JUMBO 1201 – Me Grim, you Ariadne

Author   PenfoldPosted on Categories Jumbo Cryptic

Three blogs in and I’d say this was certainly the hardest Jumbo I’ve had to blog so far.  Spread over a few days with interruptions and with time taken to parse everything and make notes etc. I’d say solving time was getting on for 90 minutes.  I got there unaided but I’ve had to do a fair amount of looking up to compose the blog.

As before I won’t comment on all clues, just those I consider worthy of comment.  If you’re still in the dark about something then leave a comment and someone will pop along to light your way with a wind-up torch.

First in was 1a, EXHIBITION, last in was MEGRIM.


Across

1
EXHIBITION – DD with the second making reference to the expression “to make an exhibition of oneself”.  Although this was my FOI it didn’t go straight in.  Before moving on I had a quick shufty at 1d, decided that “pick me up over it” meant it was probably going to begin EM which gave me a likely starting letter of E for 1a and bingo!  I think there’s a lesson there for inexperienced solvers – you don’t need to solve an entire clue to get some useful checking letters.

14
BRILLIANT – RILL (stream) in (N A BIT)*.

15
INK IN – IN + KIN

17
LAYS OF ANCIENT ROME  – a saucy CD.   Lay in the context of a, um, sexual encounter is probably most commonly used in the context of “getting laid” but it’s there as a noun in Chambers at least, both as the act and a partner.  According to my usual oracle “Lays of Ancient Rome is a collection of narrative poems, or lays, by Thomas Babington Macaulay.”

19
INCENSE – DD one a verb, the other a noun.

21
LOOSER – O in LOSER.

22
INUNDATE – I + NUN + DATE.  Nice clue.

24
HANGDOG – DOG (churl) with HANG, as in “you’ll hang for this” coming first.  I always thought hangdog meant tired-looking as in Droopy but Chambers has it as “with a cowed, dejected or guilty look.” 

26
SPIRITED – P 1 R in SITED with “in” preceding the definition.

27
BECKET – a Russian doll or double insertion clue (fnaar), with K inside CE inside BET (as in “I bet he drinks Carling Black Label”.)  Thomas Becket  (also known as Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas of London, and later Thomas à Becket) was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his murder in 1170.  We did Moider in the Cathedral in English at school so TB was familiar enough.  I can still remember “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”.

30
DARDANELLES – (leaderlands)* I needed to pay close attention to the anagram fodder to avoid a misspelling.  Back to school again for this one, this time Bosphorous and Dardanelles remembered from History.  Or possibly Geography.  As for the definition, in WWI (1915) the western Allies sent a massive invasion force of British, Indian, Australian, New Zealand and Newfoundland troops to attempt to open up the strait, which connects the Sea of Marmara with the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas.

32
DUSTY MILLER – MY reversed + ILL all inside DUSTER.  Not a plant(s) I knew (no surprise there then) but you’ll already know that it’s the common name of several plants, namely Artemisia stelleriana, Centaurea cineraria, Jacobaea maritima (formerly Senecio cineraria, as if you needed telling), Lychnis coronaria
and of course good old Spyridium parvifolium, which I think is in my probiotic yogurt.  Dusty is to Miller as Chalky is to White, Nobby is to Clark and Speedy is to Goodliffe.

33
SCILLY ISLES – C{h}ILLY INSIDE (isless)*.

35
FLIP ONES LID – FLIP (disrespectful) + ONE (person) + SLID(went smoothly on).   I didn’t know flip as an adjective meaning flippant / over-smart.  Flippant was probably the most-used word on my school reports.

39
DESKTOP – K{i}T in POSED reversed.  In trying to parse this I was a bit thrown by OP at the end and work in the clue.

42
EXACTION – EX (old) + ACTION (battle).  Not a word I hear every day despite spending a lot of time talking to banks.

44
MEGRIM – ME (our puzzle’s complier) plus GRIM for cruel.  My last in – a complete unknown and I just had to trust the wordplay and hope for the best.  Chambers says that megrim meaning migraine is obsolete.  Hmm.

