24499

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 10:49

This should have been under 10, but I was held up at the end by 3D, struggling to find the necessary non-plural word to match both “characteristic” and “buildings”. Last in before this was 5D. Answers written without full wordplay understanding: 1D, 5, 15.

A couple of congratulations today: to Neil Talbott (talbinho) for winning the Listener Solver’s Silver Salver as an all-correct solver for last year’s puzzles. Next step is to match Mark Goodliffe and Tony Sever by winning the Times championship too. Other congratulations to Anax, who will have his first FT puzzle on April 20 as “Loroso” – nothing to do with sherry apparently.

A quick note that the dates of the 2010 Championship qualifying puzzles have been announced – in the printed paper but not on the Crossword Club “Bulletin Board” until/if they put up my rather sour comment to say so. See the recent posting about the championship for details.

Across
1 CUT=nick, UP=”out of bed” – for once, “Nick” doesn’t indicate another word for the Devil. And although “getting” goes with “out of bed” in the surface, in the cryptic reading it’s a “concatenation indicator”, or what I think of as “charade glue”
4 SEM(IF)INAL – in this clue we get a much fuller description of If than the stock “poem”. “semifinal” is one word in my old Collins, hyphenated in COED. More evidence that you shouldn’t rely on expected spaces or hyphens.
9 (k)NEW, YORKER = delivery – Queens is the crossword setter’s favourite out of the five New York boroughs, with Manhattan=cocktail a fairly distant second.
10 A,SWAN=glider – as far as I can tell, “glider” is a description rather than a synonym.
11 AN(DR.)EW – “patron” doesn’t add much here – I suspect any saint familiar enough for the Times xwd is patron saint of something – Scotland and several other nations or places in this case
12 TURB = rev. of brut = dry (of sparkling wine),OF AN – clever setting here, as “back of” often indicates the last letter of a word in the clue
14 SPLIT HAIRS = (it is Ralph’s)* – the ‘s after “Ralph” has to be read as “is” for the cryptic reading Corrected – Thanks Simon. If searching for this answer in COED, you need to look under “hair” to confirm that it’s “to make overfine distinctions”
16 SAGA – rev. of “a gas”
19 RAKE – two defs, one typically referring to seating in theatres and lecture halls
20 EDITORSHIP = (Irish depot)* – “organ” meaning a publication is a stock trick
22 WELL,TO-DO = commotion or fuss = bother – “flush” is colloquial for “having plenty of cash”
23 B(ORZO)I – a couple of exotic words here – a Borzoi is a dog breed – as with so many Russian words, its meaning turns out to be rather prosaic – in this case, “fast” (cf. Bolshoi Ballet = “big ballet”). “Orzo” is another word for Risoni – pasta in the form of rice grains.
26 GLE(B)E – “land of the living” is an old chestnut cryptic def for glebe, punning on living = benefice
27 VIRGIN = maid, (mar)IAN – more setter brownie points for getting “Maid Marian” into the clue
28 DO(T=time)M(in)ATRIX – schoolboy humour brownie points for including Miss Whiplash
29 THERE – two def’s
 
Down
1 CANVAS = (painted) picture, SE(en), R
2 TOWED = “toad” – “may be” seems a bit pussyfootish here – “tow” has no other verb meaning so I’d say that “towed” IS “drawn”
3 PROPERTY – two defs
4 SAKE – Japanese booze, and as in “for Pete’s sake”. Seems like a nudge towards another “Sloggers and Betters” gathering, for which I have a half-hatched plan
5 M(ARGUER)ITE – a daisy-like plant
6 FL(A,B B from first letters)Y – fly=knowing is a stock Times xwd trick
7 Deliberately omitted from this report
8 LINE=row,N=name
13 HANDE(l),DOVER – nice surface about “passing the port”
15 LIKE=fancy,LIES,T(ory)
17 APPL(IANC = (can I)*)E – “fruit machine” is worth another brownie point
18 ARBORIST = (briars to)* – pity the surface couldn’t be twisted to have the surgeon entangling the branches
21 A THEN A = “top marks in succession” – I first thought of “Athene” for the goddess but decided that even in these days of teachers writing “Good try, Wayne” at the bottom of hideous scrawl (I was at a choir rehearsal in a school hall last night), an E is not a “top mark”.
22 WAGED – two def’s, one the opposite of “unwaged” = unemployed
24 Z,AIRE(d) – Zaire was the official name for the current Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1971 to 1997. The stock remark about “Democratic Republics” being anything but seems to apply here.
25 CRU = vineyard,X from Bordeaux.

