Today’s Saturday Stumper

Whenever I see Matthew Sewell’s name on a Newsday  Saturday Stumper, I know I am likely in for it, “it” being perhaps forty-five minutes or an hour of struggle. And so it was this week.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A and 62-A, four letters each, “Without a hem?” I thought the first of these had to be ASIS.

1-D, six letters, “Word from the Greek for ‘panting.’” My starting point.

10-D, eight letters, “What you can fix it with.” I’ve seen this trick before.

11-D, eight letters, “What’s put in infusers.” But not this trick.

16-A, ten letters, “Charger in an outlet.” MADSHOPPER? I was thinking of someone charging through the aisles in a Black Friday frenzy.

19-A, fourteen letters, “‘Dear me!’” Really?

25-A, five letters, “A whole bunch?” See 19-A.

26-D, four letters, “Directional letters.” I was sure it had to be OTOH.

29-D, four letters, “#1 reacher in each of the past seven decades.” Strange but true.

32-A, twelve letters, “Very badly.” A clue that leads everywhere and nowhere.

36-A, seven letters, “Put out.” See 32-A.

39-A, seven letters, “Have the chops, say.” Groan.

40-A, twelve letters, “Science practiced by multiple Nobel laureates.” My first guess was ASTROPHYSICS. Why not?

51-D, five letters, “Alpine trail.” Probably useful for future crosswords, not to mention sojourns in the Alps.

54-A, fourteen letters, “Nicely named beef/mozzarella dish.” I have to believe it’s real.

55-D, four letters, “Consciousness raiser.” Oh brother.

My favorite in this puzzle: 60-A, ten letters, “Book subtitled 100 Ways to Work Out With Your Dog.” Aww.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“Harris Walz”

Elaine Fine has written a one-minute waltz for piano: “Harris Walz.”

Responses and non-answers

Lawrence O’Donnell’s commentary on yesterday’s Trump “General News Conference” is worth watching in full. O’Donnell points out that most of the questions — mostly inaudible, as there was no microphone for the press — were wasted questions, silly, pointless, and that Trump’s responses (most glaringly, to a question about mifepristone) did not constitute answers. And that Kamala Harris’s speech yesterday received little or no airtime from news networks.

Here is a Trump non-answer of my choosing, his response to a reporter who asked for his “constitutional analysis” of Kamala Harris’s replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. The full question is impossible to hear, but I did make out the words “constitutional analysis.” I have made slight corrections to C-SPAN’s transcription (which — guess what? — doesn’t include reporters’ questions):

We have a constitution. It’s a very important document and we live by it. She has no votes and I’m very happy to run against her. I’m not complaining from that standpoint. And I hate to be defending him, but he did not want to leave. He wanted to see if he could win. They said you’re not going to win after the debate. They said you’re not going to win. You can’t win. You’re out. And at first they said it nicely and he wasn’t leaving and then you, you know it, you know it better than anybody. Wait a minute. So, uh, when you think about it, they said at first they were going to go out to another vote, they were going to go through a primary system, a quick primary system, which it would have to be, and then it all disappeared and they just picked a person that was the first out. She was the first loser. Okay. So we call her the first loser. She was the first loser. When, uh, during the primary system, during the Democrat primary system, she was the first one to quit and she quit. She had no votes, no support and she was a bad debater, by the way, very bad debater. And that’s not the thing I’m looking forward to, but she was a bad debater. She did it — obviously a bad job. She never made it to lowa then for some reason. And I know he regrets it. You do too. He picked her and she turned on him too. She was working with the people that wanted him out. But the fact that you can be, get no votes, lose in the primary system, in other words, you had fourteen or fifteen people. She was the first one out. And that you can then be picked to run for president. It seems, seems to me actually unconstitutional. Perhaps it’s not.

How’s that for constitutional analysis?

Uh-oh

Donald Trump is having what he calls “a General News Conference” at 2:00 p.m. (EDT). I cannot imagine that his advisers have advised that. But the mess his campaign is in? He alone can fix it!

*

1:10 p.m.: He cannot bring himself to say “Kamala Harris.” It’s just “someone else,” “Kamala,” or “she.” Tim Walz is just “a man,” who is “heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds.”

1:17 p.m.: “I think she’s crashing.” (Projection.)

1:26 p.m.: Captain Queeg is at the microphone.

1:34 p.m.: With noticeable sniffs.

1:42 p.m.: “The Minnesota gentleman.” He cannot say the name.

1:45 p.m: In other countries, the government has encouraged people to buy guns, and crime has dropped 29%.

1:46 p.m.: Walz is now “her new friend.”

1:50 p.m.: That’s all, folks. I’m done.

[Fifty splatterings from the Trump Truth Social account as of 10:28 (CDT) this morning. It’s meltdown time.]

Deer!

[Deer in photograph is closer than it appears. Click for a larger deer.]

As a city kid, I will never tire of seeing deer as they make their rounds about our neighborhood. Elaine and I recently devised another daily walk, which goes from a street to a trail to a road to a path cut through a meadow of wildflowers. All public property. The meadow is billed as a park, accessible only on foot (no parking). Day after day, we’ve seen one or more deer on the trail, road, or path. And they’ve seen us.

Can deer recognize individual people as individuals? We’d like to that this deer can. It doesn’t bolt when it sees us, and it’s seen us (we think) many times. (The little bits of color on its right side match up from photograph to photograph.) Sometimes we’re the first to move on; sometimes the deer is. It’ll mosey into the woods. And then we start walking again.

Reaping the worldwind?

From tonight’s PBS News:

“The events in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are part of their worldwind tour of several key battleground states over the next few days.”

Or maybe it was whirled-wind.

You can hear the sentence at the 2:07 mark in this story. Our household listened four times to make sure we were hearing what we thought we were hearing. If indeed we were, I say “Sheesh.”

A quick search shows that worldwind tour is not unknown. I would guess that the influence of worldwide is to blame.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

That’s not Ida Lupino. So, then, who?

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if appropriate.

*

10:26 a.m.: No need for a hint. The answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all)
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[Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that “support for actress seems to be eroding.” So I use actor.]

Hard-boiled Zippy

[“Pulp Faction.” Zippy, August 7, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy channels Raymond Chandler. The source in this panel is a sentence from Farewell, My Lovely (1940): “Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” With pipe and glasses, the writer bears an unmistakable resemblance to Chandler.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard) : More Zippy Chandler : And still more

Evisceration in Philadelphia

“Make no mistake: violent crime was up under Donald Trump. That’s not even counting the crimes he committed”: in Philadelphia, Governor Tim Walz is eviscerating Donald Trump.

And: “So we’ve got ninety-one days. My God, that’s easy. We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”

Understated or overstated

On MSNBC earlier today, a reporter pointed out that Tim Walz is the first Democratic vice presidential candidate in sixty years without a law degree. “It cannot be understated,” she said.

No, it cannot be overstated, said I. But the more I thought about the phrasing, the more I came to think that it’s inherently, unhelpfully ambiguous. Here’s a post that explains.

Ways out: “it’s important to recognize that,” “it’s not to be overlooked that,” &c.

Still, it helps to bear in mind that in Google’s Ngram Viewer, “it cannot be overstated” far outnumbers “it cannot be understated” in American English, British English, and “English.” And thus it cannot be overstated that “it cannot be understated” will most likely be understood as infelicitous phrasing.