46
BENZENE – ZEN inside (been)*. A hydrocarbon and a constituent of crude oil.

48
PRICE – The cost of Fanny?  Ooh matron.  Thanks goodness for the capital letter.  Fanny Price is the heroine in Jane Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park, innit?

49
NOUGHTS AND CROSSES – This sure took a lot of figuring out when I realized JUST A MINUTE wouldn’t fit.  “Nothing by” can be interpreted as nought X (where by is times as in multiplication) and X is a cross so if you repeat nought cross you get…

51
PODCAST – O + DC in PAST for the modern day equivalent of Simon Bates making a cassette of a week’s worth of Our Tune and posting it through your letterbox.

53
PALANQUIN – A in PLAN (arrange) then QUIN(tuplet) for a word meaning  “a covered litter for one passenger, consisting of a large box carried on two horizontal poles by four or six bearers”.  Now I know the correct name for the thing I use to get to the pub and back.

54
SPELLCHECKER – a very witty CD.

55
KEW GARDENS – and we finish the acrosses with a very nice anagram.


Down

2
HAIRY – I + R(un) in HAY.

3
BALLOONED – LO (see) + ONE (person) in in BALD.  See is one of those clue components that can be a number of things like V, Lo or Ely and you need to be on wavelength to get it on your first stab.  Here I was also misled into thinking that “see person” might be a quirky definition for bishop or summat.

4
TEACAKE – CA (= circa = about) inside TEAK + E(ast).  Of course where you are in the country will determine whether a teacake will make crumbs and what they’ll be like.  Without even bothering to research I can tell you that a teacake can be variously a bread roll, a fruited bread thing you have toasted or a softish biscuit covered with a dome of marshmallow and coated in chocolate.

5
OPTICAL – OPAL outside (broken by) TIC, def = “working with light”

8
CANTON – C(hekhov) + ANTON, as in Chekhov.  If you type “Canton City” into Google (in the UK at least) the first (and indeed second third and fourth) entries relate to a Chinese restaurant in Tring, Hertfordshire.  Further down the page we discover that Canton City can refer to Guangzhou in China, Canton City North Dakota or Canton Ohio.  I suspect the first of these is what the setter had in mind. 

9
AGREEING – I in A GREEN G(ood).

10
DEATH IN VENICE – (iveenhancedit)*.  As well as being a novella by German author Thomas Mann it’s also a film, an opera and a ballet.  I’d like to see Lionel Blair try and get that across with hand signals.

11
LAMELLA – LAME (unsatisfactory as in excuse, say) + ALL reversed.  Not a word I knew but it’s not a huge leap from laminate to lamella.  Our friends at Chambers tell me a lamella is a thin plate or layer.

12
EMPTY-NESTER – EMPTY + ST for saint in NE’ER.  We’re semi-empty-nesters with one daughter at uni and the other still at home.  The worst of both worlds.

13
VILE BODIES – V + DIES around (is stabbed by) OBELI reversed.  Tricky wordplay for the 1930 Evelyn Waugh novel.  Wikipedia says it’s about decadent young London society “between the wars”, but if it was written in 1930 I can’t see how that can be.  Silly Wiki.

20
CON ARTIST – (actorisn’t)*.

25
GAELIC – A ELI in GC for George Cross, the highest gallantry award for civilians. 

26
SALT LICK – ALT (computer key) in SLICK.   It’s a block of salt (sometimes containing other minerals) given to animals as a dietary supplement.

28
KILOLITRE – (OIL)* in KILT RE.

29
BYWORD – W(ith) O in BYRD.

31
A FLY ON THE WALL – CD.

33
SAMUEL PEPYS  – SAMUEL + homophone for peeps.  Pepys’s diary is an invaluable source for the study of, among other things, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666.  He was a bit of a jinx wasn’t he?

34
SUMMER HOUSE – spoonerism of hummer souse, the latter being the answer to 50d.  I can’t recall seeing a cross-reference Spooner device used before.

35
FLOURISHED – LOUR inside (suppressed by) FISHED (for compliments).

36
DEPRESSANTS – DE (the bottom two classifications in NRS social grading, basically people who’ve never been carried to the pub in a palanquin) + PRESS + ANTS.

