Definitely wriggly today from Wurm, I was slow and needed a break before finishing off. There are some very good clues here, and plenty of misdirection.
7 Across in particular caught my eye as a very good surface, and great misdirection.
Definitions underlined in bold, (Abc)* indicating anagram of Abc, synonyms in (parentheses), deletions in {curly brackets} and [] for other indicators.
| Across | |
| 1 | Man seemingly going to great lengths for poet (10) |
| LONGFELLOW – A “long fellow” is a man of great length.
I’m not really a fan but two of his celebrated pieces are Paul Revere’s Ride and The Song of Hiawatha. |
|
| 7 | One sent from Bow in a right ding-dong (5) |
| ARROW – A + R{ight} + ROW (ding dong)
Ding-dong for a fight is slang from the 18th century, and it is ofren prefixed by “in a right” as in this clue, and it definitely has a London feel to it, so all in this is an excellent clue, which also contains the “from Bow” misdirection: no dropped H or Rhyming Slang is needed. |
|
| 8 | Dancing along with an African (7) |
| ANGOLAN – (ALONG + AN)* [Dancing as the anagram indicator] | |
| 10 | Greek character she pays badly for dish (5,4) |
| MUSHY PEAS – MU (Greek character) + (SHE PAYS)*
If you figure that you need a 2 character Greek letter (because the anagrist has seven letters) that narrows it down a bit. |
|
| 12 | Nothing to say for sister (3) |
| NUN – Sounds like “none” (nothing) | |
| 13 | Scientist unfamiliar with nitrogen? (6) |
| NEWTON – NEW TO (unfamiliar with) + N{itrogen}
Very nice, and also true. Nitrogen (in fact any gases) weren’t named and discovered until the 1770s, some 150 years after Newton. |
|
| 15 | Reputation British sailors have around east (6) |
| RENOWN – RN (British sailors) + OWN (have) contains E{ast} | |
| 16 | Evil one Lionel disheartened (3) |
| ILL – I(one) + L{ione}L | |
| 17 | Crackers are able to expand (9) |
| ELABORATE – (ARE ABLE TO)* [“crackers” as the anagram indicator] | |
| 20 | King backed an extremely wicked activity (7) |
| KNAVERY – K{ing} + NA (AN reversed) + VERY (extremely)
Excellent word, we should be using it more. |
|
| 22 | Blasts waste by son (5) |
| BLOWS – BLOW (waste) + S{on}
This was my LOI and I was surprised it was right, as I don’t really see BLOWS=Blasts. But this famous sentence : “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off”, would work with Blast. |
|
| 23 | Endless parking in streets regulated (10) |
| PERSISTENT – P{arking} + (IN STREETS)* [regulated]
“Regulated” is a rather odd anagram indicator. If a set of items is regulated, is it mixed up? |
|
| Down | |
| 1 | Animal rootled at first in poor soil (5) |
| LORIS – (SOIL) containsR{ooted}
Tough one, as Liros also parses, and I had only barely heard of Loris. They are a small arboreal primate with grey or black fur, large eyes, and look very cute.Female lorises practice infant parking, leaving their infants behind in trees or bushes. |
|
| 2 | Enjoy wrestling with a sow? Absolutely not! (2,3,4) |
| NO WAY JOSE – (ENJOY + A SOW)* [wrestling]
“No way José” being an expression of disbelief. The OED can’t find any reference before 1979, but it feels older to me. It’s just a rhyme, but I expect tour guides are already making up derivations, by citing a story about some guy called Jose. In some other puzzle recently, JOSE was clued as “No way, man!” |
|
| 3 | Love female struggling with 4 problems? (5) |
| FLAME – F + LAME (a problem with a leg, the clue at 4 down)
It’s easy to forget the rule that if the number is less than 30, and written in numerals its worth checking for a cross-reference. FLAME=love is usually used in the expression “an old flame” |
|
| 4 | Stage left for example (3) |
| LEG – L{eft} + E.G. (for example)
A race with three stages might be said to have three legs. |
|
| 5 | Men network and party in Floridian resort (7) |
| ORLANDO – OR (men) + LAN (Network) + DO (party)
Three crossword staples in a row. If you’ve never come across them, all worth remembering. The first being military slang for Other Ranks, who are not officers, but “men”. Goodness knows what they say now that most of the armed forces contain female “men”. |
|
| 6 | Man is free with plonk — light red? (6,4) |
| SALMON PINK – (MAN IS PLONK)*
This shade of pink is often used to represent the color of salmon meat, and it can be rendered online as an RGB colour (255, 145, 164). |
|
| 9 | Direct instruction Edward Lear disregarded? (2-8) |
| NO-NONSENSE – Cryptic. Edward Lear was famous for “nonsense verse”, so he disregarded this instruction.
