Financial Times 14319 by Monk

15 comments on “Financial Times 14319 by Monk”

1. Ouch! Absolute limit of my ability even with electronic aids .. thanks to Monk and PeeDee for clear explanations of a few that I frankly guessed.

   As well as the nina, it is also a pangram I think

2. Ay caramba.

   Thanks PeeDee – I was so glad when you finally posted. I’d locked it up with ‘whore house’ for 15. Spotting the A droite sent me looking for A gauche and I was delighted and grateful when it floated. That meant that four across clues became a lot easier. I’d also entered ‘wake’ at 29 – the Northern Wakes week convinced me that Windermere might have been as traditional a destination as Morecambe — but I wasn’t happy with it being singular. Lake = holiday is new to me – we would never use it in that sense. It means to play – as in “does your Ged fancy coming out to lake football?”. But I suppose that holidays and laking go hand in hand. By the way, if I had to write it down, I’d spell it LAIK.

   I found this very tough. I was also convinced that there was some African theme going on and I was continually worried that I might be looking for geographical entries which were beyond me. Like banging your head, it was a relief when it stopped — but it certainly woke me up, so thanks Monk.

3. It’s a real humlander!

   I also was a bit confused at 29a and wondered if he meant a holiday destination up north. I was really glad to spot the ninas – I’m not sure I would have made it without them, and even so I used a dictionary for 13a (annoyingly – it’s tough but gettable straight, I reckon – but I’d convinced myself of highlancer or some such nonsense and of course Highlander was staring back at me as soon as I looked for it). Thanks for the blog.

4. Incidentally, ‘whore house’ wasn’t just a wild stab. My logic went wife = W, insecure = (in) HOUSE put Reho (a biblical region of Israel, which I presumed was once ‘threatening) = Old stews. Again, I was a tad worried about the plural. Blind alleys are such a part of crosswords.

5. Struggled with this. Thanks for the blog. While Janice is indeed a singing Joplin, I would have thought the songwriting one in 6d is Scott.

6. Hi pogel, Scott Joplin crossed my mind too, but did he write songs? I always thought of him as a pianist, and Wikipedia classifies him as a pianist/composer.

7. Digging a a little deeper I see Scott Joplin did write songs, so I guess he must have sung them sometime too.

8. Just to point out that I had another error which I thought was feasible. At 8 LISA looked like an embed. LISA was a peripheral (auxiliary) computing chip.

9. I spent ages looking for organisations with the acronym LISA too.

10. Scott Joplin also wrote at least one entire opera – Treemonisha. I heard a suite from it recently and it certainly seemed to be written in separate numbers/songs. I thought he was going for the Scott/Janis combination, but Janis evidently fits on her own too.

11. I had IRIS and then LISA at 8ac before the NINA sorted things out. Great crossword and blog – I understand OPUS now!

12. I find Monk one of the best setters around – tough, fair and always original in his way of cluing.

    I was rather surprised to find myself breezing through this puzzle, only to be defeated by five solutions in the SE (22ac, 27ac, 29ac, 16d and 19d).
    Unfortunately, seeing the Nina early on in that part of the grid didn’t help me any further.

    Re the Joplin clue, Janis was not really what we call a singer/songwriter, so I prefer Thomas99’s (@10) idea that we have two separate definitions here.

    Guardian solvers would have loved 25d, but my CoD was the simple but oh so effective 19ac.

    It is a pity (is it?) that GHANA was a down clue as ‘east of banana’ does not work 100% for me. In the clue it is to the east, in the solution it is the southern part.

    Fine crossword.
    Many thanks to Monk and to PeeDee for the excellent blog.

13. Hi Sil, as you say, ‘banana’ is not in the soltion, it is only in the clue, so no problem with east here?

    If we had been asked to place ana ‘east of’ gh then this would have been suspect, but here ‘east of’ means ‘the eastern part of’ rather than ‘to the east of’.

14. Thanks again to PeeDee for yet another great blog, and to all for positive comments. Points raised that need to be swept up: yes, nina plus pangram; GHANA indeed uses “east of banana” = ANA [NB missing H in blog ;-)]; JOPLIN was indeed meant to be Singer/songwriter = Janice/Scott; LAKE, whilst defined in the BRB as “holiday”, is admittedly not used thus by local (Yorkshire) farmers; when snorkelling as a youth, I once fondled an OCTOPUS (a very small one) and it was revoltingly squishy and slippery!

15. (Very) late entry – just wanted to say thanks for a fabulous puzzle.

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