Independent 11969 / Methuselah

23 comments on “Independent 11969 / Methuselah”

1. Your pipes are what you use to sing. Idiomatically, if you say someone has “a good set of pipes”, you mean they have a strong singing voice. Excellent clue!

2. Likes for CHOPSTICK (CAD?) and SCOT. I felt the puzzle was over too soon, especially for a Methuselah, and if the theme was to do with age, that some of the gags were a little dated. For example, I didn’t need to process the anagram for 11/13 because the actual (?) biblical character’s age and his long life are frequently mentioned in Methuselah’s puzzles. Still, I look forward to his next. Thanks Duncan and the old man. Agree with the comment @1.

3. Yep ditto Widdersbel re good set of pipes. Enjoyable cw, ta both.

4. Surprisingly straightforward, I’ve struggled with Methuselah previously. Helped by 1ac and 969, but also by clear clues… not helped by my self inflicted typos.. ah, well, should have gone to Specsavers.. which people of a certain age will get..
   Thanks Methuselah n duncansheill

5. I always enjoy a Methuselah and today was no exception. All very crisp, varied and fun; I too thought it was at the easy end of the spectrum for him.

   Loved 969 for the surface, and although I didn’t need to process the full anagram I did need the fact that there was an ‘x’ but no ‘f’ to dismiss variously four/five/forty/fifty. My only disappointment was that the ‘x’ fell as a starting letter, which made XYLOPHONE a write-in and so not doing justice to its good clue.

   Personally I though “of a certain age” was nice, because it was somewhat misleading; it doesn’t usually refer to SPRING CHICKENS!

   ELEMI and TAIGA were jorums, but fell out easily from the clear clueing.

   Thanks both

6. I found this quite an accessible Methuselah and, going by early comments, so did others. As Sofamore observes, the long anagram – particularly with a few crossers, resolved itself surprisingly easily. CHOPSTICKS held out for a while at the very end but that is often the way when searching for wordplay in what turns out to be a cryptic def. I thought the surfaces were very smooth on the whole and enjoyed the constructions. SCOT is clever but jumped out at me from the def; RECEIPT is a delightful spot – literally; DEATHLY, ASTONISHED and LOVE NESTS make a nice anagrammatic trio; SATIRISES makes lovely use of ‘those controlling pupils’ and TAIGA creates a super surface with its combo of initial letters. A theme even I could not fail to notice.

   Thanks Methuselah and duncan.

7. An enjoyable puzzle; whilst solving, it felt like there were too many anagrams, but looking back, maybe not.
   Some lovely plays, ( CHOPSTICK & “extra pasty”, plus others).
   WHY LIST today, a short one: TAIGA & ELEMI.

   thanks to Meth & Dunc

8. Oh, I also wanted to say that I appreciated the hinting for ÉCLAT; the use of “French” for both wordplay and hint for a non-obvious word is clever, and a sign of good setting IMO.

9. Parsed the SING in 12a POSSESSING as ‘use pipes’, as Widdersbel@1, but can’t quite see how the SAT in 19a SATIRISES can mean “held”.
   [17a: First heard the word ÉCLAT in the song Thomas O’Malley Cat from Disney’s The Aristocats (1970)]

10. The prime numbers device has become common recently so it was good to see a twist on a theme for SCOT.

    CHOPSTICK was a very clever CD

    “Of a certain age” doesn’t readily bring to mind twenty-somethings; as others have mentioned it would generally refer to people (women particularly?) in their 50’s/60’s. It makes an appearance in the new Bridget Jones movie for example alluding to exactly that.

11. FrankieG@9
    I see your point, re SAT = HELD.
    I confess, I just solved it without that much thought (19ac).
    I suppose, ” how do you sit on this?”, equates to “what opinion do you hold?”, but it’s a bit ropey, to say the least.

    Anyone else with a light to shine?

12. I had the same doubts about SAT and HELD, further complicated by the terms in poker STAND and HOLD both meaning do nothing. In this context STAND and SIT mean the same thing! Also how do you STAND on this? How do you SIT on this?

13. I was getting nowhere with Vlad in the Guardian so I thought I would give this a go. I thought it was very very good.

    Had to pray 11a was an anagram and I couldn’t see a ‘V’ so plumped for NINE to end it.

    CHOPSTICKS was my favourite clue and took far too long to spot. I tried all sorts of homophones for Chinese food before it clicked. Which allowed me to finish on SCOT when I finally saw what it was doing.

    Great puzzle. Thanks to the setter and blogger. Mostly for actually taking the time and confirming 11a was an anagram.

14. I plumped for ‘The meetings used to be sat/held on Wednesdays’.

15. I suppose sat/held back, as in maintained position, are kind of similar. Or sat/held still, as in what a dog might have done.
    I’ve always assumed insignia was both singular and plural so insignias looks a bit odd to me, but then again I tend to prefer anglicisation of Latin word declension, forums over fora etc.
    Favourite was the primes of Miss Brodie.

16. Well there I was thinking CHOPSTICK was one of the weakest clues. For “sat”/”held”, think “The stadium sat 50,000”. Looks like no-one’s noticed which number puzzle this was.

    Thanks duncanshiell and those who’ve left comments. I better be getting on…👴

17. Ha! I was about to post ‘Great spot on the puzzle number @16’ … and then clocked who had made the comment! Thanks for popping in, Methuselah, and what a nice bit of meta.

18. As someone who, this Thursday will be moving into his seventieth (three score years and ten) year I must admit I wasa bit ambivalent about the theme.

    But, moving on, “elemi” is one of those words I have never seen anywhere other than in a crossword. See also all those African antelopes that conveniently end with a vowel and so fit conveniently into the SE corner.

19. Thanks both. I’m sure I would not have noticed the puzzle number in any event, but it doesn’t present itself online unless you call up ‘puzzle info’. I was taking the sat/held in SATIRISES as generally how one held oneself, until instructed otherwise by our setter, though I would argue the example given reads better as ‘the stadium seated 50,000’ though I may be making the mistake of assuming sports commentators are grammatically correct.

20. @16
    I sat still.
    I held still.
    Both imply, motionless.
    It does not mean that SAT = HELD.

    Sorry, but just because one word can replace another, in a specific context, it does not make those two words equivalents.
    When a comedian tells a joke, and nobody laughs, it’s better not to explain it.

21. Be fair, E.N.Boll&. @ 16 you asked if anyone could shed any light. I could, so I did. Chambers supports “sit”=”hold” here, for what it’s worth, though maybe “seated” would be more natural than “sat” as TFO said.

22. The INSIGNIAS clue would have been like 20 percent better if it had been styled as Stars and Stripes, the US armed forces’ newspaper of record, rather than just Stars and stripes. You could imagine some GIs getting up to naughtiness to make the news.

    Anyway, this was a lot of fun. I did in fact like the image of picking up carryout Chinese (we got our mapo tofu and kung pao chicken delivered this past Sunday, bur it still resonated). Thanks to Methuselah.

23. Very good puzzle. Some lovely clues. Really liked the extra pasty, the sparkly Miss Jean Brodie (crème de la crème?), the stirring novels and shop paper… among others. Fwiw, though I didn’t parse it, I do think sat/seated are used interchangeably in some circumstances and do suggest held (eg the table sits/sat or seats/seated 6 comfortably). In any case, it didn’t stop me from applauding the brilliant spot of Mocks with “those controlling pupils”! Thanks Methuselah for the fun and to duncanshiell

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