[Caution: there’s one spoiler, for 49-D.]
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, has nifty clue-and-answer pairs to begin and end the Acrosses: 1-A, five letters, “Rulers from either end” and 61-A, five letters, “Holds from either end.” Can across be plural?
Some more clue-and-answer pairs of note:
9-D, five letters, “Homeric hound.” A faithful companion, though I’d like to see the “desperate, womanizing pretty boy” PARIS as an answer.
10-D, four letters, “Kind of mouthpiece.” For a zany moment, I thought OPED?
14-A, eleven letters, “Spring roll filling.” I was torn between thinking food and thinking sod.
19-A, six letters, “Calliope close kin.” I was not fooled.
25-A, five letters, “Great start.” Groan.
25-D, four letters, “Multifunction metaphor.” Though I’m not sure that it applies to things that function.
27-D, ten letters, “Pixar furniture merch.” Novelty itself.
38-A, six letters, “Potable Poe wrote about.” Yes, sort of.
42-A, three letters, “Pen name derived from Moses ‘with a head cold.’” I had no idea.
44-D, six letters, “Manufactured mouse manipulator.” Is it the mouse that’s manufactured, or the manipulator?
49-D, four letters, “They’re ‘made to make debt,’ per Pound.” Ezra Pound did say this, at least three times, in his wartime radio speeches from fascist Italy. An example:
Will you folks back in America NEVER realize that you are fightin’ this war IN ORDER to get into debt? I mean just that, you have been dumped into the war IN ORDER to get into debt. To get in further, to get in up to the chin, the throat. To get into the morass up to your eyebrows and no man living can see WHEN you will get out of it.You can see all three statements at the Internet Archive.
Wars are made to make DEBT.
“Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978).
Given Pound’s anti-Semitism (prominent in another of these declarations) and general crackpottery, I’d have found another way — almost any other way — to clue the answer. For instance, ”They can be civil.“ I think this clue illustrates the problem of taking something from a list of quotations without looking at the words in context.
My favorite in this puzzle: 58-A, letters, “Country discovered by Bart Simpson on Lisa’s globe.”
No more spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
comments: 3
SHAHS. STETS. ARGOS. REED.
TUNATARTARE. THALIA. HARDG.
HATS. (I’d think of wearing many hats as a matter of a person’s jobs or responsibilities, not machinelike functions.)
RACECARBED. SHERRY. (Though amontillado, distinguished from sherry, is what’s more important in Poe.)
BOZ. PETCAT. WARS. RANDMCNALLY.
Oof slow solve for me, even with your favorite entry as my first long answer. I got stuck on the middle left with HVAC instead of HATS, leading to a cross by VIA instead of ALA. They both still work!
HVAC — ooh, that’s a nice answer.
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