Picaroon is your compiler this morning.
A tour de force from Picaroon this morning, A mixture of easy and difficult clues, a smattering of general knowledge, and excellent surfaces – just what I neede to wake up my grey cells this morning.
I gave ticks to almost every answer and double ticks to SILVER LINING, MEMOIRIST, AU PAIR, and SECRET SERVICE. However, CHATEAU LAFITE was a simply magnificent anagram that left me in awe of the compiler. I think I may have seen the GEORGIE PORGIE construction somewhere else, but it was also a good clue. It took me a while to parse CIRCUS MAXIMUS, which was also my LOI, but despite never come across CIRCS before, I got there in the end.
Thanks Picaroon
| ACROSS | ||
| 1, 4 | CIRCUS MAXIMUS |
Entertained by situation, you reportedly saw compilers in stadium (6,7)
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Homophone [reportedly] of U ("you") entertained by CIRCS (circumstances, so "situation") + MAXIM ("saw") + US ("compilers") |
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| 4 |
See 1
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| 9 | APPRISING |
Giving notice of rebellion on Instagram? (9)
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RISING ("rebellion") on APP ("Instagram?") |
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| 10 | OHMIC |
I see leader of maquis in charge of resistance units (5)
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OH ("I see") + [leader of] M(aquis) + IC (in charge) |
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| 11 | ENEMA |
Base sent back American troops one’s put in the rear (5)
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E (logarithmic "base") + [sent back] <=(A (American) + MEN ("troops")) |
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| 12 | VANDALISE |
Trash lies scattered behind London attraction (9)
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*(lies) [anag:scattered] behind V AND A (Victoria and Albert Museum, so "London attraction") |
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| 13 | UNCLEAR |
Dim kind of family initially delayed (7)
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(N)UCLEAR ("kind of family") with its initial delayed becomes U(N)CLEAR |
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| 15 | AU PAIR |
A winning song for one who might sing a lullaby (2,4)
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A + UP ("winning") + AIR ("song") |
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| 17 | TIPTOP |
Great cook’s equipment – mine comes from the east (3-3)
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<=(POT ("cook's equipment") + PIT ("mine"), comes from the east, i.e. from right to left)) |
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| 19 | LITOTES |
Might such rhetoric be no great shakes? (7)
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Cryptic definition, LITOTES being an understatement |
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| 22 | IN TERMS OF |
When circling, wild monster is concerning (2,5,2)
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IF ("when") circling *(monster) [anag:wild] |
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| 24 | HATER |
Antipathetic sort scoffed, introduced to personnel (5)
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ATE ("scoffed") introduced to HR (Human Resources, so "personnel") |
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| 26 | IRAQI |
National newspaper runs article accompanying TV panel show (5)
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I (British "newspaper") + R (runs, in cricket) + A ("article") accompanying QI ("TV panel show") |
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| 27 | ANTONIONI |
Director of Chekhov, one receiving new bits of information (9)
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ANTON (Chekhov) + I receiving N (new) + I/O (in computing, input/output, so "bits of information") Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) was an Italian film director, whose most famous movies were probably L'Avventura, L'Eclisse and Blow-Up. |
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| 28, 29 | GEORGIEPORGIE |
Boy who upset girls, say, turned quiet in endless, wild parties repeatedly (7,6)
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<=E.G. ("say", turned") + P (piano in music notation, so "quiet") in [endless] ORGIE(s) ("wild parties") repeated |
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| 29 |
See 28
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| DOWN | ||
| 1, 19 | CHATEAU LAFITE |
Supply thé and café au lait for French drink supplier (7,6)
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*(the cafe au lait) [anag:supply] |
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| 2 | RUPEE |
Asian ready to use the bathroom after sport (5)
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PEE ("to use the bathroom") after RU (rugby union, so "sport") |
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| 3 | UNIVALENT |
Like certain atoms in air probed by a learner after university (9)