Fanous for the Owl and the Pussycat, he also wrote hunderds of limericks which are all rubbish, because he could never think of a third rhyme and just duplicated the word at the ends of the first and fifth lines. |
|
| 11 | Contemplate large drink or experience its effect? (3,6) |
| SEE DOUBLE – SEE (contemplate) + DOUBLE (large drink)
See=contemplate? In the expression, “Let me see”, I suppose. |
|
| 14 | Defensive structure great for Scots hero (7) |
| WALLACE – WALL (defensive structure) + great (ACE)
You know it’s rough when you’re a Scots Hero , but most people still think of you as the cheese-obsessed inventor. WALLACE went from “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” to “We’ve forgotten the crackers, Gromit!” |
|
| 18 | Measureless chasm in area near steamship (5) |
| ABYSS – A{rea} + BY (near) + SS (steamship) | |
| 19 | A trotter possibly for cooking? (5) |
| AFOOT – A + FOOT ( trotter possibly)
If something is AFOOT, it is imminent, or cooking. |
|
| 21 | Long dashes in eastern manuscript (3) |
| EMS — E{astern} + MS (manuscript)
The long dash, like the one above is called an EM dash because it is uspposed to be the width of an M. I like them, and it is one of the few keyboard shortcuts I know (Alt 0151 in windows). But they are now to be avoided because ChatGPT like sthem, and if you use them, people think you are a robot. |
|
Chewy Chewsday. Found this quite tricky and felt it was a bit above what a quickie should be, IMHO. Having said that, I did like many of the clues, the ARROW at 7a especially, and thought LONGFELLOW was neat. NO WAY JOSE was fun. Liked RENOWN perhaps paying tribute also to the great battlecruiser of that name that served in the ‘eastern’ fleet. Liked ELABORATE. MUSHY PEAS more of a side with fish ‘n’ chips than a dish. Liked the connection to ‘leg problems’ for F(LAME) but I was looking for OF??? for a while.
Thanks Merlin and setter.
8 minutes. I don’t like ‘endless’ for PERSISTENT. I understand that technically it’s ok because some dictionary (not my Chambers though) has it, but you can’t convince me that they mean the same thing.
I’m glad to hear this wasn’t easy, because I struggled. I had to write out all the letters to every anagram, while I usually just see them quickly. However, at least I had heard of loris. New to N was very clever indeed.
Time: 10:13.
10.01, nice puzzle, thank you Wurm and Merlin
Another day another typo – Np WAY JOSE should have revealed itself before I pressed submit. So that’s two out of two this week for a neighbouring key bringing me down. Only three on the first pass of acrosses before making progress with the downs. NHO LONGFELLOW but he emerged quickly enough from the checkers. Like Vinyl I found the anagrams testing – ELABORATE in particular where I fixated on it ending in -able for too long, right up until AFOOT went in. Really good puzzle, not all green in 15.49
Always like a RGB code, thanks Merlin, took me back to days when I held the company GIS licence and often wished there were more colours for my thematic maps.
I found this hard taking 15:06, with LOI SALMON PINK. I thought several clues were quite trickily phrased!
Thanks setter and blogger
6 minutes, missing my extended target once again. Nice puzzle though and I enjoyed the misdirection in the clue to ARROW.
Missing a ‘1’ in your post, I suspect
Excellent mix of clues that brought several smiles of satisfaction. Couldn’t see why Waste = BLOW except in the manner of ‘wasted’ to knock someone out.
