Today’s Saturday Stumper

Oh, what a difficult puzzle. Oh, what a difficult grid. Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Andrew Bell Lewis, is a true Stumper. It’s deceptively easy at first: 1-A, ten letters, “Western ethics attributed to Autry.” And four obvious answers start down from that one. Other answers require retrieval from a considerable distance. In other words, they’re farfetched. Take 28-A, four letters, “Avoid capping.” Take 30-A, three letters, “Well-loved trio.” Take 48-D, four letters, “It’s swallowed by piranha.” Take these clues, please.

Some clue-and-answer pairings I especially liked:

13-D, eleven letters, “A Charlie Brown Christmas instrumental.” It’s perhaps the one tune that doesn’t spring to mind.

34-D, five letters, “#2 baby girl name in 1960, #959 in 2017.” I remember three girls from elementary school with that name.

42-D, six letters, “City that sounds like sausage.”

47-D, four letters, “Pit follower.” (BEAN? FALL? No.)

56-A, ten letters, “They have no matches.” (NONSMOKERS? No.)

No matches, and no spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

A name from Nancy

If anyone doubts that the comic strip Nancy is, as they say, having a moment: in the January 20 New Yorker crossword, the clue for 1-D, five letters, is “Rich boy in Nancy.” That would be ROLLO.

Go Bushmiller! Go Jaimes!

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

“The irony is almost too obvious”

David Kurtz, commenting on a Wall Street Journal report that Donald Trump* “told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial”:

The irony is almost too obvious to point out: In order to stave off an impeachment conviction for putting his own personal interests above the national interest, Trump once again put his own interests above the national interest.

$200,000

News not to be overlooked:

Bestselling authors Stephen King and Don Winslow have pledged to give $200,000 to charity if Donald Trump’s press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, holds a press conference this week.

Grisham has refused.

“Irish Haiku”

Sounds Irish to me. Or maybe like Gertrude Stein. No, Irish, I’m sure.

Hop, skip, jump

I’m watching a bit of Donald Trump*’s rally in Toledo, Ohio on C-SPAN 2. Trump* just moved from the size of Adam Schiff’s neck to the Academy Awards to journalists (a lot of bad ones) to the fact that he won’t be getting a Nobel Peace Prize, even though he saved a country. (What?) Hopping, skipping, and jumping around.

And now he’s declared that he’s going to use both Make America Great Again and Keep America Great as slogans in his reelection campaign. Gotta have an extraordinary mind to figure that out.

•

And now, bragging that Republican voters prefer him to Abraham Lincoln.

•

“A couple of hundred years ago there was nobody here.”

TUMS

In the “I was today years old when I learned/realized” department:

A clue in today’s Los Angeles Times/Washington Post crossword taught me something. 44-A, four letters, “Tablet named for an organ.” Answer: TUMS. They’re named for the tummy!

TUMS, by the way, is both singular and plural. Here, have a TUMS. Or two. They’re small. GlaxoSmithKline styles the product name in caps, so that it’s tailor-made for a crossword.

I am slightly amazed to have never before understood the “named for an organ” bit. Obviously, I am woefully inattentive to brand names. See also Men’s Wearhouse.

In the Dark Ages

Plus ça change:

Have you ever heard people talking about the Dark Ages? This is the name given to the period which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire when very few people could read or write and hardly anyone knew what was going on in the world. And because of this, they loved telling each other all sorts of weird and wonderful tales and were generally very superstitious.

E.H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World, trans. Caroline Mustill (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Gombrich’s book was first published in 1936 as Eine furze Weltgeschichte für jungle Leser [A short world history for young readers]. I wish this work had been around in translation when I was ten or twelve. Reading about the Dark Ages today, I cannot help thinking of the lunatic conspiracy theories that now fill our bandwidth.

A Post-it dad joke

A dad joke on a Post-it Note, by Doug Savage, creator of Savage Chickens, a comic strip whose acquaintance I am happy to have made.

Thanks, Steven.

Phallocentrism and sniffs

“U.S. armed forces are stronger [sniff ] than ever before [sniff ]. Our missiles are big, powerful, accurate, lethal, and fast [sniff ].”

You can hear these sniffs — just three of many — starting at the 9:00 mark. There continues to be considerable speculation about what makes Donald Trump* sniff. The sniffing seems most pronounced when he’s reading from a teleprompter [sniff ].