Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman, constructing as “Anna Stiga” (Stan Again), the pseudonym that signals an easier Stumper. This Stumper was not easy though. I began with 27-A, three letters, “Declares, so to speak” and 3-D, six letters, “Paris premiere of 1980” and soon had the northwest and southeast corners done. But I missed by one square in the northeast: the first letter of 26-A, four letters, “Turkish tapas” and 26-D, five letters, “Drudges.” To my mind, that’s a ridiculous cross, even in a Stumper. If I were a kid playing some sort of game, I’d shout “No fair!” Or, in a resigned frame of mind, 20-D, seven letters, “Commiseration for a miss.”

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

18-A, ten letters, “It’s best left sealed.” Oblique and novel.

21-A, three letters, “Outback etching.” I learned something.

25-D, seven letters, “Get on with it.” HURRYUP? BUSFARE? No. No.

29-D, three letters, “Postwar establishment.” I thought of the CIA. But the last letter, by way of 33-A, makes the answer clear.

33-A, fifteen letters, “Fête nationale.” I knew it, I knew it.

33-D, eight letters, “Small town surrounded by soldiers.” This puzzle is not playing games.

44-A, four letters, “Reader using batteries.” I thought the plural must be a hint, but no, it uses a battery, singular.

47-D, five letters, “Freeman, at Shawshank’s end.” Are there rules about spoilers in crosswords? “Kane’s Rosebud”?

My favorite in this puzzle, sneaky in a Stumper-y way: 5-A, ten letters, “Rats, for instance.” But I’m not sure that the clue is accurate.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Recently updated

DFW on the shelf Now with a screenshot of an MSNBC guest with Infinite Jest and other interesting books behind him.

An EXchange name sighting

[This Woman Is Dangerous (dir. Felix E. Feist, 1952). Click for a larger view.]

Lewiston is an unincorporated community about eighty-five miles southeast if Chicago. It’s exceedingly unlikely that there was ever a federal building there. I can find no evidence that INdianapolis was ever in use as an exchange name. As for that FBI seal, well, it isn’t. The reality effect is shaky here.

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Olives as cars

A hungry gangster asks a question. From This Woman Is Dangerous (dir. Felix E. Feist, 1952): “Ann, you got some olives? The green ones with the red tail lights?”

Precedented

From today’s installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

This is the first time in history a former United States president has been indicted, although it is worth remembering that it is not new for our justice system to hold elected officials accountable. Mayors have been indicted and convicted. So have governors: in fact, four of the past ten Illinois governors have gone to prison. Vice presidents, too, have been charged with crimes: Aaron Burr was indicted on two counts of murder in 1804 while still in office and was tried for treason afterward. And in 1973, Richard Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to tax evasion to avoid prison time.

Illinois leads the nation in imprisoned governors: Otto Kerner, Daniel Walker, George Ryan, and Rod Blagojevich. As you may recall, Donald Trump commuted Blagojevich’s sentence in 2020. Blagojevich now calls him a “Trumpocrat.”

[Leaders of other democracies have been prosecuted as well.]

DFW on the shelf

On MSNBC just now: on a bookshelf behind Nick Ackerman, former Watergate prosecutor, a copy of Infinite Jest. You’ll have to take my word for it.

*

Not anymore: the episode is now online.

[The Beat with Ari Melber, March 30, 2023. Click for a much larger view.]

Infinite Jest is above Mr. Ackerman’s head — literally, that is. To the left of the Jest: Consider the Lobster. Three more steps to the left: that might be The Grapes of Wrath. I also see The Poetry of Robert Frost, what must be a biography of Frida Kahlo, and Lynne Truss’s (awful) Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Is Hoot a children’s book? Is Revival the Stephen King novel? Are there books here that you can add?

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TRUMP INDICTED

I turn off NPR, put on Lassie, fold some laundry, and look what happens. From The New York Times:

A Manhattan grand jury voted to indict Donald J. Trump on Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, according to five people with knowledge of the matter, a historic development that will shake up the 2024 presidential race and forever mark him as the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges.

An indictment will likely be announced in the coming days. By then, prosecutors working for the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, will have asked Mr. Trump to surrender and to face arraignment on charges that remain unknown for now.

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“The Corridors of Insomnia”

Steven Millhauser, “Cathay,” in In the Penny Arcade (1986).

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Word of the day: spiv

Ex-con Leo Martin (William Hartnell) questions the questioner, detective inspector Roberts (Robert Beatty). From Appointment with Crime (dir. John Harlow, 1946):

“So I suppose you think I did it.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you’re a copper, and I’m a spiv.”

Green's Dictionary of Slang has it covered: “a flashy, sharp individual who exists on the fringes of real criminality, living by their wits rather than a regular job.”

Jonathon Green offers four possible origins: (1) the Romany word spiv, sparrow, a derogatory term for “those who existed by picking up the leavings of their betters, criminal or legitimate”; (2) a reversal of V.I.P.s; (3) a police abbreviation for “suspected persons and itinerant vagrants”; (4) a derivation from spiff, a dandy.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the word is of unknown origin but points to spiff, spiffy, and Henry “Spiv” Bagster, a London newspaper seller and criminal:

Bagster’s court appearances for loitering, theft, assault, and selling counterfeit goods are reported in the national newspapers between 1903 and 1906. The nickname is recorded from 1904.

Not clear though why he was called “Spiv.”

And now it’s back to my law-abiding life.

Two Manhattan addresses

Two Manhattan addresses with considerable history:

64 East Seventh Street in the East Village, still standing, and now the subject of a song cycle, lyrics by David Hajdu, music by various composers.

And 14 Gay Street in Greenwich Village, now gone.

Thanks, Stefan.