Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Greg Johnson, is a fun, fast puzzle. 1-A, ten letters, “Slowdown en route”: that looks like a giveaway. 1-D, five letters, “Convention of dramatists”: can the answer be that obvious? 2-D, five letters, “Come loose”: this one too? 4-D, five letters, “UK’s best-selling female album artist of the century”: uh, yes, pretty obvious. Anyone who fears the Stumper should try today’s puzzle as an opportunity to build up the chops. Contra 63-A, it is.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

4-D, nine letters, “Boss doing training and fighting.” 33-A had me thinking in the wrong direction.

12-D, nine letters, “Many Greek-made planters.” Ah, so that’s what they are.

15-A, ten letters, “Prime-time fare of old.” How old?

16-A, four letters, “‘Rudolph . . .’ rhyme for ‘history.’” Why was it so hard for me to reverse-engineer the lyrics?

39-A, four letters, “It’s a swell thing.” That’s a swell clue.

51-D, five letters, “They’re often seen on greens.” BACONBITS won’t fit.

58-A, three letters, “It’s seen at the end of A Beautiful Mind.” Good ’n’ weird. I was thinking a Greek letter?

62-A, four letters, “Contraction lacking three letters.” WOULDNTVE wouldn’t’ve fit.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Count the assumptions

A grown-up, speaking on the news about 3D-printed rockets. He likened his dream of having a million people on Mars to “when we founded the New World with Christopher Columbus.”

Cathartic dancing

“Man confronts truck driver with cathartic dancing in Brooklyn” (Gothamist).

One thing I don’t miss about not driving in New Jersey: the honk that sounds from behind just a nanosecond — no, make that a fucking nanosecond — after the light turns green. Drivers in New Jersey and “the city” will understand.

“Vaccine-resistant Trump country”

Susan B. Glasser, writing in The New Yorker :

Consider the news this week that now one in five hundred Americans has died in the pandemic; total deaths in the country approach seven hundred thousand. What’s worse, covid deaths — the vast majority of them preventable, avoidable deaths, now that science and the federal government have provided us with free vaccines—are continuing to rise across large swaths of vaccine-resistant Trump country. This is not a tragic mistake but a calculated choice by many Republicans who have made vaccine resistance synonymous with resistance to Biden and the Democrats. The current average of more than nineteen hundred dead a day means that a 9/11’s worth of Americans are perishing from covid roughly every thirty-eight hours. To my mind, this is the biggest news of the Biden Presidency so far, and it has nothing to do with Afghanistan, or the fate of the budget-reconciliation bill, or Bob Woodward’s new book.

Six more deaths from COVID-19 were reported yesterday in my deep-red Illinois county.

Using a dictionary

“Dictionaries reward you for paying attention, both to the things you consume and to your own curiosity”: in the age of digital searching, Rachel del Valle recommends using a (print) dictionary.

I think though that she’s wrong on one point: a dictionary is a rabbit hole, or can be.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

[I have the same Webster’s Second that Del Valle writes about. (It has dazzling endpapers.) But I wasn’t lucky enough to find my copy on the street.]

The Unfaithful : an EXchange name

The Unfaithful (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1947) has something for everyone. Here is an EXchange name, more than ready for its close-up.

[Click for a larger view.]

Also in The Unfaithful : Angels Flight, The Bradbury Building, and phone booths.

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 : The Case Against Brooklyn : 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 : Escape in the Fog : 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) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : 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 (1) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

The Unfaithful : phone booths

The Unfaithful (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1947) has something for everyone. There are phone booths in the airport.

[Click for a larger view.]

Four related posts
Angels Flight in The Unfaithful : The Bradbury Building in The Unfaithful : Phone booths, Chicago, 1961 : “Telephone Inside”

Almost lunch

[Click for a larger view.]

Almost lunch, not lunchtime. This can of sardines was almost yesterday’s lunch. But then I looked more closely: “Best Before 2016.” That sounds to me less like vintage and more like dangerous. I hesitated to open the can. But I didn’t hesitate to take a photo.

Mabuti is a Filipino word for good. I trust that at some point these sardines were good. I (evidently) bought this lone can of Mabuti years ago. In a nearby Asian grocery, Mabuti sardines were cheap. Amazon has more recent cans of this variety, $27.99 for three. Not cheap.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, that’s cellophane tape at the ends of the can. The tape came with the can.]

The Unfaithful : Bradbury

The Unfaithful (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1947) has something for everyone, including a scene in the Bradbury Building. Dig the elevator.

[Click for a larger view.]

A related post
Angels Flight in The Unfaithful

The Unfaithful : Angels Flight

The Unfaithful (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1947) has something for everyone, including a ride on the Angels Flight Railway.

[“Mrs. Tanner” (Marta Mitrovich), about to board. A round trip or two rides: 5¢. Book of ten: 25¢. Book of 30 (?): 50¢. Click any image for a larger view.]

[Down we go.]

[Talk about vertiginous. No wonder almost everyone’s looking straight ahead or at a newspaper.]

The Angels Flight website lists the railway’s appearances in film and on TV.

Here, from an earlier blog post, is a glimpse of Angels Flight in Act of Violence (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1949).

Must. Get. To. Los. Angeles. Again. But not now.