Today’s Saturday Stumper

The Newsday crossword has been inaccessible at its usual location, at least for me (out of order? behind a paywall?), so I solved today’s  Saturday Stumper at GameLab. Doing so reminded me of what it’s like to look at webpages without an adblocker — GameLab requires that any blocker be disabled. Ugh. And when you’re done, it’s not possible to scroll back through to see clues. For that, I had to download the puzzle as a PDF. (Thanks, Daily Crossword Links.)

Anyway —

Today’s Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, felt more difficult than it is: the unpleasant interface made it hard for me to, as the IBM slogan says, THINK. But THINK I did.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, three letters, “First name of the only member of the Inventors and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame.” A fun fact.

5-A, five letters, “Certain high school functions.” Do you see the trick?

7-D, fifteen letters, “How oxygen is formed from supernovas.” If you say so. There’s something wonderful about having this answer cross with the down-to-earth 34-A.

16-A, ten letters, “Olympians’ emotional epsiode.” I didn’t know that there’s a name for it.

19-D, six letters, “Out cast.” Slightly awkward.

34-A, fifteen letters, “Request for a monologue.” I'm surprised to see that the answer is far more common than what still seems to me the usual phrasing.

45-A, eight letters, “Melodramatic misses.” CLOSEONES doesn’t fit.

47-D, four letters, “‘When You Rise, We Shine’ sloganeer.” But the slogan is clearly not meant to influence the everyday riser.

49-A, five letters, “You’d expect it to flop in the art world.” Heh.

53-D, three letters, “Item on US soldiers’ ration list in WWII.” Huh. It’s true, at least sort of.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

[A note to Newsday : For a non-Long Islander, subscribing to the paper doesn’t make good sense. My guess is that many crossword solvers would be happy to pay for a puzzle subscription. Hint, hint.]