Times 25045 – Beaming With Delight

34 comments on “Times 25045 – Beaming With Delight”

1. DNF, failing to get AGA SAGA (‘ava vawa’, anyone?) and the clever DEED POLL (‘lead roll’). A couple of unknowns, but I had most trouble with the holiday island, where, after dismissing the first part of the clue too quickly, I was trying to anagramatise the wrong bit.

   The stand-alone word ‘absinthe’ is still not allowed on labels of the drink in the States (where it was banned in 1915 but reapproved in 2007), according to wikipedia. Many other countries jumped on the banning bandwagon for the alleged harmful effects of thujone.

   Nice puzzle, nice blog.

   Edited at 2011-12-29 06:24 am (UTC)

2. I think this is (w)HEEL rather than a dd.
3. Not sure I would have known of Martha’s Vineyard but for the Ted Kennedy incident.

   45 minutes for this one with the SE causing most of the trouble other than supplied by my last in, AGA SAGA at 15ac. This has caught me out before so I should have spotted it sooner.

   FOULARD was an unknown.

   VWXYZ bunched together in the NE put me on early alert for a pangram but we are missing J and Q.

   Edited at 2011-12-29 05:47 am (UTC)

   1. MV is also famous in linguistics, for studies of variation and change in accents
4. 22 minutes, with a brief interruption that turned out to be beneficial, unlocking a log jam in the NE.
   AGA SAGA was last in once I’d broken the conviction that it was some (religious?) book that I hadn’t heard of with H’s in it.
   The “banned” was quite helpful for me in 16 – it tickled a memory of Absinthe being illegal in France, though I note the ban was more widespread than that and now less prevalent.
   FOULARD was a very vague (and undefined) memory. Both long ones went in on definition rather than anagram crunching.
   HISSY FIT for CoD, though it really had to be worked through in bits.
5. Thanks for the blog, Uncle Yap, particularly for correcting my desperate AGA GAGA (‘a gag a ga[g]’). SEXTON rang bells but it took time to recall that he also digs graves; CHICHI seemed familiar – but it took the blog to remind me why (nothing, of course, to do with ‘affected’). FOULARD was another entered on wordplay alone. So quite a lot of unknowns for me but it proved fun having a go. Tempted by HISSY FIT for COD but on balance COD just goes to TIDYING.
6. 26 minutes here after a moment of panic with the As of Aga (range/oven?) saga. Some natty anagrams. Rather liked snapdragon. I knew pastern from Dr Johnson’s reply to a lady who asked him why he’d defined it wrongly in his dictionary. “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.”
7. 18 minutes, pleasant challenge. Glad I wasn’t the only one staring at A_A_A_A in puzzlement, and thinking it must be something along the same lines as the Ramayana, or contain various ‘HA’s, which it obviously doesn’t.

   For those who don’t like answers which include unindicated apostrophes, MARTHA’S VINEYARD is one of the very few* placenames in the USA which officially has one. (It doesn’t bother me, but drives a friend of mine to distraction for no obvious reason.)

   *5, it turns out, on checking the relevant website.

8. 21 minutes and would have been quicker but for the AGA. Glad I wasn’t the only one struggling with it. Ali Baba kept trying to push his way in. Must thank you for the sherpa story from the week before Christmas Uncle Y. It was much better than any of the ones that came out of the crackers!
9. …’spiv’, which I really should have got.

   The ‘aga saga’ and ‘chichi’ clues are reruns, for those of you with long memories of previous puzzles, while ‘lynx’ is a chestnut already.

   I was a little surprised to find Martha’s Vineyard in a UK puzzle. Staying there requires more than affluence nowadays, if you want to cut any sort of figure. They just sold the farmhouse Obama had been renting for $25 million.

   1. You’re right about the Vineyard. We used to “summer” (now there’s a horrible word for you) on nearby Nantucket years ago but wouldn’t go near it now. It’s been taken over by what our local Mass. friends call the Bronx Navy – i.e. hedge fund types and their accoutrements.
10. Another enjoyable puzzle that mixed the straightforward with plenty of clever stuff. SIBLINGS, SPIV, INDEXED, HISSY FIT, DEED POLL (my LOI), AGA SAGA and CHICHI were particularly good, I thought. I bow to Vinyl’s longer experience, and take his word for it that the latter two are “re-runs”, but as I could recall neither having been run past me before they seemed very good. I too was among those who spent some time in the company of ALI BABA before hitting on AGA SAGA.
    1. I don’t recall CHICHI but AGA SAGA turned up in the ST puzzle on 23 October.
       1. Now that you have jogged my memory, Jack, I think I do recall AGA SAGA making an appearance in that ST puzzle, but the wordplay in today’s version struck me as better.

          On another matter: much as I liked DEED POLL, it is not entirely clear to me how the “I” that opens the clue is justified. As I understand it, a deed poll is a document or certificate signed by a person wishing to change his/her name. How can an inanimate object of this kind command the personal pronoun? Perhaps this is just one of those cryptic conventions that we have to learn to accept?