Em dash and En dash I assumed related to their respected letter lengths.
COD NO WAY JOSE but other good contenders.
Thanks Merlin for the entertaining blog, and Wurm for the challenge. All done in 20+ mins.
What about BLOW in the sense of WASTE an opportunity? You are going blow your chances of winning if you make a silly mistake.
I had it as in “I’m not gonna blow/waste £200 on a first class upgrade.” (My price differential on a recent train ticket to Manchester)
That makes more sense to me (in both respects!). Thanks James & Merlin
Merlin. Try the Seatfrog app. You have to bid 30 mins beforehand but may only cost £25. Off peak first class can be empty so good business model. J
I wish it would work for BA long haul 😃
Four, and it was tough. I couldn’t fathom half of the parses even with their answers revealed, so thank you for the blog.
Merlin – a few typos in the blog that you might want to correct. No short cut for EM in Android as far as I can see. Back in the early days of LANs you often saw that expanded as local area newtorks. Networks can also be MANs and WANs. MANs and WANs are effectively synonymous now with the roll out of EPONs which are really token access networks and nothing to do with traditional CSMA/CD “Ethernet” as such. EPON tech snuck into 802.3 somehow at the time of EFM and the MEF about 20 odd years ago.
Typos are the new way to show the authenticity of text, that it came from a human. As noted, anything with an EM dash already has a red flag.
I’ve got to try this — · _
conventional _
Never stop learning, always have an open mind … ₹ № ←→↑↓ I could play with this for a while…
I’m pretty sure that on Android — like Apple — if you press and hold the hyphen key you will see a pop-up with both N and M dashes.
Good tip, and it also has underscore _ as a third option.
Yes. Many of the keys have pop-ups, especially the lowercase letter keys for foreign options. And double-tapping the shift key gives shift-lock.
I’m having great fun, this is a great tip. I’m going to be using the § more often, and those «weird French double quotes». Alas, no pilcrow.
“Alas, no pilcrow.“
On which device?
¶ hold §
I had to Google to find out what a pilcrow looks like….
We had a really good run at the start of this until grinding to a halt with 4 to go in the SE, that took about 15 of our 28.12
Glad to see others liking no way Jose, we thought that was such a brilliant clue. Also loved the misdirection with Bow, done up like a kipper we was!
Thanks for the enjoyable blog Merlin, especially the Wallace piece that had us chortling. We also needed your help parsing Newton.
Thanks Wurm for the wiggle.
we were yet again aroundabout your time…just under 30 with a NHO LORIS.
And thank you for your mention of, on ‘no QC Sunday’ trawling back to see which was the easiest of the week’s QC’s. We followed your lead and plodded through the Monday offering, much enjoyed and very educational. : ) Will do this again (and again) thanks to you.
🙂 As it happens we tried today’s biggie over lunch as we had some spare time and managed to complete in about 41 minutes, with a few “guess a letter or two and press check” to help us stay on the path!
31:15. No nonsense blows led me to see double. No Way Jose!
Yes Wurm got me. Cheers Merlin
A bit trickier than of late but full of top quality clues. Lots of cleverly disguised anagrams and some tricky definitions sent me up a few blind alleys but everything was fairly clued.
Started with SALMON PINK and finished with AFOOT in 9.37 with COD to NEWTON.
Thanks to Merlin and Wurm.
Definitely chewy, and no time as I was in a queue for tickets to the Ashes next January in Sydney – when I logged in I was “number 194,500 in the queue” and predictably my slot came up as I was battling Wurm.
But Success on both fronts eventually – tickets and puzzle! So the day has started very well indeed.
As for the puzzle, I was well misled on several clues. I didn’t see SEE as contemplate, and didn’t register “regulated” as an anagram indicator. NO NONSENSE also delayed me, and LOI BLOWS was a real guess. I think I see it now, but not easy and the checkers were unhelpful.
Many thanks Merlin for the excellent blog
Started at #194,500 in the queue … either you were particularly slow on the puzzle or the queue was moving quickly …
Joined queue for tickets at soon after 5.00 am, saw length of it, went to have shower then breakfast, came back to do battle with the QC, still entangled with Wurm when my turn came up – but it was a slow one, pushing 16-18 minutes I guess.
