Solving time: Unrecorded – I still had five left after the hour I allow myself on blogging days, so resorted to aids for them. For most of them I had interpreted the wordplay all wrong, and I kicked myself when I worked out the answer.
With that in mind, it was probably the toughest of the week for me, although I didn’t get time to do more than glance at Wednesday’s which may well have turned out tougher. I hadn’t heard of LIME used as a verb in the sense of catching birds. I also hadn’t heard of Tasmanian Tigers – they sound more like a sports team. Also GASOHOL, FEEDSTOCK & IDO were only vaguely familiar. I found it hard to believe that ARGUFIED was a real word.
Actually, I’ve just checked, The Tasmanian Tigers are a sports team. It’s how the state cricket team refers to themselves.
cd = cryptic def., dd = double def., rev = reversal, homophones are written in quotes, anagrams as (–)*, and removals like this
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | LJUBLJANA – Lots going on here. J in L + U, then B + LANA about another J. Phew! It’s the hard-to-spell capital of Slovenia. |
| 6 | GRIEF = GRIEG with the final G dropping a couple of semi-tones to an F. |
| 9 |
|
| 10 | G + LAD + STONE – Prime Minister four times. |
| 11 | DANCE OF THE HOURS = (TOUCHED ON AFRESH)* – Made famous by Walt Disney when he accompanied it with a dancing hippo in Fantasia. |
| 13 | FIDDL(I)ER |
| 14 | B |
| 16 | LAW(MA |
| 18 | BALLPARK – dd – I didn’t get this, but should have. A ballpark figure is an approximate one, and a diamond is another name for a baseball field. |
| 21 | TASMANIAN TIGERS = (MENAI STRAIT SANG)* |
| 23 | MER(CURIA)L |
| 25 | URBAN – dd – There have been 8 Pope Urbans, although none since the 17th century. |
| 26 | cd – deliberately omitted |
| 27 | GRAVES + END – Wine has several stock answers, of which GRAVES is one. Also TENT, SACK, ASTI, IT & PORT. Have I missed any? |
| Down | |
| 1 | L(I’M)ED – LED = Taken (seems a little tenuous to me), and I’M = setter’s. Liming is the practice of spreading birdlime on tree branches to catch birds. |
| 2 | UP + SAND(D |
| 3 | L(A + C + TEA)L |
| 4 | ARGUFIED = A + (FIGURED)* – Once I’d convinced myself it was a real word, it was my first in. |
| 5 | APAC(H)E |
| 6 | GA(SOHO)L – I assumed that London area would be SE for a long time. |
| 7 |
|
| 8 | FEED + STOCK – I wasn’t sure whether this was FEED as the past tense of FEE used as a verb, or FEED as in ‘to feed the meter’. Both seem a little dubious to me. Another one I needed aids for. |
| 12 | UNTRACEABLE = (BUT A CLEANER)* |
| 13 | FULL-TIMER = FULL + REMIT rev |
| 15 | MAGNOLIA = AIM about LONG + A all rev. Needed aids again, but shouldn’t have done. The A at the end made me think of PENUMBRA and I couldn’t get away from that meaning of shade. |
| 17 | AT A PUSH = TA + UP rev in ASH |
| 19 | LEI + SURE – The Leu (plural lei) is the unit of currency of Romania (i.e. Romanian ‘readies’) |
| 20 | WI + RING |
| 22 | S |
| 24 | RUN |
Also, anyone, I’m assuming 26ac is RANCH, but why?
If I could Dave I would buy you a drink, a large one.
As the end of the hour approached with three unsolved clues I reached for a book to look up the Romanian currency and having found it is the LEU I spotted LEISURE immediately, reasoning it came from LEU around IS (for ‘question’)and didn’t worry about where the RE came from.
That still left me with 15 and 18 outstanding so I resorted to a solver. I was annoyed about MAGNOLIA because much earlier on, before I had any checkers in place I had thought the definition might be ‘shade’ i.e. a colour, but somewhere along the way I lost sight of this idea and decided I was looking a more obscure word meaning ‘area in the shade’.
At 18 I couldn’t get PACK out of my mind for ‘location of diamond’ and that prevented any progress here.
As well as the sports teams, Tasmanian tigers are (or rather, almost certainly, were) real animals
Same problem as Dave with 14 until the checkers intervened. Started with IDO – v. familiar from barred-grid puzzles – while trying out a wrong idea for 6A. And misled (like many others I suspect) at 17D into thinking “It can’t be AT A PUSH because the (TA = volunteers) are not climbing up)”. One of those times where a careless punt at first sight would have produced a faster solution.
There seemed to be quite a lot of quasi-Mephisto stuff in here: perhaps I should have known LJUBLJANA and DANCE OF THE HOURS (I didn’t) but CURIA, IDO and LEI, all in one puzzle? Combine that with a smattering of unfamiliar American references (spread, diamond) and a word I just couldn’t believe existed long after I’d solved the clue (you know the one I mean) and it was all a bit too much of a struggle for a weekday commute.
Undoubtedly a very good puzzle though, with a number of cunning traps, all of which I fell into!
However, I found it 25 minutes of good fun – and that’s what it’s all about.
Many, many times in my youth I was dragged protesting up Rodney Street in Liverpool to my orthodontist, past a sign that – I swear – said “Here was born William Gladstone, five times prime minister.” Today, through the magic of Google, I can quickly view the actual placque, still in place, and see that four, not five, is indeed what it says.. I’ve never liked dentists.
Such was the impression of Stateside prominence that I inadvertently pronounced 19d as LEEZURE even as I put it in.
Had SHNAP originally for SYNOD then looked it up online and wished I hadn’t!
TASMANIAN TIGERS reminds me of a good joke I heard yesterday. (With apologies to Scouse solvers…) John Henry, the new American owner of Liverpool FC, is renaming the club to sound more American… HUBCAP STEELERS
‘Limed’ was my first in – there’s an obvious one! – but I was lamentably slow on some others. I saw ‘ballpark’, but dismissed it as unlikely in an English puzzle, only to conclude later that I was right. It is curious how context influences you.
Fortunately, I remembered ‘Ido’ and ‘blotto’ from previous puzzles. ‘Argufied’ went in from the cryptic, and ‘Ljubljana’ was painfully worked out, as I hoped if wasn’t ‘Ljubljara’ or something. My last in was the very clever ‘magnolia’, where I toyed with ‘aim’ backwards for a long time without seeing it.
Hope I make sense…
COD 14ac.
Probably ten minutes spent writing down variations on the capital at 1A and trying to get the notorious Lublianka jail out of my head, before hitting on the right spelling then decoding the wordplay.
Very enjoyable Friday challenge. Setter – take the rest of the week off, with pay.
The “tallest building” joke (see link) is also used by tour guides passing the local equivalent in St Petersburg.
(As anyone who’s browsed in classical record shops will probably know, different nations transliterate differently – in France, Tchaikovsky is filed under C.)
Useless fact of the day: there’s a very nice bridge club in Ljubljana, where they speak enough English to welcome visitors.