          1. Hi, Mike, yes I think it’s a convention adopted via riddles that go “My first is in this but not in that etc”.
             1. Thanks, Jack. That sort of makes sense!
          2. Mike, just in case you’re interested (and you may well not be) a deed is a document executed under seal.

             A deed between 2 parties used to be made as an “indenture”, that is, it was written in duplicate on one sheet of paper which was then cut in two with uneven (“indented”) edges so the 2 counterparts could be reassembled for evidentiary purposes.

             A deed executed by just one person (for the benefit of named persons or for the world at large) had a clean cut (“polled”) edge, and was thus a “deed poll”.

             A deed by which a person changes their name is made by that person for all the world, and is probably the best-known case of a deed poll, but deed polls are still widely used by lawyers in all sorts of situations.

             1. Thanks. Fascinating. The things one learns on this blog!
                1. The plural incidentally is “deeds poll”. That would be a tricky answer!
       2. Yes, I remember blogging it. It held me up for an age that time as I’d never heard of it. It was clued in a very similar way, except then it was AGA SAGAS in the plural being clued, so the removal of the final S in A GAS x2 wasn’t necessary, simplifying the clue slightly.
11. About 30 minutes, like others, ending with AGA SAGA, from wordplay. CRAZY PAVING also from wordplay. I was also surprised to have MARTHA’S VINEYARD appear in the puzzle, thinking it must be obscure in the UK, but with that and the long ENGLISH HERITAGE both being anagrams, this puzzle came together without a lot of difficulty. Regards.
    1. As referred to above I think most people in the UK above a certain age have heard of Martha’s Vineyard in connection with the Teddy Kennedy affair.
12. I rattled through much of this but like others, aga saga took time to find and eventually I was left with just 28ac which I could NOT get.. eventually I showed it to my wife who rattled off the answer instantly, which did not improve my mood as much as it no doubt should have 🙂
    What made it worse was that I had thought of poll as in head, rhymes with doll, early on but had totally failed to convert it to poll, as in deed, rhymes with sole… grrr

    Edited, just because I can, to add: well done setter: setter one, me nil, today.. “nice try, idiot” as George would have said

    Edited at 2011-12-29 03:33 pm (UTC)

13. Andrew K
    Needed Bradford and Brewer ( to get Aga Saga). Slowly improving, but need B more than I would like.
    HISSY FIT very good clue
14. 
    Yep, I too finished with a desperate AGA GAGA (as martinfred), so technically a DNF correctly today. Quite appropriate for me, as I was struggling to get warm (getting back to a cold house) by standing against the Aga, and my brain was slowly turning to mush as I alphabet-ran to complete the grid.

    Back home after a week away of collaborative puzzling with my SIBLINGS, so glad to manage it on my own as quickly as I did! Something comforting about old habits, and for me one of those is sitting down a couple of times a year with my brothers to tackle a few cryptics.

    Thanks for excellent blog, Uncle Yap.

15. 25 minutes after golf. Nice puzzle.

    AGA SAGA has definitely appeared before but I still contrived to have it as my last in. I remember when ABSINTHE was banned but am under the impression that the ban no longer applies (and never did in the UK)

    Any old hands remember LIGHTHOUSE being clued many years ago as “Jack Warner”

    Well done UY!

16. Rather than the Kennedy connection, this triggered a long buried memory which I’ve scratched at today until I uncovered its dwelling place. Robert Lowell’s The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket gives it no more than a passing mention, but with an English teacher more than forty years ago who contrived to pass on his passion for American poets it’s kind of stuck. I think what nailed the poetry into my recollectory were the haunting lines about “Our Lady of Walsingham”. Must go there sometime and see what he saw.
    1. Thanks for this – my goodness it was evocative. Desperately sad poem but we had happy times in Madaket (our friend still has a fishing shack on the water there and his middle name really is Starbuck) and ‘Sconset, before the bankers came and spoiled things.
17. A sluggish 11:23, where once again I had a hard time finding the setter’s wavelength.

    I took an alarming amount of time over AGA SAGA – but I was doing the puzzle in my study rather than at the kitchen table where the first part would have been staring me in the face.

    No-one else seems worried about FOULARD = “tie”, but I haven’t come across this meaning before and I can’t find any justification for it in any dictionary I have ready access to. Am I missing something obvious?

    1. OK, got it now. The OED’s definitions of “tie” include “a lady’s ornamental necklet or scarf” – not a meaning I’ve come across before.
       1. I had visions of a moustachioed Biggles type, scarf trailing in the breeze, so the anagrist (LOUD RAF type) worked beautifully for me. My COD in fact.
          1. I’m not convinced. Biggles would never have referred to his scarf as a tie!
    2. I have heard it before, never really thought about it. However, upon typing ‘foulard tie’ into Google, it seems a common enough sort of thing.
       1. Thanks. I hadn’t thought of googling “foulard tie”. jackkt’s OneLook dictionary search (from tomorrow’s comments) hits the jack(kt)pot straight away with the two entries from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:

          1. A lightweight twill or plain-woven fabric of silk or silk and cotton, usually having a small printed design.
          2. An article of clothing, especially a necktie or scarf, made of this fabric.

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