I’ve blogged only four of these crosswords so far and think they’re improving. Initially there seemed to be a few rough edges, but now everything works well and I hardly make any criticisms here. People tend to point out long clues that rhyme or are in some way alliterative, but I often don’t notice these and a quick glance doesn’t show me anything in this crossword. What I do notice is that there is always so far as I can see a mention of Everyman somewhere in the clues; and I have noticed what has been mentioned, the obligatory first letters clue.
Definitions in crimson, underlined. Indicators (anagrams, hidden, first letters, etc) in italics.
| ACROSS | ||
| 1 | LLAMAS |
Tibetan monks said they might give you wool (6)
|
| “lamas” | ||
| 4 | LIMERICK |
Port, and a few lines of poetry (8)
|
| 2 defs. the port in Ireland, and the ‘There was a … of …’ five-line verse | ||
| 9 | MUTATE |
Change Greek character with brief thank-you note (6)
|
| mu “ta” te — te is a note as in do-re-mi etc | ||
| 10 | HATSTAND |
Roughly sand that item of furniture (8)
|
| *(sand that) | ||
| 12 | CREAM TEA |
Élite ate up scones etc. (5,3)
|
| cream (ate)* — élite = cream | ||
| 13 | REFUSE |
Pass up garbage (6)
|
| 2 defs, pronounced refUse and rEfuse | ||
| 15 | OVERABUNDANT |
More than one pastry poet’s finishing off – plenty, and then some! (12)
|
| over a bun Dant{e} — over = more than, a = one, bun = pastry. Dante is the poet — at least that’s my attempt at parsing a rather tortuous clue, which was my penultimate one in | ||
| 18 | WELSH TERRIER |
Hire wrestler for training, one with wiry hair (5,7)
|
| (Hire wrestler)* — a breed of dog with wiry hair | ||
| 21 | PRAGUE |
Exercise, having ingested rich sauce somewhere in Czech Republic (6)
|
| P(ragu)E | ||
| 22 | ORCHARDS |
Where to find fruit or vegetables? (8)
|
| or chards | ||
| 24 | CADENCES |
Around church, timeless descant arranged to offer musical endings (8)
|
| (descan{t})* round CE | ||
| 25 | ADVERB |
Commercial almost exceedingly bold: scandalously, perhaps? (6)
|
| ad ver{y} B — ‘scandalously’ is an example of an adverb | ||
| 26 | REMIXING |
Adjusting recordings of rock band Nine Inch Nails’ guitarists’ intros (8)
|
| R.E.M. IX I{nch} N{ails} g(uitarists} — two rock bands in the clue, R.E.M., of whom I’d heard, and Nine Inch Nails, of whom I hadn’t | ||
| 27 | EXETER |
Henry’s uncle, divorcee, chopped up tree (6)
|
| ex *(tree) — in Shakespeare’s Henry V the Duke of Exeter is King Henry’s uncle | ||
| DOWN | ||
| 1 | LAMB CHOP |
Writer of essays about jump cut (4,4)
|
| Lamb c hop — Charles Lamb (1775-1834) is the writer of essays that I’ve only ever come across in crosswordland (he used the name Elia, and that crops up from time to time) | ||
| 2 | ANTLERED |
The French tucked into wine after creepy-crawly with bony outgrowths (8)
|
| le in (ant red) — the ant is the creepy-crawly, le is ‘the’ in French, wine is just red. Reminds me of a wonderful story that Jack Bannister told on TMS years ago, about Fred Trueman in a restaurant making the wine waiter explain all about the wines and finally saying “I’ll have red”. | ||
| 3 | AUTUMNAL EQUINOX |
Menu with quail: aunt ordered, given steer, some time in September (8,7)
|
| (menu quail aunt)* ox — ox = steer in the agricultural sense | ||
| 5 | IRAN |
Country where Everyman was a contender (4)
|
| I ran — (for election) | ||
| 6 | EASTERN ORTHODOX |
Type of Christian festival given direction: do up old cross (7,8)
|
| Easter north (do)rev. o X — ‘up’ is OK in a down clue — nice because one can hardly avoid thinking of Christian festivals, but that’s wrong — I wonder if today is a reason for this clue | ||
| 7 | ICARUS |
Impetuous Cretan? Absolutely! Regretful under sun, primarily! (6)
|
| First letters &lit. — Icarus was a Cretan who in trying to escape flew too close to the sun; his wings, which were made of feathers and wax, melted, so that he fell into the sea and drowned | ||
| 8 | KIDNEY |
Pretend to have mounting appetite for offal (6)
|
| kid (yen)rev. — again, mounting is OK for reversal because it’s a down clue | ||
| 11 | DEBUSSY |
Composer‘s intro mostly sassy, regularly (7)
|
| debu{t} s{a}s{s}y — ‘mostly’ goes with ‘intro’ | ||
| 14 | EDITORS |
Who’s beginning to shun wordiest mess? (7)
|
| ({w}ordiest)*, the w being W{ho}, an &lit. because one of the tasks of an editor could be to shun a wordy mess | ||
| 16 | FIERCEST |
Most angry if secret gets out (8)
|
| (if secret)* | ||
| 17 | CROSSBAR |
To go all the way over pub – that’s some bike! (8)
|
| cross bar — cross = go all the way over, bar = pub — when it says ‘that’s some bike’ it has to be read as ‘that (the solution) is some part of a bike’ | ||
| 19 | SPICER |
Former US press secretary to add excitement to start of race (6)
|
| spice r{ace} — Sean Spicer (born 1971) was Trump’s Press Secretary until his predictable resignation | ||
| 20 | TANDEM |
One after another in accident and emergency (6)
|
| Hidden in accidenT AND EMergency | ||
| 23 | LEON |
Spanish kingdom‘s Christmas Rising (4)
|
| (Noel)rev. |
Very quick, starting with LLAMAS – having just read last week’s blog, that wasn’t hard! Two passes was enough to do it all – a very rare experience for me. REMIXING was the pick of them – great fun constructing it from the wordplay, and several earworms to boot. TANDEM was very nicely hidden. On my LOI – LIMERICK – I had the ‘port’ for L[eft] but couldn’t figure out the rest – and then the penny dropped. The paired clues are the long ones ending in OX – though, of course, the AUTUMNAL EQUINOX was only a couple of weeks ago, not in September (Oh, you live in the Northern hemisphere?). Nice that daylight savings changes – here and in the UK – mean the crossies and blogs are available earlier now… Thanks, Everyman and John.
Nothing too strenuous, but overall a fun puzzle, and met expectations. Especially enjoyed PRAGUE and EXETER, among others. I hope that today’s is just as entertaining. I’ll soon see …
A lovely puzzle which I managed to complete quite quickly and parse them all.
Like TassieTim @1 REMIXING made me smile putting it together
Other Favourites : ORCHARDS (I grow chard which helped), OVERABUNDANT, ANTLERED (didn’t know this was a word), EASTERN ORTHODOX
Thanks Everyman and John
Thanks for the blog, I agree that the clues are becoming much neater, not so much excessive use of punctuation and ……. It could almost be Custos again.
I forgot , Eastern orthodox and autumnal equinox are the rhymes and we also had our usual ” primarily ” .
I also liked ORCHARD and REMIXING. Any mention on Nine Inch Nails automatically makes me think of Johnny Cash and his great cover of their song ‘Hurt‘.
Thanks Everyman and John
I am usually OK with “close enough” for homonyms, but I have only ever heard the woolly South American animals pronounced ‘yamas’. I could see that 1ac had to be LLAMAS but entered it with teeth gritted. British English speakers surely don’t pronounce the Ls in tortilla the same way?
The equinoxes don’t get much attention here – there are 12 hours of daylight throughout the year and no spring and autumn (or summer and winter for that matter), so obviously no daylight saving time.
Thanks to Everyman and John.
The first clued LLAMA: two weeks past
The next appeared on Sunday last
And I will bet a silk pajama
Today we’ll see no third clued LLAMA
With apologies to Ogden Nash and thanks to Everyman and John
Penfold @ 6
I didn’t know that Hurt was a NIN song. I too love the cover by Johnny Cash which was used to great effect at the start of an episode of *Person of Interest* as background to a search for revenge.
Enjoyed the musical references – see also LAMB CHOP and, if you must, A flock of seagulls IRAN
For the 1st time I actually finished it : D ! (2 mistakes though -mutate and lamb chop)…all thanks to this enlightening blog, the insightful comments here and a LOT of perseverance…it basically follows me round all week!
Dante will be shocked to find himself with the gluttons in the third circle of hell wallowing in endless mire created by eternally falling rain, sleet, hail and snow, a reminder not to overegg today.
KLColin@7 If he had clued LLAMA “It sounds like Everyman is a South American animal”, more people would have complained.
PostMark@8 Nice Ogden Nash spoof.
KlColin @7; my usual comment about homophones – that you have to use British dictionaries as the standard in pronunciation. Thus, LLAMA is pronounced the same as LAMA over here.
Yes, this one was a distinct improvement over some of the previous Everyman efforts and very enjoyable. I particularly liked the ‘over a bun Dante’.
Thanks Everyman and John.
A very enjoyable puzzle. 16d FIERCEST was excellent. “Essayist” or similar for LAMB used to be a major crossword staple, but I haven’t seem it so much recently.
The surface of 17d conjured up the image of a very ambitious Evel Knievel type stunt!
Many thanks Everyman and John.
… of course I meant I haven’t seen it…
Well done Cara, I used to be exactly the same. Take all week to ( nearly ) finish the Everyman, check the answers in the paper and start again. I do not think blogs had even been invented then.
A challenge for Lord Jim if you read this – did Conrad use the word CAT in the sense of heave the anchor ? I rather think he did but have no way of checking except for scanning the books.
