Typical fair Rufus fare. A couple of nice turns of phrase (e.g. 24D), one Shakespearean reference that had me checking Hamlet (22D) and a wordplay whose decoding had me going for a bit (7D). So the downs have it – and I’m a bit surprised that Rufus let DOWN appear twice in the puzzle (18D and 25A).
I’m using our new anagram indicator: fodder* means anag(“fodder”)
Across
| 9 | IN A WAY – nice contrast between IN (home) and AWAY. |
| 11 | ARM+AGED+DON – One of the many ways to deconstruct ARMAGEDDON – our fellow is DON and he’s AGED. |
| 14 | CLO(THIN)G – Hamper shifts from picnic basket noun to the obstructionist verb CLOG. |
| 15 | REP(LET)E – peer* contains LET |
| 20 | FELO DE SE – suicide (from the Med. Latin which I didn’t know) so indeed an extreme form of self-effacement. Not sure about the wordplay unless it’s self* + some form of “does”: any offers? |
| 22 | BREWED=”brood” – double meaning and homophone. |
| 23 | EVAPORATED – nice double meaning and cryptic definition for a kind of milk. |
| 24 | DID+O – ref Dido, Queen of Carthage. I didn’t know about the Troy association but I knew that Dido was an ancient Greek type (helped by the fact that my best friend at age 6 was called Dido). |
| 26 | LAID DOWN – double meaning: you lay down the law and you lay down your arms. First DOWN. |
Down
| 2 | OF+FA – nice wordplay (FA is “Football Association” here) and definition since King Offa built dykes in olden times. |
| 4 | GRIM(A+C)E – C for a hundred is a frequent cryptic visitor. |
| 5 | DING-DONG – Seems like a double meaning: a “ding-dong” contest goes back and forth and it’s the sound of a bell. |
| 6 | HARD CHEESE – Groan… brie is soft. |
| 7 | LAG+O+ON – LAGs go slow. And you’ve got nothing (O) ON if you’re not wearing your swimsuit. Took me quite a bit to decode the wordplay. |
| 13 | OIL COMPANY – cute cryptic definition |
| 18 | STEP DOWN – (Don swept)* — the other DOWN. |
| 19 | SE(A)TTLE – Where I live in Washington State. |
| 22 | BODKIN – A dagger: ref Hamlet Act III Scene 1 in the To Be or otherwise soliloquy – he considers using one to put an end to it all. |
| 24 | DUDS – double meaning: last I filled in and my fav clue. I liked the meaning shift of “assumes” (meaning “to wear”) – I had assumed something else. |
What a disaster. I didn’t know ‘felo de se’ or ‘bodkin’, wasn’t convinced about ‘laid down’ so didn’t write it in and couldn’t get ‘Seattle’ because I was fooled by the Guardianism ‘payout’ and was convinced that 20ac had to end ‘me in’, ‘me up’ or ‘me it’. I ended up guessing ‘zero me in’, ‘instate’ and ‘took down’ and left 22dn blank, so a whopping 4 mistakes.