Alan Connor finds a flood of requests and an apparently tipsy chef in his pick of the best cryptic clues
The news in clues
Cold – not to mention damp – comfort to those wearing waders in their kitchens, but a timely clue from the Telegraph…
27ac Smallandsecurething to use in a flood (7)
... for SANDBAG, published on 4 February and, crushingly, no less timely today, or tomorrow, or …
Latter patter
Equally timely was an FT puzzle that we mentioned in passing last week because we were Meeting its Setter as part of our Meet the Setter series. Look away now (or, rather, go and solve the puzzle now) if you want to avoid a spoiler for the secret message left by the always-entertaining Gaff: a perimeter message reading HAPPY TENTH BIRTHDAY TO FACEBOOK.
Facebook has added, directly and otherwise, to the lexicon available to setters; we've looked before at the way in which the unofficial DEFRIEND has less severe overtones than the official UNFRIEND; other Facebook cameos in the Oxford English Dictionary include the entries for LETTER-BOMB, STATUS, ARAB SPRING and even CROSS-PLATFORM. The citation there is a jocose New Yorker piece by National Lampoon's Ellis Weiner, which includes a neologism we should all be glad never caught on …
The vi-spi is cross-platform, but don't worry if you think you're not on Facebook, because you actually are. Jason enrolled you when you signed the contract last year, or at least he was supposed to, and he told Sarah Williams he did before he had to retire and Sarah left for nursing school.
... with VI-SPI presumably standing for the no-less-odious VIRAL SPIRAL. Facebook is pilloried with words here, but sometimes, as the entry for DENIAL OF SERVICE shows, the attack is more serious, when the sticks are 1s and the stones are 0s. This leads us to this fortnight's challenge, defined by Collins as:
distributed denial of service: a method of attacking a computer system by flooding it with so many messages that it is obliged to shut down
So, reader: how would you clue DDOS? (Checking that in this paper's style guide, I note with interest that there is, in Guardian terms, no such word as 'denialist'".)
Culture Clue
We tend to look here at the weekday puzzles with reassuring black squares separating the grid entries. If you tend to be scared of the weekend variant with those intimidating bars, here's a clue you might enjoy. While Azed freely accepts that his puzzles include "such gems as INTUSSUSCEPT, OBTEMPERATE and ZIBET", they can also feature perfectly cromulent condiments …
11ac Dressing: odd bits rejected by JamieOliver, half cut (5)
… and this irresistible recent clue for AIOLI.
Clueing competition
Thanks for your clues for SHTUP. As baerchen wisely noted…
Yiddish words are er, God-given nuggets for setters; all the usual suspects have four or five acceptable spellings in Chambers, thereby making them all fair game
… and yonah's thoughts on the contexts in which SCHMUCK or SHVANTZ might be acceptable are well worth a read if you came and left warly. So. Nigh-on impossible to avoid a nudge-nudge in clueing this word, and you did not disappoint – witness Ambush's "Tory leader in frantic push to have sex", JollySwagman's "Quietly ram it in, Israel" and SemperFi's, which I've subbed an article from for "Get lucky in quiet uplifting place".
I also enjoyed the concealed rudeness of robinjohnson's "Piano shut violently with a bang", not to mention Middlebro's "Is what bumps every second a bang?" and wellywearer2's "A bit of a posh Tupperware do".
The runnners-up are Middlebro's apparently clean "Shaft of early sun highlights the Upper Pyrenees" and thebrasselephant's contemporary "Nudge Unit: some horrible Tory plot, initially deranged"; the winner is MwanzaFrank's splendid "A number lost in violent putsch, resulting in formation of Jewish Congress".
Kudos to Frank – please leave this fortnight's entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.
Clue of the fortnight
The audacity award of the fortnight goes to, of all puzzles, the Times. Right at the end of last Wednesday's clues lurked:
26d Localappearing to spin– ZZ! (3)
There is of course no rule that prevents a setter from exploiting the fact that if you "spin" – ZZ through 90° clockwise, you end up with something not unadjacent to
I
N
N
Those who believe that American crosswords are wholly definitional might be cheered to learn that this kind of détournement is not uncommon there, and it has cheered me to see such a ticklesome example here. Get INN!