To Have and To Hold - February 2015

The Theme

Slowly pieced together the fill in 1A and speculated with Sweet V what the Valentine's related theme might be. “Gag me anytime?” “Something about Bagend?”

Enough fill in place and the theme was revealed: “bag and baggage.” Means “all one's possessions.” Unclued entries are types of bags, often hecka obscure. Also: material goods mean everything, eh? Eep. Twas a rough Valentine's day for Richard E Maltby Jr?

• 26A) CARPETBAG
• 42A) STEAMER TRUNK
• 1D) BRIEFCASE
• 5D) DUFFEL
• 15D) PORTMANTEAU
• 19D) GLADSTONE

Gladstone wwutt?

• 22D) HAVERSACK

Haverchuck!!

Also there were like 80 bajillion anagrams this month. So, obviously we had a wonderful time :)

Highlights!

• 11A) Pay back nuts—I remember nuts (13)
  I REMEMBER NUTS * anagram = REIMBURSEMENT

• 27A) Bums: a liquid asset (5)
  ASSET * anagram = SEATS

Sweet V, on seeing this, said, “non-sexual butt jokes? What is this??”

• 29A) Melons, or lemons, can help you get sober (6)
  MELONS or LEMONS * anagram = SOLEMN

Ah, the wisdom of the Third Anagram!!

• 31A) Doctor told to get dope (4)
  TOLD * anagram = DOLT

Nice psych-out with the frequent homophone indicator qua anagrind. Nice clean narrative. Doc! My pain is unmanaged here, doc! Get me summadat dope dope! Mwa! So nice!

• 34A) Optional road trips involving sincerity (13)
  (ROAD + SINCERITY) * anagram = DISCRETIONARY

Mmmmmmmm big anagramas!!

• 2D)Hero with an ease that's cleverly disguised (6)
  AN EASE * anagram = AENEAS

Aeneas! So nice (neas)!!

• 3D) Gee, it's those contemptible Brits (4)
  (Gee = G) + ITS = GITS

“stupid git” burned into our brainpan from The Argument Sketch in Monty Python.

• 4D) Service offered anytime, but unexpectedly (7)
  ANYTIME * anagram = AMENITY

“service offered anytime” ... in our margin notes, we wrote “oral sex??”

• 7D) Large organ that comes with Capt. von Trapp (5)
  LarGE ORGan = GEORG

In our notes, this conversation with Sweet V:

“I bet it's ‘DICK’.”
“Has to have five letters.”
“D-I-C-K-K.”

• 10D) You might be put out by it, but there is another way to put it (5)
  THERE * anagram = ETHER

Ether! Shoutout to æther! And reminded of a conversation with our brother Chris two Thanksgivings ago about chloroform and grappling hooks that show up in movies—you know, that type of standard movie bad guy material. Must be from the Bad Guy Store.

• 13D) Damaged slicer remains (6)
  SLICER * anagram = RELICS

“Damaged slicer remains” is so nice and tight!

• 23D) Bring up name made in discipline involving exercises and pain (5)
  (name = N) in (discipline involving exercises = YOGA) * bring up = AGONY

Nice! The agony of yoga! Sweet V frequently complains that most yoga classes are designed for female flexibility, and thus discourage male attendance. We must to admit: we were blind to female normative exercise design!

• 25D) Ringer, Round One, given a Nick name? (6)
  (Ringer = BELL) round (One = I) given A = BELIAL

Belial is a term occurring in the Hebrew Bible which later became personified as the Devil in Jewish and Christian texts.

Source: Wikipeeds

Nick names. Very nice. Consulted V's personal lexicon of names synonymous for the Dark One, but none fit the existing fill at the time of BE--A-. Thus, then assumed it was a famous/celebrity Nick (“Nick Bettay?”)

• 28D) Old piece from fitted coat worn by Siamese, perhaps (7)
  COAT + (Siamese, perhaps = CAT) TOCCATA

Music. REALLY thought this would be a reference to one of

1. old menswear
2. Chang/Eng
3. Thailand
4. cat outfits

• 30D) One not moving in the mainstream route tavels around Long Island (7)
  ROUTE travels around (Long Island = LI) = OUTLIER

RULLY thought there'd be an LIRR reference here!

• 33D) Import daunts producer, possibly (6)
  DAUNTS * anagram = DATSUN

Datsun! Sweet V landed this one. Not called out in the instructs as uncommon, tho? Mmmmmmmmmmm uh. Not common to we!