32 comments on “24499”

  1. 20 minutes for an entertaining rather than difficult puzzle. I think the “may be” in 2D refers to the homophone rather than the definition “drawn”. A nod perhaps to the fact that people with all manner of accents do this puzzle – although “toad” for “towed” is probably reasonable enough for most.

    My only hick-up was trying to recall if the dog was “borzoi” or “borzai”, other than that no problems along the way.

    1. My first instinct was to agree with Peter B that the “may be” at 2 dn seemed excessively cautious on the part of the setter – I couldn’t think offhand of any variety of English in which “toad” and “towed” would not be prounounced the same way. However, my Chambers suggests that in Scotland “tow” is pronounced to rhyme with “cow”. Can this really be true?
      1. Quite possible but neither “tow” nor “cow” will sound as you might expect them. Around Durham they say “cooo” for “cow” and so it goes on. That’s what makes so many homophones dodgy when combined with the fact that a certain cadre can’t imagine that anybody speaks anything other than home counties homogenised.
        1. I don’t think anybody is fool enough to “imagine that [nobody] speaks anything other than home counties homogenised”. What I (and presumably most crossword setters and editors) do imagine is that their solvers know what the “home counties” English accent represented by dictionary pronunciations sounds like for most words. Scots may pronounce tow to rhyme with “cow”, but are any of them really unaware that this is a local pronunciation?
  2. 8.45 for me, but felt it could have been a little quicker. Held up a little by 12ac, and filled in 2dn without spotting the homophone.

    Previously posted anonymously (and occasionally), but always followed with interest. Finally got round to signing on

    1. You’ll be watched carefully with times like that! Unless I’ve lost form you’re a potential Championship finalist – or maybe “turnerjmw” is a pseudonym and you’ve already been there.
      1. I went once many years ago when a student. Sadly I was certainly quicker then, if perhaps more erratic. I only do the Times in fits and starts now, so I’m no threat to anyone!
        1. The scoring system means that accurate solving at a good speed is better than erratic solving at top speed. Seriously, if you can solve most Times puzzles in under 15 minutes you’re a potential finalist.
  3. 28 minutes. (The 20-30 range is getting to be a bit of a pattern I fear.) Read the “may be” in 2ac as a simple link; and thought “picked up by the ears” was a great indicator. It must be hard to invent new ones. Ashamed to say I did not know ORZO and will now have to go and find some in the big Italian food barn I shop at every week.
    On 14ac: I cannot help but be reminded of the name of one of the philosophy staff at a university where I once worked. He was German and his surname was Splitter. I kid you not. Damn fine chap as it turns out and not at all deserving of the name.
  4. One man’s obvious is another man’s obstacle. Even with —bofan in place, it took me an embarrassingly long time to get 12ac. And i wasn’t helped by failing to spot the arguer in 5dn. Ah well, got there in the end.

    SEMIFINAL as one word is a bit of an obscurity, although no doubt it appears that way in one or other of the official dictionaries. But as someone who always reads the sports pages first, I’m much more familiar with the hyphenated version.

  5. This was a quick solve. I finished with borzoi because I am always a bit shaky on dogs and I had never heard of orzo, although I have eaten it. I thought it was just called rice pasta.

    Older solvers, like me, may be surprised to learn that Zaire is no longer on the map. Younger solvers may be surprised to learn that there was ever such thing as a dot matrix printer. I liked the clue to dot matrix and also those for canvasser, glebe and semifinal (not hyphenated in Chambers).

  6. An hour for me in several chunks in between meetings. The NW corner was the most interesting, with SEMIFINAL, which I don’t think of as a single word, MARGUERITE (which I’d never heard of) and TURBOFAN (which was last in) all holding me up. Handel (13dn) was top-of-mind, as marketing folk say – they can’t write – as the choir is attempting to get ten choruses from the Messiah up to scratch in three rehearsals. COD to CANVASSER for the cunning.
  8. 14 m – and like PB 3d cost me, at least a minute, slap of head when I finally saw it as I was trying for a plural. Like borzoi clue, lovely animals, but orzo I have eaten and thought not very nice, too slithery in mouth. No doubt a better recipe needed…. Thought 1d good red herring. Yet again the anagrams helped the time.
  9. 40 minutes with interruptions on the way to work, the last 10 being spent on 23ac, 24dn, 27ac and 3dn.

