The DA Trippers

(Written in fineliner are my failures)

This one made me want to cry.

I was already asleep when RC texted me for a late DA on Friday night, and the remainder of the weekend was too busy for me to share the cryptic joy, so I attempted it solo over the last few days.

I feel as if my powers are failing me. Despite its being carried around in my back pocket most everywhere I went, I got out little more than a quarter of the crossword. And despite having the answers in front of me, there’s still plenty I can’t explain.

Help!

10 across: Hawk or Magpie spun ball’s outside point to control ball… (askance) (7)

To control ball = dribble, but nothing else makes sense.

6 across: Revolutionary ran to embrace one Zeno disciple (5)

One Zeno disciple = stoic, or, more likely, Zeno disciple = stoic. The rest, though?

8 down: Twisted bachelor-ess action sequence in The Dish?

The Dish = casserole, and bachelor-ess without the b and h is an anagram of casserole, but how that all works is beyond me.

4 down: They are common students, wearing beanies (9)

Wearing beanies = ebeians, which leaves students = pl so that students, wearing beanies = plebeians = they are common, but why does students = pl?

22 across: In Sydney, train horse to drop tail after smack (7)

Google tells me that a tangara is a type of train used in Sydney (this should technically be a DA Teaching, but I don’t find it interesting enough to bother reporting), which makes In Sydney, train = tangara. Everything else, however, I can’t work out (although mustang = horse could have something to do with the explanation).

13 down: It is crazy, perhaps, for desktop to be clean (9)

To be clean = sanitised, but I can’t quite make out the rest.

(highlighted clues were unsolved until Saturday’s Age was consulted)

RC and I met Saturday morning at Il Fornaio on the benches that make for a comfortable solving of a crossword. And comfortable it indeed proved to be, although perhaps too comfortable; slapping our heads in astonishment is all we could do for not having solved the following:

19 across: Hardest crank gear (7)

Because we were both thinking it was a double-meaning clue, we missed the easiest of anagrams: hardest crank = threads = gear.

Despite that, we managed to get through the crossword pretty well. Nothing was particularly worthy of note about it, although it was great to hear from RC that N?, a DA neophyte, had managed to solve a few clues on her own the previous night before boarding a plane and heading to Laos.

May we all one day excite ourselves with a DA before boarding a plane to places far away.

(the circled answers are either incorrect or benefited from the Saturday Age)

This one took a long time to get done. I didn’t have all that much time to devote to the crossword, and, quite frankly, I didn’t get very far early on when I tried. Thankfully, RC, N? (she’s new!) and I got together at a Melbourne Cup Day barbecue to hammer out most of it and leave ourselves mightily perplexed by three clues we could not answer.

As usual, this crossword features some DA Gold and DA Confusion. What is unprecedented is the amount of DA Teachings on offer: I learnt seven new words from this one crossword alone!

I haven’t yet had a good go at last Friday’s cryptic, and tomorrow’s public holiday for Melbourne Cup Day, at least in Melbourne, is shaping up as a good time to devote myself to DA.

But, in the meantime, here’s a little cryptic crossword I prepared earlier. It was my first attempt at creating a 15 x 15 cryptic, and, well, it was fun.

Here it is:

(The red clues were from the Saturday Age)

RC is back in town after many months of absence, and Friday night we caught up over wine and a DA.

Themed crosswords have been a feature of DA’s efforts of late, but we had never before been greeted with the peculiar instruction:

Please note: all across clues are 22-across, and go otherwise undefined.

We weren’t sure how to correctly interpret the instruction. My guess was that the answers to the across clues in sequence would constitute a poem or the lyrics to a song. The absence of short clues for English’s prepositions, pronouns and articles put paid to such a notion, so we plunged headlong into the down clues, hoping something would come of our efforts over time.

We did manage to get a few answers out, but it was RC who made the important breakthrough on the humorous 7-down:

7 down: Residents liable to be punished by thematic overindulgence? (6)

Somehow, from somewhere in the dark recesses of his prodigious mind, RC managed to drag out livers as a synonym for residents so that residents = livers = liable to be punished by thematic overindulgence. And, with that, we had ourselves the theme locked up.

