The Sphinx's Lair

1:41 AM

@MOehm yeah, this was the intent :)

@AncientSwordRage the C4 baton is now yours :D

AncientSwordRage

@oAlt CCCC: Places to hold on to broken Hadrian's wall lawlessly (9)

2:34 AM

@AncientSwordRage HANDRAILS (places to hold on to) = HADRIANSWALL* - LAW = HANDRAILS(-law) :D

AncientSwordRage

2:46 AM

@oAlt correct!

2:57 AM

CCCC: B⊂÷ (3)

3:11 AM

wut

please make sure not to break the honorable jafe's mind, we need it to make more excellent cryptic crosswords

Heh

Q: Dethy Mafia: Solved on the first day

3:46 AM

Consider the game Dethy Mafia. The full rules can be found here, but this is all you need to know to solve this puzzle: Each of the five roles "Sane Cop", "Insane Cop", "Paranoid Cop", "Naïve Cop", and "Mafia Goon" are given randomly to one of the five players. All players are told whether they'r...

juicifer

@oAlt could it be BAR, where the bar is a subset of the division symbol?

4:06 AM

@juicifer Not my intention :0 "b" as bar is deprecated and even if it were not I would have written "b" rather than "B"

juicifer

fair enough

BEL, which is inside obelus (a name for the division sign); "bel" being a unit abbreviated "B" and from which "decibel" (dB) is derived

juicifer

ah there it is

@bobble correct :D

wait I need to make a clue now

4:44 AM

CCCC: Animal sin (5)

gave up on making anything better

@bobble sloth ddef

@msh210 of course

5:03 AM

CCCC: It's a performance issue: he'd been in more than fifty films before he finally won an Oscar. (3,5)

3 hours later…

8:29 AM

I have a feeling the C4 has the def "It's a performance" and wordplay "issue" + "he'd ... Oscar"... but ofc I could be wrong

1 hour later…

9:40 AM

the only actor i can think of who fits the enumeration is tom hanks but i doubt he matches the def, he was pretty young when he won his oscars

(working under the assumption that the def is "he'd been" etc)

no wait it's actually actor GIG YOUNG... a gig is a performance, and your young are your issue

he finally won for "they shoot horses, don't they?" when he was 56 years young

9:56 AM

@Jafe yep!

@Jafe great film, by the way

@Jafe ahhhh

fun fact: the literal finnish translation of the film's title is two words long ("shoot" and "horse" with some suffixes)

10:13 AM

I can't say I'm surprised

10:25 AM

umm yeah that was broken... sorry, i'll need some more time with this one

CCCC: A black man being US president by the beginning of twenty-tens is embraced by the next generation in this family (4,5)

3 hours later…

1:53 PM

Bizarre Carcolh, with Earthlion (not lithe nor bizarre) having black substance (8)

Not a hard one at all, but my cryptic clue senses tingled when I saw the word "Carcolh" in that puzzle lol

Q: Reasoning game : The little piglet

2:18 PM

The game of the little piglet is a typical French game for 3 players. The first player takes the ball and throws it. The second player takes the throw and balls it. What does the third player do? There's nothing wrong with my translation, even if the phrasing seems weird. It is a reasoning game, ...

logical-deduction

M Oehm

3:00 PM

Quite the construction to get just the A.

mathematics logical-deduction

3:34 PM

Q: Eggs and family

Martha goes out, carrying some hard boiled eggs in a basket. She meets her sister and gives her half of the eggs in her basket plus half an egg. She meets her cousin and gives her half of the eggs remaining in her basket plus half an egg. She meets her sister-in-law and gives her half of the eggs...

3:45 PM

@MOehm yeah, "Earthlion('s) second" would have been too obvious and I couldn't think of a way to clue that in a different way haha

1 hour later…

4:50 PM

Q: Drawing beans from a jar

There are 199 dried beans in a jar, 100 black beans and 99 red beans. You put your hand in the jar, without looking in, and draw out a random pair. If you draw 2 red beans, you put a red bean back in the jar. If you draw a red bean and a black bean, you put a black bean back in the jar. If you dr...

logical-deduction

M Oehm

@oAlt Well, the "nor" construction has a certain elegance, I thought.

mathematics logical-deduction

5:40 PM

Q: Win your dream car!

You played a game in a T.V. show, and you won $1500. Now you have a chance of also winning your dream car. There are 3 closed curtains backstage. Behind one of them, your dream car is parked. You are invited to go and stand in front of the curtain you want to see opened. If your dream car is behi...

4 hours later…