As is often the case, the opinions of the commenters are at variance to mine. When the puzzle is viewed as difficult, I find it easy and vice versa. I found this tricky with some definitions excessively vague. Like, is a lamb chop a cut of meat or just a cut ?. Also, “To go all the way over pub” = cross bar ?. A lot of pubs have a square bar area in the middle of the pub so am I going all the way by crossing the bar ?. I could go on but I won’t. I did finish this puzzle with much guesswork and working backwards but I didn’t enjoy it that much. I l did like REMIXING and ICARUS was very apt.
Thanks to John and E.
[Roz @ 16 – This is strictly yesterday’s business, but interested parties will by now have moved on from yesterday’s forum. Let’s hope the blog police are taking Easter Sunday off!
Those who do retain a lingering interest in cats, heaving and anchors might be interested in the Wikipedia article on ‘cathead’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathead‘) There it states that ‘the process of SECURING the anchor is called catting and fishing it.’ (my capitals) I looked this up some years ago when I came upon ‘cat-head’ in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’. I will leave it to Lord Jim to find it in Conrad, although with Conrad now out of copyright there are Project Gutenberg texts which can be word-searched using Ctrl+F.]
[ Sorry but I just thought to mention it when I saw his name here, and I am afraid all the techno-babble is wasted on me, I just have to look through the books. Even further back – character to mean a reference is used by Conrad in The End of the Tether , Chapter lX first page. ]
[Roz @19 – Gosh, that is going back – to International Women’s Day, as I recall, to which my modest contribution was citing a use of ‘character’ in Mary Wollstonecraft. So thank you. And save ‘sorry’ for the blog police if they catch up with us – I am entirely comfortable with breaching protocols and have had my collar felt before.]
[ As I recall , you came up with the idea of the usage in Victorian literature and I remembered it being used by Robert Tressell and Conrad but I could not recall the particular details. ]
[Roz @16: I’ve put a comment on General Discussion.]
I think it would naive to assume there is only one Everyman setter, but this definitely came from the better end of the scale regardless.
Having the two long answers ending with X was a brave piece of work indeed: EASTERN ORTHODOX and REMIXING were excellent clues.
Davy@17 Crossbar is a bit strange, isn’t it. Perhaps Everyman at first meant to reference Crossing the Bar as a metaphor for death in Tennyson’s beautiful poem but then opted for something less esoteric.
I enjoyed the Nine Inch Nails clue, and the WELSH TERRIER brought back happy memories of the one my aunt and uncle owned: a nice little dig like a miniature Airedale. And there were none of those blasted italics filling the screen with this and that every time you looked at the clue – though there is a particularly egregious example in this week’s.
“span” this and “span” that of course – but if you type it, it vanishes. Why can’t the Guardian site manage the vanishing trick?
@16 Roz 🙂 thanks…there r still plenty of times I can’t even understand the answer WITH the explanation!!
Davy @17. You’re making the mistake of reading the parts of the wordplay as though they belong together. It’s not ‘go all the way over pub’=CROSSBAR, it’s ‘go all the way over’=CROSS (a river, for example); then ‘pub’=BAR; *now* put them together.
With regard to your problem with ‘cut’ when ‘cut of meat’ would be more accurate, I think the setter is entitled to make the definition a little vague for the purpose of, firstly, not making the clue so obvious that we don’t have to think about it, and second, to potentially mislead us into thinking about different types of cut.
I’m sorry cara @27 you implied that you still can’t understand some explanations. I try to explain by initially giving an algebraic expression that tells you what is going on, and then if necessary explaining further (often in blogs you see both at the same time, but I feel that clouds the issue). In the preamble you are told what the various codes mean: italics for indicators, different colours for various things. But if I fail then you must say specifically what the problem clues are.
But in my experience of asking questions in these circumstances, the very act of expressing one’s problems tends to make them clear.
As John said, just ask for more help Cara.
The people on here and the bloggers are very kind and always willing to explain things further.
@29 thanks John-that was very much frustration directed at my own ignorance/ incomprehension : )
sheffield hatter @28 Thanks for setting me straight. Maybe I’m getting too old for this crossword lark.
Davy @32. There are some days when I get sucked into the clue and get stuck reading the surface meaning. Other days the cryptic meaning stands out like a sore thumb. Just keep plugging away…
In 1 down I can see that “writer of essays” = LAMB but I didn’t understand how “CHOP” was clued by “about jump”. Otherwise I have been really enjoying these Everyman crosswords since I started them about a month ago!
The Latin word ‘circa’, which = ‘about’, can be abbreviated to either ‘c’ or ‘ca’. To hop is to jump.
Thank you John, it all makes sense now!
Easy puzzle this week.
Favourite: LAMB CHOP (loi).
New for me: the fact that LImerick is a port.
Thanks, Everyman and blogger.
I too thought this was easier that usual. 20ac was well hidden, even by the definition. Thanks John & Everyman.
Messed NE corner by having Eastern rather than Western. Sort of fitted with Easter.
I thought this was a bit harder than of late too.
What are you on about Barry? It is Eastern Orthodox.