This was an elegant, old school puzzle with none of the barbed wire cleverness that we have seen a fair bit of recently. I suppose there’s room on planet Earth for both kinds and more.
My reasoning goes thusly.
Across
1 ELBA Island
Hidden in rebEL BAndits, which was slightly annoying because firstly it wasn’t “I” in some word for “rebel” that meant bandits, and secondly because once you’ve spotted today’s hidden, you know there’s not another one.
3 REMARKABLE outstanding
A cutesy take on what exam papers are if sent for another look, easy for me because herself is currently up to her ears in EARs (enquiries about results) for a well known A level marking syndicate, There’s a word for coincidences like that. If only I could think what it is.
9 ECLIPSE Obscure
A simple insertion of CLIPS (cuttings) into EnvelopE’s -um- envelope emptied.
11 TREASON Crime against the state
Another relative doddle. AnarchisT’s last letter and REASON for justification. Tidy clue.
12 CHOIR PRACTICE meeting to achieve harmony
Mine’s every Tuesday. I reverse engineered this one: it’s the odd letters of RePoRt before ACT 1, which easily qualifies as an early bit of drama, both embedded in CHOICE for “special”.
14 SPROG (small) child
Turned up on June 25th, when I got it wrong. This clue was (IMO) easier, or at least less mistakable. PRObinG for “looking into” has its bin removed and is placed beside S(mall), perhaps doing double duty. It’s worth remembering that “by” can mean in front of or behind.
15 TAMARILLO fruit
Pleased to see I did not wholly invent the TOMATILLO, but took too long to see it wasn’t an anagram of TRIAL LOAM (was there ever a more obvious candidate for fodder?) and struggled with 6d. Memo: check all the letters are there.
17 NARCISSUS Blooming
Suggests we’re looking for a flower. It may be there are solvers out there who don’t know this bit of Greek myth. Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pool and, unable to break away from contemplation of his staggering beauty, died. There must be a word for such a fixation…
19 SARGE Officer
Short for sergeant, the (non commissioned) officer who tells us bombardiers what to do. SAGE for “wise” ingests R(esistance)
21 INAPPROPRIATE unseemly
Fell out the moment “I sleep” translated into I NAP. Streetwalker is PRO(stitute), PRIvATE (the individual us bombardiers tell what to do) loses its heart. to complete the answer. I think “individual” here is, strictly speaking, an adjective, as in “every private man”.
24 ONE-TIME Former
Broadcast gives EMIT, in French gives EN, and OSA at the outset gives just the O. The whole sequence is reversed. You don’t need to know that OAS stands for Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, “an organization of French settlers who opposed Algerian independence in the early 1960s”, though it adds a certain historical frisson to the clue. I had a query against the first letter of an acronym being the “leader”, but it can’t really be anything else.
25 ICELAND Country
A trap for the unwary suggests Ireland might be the chosen nation, but the wordplay insists on an anagram of DANCE I round back of halL
26 ASTONISHED Surprised
One dropped gives 1 SHED, set behind AS for when and TON for high speed.
27 DEAD Completely out of breath. Or dead. Or out of breath
Works either as a cryptic, if slightly ironic definition, or as a double. Dead = completely in “dead still”, for example, and out of breath is also a plausible whimsy for dead.
Down
1 EXERCISING worrying
As in “my mind was greatly exercised over 24 across.” The useful River EXE, RISING (surging) around C(irca) for about. No reversals here despite temptations.
2 BALFOUR Conservative PM
Arthur Balfour was Prime Minister from 27 February 1906 – 13 November 1911. Reverse R(ugby) U(nion) OF LAB(our)
4 EXECRATES Curses
EXECS are senior managers (allegedly) who absorb the RATE charge. I keep wanting to pronounce it like some Greek philosopher.
5 AZTEC Old Mexican
Not if Stout Cortés had any say. A(rea) Z (unknown) by (de)TEC(tive)
6 KEEP IN RESERVE store
Look around gives PEEK backwards, popular is almost always IN, book as in tickets gives RESERVE.
