This was a fairly typical Monday offering with enough about it to give pause to all but the most expert solver. I managed it in 45 minutes with one wrong and a bit of a guess at my last in, wondering how a lion might be an idol. Or maybe I got that wrong too. We shall see…
ACROSS
1 OPTIMISE – OP + IM in SITE* – a nice one to get us started.
5 H + OB+N+OB – ‘after hours’ was the giveaway here.
9 SAD + D+LE+RY – I was racing round the Isle of Man when I should have been casting my mind back to recall what it was like to exercise temperance.
10 TATTOO – ‘looking back’ is the reversal indicator and ‘over’ is the cricketing abbreviation O, so O + O (old) + TT (times) + AT reversed.
12 FIBRILLATION – I rather liked this, and the word itself tickles my fancy in a Ken Doddish kind of way; FIB + ILL in RATION.
15 Would it make you cry if we cut this?
16 SWAZILAND – anagram of LIZA[R]D and SWAN for the HIV-ravaged country with the lowest life expectancy in the world.
18 SNOWDONIA – NOW + DON in S[k]I[h]A[t] – ‘now’ for fashionable may be downright ugly but it’s in the dictionary.
19 CHIEF – no excuse at all for writing ‘thief’, as the wordplay – and word order – makes it crystal clear that the felon not only loses his head but gets crowned with a ‘c’ for good measure, ‘van’ doing its opposite of rearguard thing.
20 SQUASH (press) LADDER (run in tights) – I hated these things (squash ladders not tights) as I always seemed to be near the bottom.
24 I’ll follow the setter and make this an omission clue.
25 DELEGATE – [syndicat]E + LEG + in DATE – a little lifting and separating is all you require to attend this event.
26 EA(S)TER – if it’s not a cooker then it’s an eater, though both are in short supply in Blighty after the poor insects couldn’t scramble in all that rain.
27 SKITTISH – many will have just bunged this in, but for the record it’s SH for mum (as in ‘mum’s the word’) enclosing KIT (clothing) and a reversed verbal model (TIS).
DOWN
1 OUSE – there must be dozens of River Ouses in England; one of them is supplying today’s non-dodgy homophone.
2 TI(D)E – thanks to dictionary.com for coming up with the ‘turning point’ definition (AKA ‘a critical point in time’), even if it doesn’t quite convince me, when all I could think of was the ‘alternate rising and falling of the sea’ meaning.
3 MULLIONED – LION in MULE + D[iamonds] – a number of factors contributed to this being my last in, not least the fact the word itself was so unfamiliar as to be functionally unknown. Anywyay, in crossword land, when a mule isn’t being a hybrid it’s being, as here, a woman’s slipper, and when diamonds aren’t being ice they are being a minimalistic Mephistoesque D. Then there’s the lion. The best I can come up with for him, after extensive Googling, is the feline that appears to be worshipped along with his mount, the goddess Amba, in Hinduism. (Or see mctext’s rather more sensible suggestion in the fist comment below.) Oh, and if a window or screen is mullioned, it contains a vertical division.
4 SURPRISINGLY – another that many will bung in from the checkers. For the record, it’s P + RISING in SURLY.
6 The down omission
7 NITRIC ACID – IC in TRAIN* + CID – I sometimes wonder why God gave us all this excess Nitrogen if he knew what we were going to make of it.
8 BROWNED OFF – another phrase I like for some reason, probably because I feel like this quite a lot of the time. It’s BROW + NE + DOFF.
11 CLEAN AND JERK – yet another phrase that rather tickles my fancy, and thus gets my COD, even if it’s sister event in the weightlfiting discipline has an even raunchier name. One of my favourite moments in the Olympics was when the North Korean pocket battleship of a female weightlifter, weighing 100 pounds, made it onto the podium at her final attempt behind a Chinese and a Japanese who looked, for some reason, far better nourished. It’s an anagram of DANCER and ANKLE containing J[udge].
