2009 Finals – First Preliminary Session – Puzzle 3

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Announcement
Estimated competitive solving time: 9 minutes

As for the Grand Final puzzles, FL indicates clues solved on first look, and WW indicates those entered without complete wordplay understanding. Both are subject to the accuracy of my memory and for many of the the WW ones, it’s perfectly possible that thinking for a few seconds more would have been enough for full understanding.

Across
1 RADAR – def. and description of “palindromicity”
4 DI(STILL=calm)ED – guessed the two D’s from the rather grim bread of the sandwich but left finding the meat until there were some checkers
9 FL DINING CAR = (riding, can)* – nifty railway all-in=one
10 FRANC(is) – francs don’t need to be “old coins” while the Swiss still have them
11 FL EMINENCE GRISE = (in see me cringe)* – another foreign phrase as a mild cause of anagram difficulty, but only mild with helpful checkers already there
14 FL L(O)AD
15 B(A KINGS)OD A – didn’t know much about the cleaning uses of baking soda!
18 FL SCULPTRESS – CD requiring “chipper” to be a noun rather than adj.
19 WW  ‘IDE,A – I didn’t see the rather odd wordplay, with the apostrophe to indicate h-dropping in the middle of a word
21 WW SERVICE=church activity,CHARGE=career (vb.) – nice use of the initial capital to turn the bill into a person for the surface.
24 FL ILEAC – hidden in “bile accumulating” – I’m sure I’ve seen at least the guts of this clue before
25 FL PETULA,N(i)CE – Petula is another in the nice collection of ladies other than Vi, Di and Sal in the 9 championship puzzles
27 FL COLLECT.,O.R.=”men” – COED notes that the collect is a short prayer
28 FL MANET = rev. of “ten a.m.” = two hours before noon – worked out from “which of Manet or Monet?”
 
Down
1 FL R,UDDERLESS=”like a bull (but not a cow!)”, which raised a laugh
2 FL DO,N(ever)
3 RINGER – 2 defs and a source of trouble. A (usually “dead”) ringer is someone’s double, and a ringer is a “guest player” – i.e. an “athlete or horse fraudulently substituted for another in a competition” – familiar to me from x-c running days. I intially saw RUNNER from checking letters and sporty connections, but fortunately rubbed it out as too vague. At least one other solver left it in.
4 DECK CHAIR = Spoonerism of “check dare” = “monitor challenge”
5 FL S=succeeded,PROG – both sprogs and sprigs are children, so a possible trap for the careless
6 FL IN FRINGE – referring to the unofficial part of the Edinburgh festival which may now be bigger than the “core”
7 LEASEHOLDER – a cryptic wordplay descriiption of “pLEASEd”
8 DUCK – cricket stuff here – if you score a single=one, you break your duck, when in=batting. Potential mental agony from the contrast between duck=zero and “one” as a potential def.,being the first word of the clue
12 FL IN A NUTSHELL – 2 defs., one relying on hazel=type of nut
13 FL MANAGEMENT – MEN = chaps in (magnate)*
16 IN=home,S(P)ECTOR
17 WW S,PI(RAC=rev. of car)LE – a spiracle is used for breathing by some kinds of plant or lower animal, or maybe both
20 S.(HALO = disc = (answer to) 23)M.
22 FL 1,N(P)UT
23 DISC – double def alluding to record=disc and a spinal “slipped disc”
26 FL NU,N – “being, religious” = religious being = nun

6 comments on “2009 Finals – First Preliminary Session – Puzzle 3”

  1. I spent at least 3 minutes on DUCK at the end (which I believe is about a third as long as John Henderson did!) – what a brilliant clue. SPIRACLE was a (fairly confident) guess, EMINENCE GRISE a painful dissection.
    1. I certainly didn’t see anything while solving or writing up. But the trouble is that you can see so much in these grids.

      Prime suspect must be Don Manley, a.k.a. Duck – we have 2D DON and 8D DUCK, plus MAN at the beginning of 28 and 13, though no LEY that I can see. Don signs as DFM elsewhere, so it’s just possible that the Francis in the wordplay of 10A is his middle name.

      Then there’s Roger Phillips, Times setter and arch Nina-spotter over at the Times2 Race the Clock blog. Taking the first letter of 1D, second letter of 2D and back end of 3D, you can see “ROGER”.

      Third up is Richard Browne, Times xwd editor, who could have signed as 13D MANAGEMENT.

      Fourth, whoever considers themselves the 11A EMINENCE GRISE of the Times setting team.

      Fifth, some Times setter I don’t know about – using part-answers, hidden words from rows and columns, and groups of letters close together, I can see Ron, Les, Nina, Petula, Ern, Dean, Hal and Sid.

      While hunting for these I noticed a couple of other oddities – 16 INSPECTOR and 27 COLLECTOR are a pair of railway officials, and child psychologist Justin Daddow, who solved this en route to third place in the final, might have enjoyed the vertical column that says SPROG INSPECTOR.

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