Financial Times 16,524 by MOO

13 comments on “Financial Times 16,524 by MOO”

1. Agree with Loonapick about Tati. At first, I kept thinking of “tight” as worse for wear but knew there was no director named Tite! Smacked my forehead when I got this one very late in the game. I enjoyed the homophone in 1d though. Likewise, my first run-through yielded few write-ins but once I solved 11ac, progress was relatively smooth. It’s true that ‘about to’ in 2d seem redundant but it was another favourite of mine, along with 18ac, 13d and 19d. It’s only my second MOO but I must say I like his/her brand of witticisms. Thanks, Loonapick, for the blog – stupid of me to miss ‘minute’ for ‘tick’ and so 9ac was my last one in.

2. Thanks to Moo and loonapick. I chose TATI but came here for confirmation, and got the anagram for SCUTTLE though my printout had sin’, not sink. Both GO SPARE and ON THE NOSE in this sense were new to me,and I did not parse MILKSOP. INSPECTS is an old favorite.

3. I couldn’t get TATI to work either, though my disagreement was just based around the different way the A is pronounced in the two words. Like Diane B @1, I was tempted to put in ‘tite’.

   I enjoyed this apart from that one clue. A few ones we’ve had before like MISSUS and INSPECTS still took me too long, but the TRUMP one was good as was my favourite MILKSOP.

   Thanks to loonapick and Moo.

    

4. I really liked the wit in this puzzle. Very entertaining.

5. We enjoyed this and had no real problems except with 12ac, our LOI where we googled both ‘Tite’ and ‘Tyte’ before the penny dropped for TATI.  We take the point about pronunciation but we think that most English speakers would pronounce TATI and TATTY almost identically.

   Thanks, Moo and loonapick.

6. A mixed bag for me — enjoyed CONSORT, KEEL, EMPIRE, and BOOZE for their very clever surfaces. Agree with others on TATI. Don’t understand the definition for MISSUS — her indoors? In CAREFUL I get “a cruel” as part of the anagram but is it OK to use just one letter from fellow without indicating such? I think “on the rampage, a cruel fellow …” would be more precise but it doesn’t read as well. In MINUTES I’m uncertain how the verb form “takes note of” defines the noun MINUTES. Thanks Loonapick for parsing, esp. GODSEND and OMEGA. Thanks Moo for the humour.

7. Tony Santucci @ 6

   “Her indoors” is common UK slang for “The Wife”. It’s somewhat archaic.

   F = ‘fellow’ is a standard academic abbreviation, ie Fellow of a College.

   “minutes” in this case a verb: “We had a meeting and Joe Soap minuted it”.

   hth

8. Me @ 7

   Insert ‘is’ after ‘case’.

9. Thanks Simon — I never heard of “her indoors” nor the use of minute as a verb. I knew that the letter F stood for fellow but I thought entire words (not their abbreviations) were the grist for an anagrind.

10. How can anyone gripe about this puzzle when you’ve got the brilliantly funny surface in 1ac?

11. Help please – don’t understand the PO in 17d.  Is PO another word for chamberpot?

12. (Answered my own question, I see that po is indeed a word for chamberpot.)

13. A reasonably quick but enjoyable solve.  Think that today, I tended to see the definition and the hidden answers without taking that much note of what indicated that they were there – many times it is the other way around.  Loved the blog comment on GODSEND which I think was one of my favourite clues.

    BIGAMY raised a smile … and took a while to disassociate Boris from it – had been thinking SODOMY when I only had the M and was even more worried !  Was a clever clue when BOOZE pointed me in the right direction.

    Finished in the SE corner with the omnipresent crossword president, that GODSEND and CAREFUL (taking a while to see that it was the warning context of the word).

Comments are closed.