Financial Times 17,147 by BASILISK

18 comments on “Financial Times 17,147 by BASILISK”

1. Thanks for the blog, a lot of neat clues, GREEN REVOLUTION was very clever.
   Your BLUEBIRD is fine, it is a bird from the USA often clued as a singer or winger.
   For DRESSER I had TREAT=DRESS and casualty ( A and E in uk ) is ER in USA .
   For SCULLERY I had SCULLER is a person sculling in a small boat, so sculler-y is like a sculler.

2. Missed a bit DRESSER is the person who prepares the cast ( actors ) in the theatre.
   A lot of deception in this one a cast also possibly a plaster cast.

3. Had the same parsing as Roz for DRESSER. Don’t have any issue with your parsing for SCRIBE. I think ‘crib’ as a verb for ‘copy’ is common parlance but I may be wrong. Certainly was for me growing up.

4. Great clues ! Its a bit much asking for PINK GIN and BLACK RUSSIAN in this grid!
   Terrific puzzle. Witty And unpretentious.
   Thanks JC and Turbolegs

5. Not as tricky as some of this setter’s crosswords but a good work out for the cryptic grey matter

   I presume this time the thing he wants us to spot in the finished grid are the colours?

   Thanks very much to Basilisk and Turbolegs

6. Good spot, CrypticSue, and I agree it was not as hard as I was expecting, though still a challenge.
   That was my parsing too for the theatrical DRESSER which was clever. Also liked SCALED, the misleading ‘spat out’ in 1a and those two wingers … in the wings.
   Thanks to a somewhat merciful Basilisk today and to Turbolegs especially for parsing SCRIBE and BLUEBIRD.

7. I have an issue with 6D – if I understand it correctly: if “facilitator of rally” is a reference to tennis then surely that refers to a tennis racquet? I see no indication of homophones in the clue.

   Apropos of nothing, here in Australia, Manchester United is about to take on (and thrash) Melbourne Victory.

8. Good mini-theme of the colours, though I couldn’t spot any others hidden away. I think “racquet” and RACKET are alternative spellings for the tennis equipment, at least according to Chambers, Peter @7.

   My favourites were the self-referential SCALED, and GREEN REVOLUTION, even if I did miss the reverse anagram aspect and parsed it just as a cryptic def.

   Thanks to Turbolegs and Basilisk

9. Thanks WP re 6D. I was born and raised in England before being dragged off to Oz by my parents when I was sixteen. I have read many references in this forum to “Chambers” but I cannot recall this being a reference work when I was growing up – many decades ago. I thought that the OED was the definitive reference book for all things proper; at least that is what I remember from my grammar school days.

10. I am with you on this Peter but this battle has been lost long ago. Chambers is now accepted as the authority in crossword land . However ,I still rely on the Shorter OED although Shorter is a misnomer with two thick volurmes.

11. Another who uses the OED primarily but Neo’s use of the Shorter Collins yesterday was greatly appreciated.

12. Thanks Basilisk. I found this on the difficult end of the Basilisk spectrum needing a word fit for SCAPEGOAT, DRESSER, and REDSTART; I never figured out 2d so thanks Turbolegs for explaining. I did find many of the clues clever including LEOPARD, IDIOCY, AMORAL, NEMESIS, YELLOW SUBMARINE, SHANDY, and LOCAL. I looked for a theme or nina beyond the obvious colours but never saw one.
    [Diane @11: I thought Neo’s clue using the Shorter Collins was brilliant.]

13. [Slightly off-topic: I’m a big Chambers fan, Peter @9. I particularly like the occasional whimsical or amusing definitions which are one of its signature features. It’s best to come across these serendipitously rather than to have them all listed out, but if you can get your hands on a hard copy or the app (you need The Chambers Dictionary (not available for free online) rather than the Chambers 21st Century (which is available for free online)) the definition for “nerd” is particularly good. I won’t spoil things by suggesting any more.]

14. Thanks Basilisk, Turbolegs
    Can anyone help me get my head around the GREEN REVOLUTION? I am reading ‘ENERGY [suppl]Y requires green revolution [i.e. an anagram of green]’, but I can’t see how we get from energy to energ.

15. James @14. The way I read the clue (essentially as in the blog) is that ‘supply ultimately’ = ‘y’ and this ‘depends/hangs at the end of’ ENERG to give ENERGY and ENERG is ‘green revolution’. I’ve probably made it more confusing.

16. FWIW, my rather aged Shorter OED also gives “racket” as “a bat used in rackets, tennis, etc.”, with usage in this sense from 1500.

    James@14: the anagram indicated by “revolution” is of green, obviously, but then in order to get energy you need to add back supplY ultimately – sorry, not a very clear explanation but the best I can do. You have to implement the green revolution and then go back to the clue to get the Y is how I look at it.

17. Thanks both, think I have caught up.
    ‘Energy is the word that the last letter of supply is at the end of having made an anagram of green’ is how I’m translating it now.

18. A nice challenge from Basilisk; we thought there might be a theme or nina as there usually is in his puzzles elsewhere as Serpent, but we failed to spot it.
    We did see what was going on in 2dn but couldn’t quite work out the parsing, but we think we’ve got it now.
    BLUEBIRD was our LOI. We worked out that ‘singer’ in this case meant a bird but couldn’t think what ‘misspent’ indicated – a penny-drop moment when we realised. We were partly fazed, too, in that the spelling ‘blue’ is given in Chambers for the word meaning squander (= misspend) and we have encountered ‘blued’ as the past tense. In which case the clue could quite easily have read ‘US singer to misspend time in prison’ with no need for a homophone indicator.
    Plenty to enjoy, though. Favourites were LEOPARD and EXUBERANT (Interesing how quickly ‘Uber’ has become a Crosswordland taxi!)
    Thanks, Basiklisk and Turbolegs.

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