Quite a struggle. Eventually done in 18:49 with much of that time down to AFOOT, FLAME and KNAVERY.
My solve was wriggly and wiggly today but there was a lot to enjoy. I started with LORIS and like Merlin finished with BLOWS. Although I got them straight away I liked the surfaces for NEWTON and ORLANDO. COD for me was NO WAY JOSE. 9:01 Thanks Merlin.
I’m amazed anyone managed to unpick this prickly crossword yet alone do it as elegantly as Merlin. Thanks to Wurm and Merlin
An enjoyable tussle with Wurm. I filled the bulk of the top half very quickly (no problem with ARROW, FLAME etc.) and thought I was on for a quickie. A mis-type of ABYSt had me scratching my head over the anagram for 23a and I had stupidly biffed WINE for the second word in 6d making KNAVERY impossible. I was in the SCC before I had unravelled my errors.
Ah well, a good puzzle and a reminder to slow down and check things carefully when I think I am on a roll. More haste…..
Thanks to both.
Got there in the end (about half an hour) though NHO LORIS and some struggles with parsing so thank you, Merlin. LOI RENOWN, just needed that PDM.
Some lovely clues to enjoy such as SALMON PINK and SEE DOUBLE, thank you, Wurm.
I was fine with “blow the bloody doors off”, but NHO waste = blow; context, please?
Oh! Thank you for your answer (already written above) … but with respect I can’t agree. If we blow £300 on a wildly expensive meal it’s not a waste, only dreadfully profligate. If the meal was bad then we wasted the £300, but that’s not the same as saying we blew it.
And AgileJames: “blow your chances of winning”: surely there you’re saying wreck, not waste.
José: ok disbelief, surely also refusal, as in “are you coming with me on this parachute jump?”
So that’s how ORLANDO works, that awful “other ranks” lark. NHO network LAN either; what’s that, please?
LAN = Local Area Network. Like you probably have at home so all of your devices have access to the internet.
Don’t blow/waste all of your money at the racetrack.
LAN is just Local Area Network. There are Wide Area Networks as well. The IT industry has a wild excess of acronyms, as you can see above.
Golly – I had that chunky yellow coax with transceivers round my “study” in 1985 trying to get spanning tree to work. I had a couple of housea wired with cat5 in the 1990s. It’s pretty much all wireless now. I run my access via my phone hotspot and use a wireless router as a hub for my other wireless devices. Only things connected to the router by wire are my printer and my Sonus device.
I’m saying “Golly”, too – this is all Greek to me!
Testing, fun puzzle. First day back on the train-solve after some weeks off; I’d forgotten where all the signal dead spots are!
Slowed a bit by thinking the Greek letter at 10a would have to be “pi” so that the dish would be a “pie”, but main hold ups were the final four acrosses; like Lou I struggled to see “endless” as PERSISTENT and like Merlin my LOI was BLOWS, half expecting a DPS.
Anyway, got there all green in 09:22 for an OK Day (sub 10 on a Wurm is always acceptable!). Many thanks Wurm and Merlin.
Over 29 minutes of struggle to (nearly) finish as didn’t know EMS. Plenty of biffing employed to get going.
Struggled with this, got most of clues but failed to see Persistent and Blow = Waste? Got Afoot but could not parse. Thanks all
8.51
Definitely chewy. Loved NEWTON and I was definitely smiling when seeing some of them others (NO WAY JOSE; MUSHY PEAS and FLAME).
Thanks Merlin and Wurm
13:30 (birth of the Black Prince)
Similar experience to others, with BLOWS my LOI.
Wasted time in AFOOT trying to find four letter equines that fitted.
Many excellent clues, especially NEWTON and MUSHY PEAS.
Thanks Merlin and Wurm
Dnf…
Too difficult for me this. Still had about 20% to go after my 30 minute cut off, but from reviewing the answers I’m not sure I would have got them – a combination of both GK and clueing mechanisms.