Also, for years swore we heard Nedry saying “Datsun” instead of “Dodgson.”

• 38D) Stone making cameo appearances in Sony X-Men series (4)
  Sony X-Men = ONYX

X-Men! Nice psych-out with reference to Sony's X-Men. btw, glad to hear that Sony is letting Spider-man enter the Marvel Comics Universe of film. Altho, we're also discouraged about what the franchise superhero blockbuster culture is doing to the spec screenplay market. But what gunna do ¯\(°_o)/¯

Here's some vintage X-men #nostalgia

Lowlights!

• 12A) Corrupt NE frontier agent that stops some progress (10)
  NE FRONTIER * anagram = INTERFERON

Not an uncommon obscuro? Uh. I'm interferon with that logic. Definition:

interferon /in•ter•fer•on/
any of a family of glycoproteins, production of which can be stimulated by viral infection, by intracellular parasites, by protozoa, and by bacteria and bacterial endotoxins, that exert antiviral activity and have immunoregulatory functions; they also inhibit the growth of nonviral intracellular parasites.

Source: The Free Dictionary

• 15A) Probation officer gets me fruit (4)
  (Probation officer = PO) gets ME = POME

Pome? What is? Just, like, an apple? Murr.

• 17A) Start to do good in a lab, perhaps ... (3)
  do good = DOG

What's with the all the perhapses this month? Buh. Here's a cute doggy:

• 20A) Flooring participant in a timeless deed (4)
  (deed = TITLE) * timeless = TILE

UhhHHHhhhhhh it should be ILE by that logic. T-less! No T! We insisted to Sweet V for several hours that it must be PILE (somehow) as in carpeting, because it COULD NOT be TILE, as TILE has a T. It is not T-less. Then we got the crossing T from AMENITY in 4D and were thus forced to admit that the puzzle's answer was TILE. “Ai dreptate,” we said to Sweet V in his mother tongue. “You were right.”

Speaking of piles, here is a poem written by one of our former bosses. We were hired to that job formally as a marketing associate, and informally as a “second assistant” to the boss. Most of our intuition about the life of the Puzzle Minion is based on our experience working with this particular boss, who fancied himself a poet. Here is a memorable line from one of his poems:

My pee is in that pile
When I think of you, I smile

Source

• 37A) Drunken sot, in general, appearing ina Chinese restaurant (3)
  SOT * anagram = TSO

Tso, General. We meet again.

It should come as no surprise, and yet it still comes as a little surprise:

The dish is named after General Tso Tsung-tang, or Zuo Zongtang, a Qing dynasty general and statesman, although there is no recorded connection to him. The real roots of the dish lie in the post-1949 exodus of chefs to the United States.

Source: Wikipedya

• 40A) Lady's man, for example, backs bid to avoid a suit (4)
  ((for example = EG) backs = GE) + (avoid a suit ... ?= NT ) = GENT

Is this a bridge reference? Dear Readers are invited to elaborate logic in the ccccccomments.

• 14D) Accommodating beef served around South America (11)
  (beef = COMPLAINT) around (South America = SA) = COMPLAISANT

Variant spelling that went unmentioned in the puzzle instructs. How unaccommodating.

• 29D) Marble slab with writing on it, so they say (7)
  = STELE

Stele. Fancy seeing you here in a puzzle all the time every day (never stop) (can't stop won't stop).
Is pronounced like “Steely Dan” yess?

The Tacky!

• 24A) A female reporter with competence (4)
  A + (female reporter = BLY) = ABLY

Nellie Bly! Remembered from our feminist playing cards growing up!! A sample of this American badass:

But the piece that was to make Bly’s name was her exposé of the insane asylum on New York's Blackwell's Island. Pretending to be Cuban, Bly was committed there and found that most women in the asylum were in fact not insane but immigrants who could not communicate with their jailers or single women without a place in society. Bly stayed there for 10 days and described the horrible treatment and conditions of the place. ‘Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head—ice cold water, too—into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my mouth. I think I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub. For once did I look insane, as they put me, dripping wet, into a short canton flannel slip, labeled across the extreme end in large black letters, ‘Lunatic Asylum, B.I.H. 6.’”

