With PR well underway, I think we can wrap this up an hour early:
In contrast to most weeks when we have variety of clues from a number of different setters, this week we have a number of different clues from a variety of setters. However the difficulty of picking a winner remains constant. Plus ça change!
As always, I'm looking for that elusive combination of clever wordplay and smooth-as-Sam-Cooke surface.
Honorable mentions to tyke@4 and patrich@25 for nice acrostics; mattrom@15, mprs@14 and simon@8 for deft double-defs; chris@2, mprs@29 and aristo@38 for nice charades; and jono@3 for the compound anagram.
As for the grand prize, I debated among these four, and as always had to find nit-picky reasons to prefer one over any of the others:
geeker@19, useby@21, jono@23, mattrom@36.
geeker@19, I was impressed that you could find a way to hide the word, but ultimately decided that "collectibles" implies something more valuable than just "stuff" (as I said, I needed to get picky. And, sorry spike but geeker got there first.)
useby@21, love the surface, but that required the word "TO" which I think doesn't quite work for the wordplay.
That leaves jono@23 vs mattrom@36. Both have excellent wordplay, but in the end the winner has a surface that's just too good, and gets an extra point for brevity. So sorry jono@23, but the gold goes to mattrom@36:
French francs (old notes) rejected as money (5)
Congrats to mattrom and thanks to everyone for taking part.
Prizes:
Too much stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
The Right Stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQt579381OI
Big Stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooYExfw9lLY
Just Stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V-DguG1RiI