    Mostly straightforward for me with the only unknowns being CRUX = problem and ORZO. Not sure if I’ve met TURBOFAN before but the answer was obvious.

    1. You know ‘crux’, Jack – just mispronouncing it internally, I’m sure, or defining it as ‘pivotal point’ rather than ‘perplexing problem’.
      1. Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that I don’t know the word CRUX, just the meaning required here i.e. a problem. I know it as in “crux of the argument” of course.
  10. 20 minutes, held up by the NW corner more than anything else, though having completed it, I can’t for the life of me see why. Chuckled several times in the SW corner – must be my schoolboy sense of humour, for which I am entirely unrepentant – and therefore split COD between DOT MATRIX and VIRGINIAN. Like MARGUERITE too.
    I was disappointed to find that, even as currency, the ZAIRE no longer exists, having been replaced by the boring Congolese Franc, and in its liquid form, by the Congo.
  11. 28 mins with two wrong. Did all but three in about 20 mins but then got stuck. Eventually got Marguerite, which I hadn’t heard of.

    Couldn’t see property. I like these clues where the part of speech deceives you. Characteristic being an adjective in the surface reading and a noun in the wordplay.

    Eventually chose Bonzai for the dog. Definitely barking up the wrong tree on that one!

  12. 14A – I don’t mean to be pedantic, but the anagrist is “it is Ralph’s” in full.

    That and 3D were my last ones in.

    I posted 5:45 for this one but I would not want to suggest that PB has lost form, based on his consistency.

  13. This was a far more interesting puzzle than yesterday’s, with a couple of elements that I didn’t understand: “the land of the living” and ORZO, though BORZOI was my immediate guess, being the only dog I could think of beginning with B and ending with I.

    Feeling rather sleepy I spent 40 minutes on it, and failed at 12, though in retrospect it doesn’t look a hard clue.

    I particularly liked the homophone indicator in 2, the anagram in 7 and the double definition in 3.

  14. For some reason I found this entertaining puzzle pretty easy – which is to say it took me somewhat under 30 mins over breakfast. So I was surprised, and mildly gratified, to see Peter B taking more than 10. On a golf handicap basis, where he is scratch and I am 20, I would call that an all-square finish! I could have been faster, but was held up for a while by TURBOFAN and uncertainty as to how to spell MARGUERITE and BORZOI. I’d never heard of ORZO, translated in my Italian dictionary as “pearl barley”, which leaves me not much the wiser.
  15. Finished in 30 minutes so a fast time for me. My college drinking club at Cambridge was the marguerites so felt i had a bit of an advantage today!
    did it at midnight so quite pleased as i am sure it would have been faster in the cold light of day!

  16. Another one scribbled in during breaks, found this pretty straightforward, BORZOI and MARGUERITE from wordplay
  17. This wasn’t too difficult and quite enjoayble. Didn’t get 4A, however, until I checked this blog. I liked 3D a lot and 1D was my pick for COD.
  18. About 15 minutes for me, held up only by CANVASSER and PROPERTY, both very good candidates for COD. No real problem with the rest. Interesting juxtaposition of the 2 Americans – NEW YORKER and VIRGINIAN – in opposite places in the grid; are they squaring off about something I wonder? Regards.
  19. PROPERTY was my third answer after CUT UP and TOWED. Odd to see CUT UP after it appeared in a clue yesterday. Smiled at the definitions for CANVASSER and WELL TO DO. I didn’t know semi final could also be spelled SEMIFINAL. Couldn’t make head or tail of the ZAIRE clue and haven’t heard of BORZOIs. There aren’t any where I live from what I’ve seen of the dogwalkers. GLEBE and MARGUERITE were new words to me.

    Anax’s puzzles are always treats and I’m looking forward to his one in the FT next month. He clued CRUX as “Vintage Times puzzle” in his 30 January crossword in the Independent.

  20. Hi guys, I’m still learning these, finished today’s in a couple of hours with plenty of trips to the internet to look things up (clearly too much time on my hands as a student). This blog is a great help., thanks.

    Pete, I have an issue with your thoughts on the wordplay for 15d:

    Is it not more likely that ‘fancy stories’, rather than being two separate things gives you ‘likelies’ as in a plural of ‘a likely story’, then the Tory leader giving you ‘t’ = likeliest?

    Thoughts?

    Thanks, Adam

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