Everyman 4,009/20 August

33 comments on “Everyman 4,009/20 August”

1. Thanks Pierre. All the trademark clues are present, but Everyman is shaking things up with a variation on “primarily” at 10a.

2. Thank you Pierre.
   I liked the first letters, cad COWS. Ticks also for my LOI, ONES, and CATCH ON and PROFITEERS.
   Not sure if the nameless poet in 1d is really fair. Unless you know the poet D – T – , and where the name has been dropped from, it’s pretty difficult to solve, or search, using wildcards in various positions. Is Dante included in British school curricula these days?

3. Solved this much more quickly than usual.

   Favourites were: TRUMPETERS (well hidden), SCATTERBRAIN ( only the second time I have seen SCAT as a kind of jazz and both times in crosswords), INCH, LIBERATION (love the word libation), IN STITCHES (made me laugh), COMPLAISANT, ONES (very neat)

   Thanks Everyman and Pierre

4. Fairly straightforward from what I recall. I also very much enjoyed this week’s primarily. In particular the @lit appealed to my vegetarianism. Thanks Pierre and Everyman.

5. Thanks for the blog, I thought the standard was just right for this one, a lot of clear brief clues with good variety of different techniques. Fiona@3 has picked my favourites, I will add MICHAEL CAINE which gave a very good rhyming pair.
   PDM@2 I doubt that Dante has ever been studied in UK schools but I may be wrong , Dante’s Inferno does seem to be part of general knowledge for most people but only as a title.
   Does Wagyu steak come from COWS or bulls or both ?
   The definition for 15Ac seems a bit dodgy.

6. Thanks Pierre and Everyman. That was a gentle start to last Sunday.
   PDM@2. I thought Dante was as fair as many other poets / authors / artists that appear in crosswords. As Roz@5 says, Dante’s Inferno is a widely heard of work, and is the reason I’d heard of him. Certainly I doubt whether people abandoned hope at getting an answer.

7. Roz@5. I’m a butcher’s daughter but, apart from understanding how Wagyu are bred and fed, and the marbling, I’ve never actually looked any further. I know you don’t do links so I’ll answer your question below.
   Sorry Paul T. @4. Please look away now.

   A vast majority of Wagyu meat produced in Japan is either from heifers (young virgin females) or steers (castrated males). Between the two, heifers are more highly prized for their tenderness and silky texture. Just like humans, the Wagyu males tend to be more masculine, so the meat feels slightly tougher and chewier.

   Also, they have longer lifespans than ordinary cattle, which significantly improves flavour. Wagyu cows live for about 30 months, sometimes 35. American cows, by comparison, are slaughtered at 15-22 months. (Obviously they would normally have a longer lifespan if they weren’t slaughtered.)

   Paul T, I’m thinking of joining you.

8. Enjoyed this one and agree just the right standard. Favourite TRUMPETERS -well hidden! and COWS. Thanks Everyman and Pierre.

9. Crispy@6. 🙂

10. Another non-meat-eater* who was amused by COWS. I found this an easy solve with several grins along the way.

    * living near what was the largest calf market in Europe for a while and not liking the taste of most meat.

    Thank you to Pierre and Everyman.

11. Thanks PDM@7 , so the clue is fine. I had it in my head that beef comes from bullocks , it is our name for steers , so male.

12. That’s interesting Shanne@10. When I was pregnant with my son 43 years ago and I had a fridge full of grain fed beef, thanks to my father, I couldn’t eat it and lived off eggs an oranges. Also was living in an inner city melting pot with restaurants lining the streets. Had to cross the road to get away from the smell of cooked meat. TMI?

13. Roz @11, it depends on the sort of cattle: the ubiquitous Friesian herds are used for both beef and dairy, so only male calves become veal or beef, the females are needed for more milk – no milk without calves. In beef herds, Aberdeen Angus and Wagyu, the calves are often raised as suckler calves, and both heifers and steers can be eaten – it depends on how many are needed for the next breeding cycle, but more male than female get culled as a herd only needs one bull. Dairy cows, like Jerseys, the male calves may not be worth raising – according to Gerald Durrell it’s how he fed his carnivores in Jersey Zoo.

    Pdm@12 – I have never really liked meat much, choose fish or vegetarian given any choice, but seeing that market week in, week out I got very picky about sources of meat.

14. This puzzle seemed easier than the usual Everymans.

    New for me: EVERTON football club (thanks, google).

    Favourites: INCH, COMPLAISANT (loi).

    Thanks, both and thanks also to paddymelon for the info about beef and veal (which I have chosen not to eat since I was 18 years old). Also I never liked the taste of cow milk since I was in primary school, so I never drank it since then. But I do love butter, cream, cheese, yoghurt etc!

