The official bored-at-work cryptic crossword pass it on thread.

i am failing badly at the bottom half of yesterday's crossword, including the fancy lad, despite it being an obvious anagram. (that said, 50% is 45% more than i usually manage on weekdays)

and the 'unfortunately' bit is just another anagram indicator - anagram(lilac+h)+x

Hint for that one: it is topical, innit.

I breezed through the top half, very unusual for me especially on a Friday, and then my delusion of genius was destroyed by the bottom half. Have since finished it by cheating on several of the bottom half clues and mostly gone "ohh, of course", with a couple of "blimey, I'd never have got that but it works", so nothing desperately unfair or annoying.

Liked the puzzle on the whole, but maybe that was just because of the ego boost of the top half!

that 'be cool and calm' answer fun. Got it & figured it would be Paul, the scamp. Didn't see the paper but will have a shot at it online now.

Oh man it's saturday I could buy the times and spend the entire bank holiday trying to do the listener.

Hot to catch a girl with nothing on? (5)

I got the answer, LASSO, but do you think 'hot' was a typo for 'how' or am I missing something? (Trying to work 'hot' in hung me up for way longer than it should have!)

Must be a typo.

Also:

What one is supposed to view isn't stated, but agitation is obvious when something does. (6)

SEETHE.

'When something does' led me to believe the word would would end in S (it was unchecked.) Again, I'm probably just quibbling because I spent too long on it, but "when something... SEETHE?" Something SEETHES. "When something does seethe" I guess, but I thought that was pretty clunky. Liked the SEE THE part, though.

it's a clunky clue. every word should count precisely imo

That's been part of my problem, as a novice, is figuring out "is that standard, or fair?" Thanks for letting me ask questions, this forum has been helpful.

Here's one I actually quite liked, and solved rather easily:

Everything I put a label on the wrong way, otherwise it might end up as baggage, or a purse. (9)

ALLIGATOR

I understood "All I tag, else." But it's okay to have the letter "I" in the clue just be included in the answer like that?

it's int he cluse- all I TAG

wow look at that

"Everything I put a label on" is ALL I TAG so the I isn't random

No not random, but I just = I. I suppose you would need to do that sometimes, now that I think of it.

it's kosher alright

Yeah, better that than trying to cram iodine into the clue.

trying to cram iodine into anything is just a bad option #rules4lyfe

Ha! Just one more from my puzzle this week:

Where you might find Irish whiskey, though the grammar of the girl appeared to be crude. (7)

SHEBEEN. Great word I had never encountered before! But is he getting 'grammar of the girl' from the idea that 'she been' should supposedly be 'she's been' or 'she'd been' or something? Even though for instance, 'where has she been' is grammatically fine?

well 9/10 times 'she been' is gonna be bad grammar tbf

Yeah, okay, I guess 'appeared to be' would cover the exceptions.

for me that's still quite ugly tho:

"Where you might find Irish whiskey" = shebeen, fair enough
"though" = doesn't clue anything I don't think. really good cluers avoid adding words that only make the clue appear grammatical
"the grammar of the girl appeared to be" = she been, but this is a bit ugly and again great clues shd be meticulously sensible, logical. this is a bit too vague for me
"crude" = fair enough in the context of what went before, it at least explains why the slightly vague bit is what it is

you can argue that if the clue is gettable or mostly makes sense then it's okay, but from a point of aesthetics there should be no wasted words anywhere

There's an added layer of difficulty when shebeen is a totally unfamiliar word. I figured that out with crosswordsolver.org, then backtracked to try to figure out the secondary cluing. And when I'm still unsure exactly what's going on, that's when I throw it up to the ilx ninjas.

I liked this one from today's Guardian:

Fat cat or animated dog caught stool pigeon (9)

Plutocrat

nice

Good use of cricketing terminology!

This one was good too IMO, also today's Guardian:

March about Stoke Poges when king is deposed (5-4)

Goose Step :)

you're on fire! took me ages of pondering to get that...

once you twigged the anagram it wasn't too bad. the hardest clues are the ones where you can't work out yr line of attack i think

Good use of cricketing terminology!

That's where the c comes from?! I've been learning via puzzles in The Nation, and Frank Lewis being American I haven't run into cricket abbrevs.

c = caught, that is.

Yeah, "c" for caught is an abbreviation used on cricket scoreboards, so it's widely used and accepted in UK crosswords

further sources of confusion: Bowled = b; run out = ro; stumped = st

not out = no

don't think you'd have much use for lbw

Joint, English, strangely out leg before wicket? (5)

lol ok

Guarantee Jimmy will take a meditative chant (7)

promise

aye

was racking my brains as to why Jimmy = prise, then it struck me...

Eccentric Scotsman puts his finished documents here, by the sound of it (5)

Seriously annoyed with this clue from Paul in the guardian prize btw:

Into smacking, if I then propose shaking, the results should confirm it (3,5,2,2,3,7)

ans: The proof is in the pudding.

THE PROOF IS NOT IN THE FUCKING PUDDING

lol outré.

lol

That is nice. I usually am terrified of clues with scots things in them ('Hamish's cradle', 'Classy In Inverness' etc etc). There's one most weeks in Azed & it just means a bloody war of attrition and then dictionary mining to find a dialect word or strange spelling I'll immediately forget.

just had a look at that prize & god paul can be irritating.

In North America, island, island, island, island capital (7)

Fun, but next to no surface sense.

can't see the problem with that pudding clue. or the answer.

(it's the kind of clue i get by the word sizes rather than the anagram though)

there's no such phrase as "the proof is in the pudding".

"the proof of the pudding is in the eating" wouldn't fit across a standard sized crossword i guess.

have you tried googling recently?

was always 'proof is in the pudding' at ours - the ingredients are all well and good but the proof is in the finished result.

1st google result

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/proof-of-the-pudding.html

"That longer version makes sense at least, whereas the shortened version really doesn't mean anything"

only seems to work with a truncated phrase but...

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=proof%20is%20in%20the%20pudding%2Cpudding%20is%20in%20the%20eating&corpus=0&smoothing=1&year_start=1800&year_end=2008