40
SUNDOWNER – D in SUN OWNER.  Ho ho.  This might confuse our overseas solvers as a sundowner is a form of vagrant in Oz and a govt official in the US of A.  Rather than a specific drink it’s one taken after sunset.  Boy that’s late to start drinking.

41
TOP NOTCH – anagram of PHOTON + T{racking} around “c” the speed of light in a vacuum.  It must be one of those Dysons where you can see the dust flying around the vortex.

43
ARIADNE – I’m not sure if this is meant to be a reversal of END AIR plus an unexplained A or ARIA on top of a reversal of END with no indication of the word order.  The clue reads: Final song lifts Greek girl guide. What am I missing?  Ariadne helped Theseus find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

45
MANIPLE – another unknown where I had to trust the wordplay which is NIP in MALE.  I now know that a maniple is a company of foot soldiers in the Roman army.  A legion is more specific, being a body of three to six thousand soldiers.

46
BACKLOG – BACK as a verb + LOG.  You need to lift and separate wood and pile.

47
RUBRIC – RUB (To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub – Hamlet)+ RIC{h}.  A rubric can be a liturgical direction.

50
SOUSE – S{c}OUSE, where Scouse, of course, is Liverpool’s own adjective.

 

13 comments on “JUMBO 1201 – Me Grim, you Ariadne”

  1. found this a steady solve, not quick but not unduly slow either.. re 43dn, what Keriothe says..

    I’m not unduly bothered about it but I couldn’t quite get 22ac to work .. wouldn’t the correct answer to the clue as given be “inundating,” not “inundate?” Or are we not to worry about parts of speech any more?

    1. Jerry, I took the definition to be “to be overwhelming” rather than just “overwhelming” which works fine for me.
      1. [scrabbles through recycling to find crossword again] … ah yes, works fine for me too now. Thanks
  2. Found this one a bit harder than average, with a few unknowns slowing me down, e.g. DUSTY MILLER. LOI was VILE BODIES, which I stared at for what seemed like ages.

    Re 43D, there was a comment on the forum saying that the clue in the paper (which was presumably where you solved it) was missing the first word “A”, which is present in the online version.

    1. I was just about to reply to Keriothe to that effect. I did solve the newsprint version and there’s definitely no A at the start of the Ariadne clue.
  3. 36:51. This is about average for me so I must have been relatively on the wavelength. There were a few unknowns (MEGRIM, for instance) but they were all gettable from wordplay.
    The clue for ARIADNE is ‘A final song lifts Greek girl guide’, so the first A of ARIADNE comes from the A in the clue. Then it’s END AIR reversed, as you say.
    1. Thanks K, and well done on getting so far through the blog. As you’ll see below, the newspaper version I solved had an error.
  5. I actually knew MEGRIM (probably in Jane Austen somewhere), but never heard of DUSTY MILLER, although I thought I knew of Dusty Miller the baseball player (I just looked, and there were two of them, both way before my time). Somehow VILE BODIES just came to me from a couple of checkers; that novel ends in a European war–the story is supposed to take place in the near (post-1930) future– so in that sense Wikipedia is right.

    Edited at 2016-04-24 06:56 am (UTC)

  7. LOI VILE BODIES, Obeli helping me a great deal. SUNDOWNER in my Oxford so no problem for this overseas solver. Thanks Penfold. Is 38a which you omitted SCHOOZE=shoes (brogues) ie ‘heard’? (Ong’ara, Nairobi, Kenya )
    1. Right (SCHMOOZE, from the Yiddish). Oddly enough, I was under the impression that SUNDOWNER originated among the colonialists in Kenya! I first heard the word while staying with a friend who was doing her dissertation research on a baboon troop living on one of the two remaining white-owned mammoth ranches, near Gilgil (the neighbor ranch was owned by the Cholmondleys; like the Lowells and Cabots of Boston, the Cholmondleys spoke only to their neighbor landowners, probably not to God).

      Edited at 2016-04-24 07:00 am (UTC)

Comments are closed.