7 BOSWELL Scottish writer
O(ld) B(ook) reverses before SWELL for great. You don’t have to decide for our purposes whether Sam Johnson’s biographer was a great writer.
8 EDNA Female
Journalist the ever reliable ED, N(ame) and A (indefinite) article
10 PEREGRINATION
PERAMBULATION also fits the space but not the wordplay, which is P(icturesqu)E REGION (area) with an anagram of TRAIN within.
13 BONEHEADED Stupid
Individual provides ONE to which you add the plain sight HE. BADE for ordered and D(aughter) go without.
16 MUSCOVITE
Citizen of Russia’s capital, and an anagram of MOVIES CUT. Is “censored” OK as an anagram indicator?
18 RAIMENT Clothing
AIM for object (“my object all sublime”) is held within RENT for tear.
20 REAL ALE this beer
Sounds somewhat like reel ail
22 PRESS Crowd
The heading for Port is just the P, RE is on/about, SS is ship as in SS Grape Written, Brew Nell’s masterpiece currently on display in Bristle.
23 SODA drink
Easy enough when you stop thinking cola. A DOS(e) for a certain quality without its E(nergy), “up”.
I don’t normally notice the surfaces, but I did today, nearly all of them being smooth and plausible. It felt to me like this was a crossword beyond reproach, but I guess time will tell.
Thanks setter and blogger.
Several went in unparsed (CHOIR PRACTICE, INAPPROPRIATE, EXERCISING), but they had to be (unlike cola/coca, baldwin, ireland…)
Originally had ‘tomarilla’ as my fruit, as a tomato/something cross. Expected to come here to find arguments about whether it was a fruit or a vegetable, or whether it had bracts rather than flowers. Will have to go and argue with someone over lunch instead…
Edited at 2014-08-21 04:49 am (UTC)
Tamarillo sounds like some sort of cross but it is just an invented marketing name for the tree tomato invented, I discover, by the “New Zealand Tree Tomato Promotions Council.” Not sure it has quite worked?
I share z8’s suspicion of “censored” as an agagrind – to me more of a deletion indicator as it strongly suggests something removed rather than reorganised.
TAMARILLO sounds like it should be some sort of hybrid and reminds me of when Homer Simpson invented tomacco as a cross between tomatoes and tobacco.
Otherwise I was less a fan of this than others. Too much of it just went straight in from definitions, and I found myself with an awful lot of parsing to do post-solve. Of course if I’d parsed a bit more as I went I might have got it all right.
I spent quite a while at the end on 23dn, resisting the urge to bung in COLA, which fits the definition but not the wordplay, or MOSA, which fits the wordplay and might be a drink of some sort. I tend to have heard of cocktails though, so I kept thinking.
Perhaps this was like a tasty starter rather than a meaty main course but none the less enjoyable for that. At least the purpose of ‘censored’ was obvious but I can find no justification in Collins or Chambers for it meaning ‘rearranged’. At a (very long) stretch I can see it as meaning ‘rewritten’ but, as Jim says, it is essentially deletion or suppression.
In company with Z8 and Jimbo, I too raised an eyebrow at the use of “censored” as an anagrind at 16D. Certainly, at first blush the word prompts you to think that something has been cut or removed. But censors can also, I guess, ask for rewording or rephrasing of objectionable passages, which would give the sense of “re-arranging” required here. So, on reflection, I’m happy to cut the setter some slack.
Good blog, Z8. Thanks for parsing SPROG, which had completely eluded me. I hesitated between SPROG and SPRIG, and plumped for the latter purely because it seemed closer to the required definition.
Edited at 2014-08-21 11:31 am (UTC)
I thought ‘sprog’ was a great clue, you really have to work out what ‘bin’ is removed from and what is added.
The back page of my newspaper looks a bit of a mess as a result of various anagrams and suspected answers being scribbled, with under-linings and cross-outs where the parsing dropped into place.