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A + L (learner) in VENT ("air") after UNI (university) |
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| 4 | MAGENTA |
Kid’s utterance, eating chap’s plum (7)
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MAA ("kid's utterance") eating GENT ("chap") The kid in question here is a young goat. |
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| 5 | XHOSA |
Zulu’s close relative has ox to transport (5)
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*(has ox) [anag:to transport] |
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| 6 | MEMOIRIST |
Writer of top spy book upset about bloomer (9)
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M ("top spy" in Bond novels) + <=TOME ("book", upset) about IRIS ("bloomer") |
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| 7, 20 | SECRET SERVICE |
Spies dry, gnarled trees by river with very frozen water (6,7)
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SEC ("dry") + *(trees) [anag:gnarled] by R (river) with V (very) + ICE ("frozen water") |
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| 8, 21 | SILVER LINING |
What optimists seek – or what we will need to make wage? (6,6)
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WE with Ag inside (SILVER LINING), would become W-Ag-E |
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| 14 | CRISTIANO |
Ronaldo‘s current, boring antics or fooling around (9)
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I (electrical "current") boring *(antics or) [anag:fooling around] |
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| 16 | PITCH INTO |
Get on with horse, stifling feeling of irritation (5,4)
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PINTO ("horse") stifling ITCH ("feeling of irritation") |
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| 18 | PASSAGE |
Extract personal info about father when hosting son (7)
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PA'S AGE ("personal info about father") when hosting S (son) |
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| 19 |
See 1
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| 20 |
See 7
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| 21 |
See 8
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| 23 | RUING |
Feeling contrite about calamity? Good! (5)
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RUIN ("calamity") + G (good) |
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| 25 | THONG |
Crowd booting out king? This shows a lot of cheek (5)
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TH(r)ONG ("crowd" booting out R (Rex, so "king") |
Thanks Picaroon and loonapick! Great puzzle and an excellent blog!
Liked CIRCUS MAXIMUS and UNIVALENT.
ANTONIONI
I took ‘bits of information’ as ‘digital bits’, 1 and 0 (thus I and O).
Thank you, loonapick, needed you for the I/O bit of ANTONIONI.
This took some time to make any real headway and then, suddenly, it was done.
Didn’t we have GEORGIE PORGIE recently?
Struggled a little with if = when in IN TERMS OF, but feel sure I could come up with examples of time allowed. Perhaps others will.
I hope muffin drops in with a fuller explanation of UNIVALENT.
Excellent crossword from The Pirate. Many thanks.
Thanks loonapick. I had so many unparsed entries. Now that I understand them, I think this is a very clever puzzle. Thanks to Picaroon too.
A tour de force indeed! In case muffin does not make it today allow this chemist to explain that a UNIVALENT atom is one which can only bind to one other. Hydrogen and chlorine are common examples.
Spose if/when works, Let us know if/when you’re done, don’t remember seeing it before.
[Besides bottoms, thong always reminds me of a silly shaggy dog that ends The thong hath ended but the malady lingerth on]
And yes he whose kisses made girls cry was here recently. All good fun, thx Pickers’n’loona.
[So even in those massive proteins or huge hydrocarbons, TimW, that’s still the case?]
I’m with KVA’s parsing for bits of information.
Not too happy with IF being a synonym for WHEN. If = something might happen. When = something will happen at some stage.
Nice one, thanks to both
Worth it for CHATEAU LAFITE alone. My first one in and, frankly, I doubted I’d be besting that one today so might as well stop there. But, of course, I carried on and everything else was a delight too. nho the stadium which was LOI. RUPEE, MAGENTA, XHOSA, SILVER LINING and CRISTIANO were today’s double ticks. All in the downs.
Thanks Picaroon and loonapick (which combo feels a bit like mirror writing)
GEORGIE PORGIE was my first one in, afterva dry run of acrosses, after the repeated Paul yesterday. Slow to get started, but when I got a foothold, it all started falling into place. Brilliant anagram for Château Lafite.
Thank you to loonapick and Picaroon.
Thank you loonapick for your clever parsing of a very clever and entertaining puzzle.
A couple of definitions of LITOTES which I think Picaroon’s surface exemplifies in an amusing way, using the colloquial “no great” ( shakes) .