Source: The Daily Beast

Referencing Queen Bly makes up (partially) for yeddanother male-normative clue. Ugh, side rant, in the NYTimes crossword the other week there was GUYLINER which, o my gorn no one cares about your precious fragile masculinity, men wearing eyeliner! Here! Let us now legitimize a bogus word to keep your penis safe. It's not eyeliner, it's guyliner. They're not dolls, they're GI Joes. It's not gay if you like it. You're safe now. Which is to say: this gender normativity shit works both ways and sucks every time.

Back to Bly, the “female” reporter, who would never ever ever in a million skillion years occur to a cryptic doer without that all-important “female” hint. Because why would one of the great muckrackers of US history ever be top of mind. Being as she is in a special and discrete category of reporter. You know. As a female.

Wouldn't it be cool to at least live in a world where the cryptic clues said like “male CEO” and “male president” and things like that? Clues from a free world (cool world).

Good.

Comment (yes).

Honorable Mention - November 2014

Mmm, the quality of clues this month: extraordinary. Just exquisite! So many approaching that highest ideal: natural language, telling a human story, lacking in obvious (gimme) indicators. Smooth and cool, like a ball bearing, or the sphere in the movie Sphere.

The Theme

All I want is a room somewhere. Farraway from the cold night air. With one enormous chair. O wouldn't it be loverly. How much of the musical My Fair Lady do we remember from 7th grade, you ask? Please do go on singing in a nasally Cockney, you ask?
TWOULD BE OUR PLSUR

Ten answers missing their starting “H.” Just like how they'd be pronounced by Eliza Doolittle before the the brave Enry Iggins teaches her code switching. And then the unclueds at 36A, 17A, and 25A are HERTFORD, HEREFORD, and HAMPSHIRE: three keywords from the linguistic torture porn sections of My Fair Lady.

If you don't know this play, we feel bad for you, son. Ninety-nine problems. Not being able to solve the November 2014 Harper's cryptic is one.

As tis, even those of us now annoying Sweet V with showtunes while he's minding his own business reading the new William Gibson, yes even we lucky ones still got messed up on this knowledge content-based theme. Thought it was HARTFORD. Even believed we confirmed on Googlo that it's HARTFORD. Yah, woops. HERTFORD. Eat your hert out. Dear Reader Eric, that's where we thought the error was.

For-sure error in the footer, tho. Shoulda said “November.” Look, there! The error! BEHOLT!!

Highlights!

• 18A) Mercury or Saturn—that's a bit of a tautaology (4)
  bit of tAUTOlogy = AUTO

Ahhhh!! Like-a-the cars! Nice. Perhaps you read this clue as we did, amused, saying, “but they have ENTIRELY different purview it's couldn't POSSIBLY be a tautology OOOH Maltby, you've done it again!!”

• 20A) Englishman's back to swinging both ways, as entrée to Italians (7)
  ((Englishman's = SIR) * back = RIS) + (TO * swinging both ways = OTTO) = RISOTTO

Those British men! Swinging about!!

Your grandma Quentin Crisp is this month's Nerd Hot Guy

• 22A) I get seated uncomfortably for pictures (7)
  I SEATED * anagram = IDEATES

Mwa! Lovely! Smooth storytelling. Could be a line from an EB White memoir, right?

• 34A) Engineer helps aid constructions contributing to touchdowns (7)
  HELPS AID * anagram = HELIPADS

Helipads!! So fun!! Let's name helipads in cinema ok we'll start! The helipad in Jurassic Park. Ok your turn.

• 35A) Wheels that make you mad, mad, covering the full gamut? (5) MAD + (full gamut = A [to] Z) = MAZDA

Appreciate the two uses of “mad.” Would we have been surprised had both “mad”s been used the same way? We would not've. But then this clue would be moved to the Lowlights section.

• 1D) The man needs a lush, all-encompassing, quiet, Southern subset of doctors (12)
  (The man = HE) + A + (lush = DRINKER) + (quiet = SH) + (Southern = S) = HEADSHRINKERS

Nice. Old school language (fresh language). Makes up for the length of the clue.

• 4D) Going off to flashy places where farmers get high? (7)
  TO FLASHY * anagram = HAYLOFTS

Nice surprising anagram! Farmers get high! Perhaps on online dates?



YOU DONT HAF TO BE LONELY
FARMRS ONLY

Lowlights!