13 POSSESSIVE – ‘controlling’ as in helicopter parents. With a daughter just starting at boarding school in England, that would make my wife and I Skypelicopter parents. This time we have POSSE as the company for a change chasing [ad]VISES*.
14 BINOCULARS – was it only me who thought of the dog called Colin in Baldrick’s rotten borough being interviewed by Vincent Hanna? Probably. Glasses is the literal, and BARS around COLIN + U* the wordplay.
17 INCLEMENT – our second, I think, letter substitution clue, where R becomes L.
21 I’m going scratch this one too.
22 TAX+I – like the muggins that I am, I put Bali and only got the real answer when I stopped to work out the wordplay and saw that tax meant try.
23 Hidden omission.
1. The idol is a LION because it’s lionised. Chambers: “a famous or conspicuous person much sought after (from the lions once kept in the Tower, one of the sights of London)”.
2. TIDE: “There is a tide in the affairs of men …” (Shakespeare’s great pun on the word, picked up by the almost-as-great Agatha Christie, Taken At The Flood, 1948).
Edited at 2012-09-03 04:04 am (UTC)
Edited at 2012-09-03 04:30 am (UTC)
“As Jeeves had rightly said, there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. I drew back the leg, and let him have it just where the pants were tightest.”
Edited at 2012-09-03 12:24 pm (UTC)
SWAZILAND was my fourth answer in and it occurred to me at that stage that we could be in for another pangram however I failed to turn this thought to my advantage at the very the end when all that remained to be solved was ?A?I at 22dn. If I’d realised I still needed an X to complete the pangram I would surely have come up with TAXI and then spotted the devious definition.
Kevin, I also had misgivings about surly/dismal however it’s in Collins, which rather surprised me. I had no problems with court/date but I certainly didn’t like posse/company.
Riffled through this in about 14 mnutes, so easer than normal for me.
I don’t like tide as a turning point and I can’t think of a sentence where that would work. I agree with Ulaca that in Shakespeare’s attempt, nice try though it is, it is the flood not the tide that is the turning point. The tide is taken MC, but only at the turning point, or flood.. and this sense of the word is not in Chambers or the ODO.
Still, I bunged it in OK, so wotthehell, wotthehell
So: there is an opportunity/turning point in human concerns which, if taken at its maximum point (flood) … usw. Ergo: TIDE is a perfectly good word for “turning point” in this sense.
Of course, these days, when the tide turns, we have windows of opportunity! Yuk!
Edited at 2012-09-03 08:43 am (UTC)
Count me as another who initially dismissed TIDE: I too always thought of the tide turning rather than being the turning point.
Quite a few neat clues of the type I appreciate: thought TATTOO one of them.
Posse to mean company, or at least an affiliated group of people is (was?) part of the argot of street gangs in the inner city, five in this out-of-date-before-printed list. Probably more accurately translated as crew, rather than company (as in the “Red Dwarf Posse”), but once I’d got over Company not being CO, I was content enough to put it in without query.
I assume SQUASH LADDER could be mutated into any sport and isn’t specific to the tiny pill game? Are the two words together confirmed in any dictionary?
CoD to HOBNOB for its almost unannounced doubling of the OB’s
I didn’t like the definition for TIDE, but it’s in Collins so we have to complain to them.
This was a pretty meaty puzzle for a Monday. ‘Snowdonia’ was rather UK-centric, and ‘mullioned’ ‘fibrillation’, and ‘clean and jerk’ are all a bit unusual. I thought that ‘tattoo’ might give trouble to some people who are unfamiliar with the military meaning.
I congratulate my fellow Monday blogger on getting into the groove, although he hasn’t got the witty title part down yet.
Still slowly transcribing my way through my late uncle’s letters home, written during and after WWII (he’s currently a driver for an officer in and around Palestine, 1945 – Stern Gang etc. – and about the only people he likes are the German POWs!). If I had to guess, I’d say the single most commonly occurring slang term in his letters is BROWNED OFF, which gives you the vintage of the term and says a lot about the life of a regular soldier of the time.
