Stiff bristle, botanically / WED 12-20-23 / Fabric whose name is French for "cloth" / Gooey addition to a charcuterie board / Swiss mathematician who introduced functional notation

• • •

It was the 20th century, kids. People read paper newspapers and wrote letters by hand, and darkness ruled the land. When I finished this my first thought was "wow, they really don't want anyone under 40 to have any ****ing idea what's going on today, do they?" Both these women wrote their last column in 2002 ("Abby" had Alzheimer's by that point, and "Landers" died). They were nationally famous in the last century, for the better part of half a century, so if you were alive then, OK, no problem knowing who ANN / LANDERS is, but if you weren't, the whole "finding game" at the end becomes absurd. DEAR / ABBY is still syndicated and has a website that gets (allegedly) 10,000 letters a week, but ANN / LANDERS? The question isn't "Can I find her name?" I'm not 3 years old, and this is not a restaurant placemat game, so yes, of course I can find her name (you didn't exactly "hide" it). The only question is do I *know* that sister's name *at all*. I know the name well, and I still blanked on it at first (I was trying to remember without scanning the grid). If I had (initial) trouble coming up with ANN / LANDERS, I can't imagine what someone who (understandably) didn't know her name at all was supposed to do with the little "can you find it?" game at the end. I guess you just scan the grid for something name-looking and ... hope? Anyway, if your guess for the "hidden" name was ABBA ACRE (which, after all, is symmetrical with "DEAR / ABBY"), I'm gonna say that today, yes, that is correct: ABBA ACRE, the evil twin sister of "DEAR / ABBY," wrote the parodic "Dear Abba" column, in which she gave very bad advice and taunted her readers for not knowing how to run their own damn lives. Both ABBY and ABBA perished in a duel fought with light sabers atop the Empire State Building in 2002.

This is an easy trivia test for older folks (self included). I don't think much of the little "find the sister" game, but I have to say, that set of theme answers really is on the money, pun-wise. At first I was just looking at the last words: LETTERS, COLUMNS, SISTERS—yes yes yes, those all fit the topic. But then I realized no, it's not just the last words of the themers that are apt, it's the whole dang answer. They are WOMEN OF LETTERS (i.e. women who receive letters from advice-needers); they write STEERING COLUMNS, in the sense that they attempt to "steer" people via their advice; and they are POINTER SISTERS in the sense that they are "sisters" who give "pointers" (i.e. advice). I want "I HATE TO ASK..." to be another themer, but their readers clearly did not "hate to ask." The three actual themers, though, are really impressive as a set. The puns aren't forced at all. I can't believe I'm actually sitting here admiring puns, but miracles happen, I suppose.

The fill, however, was a bit clunky on this one. Lots of short stuff, much of it on the stale or olden side (ITT INRE AAS ET AL et al). Haven't seen AESIR in a long time, and while AMON-RA does show up from time to time, he has multiple spellings that keep his name from ever being a joy to see (he's his own kealoa*, with at least three ways to spell that AM-N part). I dropped in IMARET without blinking, but then I've been solving crosswords for over three decades. As I wrote it in, I thought "is this a normal word or do I know this only from crosswords." Pretty sure it's a crosswords-only type of deal. I've never seen it outside crosswords. I'm confident it exists, but I'm also confident it doesn't exist in the vast majority of non-crossword solvers' vocabularies. The worst of the fill, though, was the obscurity ARISTA alongside the monstrosity TUSKER. TUSKER? I ... we ... it's ... TUSKER? Really? I'll grant you that an animal can be a BITER, but a TUSKER? Wow, that is dumb. That answer would be so much better as TUSKED (which actually describes the animals) but that would result in a DEAD ABBY, which, while literally true, makes for a more depressing theme.

Not much else. I absolutely muffed the COLUMNS part of STEERING COLUMNS because I processed "turn signals" as "traffic signals" (you know, stoplights), which of course appear at corners ... so I wrote in STEERING CORNERS, wondering "Who calls them that!?!?! There's no such thing as a "steering corner"! You have to steer at every corner!" I then changed the answer to ... STEERING CONSOLE. Sigh. At last I messed up in a semi-entertaining way. 

OK, that's all for the puzzle, it's time for more Holiday Pet Pics! For today's cats, we've got Riggins, Franky, and Figaro.