What a lovely puzzle that has everything and then some. No gimme clues at all as each one had to be unravelled painstakingly – thus the headline, inspired by a wee dram of Glen Morangie, probably the best-tasting single malt in the world. But when you are blogging this, it can also be agonisingly baffling to the end. Mercifully, I survived the ordeal. Indeed one of the best puzzles I have tackled this year.
ACROSS
1 FLOSS What a tichy start. F (fluorine) LOSS (reduction)
4 JACK SPRAT JACKS (lifts as in car for tyre-change) P (piano, soft) RAT (peach, grass, betray, inform on) For the uninitiated, a nursey rhyme which I learned more than half a century ago and can still remember
Jack Sprat could eat no fat
His wife could eat no lean
And so betwixt the two of them
They licked the platter clean
9 RUSSIFIED Ins of US’S (America’s) + IF (condition) + IE in RD (road, way) …. like the Russians, Cold War rivals of the USA
10 ARGUS ARGUE (debate) with East replaced by South, East’s opponent at bridge. Argus Panoptes (Argus “All-Eyes”), a giant with a hundred eyes, set to guard the heifer Io. His eyes were transferred after his death to the peacock’s tail.
11 X MARKS THE SPOT X (ten in Roman numeral) + *(MPS TAKE SHORT)
14 rha deliberately omitted
14 rha deliberately omitted
15 DECK QUOITS DECK (52 cards in a pack or deck) + ins of O (ring) in QUITS (even) for a game played with a rubber ring on a badminton court. I remember playing this in primary school.
18 LOBSTER POT *(PORt BOTTLES)
19 AGUE VAGUE (faint) minus V (very) for a fever with hot and cold fits
21 ILL-CONSIDERED ILL (diseased) C (cold) ON (leg side in cricket) SIDE (left perhaps) RED (angry-looking) with rash, adjective as def
24 LLAMA L (left) LAMA (priest) for a American transport animal of the camel family, also prized for its wool
25 TRIATHLON Ins of TH (Thursday) in TRIAL (test) + ON
27 FLINTLOCK F (female) LINT (dressing) LOCK (hair) for an ancient weapon defined misleadingly as piece
28 DIVVY Ins of VV (two volumes) in DIY (do it yourself, work about house) for slang word for dividend or share of profit with def split
DOWN
1 FOR EXAMPLE Ins of O (old) + REX (king) in F (loudly) + AMPLE (enough)
2 OPS HOPS (vaults) with H dropped in Cockney style for operations (facelifts, perhaps)
3 STINKY Ins of INK (something used to mark) in STY (pen). However, I am inclined to the neater parsing by jackkt below – ST (i.e Saint, Mark, for one), INKY (marked with a pen perhaps).
4 JOINT HEIR JOIN THE Inland Revenue (become a tax inspector)
5 CADGE Ins of D (anything from A to G can be clued as a note) in CAGE John Milton Cage Jr. (1912 –1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist
6 STAMP OUT Ins of AM (morning) P (first letter of period) in STOUT (beer) In the East, stout (Guinness, what else?) is stout and beer is Carlsberg or Tiger or San Miguel.
7 RIGHT WINGER *(WITH GINGER Runs)
8 TOSS Quick self-explanatory after “Heads or tails?“
12 AZERBAIJANI *(Judge IN Eastern BAZAAR) + I (one) When I solved this, I knew a pangram was in the making
13 ASCENDANCY AS (in part of, as in She acted as Joan of Arc) CE (Church of England) + ins of D (daughter) in NANCY (French city)
13 ASCENDANCY AS (in part of, as in She acted as Joan of Arc) CE (Church of England) + ins of D (daughter) in NANCY (French city)
16 KNOBSTICK Ins of *(BITS) in KNOCK (innings, supported by Chambers)
17 STALWART The said agent should stall (prevent or slow down or frustrate) WART, a small hard excrescence on the skin
20 EDITED Alternate letters from lewd Fifties do
22 OUTRO At Henley, famous for its regattas, to best is to OUT-ROW the competition. Take away the W for the answer. In music, the conclusion is the ending of a composition and may take the form of a coda or OUTRO.
23 Acrostic deliberately omitted
26 LAV LAVENDER (fragrant shrub) minus ENDER (closer) for the loo, the convenience, etc. You may be interested to know that the Chinese euphemism is literally wash hand room
++++++++++++++
Key to abbreviations
dd = double definition
dud = duplicate definition
tichy = tongue-in-cheek type
cd = cryptic definition
rev = reversed or reversal
ins = insertion
cha = charade
ha = hidden answer
*(FODDER) = anagram
yfyap88 at gmail.com = in case anyone wants to contact me in private about some typo
The OED entry for “piece,” which goes on for pages and pages, says it comes from medieval French: : “heavy firearm (c1490; 1456 in the phrase piece d’armes)”
I love etymology!