Collins: understatement for rhetorical effect, esp when achieved by using negation with a term in place of using an antonym of that term, as in “She was not a little upset” for “She was extremely upset”.
Wiktionary: noun: (rhetoric) A figure of speech whereby something is stated by denying its opposite, particularly the negation of a negative quality to say something positive.
[Have we lost the ability to format in bold or italics? Is this part of kenmac’s testing of non English characters, diacritics etc?]
[I’m not having any success in saving either. The time seems to want to elapse.]
I really enjoyed parsing CIRCUS MAXIMUS, some of it after the event. It was very kind of Picaroon to give an unambiguous definition to some lovely misdirection with “you reportedly saw”, and very clever of him to parse 2 x “us” in different ways. Liked the embed indicator “entertained by”, very apt for the solution.
GEORGIE PORGIE was in Paul 29,300 6 days ago (I don’t have the ability to link any more, or bold or the rest). The clue was “Ogre, I repeated, messed with Peg in children’s rhyme “.
What a treat! Picaroon at the very top of his form. Like loonapick, I had barely any clues unticked – and there was nothing wrong with any of those.
Splendid start with CIRCUS MAXIMUS (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/09/ben-hur-remake-banned-filming-rome-circus-maximus), which like paddymelon @14, I had great fun parsing – likewise the wonderful CHATEAU LAFITE, plus VANDALISE, CRISTIANO – and many others. Lovely surfaces, as ever. I loved the definition for LITOTES.
I could go on…
Huge thanks, as ever, to Picaroon and lucky loonapick – a brilliant start to the day.
Having a classics graduate sitting alongside and murmuring CIRCUS MAXIMUS at the critical moment certainly helped. An immaculately clued puzzle, most enjoyable.
Grantinfreo @6 – certainly hydrogen is always going to be univalent. The long chains are formed by the ability of carbon atoms (essentially tetravalent, having four “hooks”, but capable of “double” and “triple” bonds) to form long and branched chains.
Chlorine, though, is an interesting one. While it’s normally univalent, it’s possible to create chlorine dioxide – but, consistent with that being a rather unnatural arrangement, it’s spontaneously explosive. As I recall from when I was a deeply irresponsible sixth former long ago…
Thanks to setter and blogger.
Thought this was extremely tricky in places, with the usual Picaroon obscurities. The anagrams provided a way in, and had to look up XHOSA. Childhood memories of the nursery rhyme helped with Georgie P. Though the MEMOIRIST took a while to fathom out. High quality fare this morning and without yesterday’s perplexing deja vue. Worth raising a glass of 1, 19 down therefore…
Very entertaining and the last few – LITOTES, MEMOIRIST and PITCH IN took quite a while, and a long break from the puzzle, to get. Too many outstanding clues to mention so I’ll just say thanks to Picaroon and well done to loonapick for parsing everything.
Thanks Picaroon and loonapick
All the GK in place, so this was quite quick. Favourite was the particularly misleading “ready” in 2d.
The alkali metals – sodium etc. – only form 1+ ions. Of atoms that bond covalently, only hydrogen and fluorine are always univalent, and even hydrogen can form a second weaker bond known as a “hydrogen bond”; these are very important in water, for example.
It would take a lecture to explain why other atoms, chlorine for example, can form more than one bond!
P.S. Paul’s crossword number 29,300 had GEORGIE PORGIE: “Ogre, I repeated, messed with Peg in children’s rhyme (7,6)”
{TimC@15. Thanks for the feedback. Have posted on Site Feedback and emailed admin.]
Very tough, almost gave up after solving only CHATEAU LAFITE and a few other clues on my first pass.
Favourites: SECRET SERVICE, VANDALISE.
I could not parse 1/4ac apart from MAXIM = saw and U = you reportedly; 11ac; 19ac; 27ac apart from ANTON (Chekhov)+ I (one); as well as 8/21d.
Thanks, both.
Perfectly summed up by loonapick and thx for the end of ANTONIONI. CIRCUS MAXIMUS and SILVER LINING were supreme. I hinted on the G thread last night that GEORGIE PORGIE was clued very recently. Top of his game here.
