The Washington Post - 20.08.2019

C2 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, AUGUST 20 , 2019

ACROSS
1 New England fish
4 Seriously injures
9 Frosh, next year
13 “Should I take
that as ?”
14 Are
15 Boy Scout unit
17 *Pedigree
ancestry
19 Luxury Honda
20 “Eight Miles
High” band,
with “The”
21 Farm building
23 Up to, in ads
24 The Beatles’
“ Love Her”
25 Suit tailor’s
concern
28 Prospective
elevator
passenger’s
query
30 Villain played by
Josh Brolin in
most “Avengers”
films
31 Flock female
32 Biblical paradise
34 Olympics
segment
35 Nightly ritual for
young children
38 On the ocean
41 Red Sox
manager Alex
42 Topeka’s st.
45 “I want to see”
47 “The Lord of the
Rings” wizard
49 *Teacher’s outline
52 “__ all work out”
53 Barcelona gold
54 Field mouse
55 Diviner’s deck
56 Opposite of sur
58 “Field of Dreams”
subject, and
where both parts
of the answers
to starred clues
can go
61 Movie legend
Greta
62 Appliance with
burners
63 Actress
Vardalos
64 Cannon of
“Heaven Can
Wait” (1978)
65 Sinatra classic
with Anka lyrics
66 PIN requester

DOWN 1 Sauerkraut, mainly 2 “Just this second” 3 Desperate 4 Drugs from docs 5 Rose of Guns N’ Roses 6 Three on a sundial 7 “Hardball” cable channel 8 Rib eye, for one 9 Baseball great Musial’s nickname 10 Beast fought by 47-Across 11 Canadian french fries dish 12 Where land and sky seem to meet 16 Most colorless 18 Chief Norse god 22 Like some mil. officers 25 Weaponless self-defense 26 Mimic 27 Goalie’s goal 29 “Hurry!”

33 It has both Kings and Queens counties, briefly 35 Uses needle and thread 36 Roman robe 37 Persian Gulf republic 38 Comparable in duration 39 “Not Taken” place

in a Frost poem title 40 “My apologies” 42 Catastrophic New Orleans hurricane 43 The whole shebang 44 Cardinals or Falcons 46 Frequent co-producer of U2 albums

48 Dashboard feature 50 Suffix with proto- or cyto- 51 Southpaw 55 Low card 57 Sched. question mark 59 Disabled car need 60 “2 Fast 2 Furious” actress Mendes

LA TIMES CROSSWORD By Kevin Christian and Kristian House

MONDAY’S LA TIMES SOLUTION

KidsPost is away this week. Go to kidspost.com to take our latest quiz, kidspost one about honeybees.

O

Adapted from a recent online discussion.

Dear Carolyn: The guy I’ve been seeing for two years had an affair, before me, with a married woman. And he’s engaged in other questionable behaviors, including sleeping with an ex (ex?) at the beginning of our relationship. He says the period just before we got together was an anomaly. My mom asked, “Do you trust him?” and the answer’s no, even though I have no reasons other than the historical ones. Is it possible he’s trustworthy, or would he cheat on me given the opportunity? I love him and he’s committed to me, so I guess it shouldn’t matter to me, but it does. How can I forgive him? Should I? — Anonymous

Anonymous: “Given the opportunity”? Cheating is an opportunity everyone has every day, give or take a few logistical hurdles. Plus, everyone who has ever cheated has to have had a first time cheating. So, there’s no predictive way to sort people into “faithful” and “cheater” files based on their cheating histories. Plus, some cheaters never cheat again. Not to mention, it just seems logical that some of those first-

time cheaters were people who themselves thought they would never cheat on anyone. It’s something that dawned on me over my 100,000 years of doing this: All the what-if questions are always about the risk that someone else will cheat. It’s seldom “I am afraid I will not be faithful.” So, either 99 percent of the people who write into columns are in the “faithful” file, and the people they date are a mix of “faithful” and “cheater” — or, every population contains a mix of “faithful” and “cheater,” at least some of whom will switch sides as circumstances change. All of this is to say the biggest risk (to my mind) in the whole trust business is of oversimplification. It’s not just faithful/cheater issue that gets reduced to caricatures, though that is a perennial favorite.

There’s also the issue of making questions of trust only about (in)fidelity. You can have a person who is rock-solid faithful in the sense of not sleeping with anyone else — but whom you can’t trust to support you when you’re wobbly, to stand up for you when you’re under attack by critics, to think of what you want and need instead of just doing whatever suits him or her, or not to abuse you. That’s hardly a win. And there’s the issue of trusting yourself, which is the bedrock. Can you trust yourself to choose a partner who is good for you? Can you trust yourself to be happy alone, if that’s the alternative to a guy you’re concerned about? Can you trust yourself to admit there’s something wrong, take difficult steps to deal with the problem, and have the courage to start over if the relationship takes a bad turn? That’s the trust you start with. Once you have that, then the other stuff gets a lot easier to work out. If after all this you’re certain you don’t trust him and don’t believe he has learned from his mistakes and left his bad judgment behind, then how can you possibly, comfortably stay?