Edited at 2012-09-03 11:47 am (UTC)
I also had an uncle who was a soldier in Palestine and North Africa before and during WWII, and he too spoke very highly of the ordinary German soldier. Tragically, having survived all that, he was killed when a V1 fell on the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks during morning service on Sunday 18 June 1944.
My uncle had a couple of spells as a camp guard in Palestine. Not that there was much guarding to be done. Most of the German prisoners were in no great hurry to get home to what sounded like chaos in their own land. One of my most treasured possessions (it’s sitting on my desk) is a cigarette case carved for my uncle by a German POW – a watchmaker in ‘real life’ – out of a mess tin. It’s beautifully constructed, with an ingenious hinge and spring clasp, and is elaborately decorated inside and out with various regimental emblems. It has a central motif carved in silhouette over a crimson lining, of a winged parachutist (my uncle had by this time moved to a parachute regiment). It’s inscribed ‘Port Said – 1947’, referring to what I believe was a transit camp for those getting ready for repatriation. On the back is a bas relief outline of the continent of Africa, also inscribed with the date. It fills me with wonder, and a certain melancholy, every time I look at it.
I saw your reference to the Guards Chapel yesterday. I am compiling biographies of those who died (see http://www.ystradgynlais.info/the-guards-chapel.html for list and my contact details) and have lodged the information with the Guards Chapel staff. If you’d be willing to let me have more information about your uncle, I’d gladly add it.
Best wishes
Jan Gore
As for the tides, high tide and low tide are surely local maxima and minima of the tidal process and therefore turning points in the strict calculus meaning of the term. The fact that it is impossible to predict their occurrence at any point is neither here nor there. See this Australian Bureau of Statistics article which mentions Lord Kelvin’s harmonic analysis prediction method (“Before it was introduced … the tides at Australia ports were a hopeless puzzle”) and “The Dodger” of Adelaide.
No reliable time although if they change the championship rules so as to require entrants to consume a bowl of soup whilst solving I banked some valuable practice today.
COD to browned off.
We set up a squash ladder at work last autumn which has now degenerated into a ladder of two – me (top) and the guy in second place who play each other most Wednesdays.
Re Snowdonia – I wonder if our setter is in fact an ultra-distance fellrunner not a squash player. Google the “Dragon’s Back Race” which started this morning at Conwy Castle in north Wales and traverses Snowdonia today. (I know three people competing in it and will be following their progress online.)
16 minutes, and relived I’m not the only one who was caught up for a long time on TAXI – I ended up going through the alphabet before spotting it. MULLIONED from wordplay, TATTOO and BROWNED OFF from definition
* the only way to do give wider deletion powers is to make all the report writers “administrators”. I believe linxit and I are the only (active) administrators at present.
* whether individual report writers get spam notification e-mails depends on their LJ settings
As mentioned on George’s recent Mephisto post, I still get (and delete) spam postings for a very old report of mine.
I’ve deleted the spam comments from this one, but the wider solution is for linxit to ponder (lucky boy …)
For what it’s worth, I’m against disabling anon comments as we get some nice contributions from lurkers at times. And even the not so nice ones can be fun. Not everyone wants to sign up with LJ.
Edited at 2012-09-04 12:30 am (UTC)
Link | Reply | Parent | Thread | Delete | Spam | Screen | Freeze | Track This
This isn’t too much of a hardship as a) most of us do just two posts a month, b) spammers are mercifully rare and c) we get an email each time anyone posts to a entry we have written.
I agree very strongly with kevin’s view that there should be no moves to do away with anon postings as that’s the easiest means there is of attracting new contributors.
Edited at 2012-09-04 07:16 am (UTC)
Having read through all the comments above, the best way forward I think is to give admin rights to all current bloggers but continue to allow anonymous posting. I’ve deleted dozens of spams myself in the last few weeks, mostly targeted at the advert for Anax’s birthday party and a blog of mine from 3rd March.
Not a difficult puzzle but good all round entertainment