Catnip

This thread is delightful, and feels like a gentler version of Richard Feynman's pranks when he was working at Los Alamos.

(If you're not familiar with those, "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" is worth a read. Even in his own words, his genius is mixed with some egregious asshole behaviour.)

unch unch

🥁🥁🥁 Coming Soon — a brand new cryptic crossword magazine we’re calling Unch. Interested? Sign up for email updates at unchcrosswords.com to find out more. And we’d love it if you could repost this to your own followers 👍

Aw, not Tom Lehrer! 😥

Guess I know what I'm going to be listening to for the next few days.

😁 🥳

From context, they might have meant Vin de Paille, the other Jura speciality, which is more expensive. Still should be cheaper than that.

TdF passing through Jura, TNT Sports talking about Vin Jaune being at least £250 a bottle.

Either prices have spiked since I was there or they're being ripped off.

So this was YOUR PARTY, Jeremy Corbyn's new party (or possibly not - there seems to be some confusion over the name).

UR inside TORYPAY*

A better clue might have been:

Foolishly pay Tory to host primitive lefties (4,5)

Congratulations. I liked 21d and several clues like 17d which took some serious parsing to properly appreciate.

Definitely topical. Lots of discussion about [solution] at the moment. But this clue probably couldn't have been done a couple of hours ago, and may be impossible in a couple of days!

Tory pay improperly cut by primitive lefties (4,5)

#cryptic #crossword

A Venn diagram showing three circles overlapping, one says I bet you think this graph is about and the other two say Don’t Dont and the middle says You

You’re so Venn

Somewhere between:
😂😲🤢

Nice one. I just about ground to a halt in the NW, but some nice clues with lovely surfaces.

And I don't know that it's my favourite, but 27a made me laugh and I'll never forget it. (However hard I try!)

Snip from Minute Cryptic solving guide. Substitutions: Substitutions are the heart of wordplay - swapping one word for another to build the answer. These swaps can be full synonyms or shorter abbreviations.

Absolutely, and Minute Cryptic has this in its guide. I must confess, I'm astonished that anyone could think like this when a definition is pretty much universally an unindicated synonym, frequently a devious one. But my failure of imagination counts for little.

That's my understanding of the goal. They deal pretty much exclusively in clues which present the solution letters in some form within the text.

Some of those are clever and sneaky, but I think that style's pretty consistent and on the easier end of the spectrum.

Seriously, it's a real concern if efforts to create accessible clues are leading solvers to feel that the most basic synonym is some kind of unfair imposition.

Surely the fairest, most accessible approach is to simply tell the solver what the answer is!

Obviously, you couldn't just say it - that might be a bit too simple. But you could have some well-defined code, setting out rules for how...

...hang on, I'm getting an update.

Most 18-year-olds are.

Incredible commitment to the wordplay silliness. Could only be improved if the horse turned out to be four of these guys in a trenchcoat.

🐱

How many letters?

Para from a BBC Sport report, which reads: "PGA Tour players hole 90% of putts from four feet. At that time, Scheffler was making 80%. The best player in the world was ranked outside the top 150 in putting and fending off the same questions every week." Just imagine being a top sportsman who's so bad at media duties that you're an also-ran in the all-important "fending off the same questions every week" metric.

Amazing the number of things these sports keep stats on.

That isn't what I said, and it takes either massive bad faith or a total failure of reading comprehension to make that leap. Either way, worth a block.

Yes, agreed on both.

Bound to be a factor, yes. At any rate, he had a good thing going and didn't want to risk it.

And to be honest, I think my threshold for reporting a co-worker's behaviour would be a lot higher if my job might be at risk as a result.

Obviously it doesn't work that way, but:

For all the scoffing about England slogging and giving wickets away, if Jadeja's SR had been even close to 50 (hardly wild), India would have won. Slightly over 50, and they'd have won before tea allowed England to regroup.

How fast you score does matter.

Cricket, eh? Bloody hell.

a black and white photo of a man with the words you dirty old man above him ALT: a black and white photo of a man with the words you dirty old man above him

You know who else was a working class man with a direct manner?

If I had a pound for every time Chelsea had been celebrating a trophy while a self-absorbed spectator tried to insert himself into the fun, I'd have two pounds.

I'd actually be interested in reading a forensic examination of Torode in all this, because I think it would be quite revealing.

Torode apparently dislikes him, so the dynamics of what he saw and how he reacted could tell us a lot about how Wallace types get away with it.