Private Eye (Cyclops / 741) Loosely Hacking

10 comments on “Private Eye (Cyclops / 741) Loosely Hacking”

1. Thanks for the blog and the joke. I thought the clues were very good but perhaps a little subdued for Cyclops. Truss finally gets a mention and Brian is back.
   I liked PHONE HACKING , many cases are still being settled but NI will not let any go to court from The Sun, at least it is costing them a fortune. ENNOBLING was also very cynical.
   I thought FULL-DRESS was a military term but I suppose it is any sort of ceremony. In 7 years at Oxford I never heard it once, sub fusc was the stupid term used.

2. [beermagnet, I haven’t done the crossword yet but your intro caught my eye and the joke below made me laugh.
   I did know full-dress in various contexts but not at university. In my uni days in the early 70s in Oz, still holding on to British traditions, we had to wear academic gowns to dinner on campus, and the lecturers had to wear them to lectures. The rebels amongst them wore them all ripped and tatty, as they revved off on their Harley Davidsons.]

3. Thanks, Cyclops & beermagnet. Agree with you and Roz on all counts. Private Eye is a thoroughly depressing read these days. But vital for filling in the gaps not covered by other news outlets. The crossword is some kind of relief but the topical clues never really let you escape reality.

   Even though I’m a grammar/redbrick oik, I’m familiar with the term FULL-DRESS from military contexts.

   Took me a moment to get the nun joke. Very good.

4. My headline for this one would be “Cross-dressing disbelief”, because I don’t understand why the setter, having used DRESS at the end of 13a, would decide to repeat it for 8d when there are plenty of other D-E-S words that could have been used there.

5. Have to admit, I am familiar with Full-Dress in a military sense but heaven knows from where!!!! Our grammar school head had a bat cloak but thankfully uni had dispensed with such things.
   I was not familiar with lum, however, and had it down to query here.
   With phone hacking, I was immediately looking to see if Rebecca Brookes fit the answer format (which it does if one calls her Becky)!!!!

6. FULL-DRESS with a hyphen sounds very military, as in “full-dress uniform”. Full dress without a hyphen is “a formal or ceremonial style of dress, such as white tie and tails for a man”, to quote part of the Collins definition. Mercifully, Oxonian sub fusc doesn’t go as far as tails — an ordinary dark suit will suffice.

7. It seems this full[-]dress (with or without hyphen) knowledge hole I have is more due to a lack of contact with any military environment.
   At school, I managed to duck the CCF by doing music on a Monday afternoon and Music O-Level, but they wouldn’t let me do Music A-Level because I only had a Grade 5 in an instrument (piano). So I had to pick something else – and as luck would have it, a new opportunity arose in a partnership with the Tech College a few miles away: Computer Club! They had a proper machine – a second hand IBM machine (can’t remember the precise number) that we put our programs in with punch card in Fortran and a bit of Control language and got results in printouts – talk about living in the 21st century! I got very proficient with the totally manual, 12 button, 1 column/character at a time, card punch machine.
   So, as an “IT professional” it will soon be a full 50 years I’ve been doing much the same thing.

8. I had mixed feelings about the CCF in my (non-public) boys’ school in south London. In principle, it represented everything that seemed totally outdated to most teenagers of the 1960s (conscription ended in 1963). However, once you had done the initial squaddie stuff in a khaki uniform you had the opportunity to join a different section, and my inner Biggles rather enjoyed learning a lot about aircraft and aviation in the RAF section. The highlight for me was a flight over the English Channel in the passenger seat of a Chipmunk trainer based at RAF Manston — now notorious as a dumping ground for refugees — once I had persuaded my mother to sign the consent form. Luckily she wasn’t aware of the less than perfect safety record of these flights. By the time I was a sixth-former our headmaster had yielded to pressure from pupils and introduced an option to participate in a community service scheme (providing practical help to local OAPs) rather than remaining in the CCF. In their day jobs, the head of the CCF taught geography, the head of the army section taught history and the head of the RAF section taught Latin.

9. In 1ac, MA is the abbreviation for Massachusetts, not Maine, which is ME.

   I concur with your feelings about PHONE HACKING (11/22), but I think the strength of your emotions has made it difficult to coolly analyse the clue. It is indeed a cd, but there is no need to equate ‘hack’ and ‘journalist’. Hacking (gaining unauthorised access to) a phone call is a way of heeding it closely and also the manner in which former NI employees did so (or paid others to do).

   (Missing hyphen in the answer for 12/20, MEALY-MOUTHED, btw)

   In 13ac, the hyphenation makes the answer an adjective, so the word ‘of’ in the clue is also part of the definition.

   19ac (ADMIN): Idi Amin has been dead nearly twenty years now and his despotism ended over forty years ago, I think. Admittedly, his name did crop up quite a lot in the Eye in the seventies. Maybe ‘former’ despot, though?

   23ac (STUMBLING): Great surface.

   25ac (LOCUM): I have heard the word ‘lum’ but had to check it.

   26ac: Technically, it’s always the MAHDI (al-mahdi), just as it’s always ‘the Messiah’.

   In 27ac (ADMISSION), I think the def is just “access”, which is “offered by” the wordplay.

   7dn, LOOSELY was a LOL (O yes!)

   16dn, FAIR GAME: a reference to the Kerch Bridge, said to have military use as well as civilian? Sad to reflect that the response to that appears to have been the ongoing destruction of Ukraine’s electrical power grid, also partially of military use, so equally FAIR GAME? On the question of whether destruction of electrical infrastructure constitutes a war crime, as now alleged by some, can anyone fact check this quote from Jamie Shea, NATO spokesman, 25 May, 1999: “All he [Slobodan Milosovic] has to do to is accept NATO’s five conditions and we will stop this campaign, but as long as he doesn’t do so, we will continue to attack those targets which provide the electricity for his armed forces”? See also https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63754808

10. Btw, I’m with John E@4 in wondering why DRESS was repeated. I certainly hesitated before entering it.

    On a lighter note, his remark reminded me of the ever-bizarre Milton Jones’ Uxbridge English Dictionary suggestion in a recent episode of Radio 4’s ISIHAC:

    CROSSRAIL: When trains dress up as boats

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