Ta Picaroon & loonapick.
Yes, paul @21, I mentioned that clue @15.
In the spirit of 19 across this was not at all bad.
[The usual bold, italic, and link tabs are there for me initially, though not if I want to edit.]
What Eileen said
Many thanks to Picaroon and Loonapick
Much of the General Knowledge this morning fell neatly into my zone of General Ignorance – footballers, resistance units, rhetorical devices, atoms… but I managed to get all except UNIVALENT (thanks to everyone who has tried to explain what that is all about, but I’m none the wiser) and I enjoyed the ride. Smiles for APPRISING, ENEMA and THONG, and SILVER LINING and CHATEAU LAFITE were brilliant.
I know the elements of a clue like AU PAIR are not actually related to each other, but the grammatical ugliness of A UP AIR made me wince and was a hindrance to solving the clue.
(Thanks muffin. I must have a compatibility problem. The tabs are working here on my phone but not on my laptop.)
[The “b i link” tools have reappeared, after a refresh]
Agree with KVa@ on the bits – 1/0, not i/o in ANTONIONI
Thought CIRCUS MAXIMUS was “magnus“, CHÂTEAU LAFITE “très bon“, and LITOTES “not bad”.
Many thanks to all the chemists… but I’m starting to wonder if it had been wise to ask…
Excellent puzzle, an enjoyable challenge.
Thanks loonapick for an excellent blog and specifically for the ‘circs’ in CIRCUS and the ‘wage’ explanation in SILVER LININGS.
So many great clues, with 1/19 and 1/4 setting the standard from the beginning.
I started to pick up a spy theme (1a Circus, 6d M, 7d/20d, and 28a Georg(i)e (Smiley)) but it then fizzled out. So not a theme.
Favourites probably CIRCUS MAXIMUS, MEMOIRIST, SECRET SERVICE, VANDALISE.
Thanks Picaroon and loonapick
Nice use of chemistry this morning (I loved Ag in we and even saw the trick that we have to convert we to wage but it still took crossers for the answer to hit me). I was less happy with “ohmic” as it does not mean that. There is a word “ohmic” – it refers to materials which obey Ohm’s Law which means the resistance is constant. It does *not* mean “related to the units called ohms”. If it did we would have the words “grammic”, “centigradic” and “amperic” none of which are real. It would be like cluing “metric” as being “related to units of length” – the word does not mean that, even though it exists and, punningly could be thought of in that way. But that makes the clue a CD and wordplay, i.e. lacking a true definition.
Just my little gripe on an otherwise outstanding puzzle – thanks to Picaroon and Loonapick. Chateau Lafite – if I can ever afford a bottle I will definitely casually look at the label and say “oh, that’s an anagram of cafe au lait and the” and look very very smug!
All the things I usually say about Picaroon’s puzzles. I did wince a bit about ‘memoirist’ as a word, but it wasn’t hard to fathom.
Echoing the “excellent” comments. Lots of favourites. Picaroon is a clever setter. Thanks to him and to loonapick.
I can only agree with others who thought this an excellent puzzle. Last in was IRAQI, which I think was my favourite. With thanks to Picaroon and loonapick.
And a shout out also for that amazing anagram, CHATEAU LAFITE.
nearly twice as long as usual to fill in – which is a good thing! Thanks Setter and Blogger
Thanks to TimW, NeilH and muffin for the chemistry knowledge. And to JoFT re ohmic, at which a politely enquiring eyebrow did flicker.
Thanks for the blog , I thought this was really good, very pleased to see the split entries were in clue order. Very good variety and clever wordplay throughout. SILVER LINING my pick for the we becoming wage.
CHATEAU LAFITE a great anagram but not keen on supply and supplier in the same clue.
OHMIC – Jack @34 has spoken for me, Chambers gets this wrong so the setter can’t be blamed.
William@32 just think of it as atoms that have single-fold or (n-1)-fold degeneracies in the solutions of the Dirac equation.
