thirty-two-minute workout, targeting all major muscle groups.
Many clue-and-answer pairs to admire here:
1-A, ten letters, “Creators of story lines.” N-A-R-R-A-T-O-R-? Oops, no.
8-D, seven letters, “Green-haired Lincoln or Washington.” Somehow I flashed on our old Walgreens, which like every Walgreens, has no apostrophe in its name. I just checked.
11-D, six letters, “Many Oktoberfest deliveries.” Exceedingly misleading.
15-A, ten letters, “Approaches a runway too fast.” This post, which will reveal the answer, explains how I happen to know the answer.
23-D, eleven letters, “Welles’ War of the Worlds landing site.” I had it confused with a Thornton Wilder town, but ETs, to my knowledge, never stopped there. Or did they?
27-A, four letters, “Something often penciled in.” No, Michael, it can’t be APPT, because there’s nothing in the clue to signal an abbreviated answer.
30-D, six letters, “Embroidery sample.” What?
43-A, six letters, “Copy righting.” Clever.
59-D, three letters, “Vowelless Scrabble play.” The answer, fortunately, is not one of those ridiculous Scrabble words like CWM.
61-A, ten letters, “Ferocious problem-solvers.” I’m from academia, so the idea of people ferociously solving problems is pretty foreign to me. SUBCOMMITTEE? Hah.
No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Today’s Saturday Stumper
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
comments: 7
ARCHITECTS. CHIAPET. LIBRAS. (You were thinking STEINS?)
COMESINHOT. GROVERSMILLS. (Our Town is set in Grover’s Corners.)
BROW. SEWOUT. ERRATA. TSK. TIGERTEAMS.
Funnily enough it had never occurred to me that the Welles version of War of the Worlds would be set in America - the original Wells version is in the northern parts of Surrey (an English county just south of London). So there was I trying to fit things like Horsell Common, Ottershaw, Woking etc in place. Ah well. Growing up slightly further south in Surrey, it used to entertain me to contemplate Martian landing sites nearby (and I never much liked Woking as a town anyway).
In passing, I just realised (very belatedly) that you folk over the water have a different convention about number of letters in the clue. Over here we would always indicate if an answer consisted of more than one word, so "Grovers Mills" would be indicated as (6, 5) and not (11) - the latter would prompt the solver to look for a single eleven-letter word rather than two words.
The Welles version is worth a listen, especially when you remember that most people had few if any ways to check the truth of the news in real time.
Here cryptic puzzles are always 6,5 style. So that convention applies to standard crosswords in Great Britain as well?
"Here cryptic puzzles are always 6,5 style. So that convention applies to standard crosswords in Great Britain as well?"
Aha that explains it... I am much more familiar with cryptic ones than standard (sufficiently that I would naturally assume standard = cryptic :) ). I had also wondered about the apparent lack of anagrams in your regular Saturday Stumper but that probably follows the same convention. Offhand I'm not sure what the clue length convention is for non-cryptic ones over here, but I'm sure I can find out.
I looked online a bit at British newspapers — I didn’t see letter counts, but I did see “2 wds.,” which I don’t think ever appears in the Times or other U.S. puzzles. But I think I was seeing the easier syndicated puzzles that many newspapers run, not more distinguished puzzles associated with particular papers.
My parents for years did the Guardian (cryptic) crossword, in the days before it went online. These can now be found at https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/series/cryptic, and picking one at random, I find 18 down in #28,226 has the clue
Attention surrounding vehicle turning up for daily grind (3,4)
(My guess is Rat Race, being "car" backwards, from "vehicle turning up" inside Rate - a not very convincing solve for "Attention", all meaning "daily grind")
I think your answer must be right, but, well, yikes. Maybe “Unit charge surrounding...?”
In grad school I had a prof who corresponded with Dame Helen Gardner about, among other things, cryptics (!). I believe they were checking their answers.
Post a Comment