7ac “Arrow” seems so obvious, but I was obsessed with bells – an example of the clever misdirection from Wurm combining Bow and Ding-Dong. I will have to remember “OR” for men.
FOI – 4dn “Leg”
LOI – Dnf
COD – 13ac “Newton”
Thanks as usual!
All in all good but I did have a couple of worries at 22a and 19d. Thanks Wurm and Merlin.
22a Blows (=blasts), I worried about this, but “blow the doors off” is a great let-out for Wurm.
23a Persistent. Merlin said: “Regulated” is a rather odd anagram indicator. If a set of items is regulated, is it mixed up? to which I would answer yes if it is OFWAT or indeed anything to do with our water. Hey ho.
19d Afoot. I worried about this too, especially as it depended on 22a which I doubted. I wondered if we were supposed to think of pig’s trotters being cooked and eaten?
21d Ems, thanks for the tip Merlin, I will eschew them in future.
A delightful and tricky QC from Wurm. Quite GK heavy but, as I knew it all, it seemed perfectly fair to me.
13 minutes. LOI SALMON PINK -biffed.
So many good clues; maybe COD to RENOWN.
And a great blog too.
David
8:22
Slow to get going with just four acrosses in on first pass (NUN, NEWTON, ILL, PERSISTENT). Some improvement on the downs but still plenty of gaps which needed plugging. Liked MUSHY PEAS and NO WAY JOSE, but took a while to think of LONGFELLOW and ANGOLAN. LOI RENOWN.
Thanks Merlin and Wurm
22:11 for the solve. Most of those last two mins trying to parse RENOWN rather than just bung it in and find it was a word like “benown” or some such. Held up in lots of places – bit anagram heavy for my liking especially when combined with unbiffable defs. Needed the three checkers before vaguely remembering LORIS (which I would think of as a Dr Seuss book). Very much liked NEWTON and ARROW though.
Thanks to Merlin and Wurm
A chewy puzzle indeed. I started off quickly butthen got bogged down. LORIS was FOI. BLOWS and AFOOT brought up the rear, with the latter causing a furrowed brow for quite a while, long enough to take me over my target. 10:09. Thanks Wurm and Merlin.
Good v tricky puzzle but had to reveal ANGOLAN which gave me LOI FLAME.
Was OK with the GK, including EMS, as twas a printer’s measure in days of yore. (Useful in Scrabble.). I liked many including the amusing NO NONSENSE, NO WAY JOSE and ARROW.
I managed the bottom half first – no one else has mentioned they struggled with ANGOLAN, oh dear.
Luckily NEWTON was the first scientist to spring to mind, and WALLACE the first Scot.
Many thanks, Merlin.
I see that my return to form lasted an entire day — 12mins yesterday and nearly 30 today. The top half of the grid wasn’t too bad, but I struggled all the way across the bottom, typified by wrong end of clue issues with Persistent. Some good clues in the mix, with my CoD vote going to Newton for the pdm (adm?) Invariant
Tough
21:29 for me
Like others I found this tough, and finished well outside my target at 12.20. It was a well constructed puzzle with some good clueing, and plenty of misdirection to keep us all on our toes.
There were a few tricky ones but lots which were really clever I thought, any one of which could have been COD in some other crosswords. The scientist in me just shades it to NEWTON though. Really enjoyed that one. 11:55 for us which is somewhere around or slightly faster than par. Many thanks, Merlin and Wurm.
A nice tester today. Liked NEWTON, JOSE, MUSHY PEAS and SEE DOUBLE particularly.
Thanks Wurm and Merlin
A wonderful crossword after a few write-ins of late. Too many good clues to pick a COD. Oh ok, NEWTON, then.
Really enjoyed this one – thanks, Wurm, and another brilliant blog, Merlin!
Gave up after 17 minutes, couldn’t get the corner of see double, afoot and blows at all. All make good sense to me now but probably wouldn’t have got them. Was also stuck on longfellow and flame, never heard of longfellow and the wordplay wasn’t obvious, didn’t realise 4 could refer to the leg clue, prevented me from doing that one either.