1.an obsolete gunlock in which the charge is ignited by a spark produced by a flint in the hammer
2.a firearm having such a lock
and I reckon ‘piece of old’ can refer to either (‘gunlock’ being defined as a firearms mechanism).
Actually, I don’t quite see where we’re disagreeing. 🙂
The best tribute I can pay this puzzle is that its trickery caused the solver (me, at any rate) to find trouble even with the simpler clues; thus, 1dn and 4ac were more resistant than multiword clues should be – 15 ac too!
Last in DIVVY, as I had put ‘loo’ instead of LAV. Another case in point…
Edited at 2013-06-13 04:28 am (UTC)
This took me 68 minutes without ever feeling stuck for a moment as during my thinking time my brain was racing away pursuing so many different possible lines of enquiry and there was no danger of boredom setting in.
As has already been said, this was a real treat though I’m grateful it didn’t come on my blogging day so that I would have felt under pressure to solve it quickly in order to write it up.
I made one error discovered during the post-solve review, having originally put STINKS at 3dn. I felt this might have been a deliberate bear-trap designed to catch would-be speed merchants. I think my explanation (posted above) is neater than Uncle Yap’s although his has merit too.
Edited at 2013-06-13 04:46 am (UTC)
Thought it was going to be a shoo-in when I got FLOSS straight off, but no way!
Lots needed further explanation, so many thanks Uncle Yap for those. I got ST + INKY for 3dn, but didn’t really appreciate the clever ‘Mark, for one’ bit of ST.
COD: JOINT HEIR. Or maybe DIVVY. Or AZERBAIJANI…
Guessing that it was a pangram (X and J early on) didn’t help that much, especially with AZERBAIJANI, as I imagined the def was Judge, because the need for a J had already gone, and an eastern bazaar can have a Q in its various spellings.
Not helped either by putting LOO (a bit of light relief?) on the basis that there had to be a fragrant shrub (worse that “plants”, shrubs) that went LOO?
Taxing stuff requiring much unravelling. My favourite today JOINT HEIR, not because it was particularly tricky but because it wasn’t, and made me smile.
The only clue I don’t like is 8D, the rest are all good and I’m glad I didn’t have to blog it. Thank you setter.
On edit: too relaxed to get worked up about the homo-what-not
Edited at 2013-06-13 09:04 am (UTC)
TonyW
COD to JOINT HEIR, simply because I have a weakness for clues like that.
As JACK and QUOITS suggested a pangram, confirmed by 11ac, it was easy to see 12dn
Other than that, though, a super puzzle. Lots of tricky stuff, and none of it because of obscurity. Hurrah!
Thanks for explaining the first two letters of ASCENDANCY. Didn’t have a clue.
A challenging puzzle with lots of tricky definitions and wordplay elements (‘peach’ for ‘rat’ was another new one for me).
As keriothe has said, there were some gimmes. For me they were 1ac (almost identical answer and definition in a recent Jumbo), 1dn, and therefore, because of the X, 11. 14 and 23 were also easy to spot. The rest was a fair struggle.
Edited at 2013-06-13 02:08 pm (UTC)
Is there a new setter on the team? We’ve had a few puzzles like this lately – some easy-ish ones to make you feel confident then one tricky devil after another and a couple of bear traps in the shorter clues.
I was sore tempted by ‘test’ but resisted – there’s a ‘vintage’ feel to that clue. And I arrived at STINKY the same way as Uncle Yap, though I’m sure jackkt is right about the parsing (which makes it my COD).
I was struggling before I nodded off, but that could have been the tiredness kicking in. After I woke up I was back to what has become my normal solving speed, but I was held up in the NE corner. I wasn’t looking out for a pangram so didn’t realise I was missing a ‘j’, although that’s no excuse for not seeing JACK SPRAT far sooner, and I only got that after finally seeing CADGE, having been fixated on the wrong kind of bums. Titter ye not, I meant tramps and backsides. That finally led to JOINT HEIR, and TOSS was my LOI with a shrug.
I was a bit thrown by the plural “daughters” in 13dn. Wouldn’t this normally imply more than one D?
I had a look at this clue again as it was causing some problems:
the idea (for what it is worth!) is simply that those calling tails may have their call landing up, thereby winning.
I understood this aspect of the clue and it didn’t cause me any problems when solving, but the more I look at it the less I can satisfactorily dismiss TEST as an inherently less valid answer. Probably just me!
In any event, thank you for the fun.
FOI Floss, LOI Lobster Pot. One error – I guessed Meet not Meek. Thought X Marks The Spot and Joint Heir were superb.
No objection whatsoever to TOSS (though I was tempted by TEST for a while simply because it fitted).
OUTRO appeared in No. 24,427 (6 Jan. 2010) as the answer to “Part that closes in flower turned yellowy colour (5)”.
All in all an exceptionally fine puzzle.
George Clements
TOSS is singular, represented by ITS (singular)
WINNERS (plural to be consistent with the normal ‘heads or tails’) with their call/s of “TAILS”
I fail to see any defect, especially when the whole clue has that ? at the end as well.