A rather more challenging Monday puzzle, highlights of which were an excellent cryptic clue (9) and a weird Gaelic word which did for me (21). 35 minutes for all bar these two, a few more to get the long down and then resort to aids when I couldn’t quite believe that the unknown one could be what it turned out to be.
If anyone has not tried Jumbo 1000, it’s not your average jumbo. Top notch, in fact, with exactly the right amount of theminess.
Across
1 MOPPET – MOP+PET; cross between a poppet and a muppet?
4 EMERSION – EMERS(I)ON
10 SEMICOLON – SE (Kent) + MI COL (intelligence officer) + ON; definition is stop. A kind of synecdoche as one of the home counties stands for the whole.
11 DRESS – double definition; it’s October and dress meaning ‘come into military line’ is already starting to take on a chestnutty flavour.
12 ERA – ‘are’ reversed
13 ELABORATION – ELA(A ROB reversed)TION; the definition is ‘having added detail’, which is a gerund and therefore nouny enough for many, if not all, I suspect.
14 MOWGLI – MOW + GLI[b]
16 ENTREES – [stor]E + N[ew] + TREES; the question mark will save DBE-phobes from tearing out their remaining hair.
19 FIRE+DOG – a ‘great’, AKA grate, support. If you think this is weak, all I say is, have a hearth…
20 MAYHEM – no need for the wordplay here if you have the checkers; for the record, it’s AY+HE in M.M. Governors as well as ambassadors are HEs apparently.
22 ORTHODONTIC – cordintooth*
25 omitted
26 EDITH – hidden; the Sitwells are one of Crosswordland’s most eminent families, even if youngest sibling Sacheverell rarely gets a look in.
27 EDELWEISS – WE inside DELIS all inside ES; I hope thou ‘art’ able to cotton on to the French bit.
28 TIGERISH – E in is+right*; hands up anyone else who was working around the Tamil insurgents? No, I thought not.
29 ADVENT – A(DV)ENT; there are other departments in most hospitals besides the ENT, but not always in Crosswordland.
Down
1 MUSSEL – LESS & UM reversed.
2 POMP+A+DOUR – bouffant hairdo favoured by among others Marie Antoinette when she still had a head and Elvis.
3 EMCEE – E[nglish] + ME around CE; verbal use of ’emcee’.
5 MIND OVER MATTER – MIND (object to) + MATTER (question) about OVER (past).
6 RADIANTLY – (RA + tinylad)*
7 ICENI – I + (IN+CE reversed)
8 NOSINESS – NO[i]SINESS; the most famous bearer of this epithet may or may not have been Aloysius but he was definitively ‘nosey’.
9 FLOATING VOTERS – cryptic clue and a jolly good one.
15 GODMOTHER – GO (correspond=match) + DM (Deutsche Mark) + OTHER.
17 EXECUTIVE – EX + E + CUTI(V[eal])E.
18 AFFOREST – offers+at*
21 WHISHT – WHIS(H)T; had nae the courage of my convictions to put this in.
23 omitted – this one you should have been inking out.
24 CAWED – sounds like chord; I wasted time muttering about yet another clue where I had to arrange a random selection of letters from A to G, but the setter, as so often, had the last laugh.
Have to disagree on at least two points: the cryptic def at 9dn is terrible and the question-mark at 16ac will not save this quite hairy DBE-phobe from complaining. Lastly: not too happy with “remaining”=OTHER at 15dn.
Grouch over … the other (remaining?) bits were fine and a welcome change from the usual Monday fare.
On edit and re-read of the blog: took the “having” at 13ac as a linkword and the def as “added detail”.
Edited at 2012-10-08 03:14 am (UTC)
I’ve no problems whatsoever with OTHER for remaining. It’s in Collins with the example “I’ll read the other sections of the paper later”.
I took ages to get started and then progress was slow but mostly steady though I did reach the stage a couple of times when I wondered if I would finish without resorting to aids.
One of my blogs from last year was spammed incessantly yesterday by “jokes” in cyrillic script. In the end I put a freeze on further contributions to put a stop to it.
Edited at 2012-10-08 06:07 am (UTC)
Edited at 2012-10-08 06:41 am (UTC)
http://www.rampantscotland.com/poetry/blpoems_imphm.htm
Edited at 2012-10-08 07:25 am (UTC)
Edited at 2012-10-08 08:41 am (UTC)
http://www.livejournal.com/shop/renameaccount.bml
Cost ya $15 but.
Not to mention that you do occasionally get real, readworthy comments weeks or months after the original post, which otherwise I would never see..
Edited at 2012-10-09 11:53 am (UTC)
Edited at 2012-10-08 07:56 am (UTC)
Dr Cameron: Dinna be silly Janet and take yr tit out of the porridge.
Forgot to add for bar crossword solvers, this week’s AZED is good value
Edited at 2012-10-08 08:40 am (UTC)
Whisht! Lads, haad yor gobs,
An Aa’ll tell ye’s aall an aaful story
Whisht! Lads, haad yor gobs,
An’ Aa’ll tell ye ‘boot the worm.
Having said all that, I enjoyed this.
Andy B.
Many thanks for an amusing blog and commentary today.
Cheers
Chris Gregory.
I found it all pretty easy but was stuck at the end with the SEMICOLON / FLOATING VOTERS cross. I do believe that SEMICOLON was one of those British clues I’m fated to never get. The only part of the charades I got was “cricket side” = ON. I must try to remember ‘Kent’ = SE in the future. Are there other such place names I should be on the lookout for?
The other one I missed was WHISHT. I understood the wordplay and wrote it down, then rejected it as not looking like an English word. Looks like I was wrong!
The major contenders from the south-east (Kent) clockwise are: Surrey, Berkshire (Berks*), Buckinghamshire (Bucks), Hertfordshire (Herts) and Essex. It should be noted that Middlesex exists in a kind of limbo, although the county council was abolished some years ago.
* abbreviations in brackets
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