Financial Times 17,055 by STEERPIKE

15 comments on “Financial Times 17,055 by STEERPIKE”

1. Another enjoyable outing from Steerpike which proved a steady solve. Favourites were 2d and 14d. My LOI was BRAWN (for which I had PRAWN using ‘pan’ as the more likely ‘bin’ failed to come to mind).
   The proximity of LEO/ IDOL made me think of DiCaprio.
   My questions over the half-parsed 24a, 5d and 19d are answered here – thanks, Grant.
   Thanks also to Steerpike.

2. A most enjoyable puzzle, with, as you say, loonapick, some very pleasing surfaces (in particular, THRILLER, GARDEN PARTY, METHUSELAH, FLABBERGAST (lovely word), BLUE MURDER and AIM, which made me laugh. (I don’t mind having my mornings ‘disrupted’ thus. 😉 )
   I enjoyed the convoluted constructions and parsings, too.

   I haven’t encountered BRAWN since I was a child – not a happy memory.

   Many thanks to Steerpike for an excellent puzzle and to Grant for a blog to match.

3. Most enjoyable. I hadn’t heard of “Muse” in 22d, and I was trying to work out why Henry was “Has” in 5d. Everything else fell into place.

4. Eileen @2,
   I can imagine how unpleasant that dish was. Luckily, my association is mainly in the ‘brain v brawn’ description…wouldn’t want to eat either!

5. I do like it when Eileen does all the work for me! (I even agree with her thoughts on brawn) Thanks to her, Steerpike and Grant

6. Eileen et al:
   My Gran used to make brawn and very delicious it was and is. I love all offal, the cheapest and tastiest of meat cuts from andouillletes through haggis to brains-on-toast and devilled kidneys.
   You don’t know what you’re missing.

7. Said with tongue in cheek, perhaps, Grant?!

8. To Diane:
   Nope. ‘Tongue in Cheek’ in an excellent description of ‘Bath Chaps’, on of my favourite pork offal dishes. Gaufrid will probably be on soon to stop all this off-topic nonsense.

9. Ah, Grant Baynham @6: like the hero of Ulysses, by Joyce:

   “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

10. To Spooner’s @9:
    One of my favourite passages in literature.

11. Thanks to Grant for the blog and to everyone else who commented. Offally kind of you!!

12. All great fun but I made it harder for myself by hurriedly entering INTESTINES for 6d which had me looking for an odd type of celebration. Sorted it when I finally read the clue correctly.
    Thanks both.

13. Spooner’s Catflap @9
    I had the same thought as you since I’ve just reached p.600 of Ulysses. That passage you cite, and which Grant admires naturally, made me think, in turn, of Gargantua (Rabelais) – not just for the epicurean aspect, but the bawdiness and those freewheeling, lengthy lists.

14. Thanks Steerpike and Grant
    Went the PRAWN route too … dammit – having done that, wasn’t really impressed with a PAN being a container, although a bed-pan would have passed muster !! Still that answer was gastronomically much more appetising than the correct one.
    A good deal of the rest of the puzzle consisting of putting together a lot of charades in the word play, which I found quite entertaining. Hadn’t come across the saying ‘keep scrum’ before – but was happy to assume that it meant HUSH. Also didn’t know the HBO pay TV network until looking it up to confirm HOBO.
    Finished in the SE corner (regular pattern lately) with SWEEPSTAKE, HASTENED (nice use of AS=’playing’, I thought) and the SIT-DOWN strike as the last one in.

15. bruce@14 re 24ac: schtum is one of several English spellings of the German word stumm meaning “silent”. The initial S in the German word is pronounced like the English “sh”. In your comment, it seems to have suffered from an overzealous autocorrect.

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