Financial Times 17,097 by JASON

10 comments on “Financial Times 17,097 by JASON”

1. Lots to like in this puzzle from Jason, including CRACKPOT (surface), UNIVERSITY (nicely misleading wordplay), TIRAMISU and other lovely words with which to conjure like KICKSHAW. 3D was my top pick.
   I failed, however, on DISTAL.
   Thanks to Jason and PeeDee for explaining the latter. I’d go along with your explanation for 14a.

2. I enjoyed this, and managed to solve all with minimal help from the internet. I wated a lot of time trying to think of an anagram of “frosts do” in 1a, and smiled when I eventually got it. I evntually discovered that “chunter” is “British informal”, which is why I was surprised it wasn’t in OED online. New words for my lexicon are “palestra”, “haw” as a fruit, “kickshaw”, “birch” meaning “flog”, “distal”, “pellucid” and “wain”. I always thought of culling as removing items from a list, but I see it has another meaning. In 5d I’m not sure how “count” equals “list”. I had “sprout” for 6d for a while, until I realised none of the intersecting clues fitted. Just “C” for “college” in 3d was disappointing. I’m sure it’s legit, but the list of single letters for words is getting awfully long, methinks. The right reverend in 15d stumped me too.

   But all good fun, thanks Jason & PeeDee.

3. Geoff,
   I thought of ‘ I count/list someone as a close friend’.

4. I failed on 6a, entering an unparsed “Rugrat” for ‘Kid’ as the def. I’d never heard of KICKSHAW or PALESTRA and put in END POINT without understanding it, so all in all I found this pretty difficult.

   Still, a nice pick-me-up with TIRAMISU to finish off.

   Thanks to Jason and PeeDee

5. For 6a, I dallied with both SHABBY (but couldn’t think of a game called ‘sh’ to go with ‘baby’) and later RUGRAT, thinking RU and/or TAG for ‘game’ but didn’t know what to do with a stray ‘r’ and that ‘unkempt’ kept nagging at me. It was ‘tag’ that got me there eventually.

6. Thanks Jason for the challenge. Even though I threw in the towel with a half dozen left to solve I enjoyed this due to clues like END POINT, TEA CHEST, and RAGTAG. The latter dawned on me when I stopped thinking that the definition was “kid with” and the wordplay was an anagram of “game is.” Thanks PeeDee for the blog.

7. An enjoyable solve. When we got AMARETTO and TIRAMISU in quick succession we wondered if there was going to be a theme of Italian food and drink or, with KICKSHAWs and RAITA, just exotic fare. There’s also ROCKET but that’s hardly exotic these days.
   We had a slightly unsatisfying RAGBAG for 6ac; it does just about parse, thinking of a bag of game (e.g. pheasant, etc) and that an unkempt person’s appearance might be something of a ragbag. Don’t know why RAGTAG didn’t occur to us – D’oh!
   We think PeeDee’s explanation of END POINT is about right. For instance, in a chemical reaction the end point is when all of a particular substance has been used up; this is often accompanied by a visible change in, e.g., colour and that change can be said to be ‘pre-figured’ as the end point. That’s a bit of an over-simplification but no-one wants a chemistry lecture at this time of night.
   LoI was PALESTRA which we worked out from the anagram fodder and crossing letters; we had heard of it but needed to check the definition in Chambers.
   Favourites were UNIVERSITY and APARTMENT. Oh, and 20dn was nice, too (pun intentional).
   Thanks, Jason ands PeeDee.

8. Thanks Jason and PeeDee
   I notice that the difficulty factor for this setter has continued on the higher end compared to when he first began with the number of more unusual words increasing as well. Today KICKSHAW, CHUNTER, DISTAL (although on looking up its meaning, vaguely recall murmurings amongst dentist and dental nurses mentioning it) and PALESTRA were new learnings whilst needing to confirm that TABERNACLE was actually a tent. Thought that CRACKPOT was amongst the better clues.
   Finished in the NE corner with ROCKET and that KICKSHAW before tidying up with what was a tricky WAIN.

9. Very good puzzle. Thank you Jason and Peedee.

   A possible quibble:

   Should 1A be “frost does this…”
   aligning with ‘ Crack pot’
   “..frost do this…” seems to lead to ‘crack pots’.

10. Hi Hugh, something similar crossed my mind. But I think frosts (instances of frost) can crack pot (the material pots are made of). It sounds odd, but I could not think of a definitive reason why it cannot be allowed grammatically.

    Maybe one frost is not up to the job, but a succession of frosts will crack pot.

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