Dean Mayer 4910 – déjà vu all over again

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
12:13. A fun puzzle with a clue (12dn) that is pretty much identical to one that appeared in one of Dean’s puzzles that I blogged in March (4892), that was itself almost identical to a clue in one of Dean’s puzzles that I blogged in May last year (4852). At this point I feel I’m being trolled, but at least it gives me the opportunity to head my blog as I have and it be true, rather than just a gag.

Anyway, really fun puzzle as I said, but Dean please stop lamplighting me!

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (TIHS)*, anagram indicators are in italics.

Across
1 Drone, brief solution for US?
HUMANS – HUM (drone), ANS (abbreviation of ‘answer’).
5 Feeble way to refer to reversing
PATHETIC – PATH, reversal of CITE.
9 Please let me go or come again
I BEG YOUR PARDON – I don’t think this quite works. To ‘let go’ is to release, not to pardon. That’s ‘let off’. One might be the consequence of the other but that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing.
10 Famous runner carrying her stick
COHERE – Sebastian CO(HER)E.
11 Start broadcasting from, primarily, Golders Green
GO LIVE – Golders, OLIVE. I got very confused by this, thinking LIVE was a reference to the wires in a plug, which meant that ‘primarily’ had to be indicating the first two letters of ‘Golders’, which seemed very odd. The live wire in a UK plug is brown, and of course has nothing whatsoever to do with this clue.
14 Hand over all evidence of monarch leaving throne?
ROYAL FLUSH – ‘throne’ here being a word for the loo, and the answer being the best hand you can get in poker.
16 Spymaster and worried colleague
MATE – M (spymaster), ATE.
17 Covering over swimming pool
LIDO – LID, O.
18 Fish and chopped nut on ice
ROCK SALMON – ROCKS, ALMONd.
20 Gets through customs, then skyward
USES UP – USES (mores, customes), UP (skyward).
22 Word for one turning on soft, small light
PLEDGE – reversal of EG (for one) on P, LED.
24 Taking a long time or a couple of minutes?
LITTLE BY LITTLE – two minutes (LITTLES) next to one another.
26 Crowd wave before English party
JAMBOREE – JAM (crowd), BORE (wave, as in the tidal bore seen on the Severn for example), E.
27 Eager artist’s group
RARING – RA (artist), RING (group).

Down
2 Leader of unruly mob battered boss
UMBO – Unruly, (MOB)*. Collins: ‘a large projecting central boss on a shield, esp on a Saxon shield.’ An obscure word you are unlikely to come across outside crosswords.
3 A new show holding a vote on old people
ANGLO-SAXONS – A, N, GLOS(A, X, ON)S. I think this is GLOSS as in ‘superficial attractiveness’ rather than ‘explain the meaning of a word or phrase’ although arguably both work.
4 Engaged person OK to dance, embracing female
SPOKEN FOR – (PERSON OK)* containing F.
5 Usual meeting place not quite enough for social climber
PARVENU – PAR (usual), VENUe.
6 Noise from guitar fret? Start to tune up
TWANG – reversal (up) of GNAW (fret), Tune.
7 The purpose of open discussion
END – contained in ‘open discussion’.
8 Pub praises new product
INNOVATION – INN, OVATION.
12 Spill jam, given flimsier sandwich
LAMPLIGHTER – see above.
13 Do the first part of it?
TONIC SOL-FA – CD, based on the fact that do (a deer, a female deer) is the first note of the musical scale.
15 New horse boxes are affecting old landlord
HOSTELLER – (HORSE)* containing TELL (are affecting).
19 Old man cutting wire with skill
CAPABLE – CA(PA)BLE. The definition looks like an adverb but it’s an adjective.
21 Icy, or the opposite?
POLAR – ‘polar opposite’ is a recognisable idiom so POLAR is an example of an opposite.
23 Is able to house large family
CLAN – C(L)AN.
25 When inverted, only </u>water could be in it</u>
TUB – reversal of BUT (only).

