london.pm xmas xword solution and winner

[Aaron Trevena]

2010/1/4 Aaron Trevena <aaron.trevena at gmail.com>:
> We have a winner for the cryptic crossword!
>
> Congratulation to Smylers, who managed to get a 100% correct solution :
>
>  3a  better not pout
>  4a  winter
>  8a  naughty
>  9a  snowman
>  12a  Boxing Day
>  14a  not even a mouse
>  15a  Jingle Bells
>  17a  checking it twice
>
>  1d  Be good for goodness' sake
>  4d  Christmas
>  5d  Advent
>  7d  Santa Claus
>  10d  making a list
>  11d  better not cry
>  13d  November
>  16d  nice
>
> I will be speaking to Smylers later on to discuss his prize of an
> easter egg in one of my cpan modules, in the meantime everybody give
> him a well deserved round of applause!
>
> I suppose some explaination is in order.. as I've always said, it's
> mostly bad puns and plays on words.
>
> 3a/11d : "Better not pout/cry" is "Improved", not, *pout emoticon* -
> from Vi Improved via substring
> 4a : "Winter" is an anagram disguised as perl with added punctuation
> 8a : "Naughty" is a phonetic joke : Nought E
> 9a : "Snowman" is unicode hidden behind perl and phonetic wordplay = "U+2603"
> 12a : "Boxing day" is 26 (oct oct hex fff) dec (december)
> 14a : "Not even a mouse" is NOT, any power of two - i.e. even, and Any
> Moose is mouse
> 15a : "Jingle Bells" is an anagram of jingle disguised in a regex with
> ^D being a "Bell" ASCII escape code
> 17a : "Checking it twice" is evaluating $_, i.e. "it" once and again if true
>
> 1d : "Be good for goodness sake" is a variation of a line in a version
> of "santa claus is coming to town" written in bash I saw in an email
> just before christmas, but I've made it more perly and less obvious by
> changing sake to leetspeak : $4ke, hiding Good in $something,
> Goodness' in $somethings but it still works if you read it outloud as
> "be something for somethings sake" which is obvious if you know the
> words to the song.
> 4d : "Christmas" terrible wordplay - xmas from x mass where $m is
> mass, "m" being the recognised symbol for mass, as in e=mc^2
> 5d : "Advent" - a Laptop by Asus, my wife has one, they are ace,
> although the battery has gone from a few hours to a half an hour
> 7d : "Santa Claus" - reverse "esrever" hints that you need to reverse
> "73%6c%61%75%43%61%6e%74%61%20%53%" which then spells out santa claus
> 10d: "Making a list" - Build is the new Make, and of course still
> means the same thing, and of course the context we're looking for is
> list
> 13d: "November" is the month before christmas, and a Perl 6 wiki - of
> course Perl 6 delivery date is "christmas" and the perl 6 wiki has
> already arrived, I particularly like this clue as it works on several
> levels.
> 16d : "Nice" - It's nice to be nice, and nice children get presents,
> nice makes a process nice when you give it a positive value, as
> opposed to greedy when you give it a negative value
>
>
>
> --
> Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons
> http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk
> LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
>

oops.. I missed the one that Smyler didn't include in his answer :

2 down: "Antlers" - from horny Class::Accessor - use Class::Accessor
qw(Antlers) enables Moose style API in Class Accessor.

A.

-- 
Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons
http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk
LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting