25763 Take your bag of Scrabble™ letters, throw them into the air and see how they land.

And just who is Roy Maer (line 6)? My time for sorting all the letters (it is a pangram this time, I’ve checked and checked!) was 24′ 47″, with determined knocking off of the wordplay on the way. It will be interesting to see how many known unknowns there are for our regular readers in this collection. For me, there are a few words I know without necessarily being able to draw a picture of what they represent, but that should never be seen as a handicap to the seasoned solver. First in was 1d, last was the innocuous but elusive 25ac, even after I knew what the noble was. This is how I reasoned my way to everything in between

Across

1   SNOWBOUND  What the redoubtable Ann Bancroft, or come to that the Top Gear Boys could be.
    SOUND (thorough) surrounding NOW (current) B(ook)
6   DECAF  DEAF, unresponsive as “he was deaf to their plea for mercy” taking C(old) on board for a substance that is almost,
    but not quite, entirely unlike coffee. I mean, what is the point of coffee without caffeine?
9   AXILLAE one of those Scrabble™ entriies that players know without having a clue what it is. I looked them up so that you
    don’t have to. They are armpits. A football team has XI players until Beckham is sent off. Admit it and ALL “twisted,”
    – reversed –  into A (&) E (ask Thud ‘n’ Blunder).
10 LACQUER a kindly definition and wordplay, the starts of L(ose) A(t) C(hess) with QUER(y) being without its end.
11 EGO  None of the 3-letters were particularly tough today. This Self Confidence is a hidden reverse in imOGEn
12 DISCIPLINED Definition “being strict”, DI plus rejected PICS and LINED with crows feet and such as time’s permanent
    markers.
14 HOMAGE  the Pig and Whistle pub name needs treatment to separate out the HOG and the last of (whistl)E and wrap them
    both around old lady MA. Respect!
15 NEW DELHI The place is well known, the wordplay’s less obvious. Dicky indicates an anagram of WHEN and LIVED short of
    V(ery)
17 MAJOLICA  Bill=AC(count, see=LO, press=JAM, all reversed to give tin-glazed pottery originally from Italy but nicked by the
    Brits and turned into something rather vulgar with a J, not an I
19 FLORAL  Lad’s first is L, place inside FOR=for (!) and (s)AL(e) minus its limits. Among other things, “annuals” are generic
    flowers.
22 INSEPARABLE  How many types of farmland do you know. Yup, ARABLE. Tag it on to an arrangement of PINES and you have
     “very close” spelt correctly with an A not an E.
23 DIS the primaries of Druggie Inhabits Shady for the ever useful word for the lower circles of hell and alternate name for
    Lucifer.
25 TAIL OFF I got the TOFF for noble but struggled with the AIL for suffer. Don’t know why: perhaps my solving powers are in
    decline.
27 RHIZOME another handy Scrabble™ word, meaning “rootstock”. ZERO, H(elp) and I’M move around to create.
28 DWELT “stayed”. See Oxford, think shoe and, here, its bonding WELT added to D(aughter)
29 LANCASTER I think a triple definition, (Burt) Lancaster, the county town of Lancashire, and the Wars of the Roses team
    that wasn’t York.

Down

1   STAKE Double definition, pole and the monetary component of a bet/punt. Nothing to do with falling in the Cam.
2   OVIFORM Egg-shaped. Decoration gives O(rder of) M(erit), deposit within V(erse) and generic Welshman IFOR, spelt that
    way because it just is, look you.
3   BULLDOG CLIP A highly sprung device for keeping office papers together and inflicting injuries you may be able to claim
    for. Order from Rome is a (Papal) BULL, follow=DOG.and CLIP is a glancing blow in, say boxing.
4   UNEASY All you actually have to do is take off the Northern (upper when written in the grid) letters of (J)UNE (w)AS (b)Y.
5   DULCIMER A sort of flat harp played with hammers, rather like the cimbalon that does the Harry Lime theme. Judge is LUD
    (as in M’) upset and placed before an involvement of CRIME
6   DOC (not necessarily my) COD fish reversed. Think Leonard “he’s dead Jim” McCoy to make the connection with bones.
7   CHUNNEL  LUNCHEON with its O(ver) cancelled and realigned for the contracted version of le tunnel sous la Manche,
    surprisingly dating back to 1928
8   FIRE DRILL  A semi &lit, I venture. IF backwards, then RED=burning and RILL=trench, the solution being what you need to
    combat it.
13 LA DOLCE VITA, Federico Fellini’s take on a week in the life of Rome. Not a musical: that honour is taken by EVITA, which
    tacked on to LAD=youth and the even letters of pOt LuCk creates the film.
14  HAM-FISTED Our actor is the not necessarily awkward HAM, the IS is gripped by the newspaper boss who is the F(inancial)
    T(imes) ED
16 SCORNFUL  Sixteen is four fifths of SCORe (geddit?), added to the N(ational) F(armers’) U(nion) and L(eft) “showing
    contempt”
18 JASMINE One of my small collection of known plants and an air freshener flavour. Germany’s yes (JA) set over S(mall)
    MINE=pit
20 REDCOAT An entertainer at Butlin’s holiday camps and of course the archetypal British soldier. I’ve been trying to find out
    whether British soldiers were called redcoats and Tommies at the same time. Today’s debate, perhaps.
21 OBERON  King of the fairies in AMSND. Our alumnus, an O(ld) B(oy) picks up the openings of E(xpress) and R(egret) and
    ON, as in playing on stage.
24 SHEER  Compete as in “sheer nonsense” sounds a lot like SHEAR as in haircut or clip.
26 OUT  “Away”. In Corsica, you would say OU for “where” and temperature’s highest (we are still in down clues) is T

36 comments on “25763 Take your bag of Scrabble™ letters, throw them into the air and see how they land.”

  1. And where the pangram helped again with LACQUER and MAJOLICA going in early.

    At 9ac, the A&E is Accident and Emergency I think, which if so fits the surface nicely. Sorry if I stole the thunder!

    What struck me today was the great surfaces of the clues. (Or was it just after yesterday’s retro where there were few.) 1dn and 24dn are particularly good.

    And … there are non-hammered dulcimers.

  2. 51 minutes but with ‘Axialle’ at 9 for my ‘twisted body parts’…Of course, we had this word a couple of years back: http://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/824484.html

    Like McT (how did the warbling go? You may be giving the old Carousel number quite a few airings come May if things continue the way they are), I thought STAKE was especially neat?

    1. It was a beautiful ceremony of which I was definitely the low light.

      The trouble with the end of the season is that the minnows bite back, as Man City just saw. And there’s also the fact that (though it hurts to say it) Chelsea are not a bad side at all.

      Edited at 2014-04-17 04:30 am (UTC)

  3. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t find this very enjoyable. Unlike mctext I thought the surfaces were rather weak and with very few exceptions (only SNOWBOUND, AXILLAE, SHEER, HOMAGE, I think) I didn’t bother much with the wordplay.

    As to REDCOATS, according to Wikipedia the British army last fought in red coats at the battle of Gennis (Sudan) in 1885. The OED gives the first literary reference to TOMMY in 1884 (Kipling). According to Wikpipedia the use of “Tommy Atkins” dates from mid-18C, although it is not clear on the earliest use of just TOMMY.

    Edited at 2014-04-17 04:24 am (UTC)

    1. What I meant here was that, if you just read through the clues, they nearly all make perfectly good and smooth English sentences or phrases. You might even hear the odd one or two in everyday talk; and quite a few might be plausible parts of actual written texts. And getting that right is an art under Ximenean rules. Though as I said, it may just be that we had much the opposite yesterday in the 1961 puzzle.

      An exercise for sceptical solvers: if you find a clue weak, write down the answer two weeks ahead in your diary. Then clue it yourself. Then go back and compare yours with the original for accuracy and aesthetic value.

  4. I’ve no solving time for this one as I was interrupted and lost track, but it was certainly more than 40 minutes. Unfamiliar things (though probably met before and forgotten) were OVIFORM, RILL as ‘trench’, MAJOLICA and WELT with specific reference to shoes.

    I can’t say I paid much attention to the surface readings on this one – I tend to avoid doing so – but my heart sank when I saw so many words on the page and I’m hoping for succinctness in tomorrow’s puzzle.

    1. I don’t look at them at all when solving. (Sabine_tk used to have great comments on this essential tactic.) But, after the fact, sometimes hours later, I try to appreciate the setter’s art; looking back, as it were, on the poetry itself after the parsing of it.

      (Jim will hate this comment!)

      Edited at 2014-04-17 05:33 am (UTC)

  5. 24:48 .. a very satisfying solve. My compliments to the setter.

    I couldn’t parse 16d, so thank you Z8 for untangling that bit of mathematical mischief.

  6. After a day off yesterday – I’ve had enough of puzzles like that to last my lifetime – I was pleased to run through this quite smartly in 20 minutes

    My unknowns/forgottens were AXILLAE and MAJOLICA. Thanks setter for the “say” in 28A and the devious “sixteen” in 16D

    I think the first plans for the CHUNNEL were drawn up in the 1800s and I’m sure building it was used in the Paris Peace conference after WW1 as a means of trying to convince the French that we Brits would always be around to help them out. (How many Frenchmen are needed to defend Paris – nobody knows as they’ve never managed to do it!)

  7. 18 mins. I quite enjoyed this puzzle, although you can count me as another solver who doesn’t bother much with surface readings. DULCIMER was my LOI after SNOWBOUND. SCORNFUL had gone in from the definition alone so thanks for that Z8, and I only saw the parsing for OUT post-solve.

  8. Is there a K that I’m missing? I’d entirely forgotten about Butlins. 22.33. Quel relief.
        1. Not as red as mine would have been had I been wrong; i might never call Pangram again! For what it’s worth, K wasthe letter I couldn’t find either!
  9. . . . but curiously unsatisfying; a sort of so-what puzzle. As mctext points out there are dulcimers that you dont hit with mallets but nevertheless, the standard parsing exercise of my youth was to identify the noun, verb and object in “A damsel with a dulcimer in a vision once I saw” so the word went in. As for Harry Lime, wasn’t it played on a zither (by Anton Karas)?
    1. I think I have to concede the original Harry Lime theme to the zither, though cimbalon versions exist. I may well have been thinking of Hary Janos by Kodaly. Still not a dulcimer as such. No call for them round here!
      1. “noun, verb and object”?? Should be “subject, verb and object” but I cannot edit now.
  10. That was tricky. 23 minutes didn’t see wordplay for OUT, SCORNFUL or DWELT and MAJOLICA went in by wordplay alone
  11. It all seems so remarkably clear after reading Z8. Holed below the waterline by not knowing axillae and not believing the wordplay, then by getting a calling to Rome where my punch card became my calling card – worse in that some of the crossers match. Thanks, z8, et al. Thanks, I think, setter.
  12. After staring at a blank one yesterday for half an hour this was a real pleasure. For once I not only managed to finish it, but also to parse all the answers (including 16d), spot the pangram and enjoy the surfaces. My cup runneth over!! The only iffy bit is rill for trench, can’t really see it.

    Thank you blogger and setter.

    Nairobi Wallah

      1. Thank you, I thought it would be in one of the dictionaries, my OED and Collins don’t have it.

        Nairobi Wallah


  13. Nah, not so good for me at all today…

    After coming back to it (again and again), I still had gaps at DULCIMER (unknown/unfamiliar) and STAKE. I also had ‘disciplines’ which gave the unlikely ‘fire skill’.

    Needed the blog to understand SCORNFUL. Too clever for me…

  14. I quite liked this one. Thought I was going to get stuck on the last few but the pennies dropped quickly enough for a 19min finish.
  15. 25m here, with nearly ten at the end staring at the REDCOAT/FLORAL pair. They’re really not that difficult.
    A couple of wing-and-prayer jobs with AXILLAE and MAJOLICA but the wordplay couldn’t have been clearer.
    As so often a little ignorance can be a good thing: I knew the word DULCIMER but had no idea what one might or might not be hit with, so it didn’t cause me a problem.
  16. Much happier than yesterday. Got all the answers but no idea how SCORNFUL was parsed – too devious for me, but the definition was obvious enough. DWELT fitted in similarly…..thanks for the blog.
    Just over the hour which is good for me!
  17. At the end, for my LOI, I had the choice between STAKE and STAVE, and went with the latter as clearly being part of a boat. I totally forgot about the wagering sense of ‘punt’. Oops. Everything else was OK, and all parsed, no less, except OUT, so thanks to z8. Overall, about 30 minutes, and a relief after the memory lane outing from yesterday. Regards.
  18. Much more enjoyable than yesterday’s which seemed a sort of deliberate “beginners’ crossword”. Ah well. About 45 minutes today, including a very crowded 20 minute tube ride.

    For some reason, stared at a blank grid for some time, not quite believing that the four short ones were so straightforward. Held up a bit, as tried to parse “disinclined” instead of DISCIPLINED. FOI DIS, then DOC, etc … LOI DULCIMER.

    COD for DULCIMER, for reminding me of damsels, and caverns measureless to man, and pleasure domes, and sacred rivers … Happy Days!

  19. Doh! I should have left this one until I wasn’t feeling so darned tired. Instead I half-wittedly bunged in AVILLAE (whatever that might be!?) without going back and reading the clue properly. My first mistake of the year – coming immediately after yesterday’s miserable attempt. (Deep sigh!)

    I think I’ll have an early night.

  20. Sorry to be so late, but we dawdle over our crosswords, and got stuck on ‘dulcimer’.
    Kipling’s poem “Tommy” in Barrack-Room Ballads does indeed use ‘redcoat’ and ‘Tommy’ within a few lines of each other.
  21. Thoroughly enjoyable wrestle with word plays to get not-seen-before answers. Perfect entertainment for a sunny day yesterday without access to iPad/laptop. Took ages but who cares?

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