Write to Carolyn Hax at [email protected]. Get her column delivered to your inbox each morning at wapo.st/haxpost.

Join the discussion live at noon Fridays at live.washingtonpost.com.

He cheated before. Will he do it again?

Carolyn Hax

NICK GALIFIANAKIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

robberies and security flaws).
Sawyer and Ogle still play Poké-
mon Go — or PoGo, as its fans call
it — and often bake treats for
fellow players in their local com-
munity on special days when rare
Pokémon are released in droves.
PoGo is just a small piece of the
Pokémon enthusiasm that still
burns as bright as a dragon’s fiery
breath and has the magnetic pow-
er to bond strangers, neighbors,
friends, even lovers. The champi-
onship weekend was like a Comic-
Con mixed with the Super Bowl —
a whirlwind of casual-to-extreme
fandom for this clan of fictional
characters and the very real joy
they inspire.
Pokémon Co. International
says PoGo has 1 billion downloads
since its inception three years ago
(though the company won’t say
how many are active). There’s also
the Pokémon card game, which
has been around for over 20 years;
more than two dozen Nintendo
video games; a cartoon television
show that started airing in the
late 1990s and is in its 22nd sea-
son; and more than 20 animated
films, plus the recent live-action
film “Detective Pikachu.”
At the annual world champion-
ships, held in a different city each
year, approximately 1,500 players
as young as 5 years old from
nearly 50 countries competed in
the card- and video-game cham-
pionships for a combined
$500,000 in prize money. To qual-
ify, hundreds of thousands of
players had to battle it out in
various regional competitions.

POKEMON FROM C1 The world championship
matches are intense. Some last
more than an hour in front of
thousands of spectators cheering
them on and even more watching
via live stream. The top competi-
tors play onstage, wearing head-
sets to cancel out the noise
around them, as their every move
is dissected by “casters,” video-
game sportscasters giving spirit-
ed play-by-play narration.
Walking through the conven-
tion hall, you can hear Italian,
Spanish, French, English, Japa-
nese. But everyone has one lan-
guage in common. A former card
competitor recalls a time he
played a matchup with someone
whose cards were in Japanese.
Because they both knew what
powers every character possessed
and what each could accomplish
when paired with certain special
effects, no dictionary or interpret-
er was necessary.
Inside the convention hall, red-
and-white searchlights dance
overhead, making the ceiling look
as if Poké balls, which players use
in the game to catch the various
characters, are bouncing on the
ceiling. Characters are embla-
zoned on banners throughout the
hall — look, there’s a Slowpoke!
There’s a nervous Psyduck with
his hands pressed against the side
of his head. A furry, adaptable
Eevee. A muscle-bound Ma-
champ. A snoozy Snorlax. Twen-
ty-somethings lean down to get
on the same eye level with 7-year-
olds as they trade characters dur-
ing a PoGo scavenger hunt. Par-
ents hover with snacks, making
sure their kids get nourishment

and bathroom breaks between rounds of card matches. Some competitors place stuffed-animal Pokémon next to them for good luck. A young girl comes to a card match with a plushie Bellossom, a grass-type character resembling a hula dancer that can deploy solar power against its opponents. A grown man competes onstage with an Ampharos, an electric-type character that can beam light from space, by his side. Ask anyone to name their favorite Pokémon, and they either know right away or caaaaaan’t pick just one. The characters may not be real, but for many here, they spark wonder or nostalgia — or they’re just cute. Cazzy Medley, a 23-year-old from Maryland who’s been playing the video games since childhood, loves Rockruff because he reminds her of her dog. Even their weaknesses can seem relatable. Ogle loves Jiggly- puff because the balloon character enjoys performing, even im- perfectly. “It’s kind of inspiring that she keeps going even though people don’t always pay attention to her,” Ogle says on day two of the competition. Her other favorite character is Shaymin, a pink-and- green hedgehog who can dissolve toxins in the air. Shaymin “reminds me of that sweet spot in my childhood when Pokémon was all I did,” she adds while standing in line with Sawyer to play a demo of “Pokémon Sword” and “Pokémon Shield,” Nintendo games being released this November. For some, Pokémon knowledge has become their personal super- power. Jonathan Kilburn, a 25- year-old from Cincinnati, has extreme social anxiety, but Poké-

Love for PoGo, each other

mon events “are the only place I feel no anxiety at all,” he says. Because the Pokémon card and video games have been around for so long, fans can connect across generations. Back in Ohio, Kil- burn started a Pokémon card league at his public library, which allows him to help younger players improve their game. At the championships, Medley bonded with a teenage girl whose first Pokémon video game is a remake of the first game Medley played as a child. “I felt like she was me,” Medley says. When Austin Knowles was a college student in Pennsylvania, Pokémon gave him an opening to talk to Meredith Romano, a cute girl who lived down the hall. When he learned that she was into the video games, he asked if she wanted to go to a GameStop and buy a new one they were both excited about. Almost seven years later, they’re still playing together — and they’re playing for keeps. On their most recent anniversary, Knowles, who’s a 25-year-old graphic designer, gave Romano, also 25, a pack of Pokémon cards as a gift, with a special card he’d designed in the middle of the pack. “When you play this card, a proposal will be made,” the card read, paired with an image of an engagement ring. “If you say yes, you will be affected by the status: Engaged.” It was modeled off the game’s item cards, which make a Poké- mon character stronger. Romano didn’t see it at first; the card blended in with the pack. But once Knowles pointed it out, and brought out a sparkling ring to match, she said yes. [email protected]

pearls dressed up with real dia-
mond clips, an early “intertwin-
ing of true and false” that, as
Staggs writes, “could have served
as the Gabor coat of arms.” Her

