Today’s Saturday Stumper

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.

An EXchange name sighting hearing

[The Case Against Brooklyn (dir. Paul Wendkos, 1958). Click for a larger booth.]

Police Captain T.W. Wills (Emile Meyer) drops a dime: “Hello. Call me back at GEdney 5-1099.”

GEdney was a genuine Brooklyn exchange name, the exchange of my family’s first telephone number.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : Chinatown : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Fallen Angel : Framed : The Little Giant : Loophole : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Briefcase madeleine

[The Case Against Brooklyn (dir. Paul Wendkos, 1958). Click for a larger briefcase.]

Ahh, I get it — the case against Brooklyn. And the movie opens with a briefcase! I am belaboring the obvious.

This image was an instant madeleine for me: as a elementary-school kid in Brooklyn, I carried my books to school in an inexpensive knock-off that looked much like this briefcase. That’s what boys carried. High-school guys too. It was a pre-backpack world. I remember girls as carrying their books in bookstraps or in plaid bookbags, something like a fabric-and-vinyl version of a briefcase. Briefcases were made of genuine something — bonded leather? I remember the smell.

And I remember a briefcase for the start of school purchased from Century 21 on Brooklyn’s 86th Street. That’s the chain that just went out of business.

By sixth grade, I had switched to a metal attaché case. And when my family left Brooklyn for a New Jersey suburb, I found that carrying an attaché case was the cue for instant mockery. Mine promptly disappeared. The attaché case, that is. Not the mockery. Damn suburbs. Yes, abolish them.

Reader, did you carry your books to school in a briefcase?

A related post
NYC schooldays

Another time and place

[Massimo Vignelli, a detail from the New York City Subway Diagram. 2008. From The Vignelli Canon (2010).]

Up the road a ways

The New York Times reports on life at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: “What the scientists had not taken into account was that some students would continue partying after they received a positive test result.”

Expel ’em.

“What?”

Walking on campus, Elaine and I, masked, see a student, unmasked, headed straight toward us, slowly, head down, reading his phone. We left the pavement and stepped far away to walk around him.

“Giving you a wide berth, son!” I shouted.

He turned. “What?” He looked a bit like Joe Kennedy III. No, more than a bit. Maybe he was reading about his doppelgänger’s primary loss.

“I’m giving you a wide berth!”

This time he didn’t say anything. He just kept walking and reading, unmasked.

It didn’t occur to me until much later that he may not have known what it means to give someone a wide berth. Someone will have to explain it to him. (Joe Kennedy III?)

“What’s he doing?!”

[“Three Strikes.” Zippy, September 10, 2020. Click for larger rocks.]

The rocks have assumed their positions. But what’s up with Zippy? Click to read today’s strip and find out.

“Some rocks” are an abiding preoccupation of these pages.

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Human?

From a robo-call voice mail: “Sorry, you did not reveal yourself to be human. Goodbye.”

In Indiana

“When you need wigs and novelties, and you’re in Indiana, you can hang it up, buddy!” Tom Waits on stage, in Big Time (dir. Chris Blum, 1988).

“The scale of betrayal”

"The scale of betrayal is almost beyond political analysis": Mara Gay of The New York Times, just now on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour. Gay is still recovering from the effects of COVID-19.