[ AlanC @ 24 very belated thanks for your link, (for various reasons) . Holly is my favourite character, so deadpan. However I do think it is very unfair that people make jokes about KPR , Is the Stoke manager the next one to be sacked ? ]
Excellent puzzle with too many good clues to enumerate. Nice to see a bit of science, even if the def for OHMIC is a bit wayward (acknowledgement to JoaT). My attempt at a comprehensible definition for UNIVALENT is ‘forming only one bond with another atom’ (chlorine is often univalent, but can be up to pentavalent 🙂 ).
Special mention however for CHATEAU LAFITE – a grand cru anagram.
Many thanks to the Pirate and loonapick
(PS or technically heptavalent in perchlorates)
I’m going against the flow on CIRCUS MAXIMUS. I thought the surface a bit laborious by Picaroon’s usually high standards. I did enjoy LITOTES, though, and having to mine for ore in SILVER LINING.
Thanks to Picaroon and loonapick.
Not bad at all (19A), although I failed to parse CIRCUS MAXIMUS and SILVER LINING (which is now one of my favourite clues).
I don’t know if anyone else noticed but there seemed to be a lot of solutions ending in vowels. I expect it is just coincidence after fitting in the longer ones.
Lots to admire here, including the anagram for CHATEAU LAFITE and the surface for ENEMA.
Thanks Picaroon and loonapick.
Georgia Porgie has cropped up 3 times in recent weeks. One may have been in Everyman, tho.
Simply brilliant! CHATEAU LAFITE took the biscuit (with a choice of accompanying drinks?)
Thanks Picaroon and loonapick
Roz @41: Wonderful! Made me chuckle on this grey old day.
Excellent puzzle as always from Picaroon. I had no problems (William @2 and Rats @7) with “when” = IF. “When/if it’s raining we tend to stay inside.”
For those who dislike misleading capitalisation / decapitalisation: what did you think of the misleading acute accents in 1/19?
Many thanks Picaroon and loonapick.
XHOSA (a write-in for me) is second only to Zulu in numbers of speakers amongst the indigenous languages of South Africa – the mother tongue of Nelson Mandela and the language of the South African national anthem: Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika
[muffin@20 – you caught me out as an old IUPAC guy. For those not versed in the art “I Used to Pretend to be A Chemist”.?]
[grantinfreo@6 – yes, even in those huge molecules the hydrogen atoms waggle around the edges holding on with just one hand!]
Lots to like here despite a slow start. 8D is brilliant now that loonapick has parsed the We/Wage part for me. Like many others I loved 1D/19D
[Gervase @51: A particular delight of having a South African friend visit around Christmas was hearing her 5 year old daughter in the car singing variously in English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa. Apparently her school does a lot of singing (her mother is an ethnomusicologist so definitely approves) and has one teacher who only teaches in Zulu. What a gloriously lucky way to be educated. When we saw a big dog fox when out one day I had to explain to her that it was somewhere between a jackal and a painted dog, both of which were familiar to her from field trips. The fox was quite a novelty for her!]
Roz@41: I never thought to check Chambers for such an error and my ancient (mid-80s) copy does not have this mistake. It does have the error for loudspeaker and the joke definition for ‘eclair’ however.
After an absence of decades I’m easing myself back into Guardian Cryptic. Used to smash it and the Irish Times “crossaire ” back in the day but they’ve got tougher. The goalposts have moved. We’re not mind readers…. Today’s was the hardest I’ve seen since starting last November . “up” for “winning”? “itch” for “irritation? Gimme a break ! But many of you are hailing this as a masterpiece….
Seriously though , are all the setters playing by the same rules? Have they got tougher over the years and is there a handy guide to download explaining the Guardian cryptic crossword? I’ve seen some blogs on the newspaper’s website but would love a printed handbook.
Very enjoyable and fun. Great variety.
Perfect for my husband and myself, with our different solving skills (I suspect neither would have finished it alone).
Minor issues, which didn’t spoil it for me.
Loved CIRCUS MAXIMUS and MEMOIRIST once I finally worked them out!
