Sixes and Sevens - May 2013

Dear Readers, we're going to kinda phone it in this month. We are hard at work on our show, BLOGJOB. If you have not watched, you should watch. Currently, and this makes us very proud, our show is the top hit for a search of "blogjob." Take that blogjob.com! At least, that's true from this IP address. You know that Googly changes results based on IP address? It helps them maximize profits, prolly. So cool! What a cool company.

So this post will be barely edited (read: long and rambleh) while a couple scenes of footage from our show, BLOGJOB, render in Premiere for the next 45 mins. Don't tell us about how you hate editing in Premiere. Guess what? We've heard your rant. Guess what? It's what we're doin. It's just what's hannin. Believe.


Too much scaffolding in this post already! Alla this blah-blah would normally be cut! This time, it's not! But! Dear Readers! An important and majestic something has occurred! And that is that: the miracle has arrived! Yes, it's finally ha'en'd! Lo! A missive!

Foolishly we thought this might be fanmail from one Richard E. Maltby. But it was even better: the hand-scrawled letter confirming that we were a winner of the April 2013 cryptic contest.
FRABJOUS
DEY
CALLOO, DEAR READERS
CALLAY

And here we thought we were the only one out there still writing business mail by hand. That's how we request to be removed from junk mail lists when the junk mail arrives. The upshot is that we rarely receive mail of any kind, let alone good mail. If you're itching to send us mail, you can do it care of: BLOGJOB, Box 409012, Chicago, IL 60660.

To the puzzle!

Nothing really to say about it, puzzle-wise. Very regular. Familiar theme. Solid, steady. A white rice kind of puzzle.

Lowlights!

• 11A) Architectural feature due me? That's what it says! (4)
  (DUE * homophone = DO) + ME = DOME

Yeah ugh. No. If we're playing the homophone game we're playing the homophone game. No fun to switch it up to the orthography game. At least not for a thin nothing little word like "do." The answer should be "DOOMY." Doomy + gloomy.

• g) Topics for redesigning a study for a scientist (6)
  TOPICS * anagram = OPTICS

A single-translation anagram. Boo. Least favorite. Unrelated to the puzzle, and not Maltby's fault, but it drives us mad! that it's in vogue for political commentators to say "the optics" when they mean "the [public] image." Excruciating. Yet another crime committed by our field of undergraduate study, political science. ([Russian accent] "Is not real science!")

Matt D would agree.

• e) Check on trade requiring, therefore, holding a degree from Wharton (7)
  (therefore = ERGO) + (degree from Wharton = MBA) = EMBARGO

Too easy. Meh.

About 20 minutes left on rendering! Don't stop now, team!

• h) Pastoral letter from Benedict, upper-class pain in the gut (7)
  (letter from Benedict = B) + (upper-class = U) + (pain in the gut = COLIC)

Just ... so paint-by-numbers.

Highlights!

Both of the big twelves were very nice here:

• 16A) Darlings heard by orators in hats (12)
  ((Darlings = DEARS) * homophone = DEERS) + (orators = TALKERS) = DEERSTALKERS

Like the Sherlock Holmes hat. Kept thinking there was some more severe homophony on and about. Nay nay. Do you watch the new Sherlock Holmes? People love it. We've never seen it, but we know that there's a guy named Cumberbatch in it, and he's really hot. We've also never seen Dr. Who. Kate Beaton did a good job of summing up what we think Dr. Who is like. We gave it a watch the other night. There was a 10-minute sequence about how Dr. Who is a picky eater. Is his fussiness related to being a Time Lord®? We weren't too interested either way. We've given up on Dr. Who for now, just as we've given up on Battlestar Galactica. It started out so good! Season 2 was exquisite! But now we're in Season 4 and a) nothing is happening and b) everyone is just stressed out and yelling all the time, and not particularly intelligent or creative. No one's even having sex. They just yell and sweat a lot. We thought space was cold! Why's everyone sweating all the time?

