A crossword solver intimidated by the Newsday Saturday Stumper would do well to give today’s puzzle a try. It’s by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, and it’s easy, as Stumpers go, probably the easiest Stumper I’ve seen, with just a couple of tricky spots in lower left corner. At least that’s where I found them.
Shout-outs to these clue-and-answer pairs:
3-D, nine letters, “Italian erupter.” Sorry, MOUNTETNA.
13-D, five letters, “Place for a pilot.” Back in the day. And today, but elsewhere.
18-A, seven letters, “Animal float or wind-up boat.” The rhyme is nice.
21-A, six letters, “Calzone's conic kin.” At this point 21-A is much more familiar to me than the calzone. When did I last see a neon CALZONES?
23-A, four letters, “Novel designation.” The clue redeems the answer.
33-D, nine letters, “Tobacco plant genus (unsurprisingly).” Dammit, I knew this one right away. (I’ll always be an ex-smoker, never a non-smoker.)
39-D, seven letters, “LG introduction of 2011.” Part of the brief lower-left snarl. LG means phones, right?
52-D, four letters, “Notes with a Manitoban museum.” Just so weird.
56-A, seven letters, “Cupid colleague.” Also part of the trouble in the lower left. Misdirection!
58-A, seven letters, “Downton Abbey role.” I was trying to run through character names. Uh, CARRSON? SYBILLL? CALZONE?
No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.
Saturday, September 12, 2020
Today’s Saturday Stumper
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comments: 5
STROMBOLI. STOVE. POOLTOY. SAMOSA.
ISBN. NICOTIANA. SMARTTV. TENS.
(Money, in the Bank of Canada Museum.)
BLITZEN. SERVANT.
It's funny, because when I think of calzone's kin, the first word that comes t mind is your first word here, stromboli.
I’m going to throw my half-Italian ancestry into question by admitting that that connection went right by me. I was too busy being happy about figuring out that Stromboli is a volcano.
The first word that comes to my mind when I think of pizza and calzones is Brooklyn.
I got stuck in that bottom left too because for “Return alternative” I already had the first letter, so naturally I wrote in ENTER 😩
ENTER would be a nice answer for that clue. There was a kerfuffle in the tech world recently about Enter and Return and a NYT mini-puzzle. I think for ordinary humans (me) the words are interchangeable.
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