Thanks to setter, blogger and contributors.
Ricardo: Imagine learning English as a native 40 years ago and then living abroad without exposure to English TV etc. On your return you’d think we are speaking a foreign language. So it is with the crosswords. Someone devises a new trick (like reverse anagrams, or the we->wage example here) or a new synonym and pretty soon it’s been used half a dozen times and it’s part of the language. To people learning crosswords from scratch they would not know these are new tricks. To someone familiar with the old ways, I can see this must seem frustrating, but stick with it and you’ll find more and more of the tricks crop up repeatedly. Go n-éirí an bóthar leat!
Tim C @15 and @25 – oops! sorry. I thought that I had read all the comments before posting mine, but somehow I missed you at 15.
SueM48 @33 – yes, I thought there was a spy theme too!
To which my colleague added is 11 ENEMA of the state?
Ricardo@56
Welcome back.
My late father used to religiously do the Crosaire in the Irish Times when he had read the death notices.
I never was a fan of Crosaire but my wife and I started doing the cryptics here over 20 years ago now. The variety of setters rather than a single setter appeals to us.
Persevere. Even now, although we almost invariably finish most setters, we still come to this excellent site to see the ‘parsing’.
There are no doubt various resources but just doing crosswords is the best bet IMHO.
Best
Brendan
PS Just testing the markup which seems to have worked. Love the new edit feature.
Jack of Few Trades @58
An bbfhuil aon focal I nGaeilge ar anagram?
Is iontas é Gaeilge anseo!
[Brendan @62 I confess I got to my limit of the language with that most famous expression so can’t help exactly, but how about “Drunken craic buys a round (5)” for “circa”, using the opposite of a “lift and separate” for the definition.]
Ricardo@56: in my subjective, anecdotal experience they’ve become harder overall just within the last few weeks. I’m not going to give up but I’ll admit to feeling somewhat dispirited of late.
Ricardo @ 56: How about
“The team were up till the last ten minutes but then lost the game”?
And I don’t know about you, but I always find an itch irritating till I scratch it!
Thanks Picaroon and loonapick
Some very clever stuff here, as a brief scan of the comments before me will confirm. CHATEAU LAFITE the best anagram I’ve seen in a while, from anyone!
LITOTES – appalled to find instances of litote, as if it’s a plural that can be singularised.
And that go n-éirí an bóthar leat apparently doesn’t mean “May the road rise to meet you”.
Phew! Thanks both.
Difficult to find anything new to say about Picaroon. Reliably brilliant. CHATEAU LAFITE and SILVER LINING are classics, TIP-TOP is a smart surface, UNIVALENT is an exemplar of how to clue an obscure word for mass consumption, and RUPEE is simply very funny.
I’m here to echo loonapick’s praise. There have been so many difficult puzzles lately that I thought I was losing my perspicacity (to quote Lisa Simpson). Today I feel that my grey matter has not completely abandoned me. I failed to come up with IN TERMS OF but otherwise solved what I felt was a very challenging and fun puzzle. Too many great clues to choose from!
Beautifully crafted as always. SILVER LINING was my fave too.
It’s interesting that soundalike clues often generate heated debate, but no-one bats an eyelid when MAGENTA is defined as plum! Aural sensitivity trumps optical apparently 🙂 .
Thanks, l and P
No, I’ve never seen a magenta plum either.
I’m kicking myself for not getting RUPEE and I’m sitting here in Karachi where it’s the currency, although with 30% inflation it’s not worth a lot these days.
Found this difficult to get going with probably because of a few days away due to family commitments but once I got going, plenty of smiles all around. 19a and 3d new to me; never heard of 27a but my second hand Chambers Crossword Dictionary had. Best 50p I ever spent…
Thank you Picaroon and loonapick.
Ronald @18 must be in the highest income bracket to be able to cavalierly swig down such a glass. Allow me to second, and then third, Phito Nelly @71 and Gladys @72: when I had the initial “M” from MAXIMUS, I was certain the plum would be a shade of mauve, certainly not magenta. Plum is a splendid word for a clue, also referring to a palpable LBW and a Victoria and a perfect position in the workforce.
