Today’s Saturday Stumper

What’s up with the Newsday crossword? The puzzle still won’t load from the Newsday website, at least not on my Mac. I’ve tried three different browsers, turned off content blockers, turned off iCloud Private Relay, and still no puzzle.

Brains Only and The Washington Post have the puzzle for online solving, but only on the day of publication. Newsday has slways made the puzzle available at 10:00 Eastern the night before, which makes Friday night Stumper Eve.

Last night I found a printable puzzle at creators.com. I started at 9:00 and was done at 10:00. Today’s puzzle, by Matthew Sewell, might be the most difficult Stumper I’ve ever completed.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, ten letters, “What Martha Stewart bakes with turkey ragu.” I’m not sure how one should clue this answer, but I’m not crazy about this kind of factoid trivia.

9-A, five letters, “Hunger (for).” This clue gives a good idea of the puzzle’s difficulty. It’s a fair clue, but the answer is surprising, at least to me.

10-D, fifteen letters, “Screenplay overhauls.” So that’s what it means.

18-A, ten letters, “Scrooge McDuck, by birth.” It’s a bit of luck that I’d just seen a movie that put the answer in my head. (Not a cartoon.)

20-A, five letters, “Kid-lit pachyderm, aptly enough.” New to me. My first guess was BABAR — because it sounds a bit like babytalk.

26-A, seven letters, “Perrier ingredient?” Très Stumper-y.

28-D, three letters, “Bingo alternative.” GIN? UNO? No, make it Stumper-y.

33-A, eight letters, “Aghast outburst.” I like the clue’s near-rhyme and the answer’s colloquialism. It just occurred to me that the word colloquialism is not at all colloquial, just as big is not big, but David Foster Wallace figured that out some time ago.

35-A, five letters, “Capacity.” See 9-A.

36-D, three letters, “Sports booster.” If you say so.

42-A, seven letters, “Fall break?” Yay!

43-D, six letters, “Met set.” Just a great clue.

46-D, four letters, “What films have to be.”

56-A, four letters, “Rodin’s thinker.” Tricky.

My favorite in this puzzle: 4-D, fifteen letters, “Corresponding request.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.