The news in clues
On Friday, a solver of the Times puzzle would have been forgiven for flicking to the front page and checking the masthead. A themed puzzle? In the Thunderer? So it seemed, right from clue one ...
1ac Like beefcake — and fish is just fine! (5-4)
[ adjective describing muscular males (‘beefcake’), and a kind of fish ]
... with HUNKY DORY appearing a year after the death of the musician who broke through with an album of that name. One clue does not make a theme, but other entries confirmed it, and eagle-eyed solvers found themselves asking, as they looked at the top-right entries LIFER and SALT MARSH: is there...? is there LIFE on MARS? There is.
Retrospection was also, quite rightly, in a pair of incredible end-of-year puzzles. If you’d rather never about 2016 again: (a) you never know, we might soon be looking back on last year as a more carefree time and (b) they’re honestly among the year’s finest crosswords: Eimi’s Independent and Micawber’s Telegraph Toughie.
And if, like me, you’ve been wondering: how have American cryptic setters responded to the Trumpification of the nation (other than worrying that there won’t be any free presses with which to print their puzzles), here’s one answer. The Nation’s Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto, whose puzzles have become accessible by non-subscribers since we last met them, produced a furious, ingenious and often riotous call-to-arms [puzzle | solution].
My favourite clues are this grim evocation ...
10ac Company carrying alcohol, tobacco, and firearms — and regressive party providing what the poor may have to eat in Trump’s America (3,4)
[ abbrev. for ‘company’ surrounding (‘carrying’) US abbrev. for ‘alcohol, tobacco, and firearms’, then backwards (‘regressive’) synonym for ‘party’ ]
[ CO surrounding ATF, then backwards DO ]
... of CAT FOOD and, this exhortation ...
7d Serene wisdom reveals what Nation subscribers might want to do in advance of a Trump presidency (5)
[ hidden inside (or ‘revealed’ by) SERENEWISDOM ]
... to RENEW subscriptions to independent journalism, which holds as strongly over here (to the tune of a mere monthly fiver).
Latter patter
In a typically challenging Guardian Genius puzzle from Enigmatist (Meet the Setter), I appreciated the tip of the hat to solvers’ blog Fifteen Squared, and even more so the simplicity of this double definition ...
12d Jack Jones of Bow or the Fox of Falkirk? (3)
... since, as the now-published annotated solution describes, TOD is a Scottish word for “fox” as well as a piece of Cockney slang interchangeable with “Jack Jones”.
“Jack Jones” is perhaps not the best rhyme for “alone”, but it has persisted and mutated into the 1990s student slang adjective “jacks”. And perhaps the connection to solitude is not just the near-rhyme of “Jones” and “alone”, at least in this ditty:
TOD’s makes for a more satisfying rhyme, from the turn-of-the-century American jockey Tod Sloan, as does the subject of our next challenge. There doesn’t appear to have been an actual Pat Malone, either in music-hall melody or on Newmarket nags, but the name is another way of saying the same thing, usually in truncated form. So, reader: how would you clue ON ONE’S PAT?
Clueing competition
Thanks for your clues for POWWOW. We had appealing acrostics galore, including GeoScanner’s timely “Head Post Office workers walk out, wrecking talks”, WoodSmoke’s plausible “Politicians of world war one with heads together” and accompanied by a fiendishly concealed definition in Alberyalbery’s “Conference pear or walnut with orange-coloured watermelon starters”. And Chrisbeee kept things local with “Original people of ‘Wild West’ occasionally would meet up”.
Other devices I especially enjoyed included Robi23’s “Dog beginning to pine for start of brief congress” and DameSweeneyEggblast’s “Even in Epsom we woo, we get together”.
The runners-up are Catarella’s poignant “Charles takes a wife, then another with love (and intercourse)” and Lizard’s evocative “Three wives gathering round by post office for a confab”; the winner is Jamesfarrier’s economical and erudite “Magic: The Gathering”. Kludos to James; please leave this fortnight’s entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.
Clue of the Fortnight (or so)
As we said in our For Beginners on containers, when the answer is there in plain sight, the setter’s job is to hide it as best he or she can. Such hiding has seldom been done better than by Qaos (Meet the Setter) ...
24d Party to develop a “Third Way” (4)
[ found within (‘party to’) DEVELOPATHIRD ]
... in a staggeringly economical and readable clue which leads the solver straight up the garden PATH.
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