Clearly, alcohol had something to do with the theme, and when RC in a flash turned to 12-across and proclaimed it to be Stella Artois, we knew we had for ourselves an amber-ale-themed crossword.

Notwithstanding the theme being revealed, further progress was arduous; DA had still managed to make the crossword quite difficult even for boys well-versed in beer. We called it a night having done about half the crossword some time after midnight, and we were both impressed by the amount of mental strain involved in getting as far as we did, which wasn’t all that far at all.

I answered a few more clues on Saturday before admitting defeat and consulting the answers on Sunday. How a few of the clues work still baffles me; how my favourite of all beers, Tsingtao, went unsolved baffles me still more.

I was caught up with the preparations and celebrations that came of my brother-in-law’s 40th birthday party over the weekend. I did manage to sneak peeks at the DA, but they were to no avail; my fleeting glances met with no solutions, and now I ask for absolution.

I’ve got no crossword to upload and I’ve got nothing to say, really, about Friday’s DA. If any of you have something to offer, please do, and I will have to live vicariously through your accounts. 

So DA will have to wait until the coming of this week’s end, when Friday’s crossword will surely make a more enduring mark on my doings, and RC might just be back in the cryptic circle after many months of absence.

(I solved the answers in red, the Saturday Age solved the answers in black)

Another tough one; DA is making us hurt. I flew the flag solo on Friday because the weekend was gonna be hectic. I made reasonable progress and got about a third of it done, but when I went through it again on the Saturday and found myself making no further progress, I gave up and checked the answers. The answers, however, often didn’t help me in figuring out how the clues were constructed; DA was in a nasty mood again, and this time around he seemed to be making the direct clues particularly cryptic.

To make up for my lack of success, a couple of tram rides over the weekend were spent doing a Thursday NS that I had scrounged from an old newspaper. Success was quickly forthcoming; that sense of cryptic-solving satisfaction, however, was not.

An aside: Does a lack of DA success cause me to use the non-commital semi-colon more often? Does the semi-colon reflect my sense of confusion? Does a tough DA make me less declarative? Is this uncertainty a good thing? Should I be happy that I’m not Hemingway?

(the circled answers were not the product of my own mental workings)

TH was in Sydney, I have no idea where in the world RC is these days and I was having a very slow day at work. So I took on this baby mostly during working hours and found myself mostly at Degani’s in Burnley (sans Elvis impersonator, sadly) praising the good DA’s name; I think this is his best since this blog has been started.

Following what seems to be a trend over the last couple of months, this is another themed crossword, and my solving the clue to which most others referred turned out to be a two-stage process:

13 across: Islander virulent against US intervention?

With a t as the first letter and a tentative s as the third, I figured Tasmanian was the answer even though the only explanation I had for it was that Tasmanian = islander. The other clues referring to 13-across all seemed to confirm my suspicion, but I still had no watertight explanation. Only with the solving of 24-across, which put an inopportune e in the middle of Tasmanian, did I realise the answer was going to be Taswegian and the explanation virulent against = tasgian, us = we, virulent against US intervention = Taswegian = islander.

With that, only a few clues remained of the crossword by knock-off time. Between then and the witching hour, though, progress was only made on one of the few unsolved clues, and I consulted the SMH online for the answers to the rest (for some reason, the crossword software never works in my browser on The Age website).

Now Tasmania is happily associated with one of DA’s best. Excepting Launceston, my already high estimation of the place shot through the roof, and I’m expecting cryptic-crossword aficionados to mysteriously drift southward as if this DA were a siren’s call from the other side of Bass Strait.

(the answers written in pen were solved the hard way, the answers written in fineliner were solved by the Saturday Age)

I doubt TH and I solved even a handful on Sunday, while I managed to eke out about that yesterday before giving up and deciding I might as well post about the pain.

This was hellish. And now that we’ve got the answers, I still don’t have the explanations.

Stay tuned for a fair bit of DA Confusion.