• 12A) Unconventional theorist? Hm? Nearest thing to it! (9)
  THEORIST HM * anagram = THITHERMOST

Pffffffffffffffft. Meh. It's ok. Still a lowlight, but ok. Tellya what if they'd tried to pull off THITHERER tho. Well. Then we'd feel the special delight we feel every time we get worked up about the Harper's cryptic. Oooh!! Get that pulse racing!

• 14A) Pauses, managing a rescue (7)
  A RESCUE * anagram = CESURAE

Never hearda. Booo. We hate learning. Thought it would lead with CAE- but like it'd be one of those words where if you were feeling fancy you'd do some ligature like CÆ. But naw no ligature. Cese and desist.

• 32A) Narrated story that gives the Chinese weight (4)
  (story = TALE) * (narrated = homophone) = TAEL

BUh have we mentioned that we hate learning ok actually we love learning, actually we're bashful not to know more about Chinese weights and measures. But TALE to TAEL? Single letter translation? Woof. Yah we know it's not an anagram. But, like, when the homophone is so close orthographically then it's like moooooooooo (moo-urns).

• 37A) Long-tailed cats, ones riddled with mysteries, so they say (8)
  SPHYNXES

Another really dum homophone. Dumophone. Yah so the puzzle instructs call this one out as “unusual” and if you're like us, then you shrug and say, “wha like the one Oedipus defeats? The answer to the riddle is man! The answer to the clue is not so unusual!” Why the homophone indicator this be a synonym yo! Yeah but and so with a “Y” it's a real-life breed. oO

Breed Standards

Wedge-shaped heads with prominent cheekbones
...
[ blah blah —ed ]
...
Whiplike, tapering tail from body to tip, sometimes with a puff of fur on the tip, like a lion

Source: Wikipedia

• 38A) Start with hello, right? The heart of Nelson Eddy does this (6)
  (Start with = W) + (hello = HI) + (right = R) + (heart of Nelson = LS) = WHIRLS

Exhausting. Convinced ourself it was SWIRLS for a long time.

• 5D) Alcoholic content of party: a furtive sip (5)
  (party = DO) + SIP = DIPSO

A party is a “do”? Fine. Dipso?? Was sure it was TIPSY longtime.

dipsomaniac (n.) Look up dipsomaniac at Dictionary.com "drunkard," 1858, from dipsomania; slang shortening dipso is from 1880.

Source: Etymonline

• 6D) Irregular who art where the vattles are ... (5, two words)
  WHO ART * anagram = HOT WAR

As opposed to ... a cold? war? Umunununun. If [x][y] esists, then [-x][y] exists? No. You've heard of cornrows; therefore, corncolumns. You've heard of dreadlocks; therefore, dreadopens. We could keep going. You've heard of right to die; therefore, left to die.

You know where Wikipedia redirects “hot war”? To “war.” Yah.

Theme necessitated not breaking down how many letters per word lest the jig be up. But then, doesn't this sort of elephant-in-the-room cluing exactly raise the jig? Look up, see it? The jig? There's an elephant on it?

The Tacky!

Yah so even though truly we loved the clues this month overall, there were a whoppin THREE we call “tacky.”

• 13A) Two acts and he's a goner (4)
  (acts = DO) * two = DODO

He's a goner. This one made us sad. For the Earth.

• 28A) One of three South American flowers planted inside. One grows ... (5)
  One grows = NEGRO

Yah so. Just, doe'n't feel comfortable writing that. It's just the Spanish word for “black.” What's the bigs? Yah. We feel you. But if you're inviting us to alienate ourself from our emotional instincts ... good luck. Five years ago, two years ago, woulda been much easier. This year, you would have a rough go of it. Not gonna alienate ourself from our feels. And the feels? They're bad and weird, even contextualized by Latin America.

• 10D) Touring East, dancing role exhausts people who do it religiously! (12)
  (East = E) + ROLE EXHAUSTS * anagram = HETEROSEXUALS

Longtime readers knew we were gonna call this one out. What religion? What orthodoxy? The religions and orthodoxies so pervasive they need not be named.

Maltby has clearly never heard of the OTO, and eleventh level ritual buttsex.

This clue, it's like: why not “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”? Why tremble at the precipice? Just go for it. Name the infidels, the unclean, those whose way of love profanes the Creator and Creation. Say it. Queers are going to hell. Say it.

Tell it to the sisters.

Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Know and love.

Yah we're a little punchy this month. Ya.

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