Completed with the exception of 22ac in around 28 minutes. An alphabet trawl for the last one came up with BLOWS and BOOMS. The first seemed a poor synonym for blasts and for the second I couldn’t equate boom with waste. My mental toss-up came down the wrong way so a DNF for me.
FOI – 1ac LONGFELLOW
LOI – DNF
COD – 13ac NEWTON. NO NONSENSE and MUSHY PEAS also very good.
Thanks to Wurm and Merlin
9.08 SALMON PINK and LONGFELLOW needed checkers and I hesitated over LOI AFOOT. ANGOLAN was nice. I can’t read NO WAY JOSE without thinking of Father Dougal. Thanks Merlin and Wurm.
24:42
This felt like very hard work with much circling of the grid with answers slow to reveal themselves.
Pleased to find that I wasn’t alone.
No problem with waste and BLOWS – ‘don’t blow all your cash at once’.
FOI: NEWTON
COD: SEE DOUBLE
LOI: KNAVERY
Great blog Merlin and thanks to Wurm
Vicious! Well into SCC territory at 24:05, and I came very close to a DNF. A bit much for me, I think.
Thank you for the blog!
50 minutes, so this was right at the very outer edge of ‘doabilty’ for me. Only three Acrosses and one Down clue solved after 10+ minutes and I barely improved upon that pace throughout. LONGFELLOW was my LOI and I sincerely hope that was the hardest QC we will have to face for some while.
Many thanks to Merlin for the blog.
Boohoo, could not see the slantwise BLOWS and settled for BOOMS without any hope after sliding into Club territory. (I have never heard of the “famous sentence, had to look it up.) Great puzzle, slow brain today. ARROW was mysterious (ding-dong?), but I believed it anyway. MUSHY PEAS reads like a “green paint” answer to foreign me, but I see it’s in Collins. Nauseating but funny. Funny but nauseating. Loved NEWTON, which had me well and truly stymied for a while. But COD absolutely NO WAY JOSE. Looking at the literal and enumeration, I could see it but thought “no way!” until I looked again at the wordplay. I liked ABYSS for the way the clue evoked both Coleridge’s chasms measureless to man and Poe’s descent into the maelstrom. Top quality stuff!
Thanks to Wurm for the thrashing and to Merlin for the colourful and informative blogging. I too like using em-dashes – but fear being taken for a LLM.
10 mins-ish DNF because of LONGFELLOW, SALMON PINK (had put wine for plonk), and MUSHY PEAS, where the parsing was obvious put the answer somehow elusive. But Wurm is normally hard so I’m not surprised.
Hard one taking 50 minutes but needed help with RENOWN so a DNF.
I equated BLOWS and BLASTS with wind – Icy Blows, Icy Blasts.
Plenty to enjoy. Thanks Wurm and Merlin.
25:25 Many great clues but WINE for PINK was a time-stretcher and PERSISTENT, BLOWS, and KNAVERY all took ages to appear. Very hard to choose one COD with NEWTON, SEE DOUBLE, AFOOT, MUSHY PEAS, FLAME, and NO-NONSENSE all competing.
I wonder if the pop song “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” was inspired somehow, maybe subliminally, by NO WAY JOSE?
10.41. I enjoyed this puzzle a lot, even if my completion time was longer than usual. A very nice assortment of clue types.
32:58
Gosh that was tough! The top was ok but had to rely on copious biffing and guesswork. SALMON PINK, AFOOT and BLOWS all unparsed. LOI FLAME.
20:23 to go from ARROW to FLAME. Lots to like today, NEWTON gets my COD vote.
Thanks to Wurm and Merlin.
Why do I waste my time with this? I am completely incapable of ever achieving any proficiency here.
Took 53 minutes and still DNF. Could not get BLOWS or AFOOT.
If I had any confidence left to lose, this would have done the job. As it is, it just confirms what I already know.
No enjoyment, no sense of achievement. Just a profound sense of ignorance and stupidity. I struggled on virtually every clue and could barely see anything.
Useless.
Don’t reply, I’m really not in the right frame of mind.
7 short on 15 x 15 in 75 mins. I’m nowhere with this.