I wear a scruffy back page these days like a badge of honour (as long as the grid has been completed), rather than the scars of battle that they used to feel like as I honed the acquired skills that were necessary to overcome the said lack of talent.
A satisfying puzzle.
I’ve just sent you an LJ message.
By the way if you click the reply icon to another person’s message here, you will automatically get a copy in your LJ Inbox.
Edited at 2014-08-21 02:05 pm (UTC)
Edited at 2014-08-21 02:08 pm (UTC)
Once you reach that level you can employ techniques to increase your speed and if you ask again at that time there are people here who will help you – but consider you may be sacrificing enjoyment for ego massaging
Brain-training for this pursuit is, I think, in 2 parts. The first is relatively easy: read every clue as a clue, not a sentence. Whatever it appears to mean is the one thing it isn’t. In that respect this puzzle is a fine example, because virtually every clue makes plain sense that is nothing like what the answer is. Seasoned campaigners play the game of spot the definition and go from there. Even if you guess what the definition is, as many were doing today, try to work out why the rest of the clue works, even if you are going for a fast time. It pays in the long one. And remember the Paxo dictum: “why is this lying b*stard lying to me?”
The second bit of brain-training is the one that I find has the most impact on the rest of my life: it’s developing fast word association reflexes, especially the more sideways ones. After some undefined amount of time, you catch yourself making logical and linguistic leaps that other. less afflicted people may well find hard to follow, and not only when you’re doing crosswords. I asked a couple of days ago whether Robin Williams was a fan of cryptic crosswords: he should have been with the way his mind and word flow leapt in unpredictable, but always (just about) connected directions. An example:
During a media tour for the 1990 film Awakenings, when director Penny Marshall mistakenly described the film as being set in a “menstrual hospital,” instead of “mental hospital,” Williams had the presence of mind to offer the explanation: “It’s a period piece.”
I don’t think this is something you can drive yourself to do, nor do I think you’ve either got it or you haven’t. Prolonged exposure to the cryptic genre will do it to you whether you’re trying or not, so once again, practice, keep b*ggering on (Churchill, honest) is the key.
As Z says, the most important thing is to keep practising. One of the things I find most difficult is knowing when to move on from a clue, and that really only comes with experience.
Go through the clues after you’ve finished to make sure you’ve really understood the finer points. (This blog must be a godsend to beginners and improvers. I’m sure I’d have progressed a lot faster if it had been around when I started out.) You’ll find that ideas, and even complete clues, keep reappearing.
Make sure you’ve read ALL the clues fairly early on in your solve: there’s nothing more annoying than finding you’ve missed an easy one which would have given you a useful crossing letter in another clue you’ve been struggling with.
Finally, though, if you’re competing in the Championship, remember that accuracy is more important than speed. Always check your solution before sticking your hand up. (As a seasoned competitive solver, I’ve got into the habit of checking mine every day.) I still make mistakes, but I suspect I come as near as anyone to achieving dorsetjimbo’s target of solving correctly (without using aids) 99 times out of 100; however, even I don’t quite manage that.
Like you, I do enjoy trying to improve my solving speed, but that does, sometimes, result in impetuous entries and avoidable mistakes that make me annoyed with myself.
As a counterpoint to Jim, without the speed element I’d find half the fun missing; and, anyway, spending two hours on the things (long-term) is no fun to anyone but a masochist!
Best puzzle for a while, IMO.
I made a good start, though, rattling off the first four clues, but then stuck on 12ac (CHOIR PRACTICE), despite this having occupied a large part of my life between the ages of 16 and 36. I spotted the RPR sequence, but reckoned there couldn’t possibly be a way this would fit into the answer. (Doh!)
This was one of those days when my final check-through paid off, as I found that TOMARILLO, which I’d bunged in so confidently, didn’t actually fit the anagram. (Another foodie entry for my list of difficult words. Show me the way to TAMARILLO? Hm! Perhaps not.)
There were several old friends among the clues, but it was none the worse for that.