15. Fairly straightforward, but why “Starts to eat” at 17a, rather than simply “Eats”?

16. poc, I think the sense is that chewing is the first stage of eating; you haven’t really ingested food till it’s gone down. Cue parents who tell their children to chew 28 times before swallowing.

17. Loved this Everyman as a newbie. The only ones I didn’t get were SCATTERBRAIN and COMPLAISANT, my favourites were ONES and SUPERSONIC. Loved all the anagrams as well.
    Thanks Everyman and Pierre.

18. Roz @5 et al: If you have a replacement rate of 25% ( fairly common in dairy herds, but extremely high for sucklers ) then half your heifers would go for beefWe’re talkin prime beef here, barren cows also go for beef in some form or other.

19. Just because Dante isn’t much in school curricula these days, that doesn’t stop him from being probably the most common poet used in crosswords. Not only that, but he’s surely part of everyone’s general knowledge even if they haven’t read him (although for people who say this sort of thing ‘general knowledge’ is simply what they know). Nice to see a variation on ‘primarily’.

20. Here’s Nina Simone singing FEELINg GOOD, scat singing at the end https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHs98TEYecM

21. Actually, 21d SIKH is pronounced “sick,” because Hindi has the same short I vowel English has. I’m assuming everybody pronounces it “seek” because 1) it’s foreign so we have to change the vowel and 2) it’s too confusing to call all those people “sick.”

    Thanks Everyman and Pierre.

22. Failed the SE corner 🙁

23. The Inferno is commonly read, is never out of print, and was/is hugely influential on pretty much all of Western literature. It isn’t taught in English (or American) schools for several reasons, the biggest of which is that there just isn’t time. But that doesn’t mean, in any respect, that a well-educated person can’t be expected to have heard of Dante.

    One of the poems I liked to use when I taught introductory literature was Frost’s Acquainted with the Night. It’s a sonnet, with fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. But it’s also a terza rima, with rhyme scheme aba bcb cdc ded ee. Know who else used terza rima? Dante, in his famous tour of hell. Think Frost hadn’t thought of that? Then you don’t know Frost. And this poem is its own sort of tour of hell, in a way.

    Separately, I once came up with this clue: Scatter articles across the Rio Grande (4), for the scatter so famous for it that she needs no last name.

24. Ms Fitzgerald was certainly a talent, mrpenney. And a gift to setters.

25. mrpenney @23. See also Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, which consists of five terza rima sonnets, but apologies if you already knew that.

26. SC @25: I didn’t know that. Shelley was consistently my least favorite Romantic poet, so I’ve read embarrassingly little of his work. [To be fair, he was also a victim of the graduate-school fatigue effect. My Romanticism seminar took the Big Six in the order Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and by the time we got to Shelley I was writing three term papers, sleeping like three hours a night, skipping all the secondary reading, and reading only enough of the primary readings to not sound like an idiot in seminar.]

27. Pierre@16: it’s a minor quibble, but I dislike redundancy in clues. “Starts to” adds nothing to the sense. One could even argue that chewing occurs after biting and so isn’t even the first stage of eating. Anyway, ’nuff said.

28. I found this fairly easy for an Everyman, but maybe I was just having a good day. I’m not complaining in any case: I found it very enjoyable.

    I suppose that the PERCUSSION / SUPERSONIC anagram is a chestnut, but I don’t remember seeing it before, and it’s a very satisfying anagram. Other favorites were the variation on the “primarily” clue (10ac) and 23ac (INCH).

29. Finished in one sitting, really enjoyable! Re DANTE – definitely still valid as a poet. MICHAEL CAINE & SCATTERBRAIN our faves. Great crossword, thanks all!

30. Got stopped by 22 down. Had no idea that 1 £ notes were no longer in use.

    Aside from that I liked this puzzle, especially 9 across. In respect of the comments from Paul T@4, paddymelon@12, et al.: I tried to be a vegetarian for about a year, a long while ago, but every time I smelled meat cooking I would start to drool disgustingly. All my friend urged me to go back to being an omnivore, so I did. And felt much healthier for it.

31. Agree, this was a bit easier than some we’ve had recently. No bad thing.

32. Much easier than normal.
    As to Wagyu- after living in Japan for 14 years I never really liked it even though the beasts are fed beer and massaged. Anf the Wagyu is overpriced.

    I didn’t likle 1D

33. Cruised this. As easy as the Black Caps run chase but we did not lose a wicket.
    Definitely a bit easier.
    Thought the tennis player was the famous kiwi player Kelly Everton but there you go. Maybe I made up his spelling.
    Go an NZ vs England final.

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