BOOK WORLD FROM C1

have likened her 1945 confine- ment at West Hills Sanitarium to “the sufferings of concentration camp victims,” as the author does.) Staggs bridles in particular at those who would link the names Gabor and Kardashian, but didn’t the Gabor sisters stay famous because, in Staggs’s words, “they never stopped working at it”? (Eva made her last TV appearance a month before she died.) And didn’t Paris Hilton, as a little girl, splash in Zsa Zsa’s pool? Surely she absorbed more than chlorine. Then again, when was the last time a Paris or a Kim or a Kylie made you laugh the way Zsa Zsa does when she says, “I believe in large families. Every girl should have at least three husbands,” or, “When I divorced Conrad Hilton, I got six thousand Gideon Bi- bles.” The Gabors saw their joke before anybody else did, and they laughed like the survivors they were. [email protected]

Louis Bayard is a novelist and reviewer whose most recent book is “Courting Mr. Lincoln.”

Gabors’ passage to fame

daughter Jolie inherited both a flair for costume jewelry and a sneaking suspicion that the man she married was beneath her. Jolie’s eldest daughter, Magda, worked in the anti-Nazi under- ground and saw firsthand the

ravages of the Holocaust. By then, youngest daughter Eva had already broken for America, rid- ing the first of five marriages to 1939 Hollywood. Paramount dropped her into B-pictures (where her lovely Magyar face bears scant relation to the surgi- cally refined Eva of later years). Of all the Gabors, she was the most interested in being an ac-

tress, scoring a Broadway hit in “The Happy Time” and acquit- ting herself more than honorably in A-list movies such as “Gigi.” Her fame was sealed, though, by an exercise in cornpone surreal- ism called “Green Acres,” through which she floated, in Staggs’s unimprovable phrase, “like Titania among the rustics.” We come at last to middle daughter Sari, whose destiny was almost certainly assured the mo- ment she claimed the nickname Zsa Zsa. A Miss Hungary finalist at 15, she was still a teenager when she inveigled a Turkish diplomat to the altar. (Later in life, she would claim that she was also Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s mistress.) When her husband went on a lecture tour of London, she followed, and Staggs’s great- est biographical coup may be the unearthed photo of kittenish young Zsa Zsa drawing the eye of both H.G. Wells and George Ber- nard Shaw. But Zsa Zsa had ideas beyond being a muse. These included shedding Husband No. 1 and beating an eastward path to America. With her 21 suitcases, she traveled from Istanbul to Baghdad to Karachi, Pakistan, across the Pacific and through the Panama Canal. Within 10 months of landing in New York, she had bagged her second husband, the pious hotelier Conrad Hilton. “Whatever else could be said about Zsa Zsa,” wrote Hus- band No. 3, actor George Sand- ers, “she has a lot of guts.”

Equally, a sense of the mo- ment. In 1951, while waiting for Sanders to return from location, she accepted a last-minute slot on a TV show peddling advice to the lovelorn. When asked about her jewelry, she answered, “Dahl- ing, zese are just my vorking diamonds.” A star was born. Within a year, she was a glowing presence in “Moulin Rouge” and, in Staggs’s view, might have ma- tured into a real actress if she hadn’t been seduced by playboy Porfirio Rubirosa (the suave dip- lomatic face of the brutal Domin- ican Republic regime). The two would never quite marry, but the headlines that encircled them made Zsa Zsa fatally unserious, and the rest of her career was a decline into self-parody. Her fi- nal years found her a mere invalid, tethered to and exploited by Husband No. 9, a bogus German prince whose lust for publicity may have exceeded hers. Staggs is an invaluable film chronicler (“All About ‘All About Eve,’ ” “When Blanche Met Bran- do”) whose work has always toggled between the engrossing and the overwrought. In this case, his long friendship with Zsa Zsa’s late daughter Francesca seems to have exacerbated the divide, and his fractured time sequences, breathless prose and pugilistic opinions suggest he is either competing with or being absorbed by the Gabors themselves. (Although it’s hard to imagine that even Zsa Zsa would

The Reliable Source

Helena Andrews-Dyer and Emily Heil are away. Their column will resume when they return.

PHOTOS BY EVELYN HOCKSTEIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST TOP: Braden Sawyer, 24, and his fiancee, Avery Ogle, 19, from Orem, Utah, watch the Pokémon World Championships in the District. He proposed to her at the event Friday. ABOVE: The player Strawburry17 competes in the championships.

The Washington Post - 20.08.2019

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