20 comments on “Dean Mayer 4910 – déjà vu all over again”

  1. I was so chuffed at getting this done so quickly that I failed to notice SOL-LA. LOI COHERE, where I wasn’t expecting ‘runner’ to mean ‘runner’; started to do an alphabet trawl, when I remembered COE. Biffed I BEG etc. from the B, without notice the problem Keriothe points out. Biffed ROCK SALMON, parsed post-submission. COD to ROYAL FLUSH. K, you’ve left out the ON in ANGLO-SAXONS.
  2. 31 minutes. Lovely puzzle, with many good clues. Shazam! As someone who used to love the sound of Duane Eddy on Luxy, the TWANG was definitely the thang. COD though to ROYAL FLUSH for the giggle. Thank you K and Dean
    1. Do you know if Eddy actually pronounced his first name as ‘Doo-ayne’ or was that some DJ’s just being silly?
      1. I honestly don’t know, Jack. I’d never thought about it before. The American pronunciation guide on Google has it more or less as Dwayne. Back in the day, I pronounced it more as Jew-ane, but this is a rare occasion l have to concede that Lancastrian English isn’t Top Trumps. A rebel rouser on forty miles of bad road might well say Doo-ane.
  3. 25 and 26 delayed me a little as my last two in but I was still done and dusted in 27 minutes which must be a PB for me on one of Dean’s puzzles.
  4. That was enjoyable.
    Thank you, keriothe, for ROCK SALMON and LAMPLIGHTER, neither of which I could parse fully at the time. LAMPLIGHTER is a term I’m familiar with from Le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor” trilogy.
    Somehow I knew that “throne” in 14ac would have meaning it did have!
    25d TUB was very good but my COD goes to TONIC SOL-FA.
    Finally, are we to make anything of Row 1:
    “Humans Pathetic”?
  5. ….at 24A, and then a John Fogerty album in the title of the blog, not to mention Duane Eddy’s thang. I won’t be short of earworms today.

    I didn’t parse ROCK SALMON, ANGLO-SAXONS, or LAMPLIGHTER until later. Almost two minutes at the end to solve HUMANS, and I still don’t know why !

    FOI I BEG YOUR PARDON
    LOI HUMANS
    COD ROYAL FLUSH
    TIME 11:44

  6. 13:12, which is quite fast for me for a Dean puzzle. Some lovely clues. I particularly liked HUMANS, PATHETIC, ROYAL FLUSH and TWANG. Great stuff. Thanks Dean and K.
  7. This was a game of two halves for me. Got about 16 clues in my first session and thought that might be it- but including LAMPLIGHTER which I remembered from somewhere (thanks to Keriothe for the reminder). FOI was END. 2OI LIDO. My blanks were mainly on the LHS.
    A second session yielded a number of breakthroughs;was not sure about HOSTELLER. COD to HUMANS which was very late in.
    LOI was PLEDGE.
    Very enjoyable and very happy to finish a Dean puzzle.
    David
  9. I enjoyed this puzzle, with ROYAL FLUSH getting COD from me for the laugh. TONIC SOLFA was another light bulb moment. No particular problems and I was all done in 28:17, so this must be my quickest finish of a Dean puzzle. Thanks Dean and K.
  10. 19:13 and rare for me to get anywhere near sub-20 mins on a Dean Mayer puzzle, so I think this was at the easier end of this setter’s spectrum. It did occur to me when solving that the clues for the smaller three and four-letter words all seemed uncharacteristically untricksy for this setter. Rock salmon parsed post-solve, everything else got and understood while solving.
  11. I’d never heard of Sebastian Coe, but was confident enough to wait for the blog for the explanation.

    Only 13 comments before me, so I had to add one.

  12. I’m late to the party, but I think the first part of 9ac is suggesting you might say “I beg your pardon” to the person standing in your path, meaning “please let me go [through]”.
  13. Put me out of my misery please – having read all Le Carre’s books I still do not understand 12 down and its relationship to spill.

    Michael

    1. Hi Michael. I’ve no idea what your reference to Le Carre is all about but a spill is (Collins) ‘a splinter of wood or strip of twisted paper with which pipes, fires, etc, are lit’. So something that lights lamps.
      1. Thank you.

        Michael

        PS – the Lamplighters appeared in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

        1. Thanks: I’m pretty sure I’ll get round to Le Carre one day… maybe in a decade or so.
  14. Thanks Dean and keriothe
    Started off well enough seeing PARVENU and I BEG YOUR PARDON quite quickly and thought that I was in for an easy solve. But initial errors in LAMPLIGHTER (even though the similar clue was recently with us) and USES UP started to put the brakes on.
    As with others thought that ROYAL FLUSH (for both the clever definition and the humorous cryptic look at it) and HUMANS were my favourites.
    Hadn’t heard of either HOSTELLER or ROCK SALMON before.
    Finished in the SW corner with the corrected USES UP, the very well defined TONIC SOL-FA and the innocuous but hard to get JAMBOREE the last few in.

Comments are closed.