• 24A) Peculiar quality sailor held in place—this shows restraint (12)
  (quality = TRAIT) + (sailor = JACK) + (held in place = SET) = STRAITJACKET

The other nice twelve. "sailor = jack" we'd never seen before. Got STRAITJACKET by inference, had to look up syns for "sailor."

• 31A) Animal from pound running after one (4)
  (pound = L) + (running = ON) + (one = I) = LION

"Running" as in like "is your fridge on? Well you better go catch it!"

• 4D) Look! The gentleman's upset an animal (5)
  (Look = LO) + (gentleman's = SIR) * (upset = anagram) = LORIS

LORIS! Holla atcher O'Reilly texts! Glorious :) Here is a video of slow loris getting a tickle. If this video does not give you feelings then you have no feelings. Click the video. Feel things.

• 10A) Headgear with the front cut off for the city (5)
  (Headgear = TURBAN) - first letter = URBAN

This was the first clue we got. Splendid! As a sidenote, we love seeing Muslims in hijab, turbans, kurta, etc. Be free, brothers and sisters. Honor your Creator how you see fit! It's not our job to thought police. That's Laura Roslyn's job. We have probably spent much-too-much time imagining ourselves as one of the good-hearted Cylon, and how we might be able to get through to President Laur. But there's just no way. Her prejudices, cheekbones run too high. Forget it.

• f) Spooky and kinda not like a container! (7)
  UNCANNY (double syn)

Ooooooh so normally we're not into these fake-o words but uncanny! Uncanny valley! Uncanny X-Men! Not like a can! YES!

The Tacky!

Two kinda tacky. One is is mildly lewd. The other sexist-y. Nothing truly untoward. Nothing about rape. That's saying something. Isn't it bad that that's saying something? It's bad! Here they are:

• f) Habit-forming item endlessly allowed to be put on wuss (6)
  (wuss = WIMP) + (allowed = LET) - last letter = WIMPLE

Ah yes, the noble wimple! One time Nikki came with us to a reading in San Francisco. We had recently learned the word "wimple." At the reading, a twice-published author read from her second book of softcore medieval lesbian erotica.

... It's possible that we've already told this story before in this blog? No time to check! Onward!

This softcore lesbian authoress read from her book and hooooooow hard is it to make sexy fair maidens sexy? Not hard, right? But this passage was boring and bad. It made us mad, and sad. As we recall, the only things that happened in the passage were a quickened pulse and a dropped bowl of hærbs.

As Nikki said afterward, "there was nothing medieval about that book. It was just San Francisco, with wimples."

"Nikki, we have to write and publish two books, just to bring the world back to zero!" we said. Ok, the bouncing icon in our Dock has informed us that we're done rendering that BLOGJOB footage. Gotta wrap this up.


Dunno about you, but growing up it was very clear to us that "wuss" was a bare euphemism for "pussy." Like "frack" for "fuck." Lewd. Thanks, Maltby.

Here's the other tacky.

• One might be fond in bed with a crazy person, rising around one after gym (7)
  (crazy person = AUNT) + (one = I) + (gym = PE) = PETUNIA

Aunts are synonymous with crazy? We now direct your attention to our several crazy uncles. And crazy aunts. We were blessed with both. We are very excited that next month our Romanian boyfriend will get to meet a sampler course of them at a family reunion. Then and only then might he truly understand us. This is our heritage. Our crazy uncle heritage.

This clue seems to come from the deep dark heart of "crazy spinster aunts" and Miss Havisham and her-only-fulfillment-was-through-her-siblings'-children. From the dark place of "failed woman."

EDIT! Per Dear Reader Tyler's obso, "a crazy person" = A NUT. Because there's an indicator for a reversal. Which we ignored. Because we felt like it. So, nevermind! Nevermind! This clue escapes our outrage.

Anything to share? Agree to disagree? Disagree to agree? Orwellian double-speak? Discourse through blog comments? Leave one below!