Way above my pay grade.
Nice puzzle, thanks Picaroon and loonapick.
I wouldn’t say that loonapick’s definition of litotes, “an understatement”, was the best I’ve ever heard..
NeilH@17 I too cheerfully admit to having been a deeply irresponsible sixth form Chemistry student and standing in an empty lab creating chlorine dioxide ! I felt it prudent to stop after the explosion shattered the test tube. I’ll also own up to holding (with tongs) calcium carbide under a running tap….
Picaroon is one of my favourite setters, and this didn’t disappoint, despite one or two niggles.
CIRCUS MAXIMUS for starters. Yes I visited Rome as a kid, with my parents, and I guess we must have ‘done’ CM as well as all the other Roman stuff. Boy was I bored! But my father insisted – we had to get our ‘money’s worth’ when visiting Rome so he dragged us all over the city and surrounds, ignoring my mother’s (and us kids’) plaintive pleas for a rest day…
Enough about Rome.
Anyway I failed to parse CIRCUS MAXIMUS. The U, the MAXIM and the US are fine, but I’ve never seen CIRCS as an abbreviation for ‘circumstances’.
I eventually hit upon LITOTES but thought that as a cryptic definition it seems rather weak for a rather obscure word.
And I had to check the spelling of LAFITE – I felt sure it was spelt with two ‘T’s. But I was wrong. Not the sort of beverage I’d ever care to imbibe, even if I could afford it!
Everything else was great. Special ticks for ENEMA (ho ho!), VANDALISE, UNCLEAR, AU PAIR, GEORGIE PORGIE (another ho-ho!), RUPEE (yet another ho-ho!!!), SECRET SERVICE, and PITCH INTO. But the ones I haven’t mentioned are just as good.
Regarding the ‘ho-ho!’s, is Pickers getting a bit of the Paul about him?
Anyway, nice work Pickers and thanks loonapick.
JohnB @78: Did you have a naked flame anywhere nearby? My memories of calcium carbide are from my caving days, when we used carbide lamps.
[Roz &42: I imagine the Stoke gaffer will be sleeping like the proverbial tonight, whereas I ….Glad you enjoyed the link].
I found many of the surfaces here particularly delightful, though I am also in the “if” =/= “when” camp. (Even if there exist sentences that do not change their meaning when the one is substituted for the other — that’s not sufficient.) VANDALISE was my personal favorite, though APPRISING was also particularly clever.
Been doing this for some time, now, working my way into becoming a something-or-other. I think I might have made it. In the process of solving these things, I’ve become familiar with Cockney rhyming slang, “Britishisms” in general, soccer (sorry: football) teams and terms, obscure European rivers (to me), cricket and rugby idioms, interesting anagrinds, and so on. My rule has always been: never look up anything, just admit defeat and move on to tomorrow. The joy that came from competing this one, and from recognizing and appreciating the clever parsings and general genius that it took to create it was well worth the wait. TA to all involved!
Laccaria @ 80 I’ve been using CIRCS as an expression for decades!
What a super, sparkling puzzle, as many have said. Many thanks to P and L.
For the non-chemists, ‘univalent’ roughly translates as having a ‘combining power’ of one. Muffin@20’s explanation is spot on (though I might demure at a hydrogen bond affecting the valency of hydrogen). Chlorine is univalent in its negative oxidation state (chloride ions and in organic chemistry) but not when it has a positive oxidation state greater than +1 such as in various chlorate ions. I’ll get my hat…
Andrew@76 I am reluctant to comment on cricket but surely it is plumB LBW ?
Victoria plums are the finest fruit in the land , shame it is such a short season.
A masterpiece today, but would it be curmudgeonly of me to point out (11 ac) that if e can be a base, so can any other real number? Yes, we sometimes use natural logarithms with e as the base, but we also use common logarithms (to base 10) commonly, and in theory any other number could be used.
TassieTim@81 the naked flame wasn’t necessary, the acetylene produced by the reaction between calcium carbide and water usually ignited spontaneously.