Times Jumbo 912

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Jumbo Cryptic
29:33 according to the Club timer, which corresponds to moderately tough, I’d say. More than one clue went in without full understanding of why they were right, and was confirmed after the event. A puzzle which I enjoyed for the most part: if it lacked the surgical precision you regularly get from some setters in the Times, it also had lots of pleasing surfaces and a certain wit. And I suppose the ultimate test is whether you manage to complete the puzzle…

With Jumbos I generally confine myself to discussion of answers which I think might be a) less straightforward for inexperienced or non-UK based solvers, or b) especially elegant / questionable. However, as always, if a particular clue is not discussed, please feel free to raise it in comments for explanation or discussion.

Across
10 BURRO – BURROw, which is definitely a donkey and not butter, despite what we may have learned in Mr. Fawlty’s Spanish classes.
15 ISRAELI – (LEAR)rev. in IS. + I. (or possibly (LEAR’S)rev. in I. + I.
18 GOLDEN NUMBER – (NONEGRUMBLED)*. I must admit that while I knew that there was a complicated formula for working out the date of Easter, I couldn’t have given the slightest detail of that formula. Explanation of how the golden number operates is to be found here. Despite this, I felt pretty confident from the wordplay.
20 SPOTTED DOG – [(ODD in GET) + TOPS]all rev. I’m much more familiar with Spotted Dick, but this alternative name vaguely rang a bell
23 NGWEE – followiNG WEEks. Not madly keen on being expected to know such an obscure unit of currency, especially as it’s not a particularly likely looking word. It seemed a level of difficulty higher than was required here. Just me?
25 ST KITTS – SKITS with two ‘T’s inserted. A good example of what I meant by lack of precision, which didn’t even add much to the surface, I thought.
26 TARRADIDDLE – TAR + R.A. + DIDDLE. Fairly obvious when you break it down, though I wasn’t sure I’d thought of it as a real word before.
36 CLEARWAYS – (SAY WE Left CARS)*.
38 ONCER – cONCERt. Makes me feel a bit old to be well able to remember pound notes (phased out in the UK in 1984). I can even remember a newspaper which always used to offer “a crisp oncer” as a prize for some regular competition, when a pound was clearly a decent sum of money.
39 DREARISOME – (REAR IS) in DOME.
41 CABLE RELEASE – CABLE RE: LEASE; before the wikileaks furore, it must have been a while since the general public regularly thought of telegraphic messages as “cables”.
46 TOASTIE – TOAST (“Cheers!”) + I.E.
50 QUARTERMASTER – QUARTER(=”fourth”) + MASTER(“star”).
52 LOSER – cLOSER.
54 BREAD TREE – BREAD(=money) + TREE(=plane), which will annoy those who detest definition by example. In this case, it does at least add to the elegance of the surface, which is presumably the setter’s defence.
 
Down
3 TILDE – Daughter in TILE. The tilde is the little punctuation mark which will turn senor into señor.
4 CESSION =”SESSION”.
7 NORMAL – NORMAn with the last letter changed. Another imprecise one, which effectively says “Change the last letter…to, er, something else, which will remain unchecked”.
8 BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE – (HEIRBORNINNICEPLACE)*, a splendid long anagram, and given that he was born in Rome, an &lit. Assuming you agree with me that Rome is indeed a nice place.
9 WARRANT – i.e. WAR RANT. A good charade style clue.
10 BRASS NECK – BRASS(as in orchestra section) + NECK(=”kiss”).
19 EYEWASH – fiEld + YEW + ASH. Clues like this are what made me like this puzzle.
21 GOSPELLER – SPELL in GOER. Thanks in part to Monty Python, I don’t always immediately think of energy being the primary characteristic of a goer…say no more, say no more.
22 STRAPS – TRAP in bruSSels.
24 STIRRUP – howleR in STIR UP gives one of the tiny bones of the ear.
25 SADNESS – (SEND AS)rev. + Second is how I parsed this, taking “broadcast, for instance” to be interpreted as “SEND AS”. Am I right? Does this work?
27 EASTER – [European + (RETSinA)]rev. Another beautifully crafted little clue.
31 FLORENTINES – [LORE + N.T.] in FINE Southern. And an elegant clue with a lift-and-separate at the end.
40 SALAMIS – LAM 1 in S.A.S.
43 ENDORSE i.e. END ‘ORSE. An initially impenetrable one that raised a smile.

8 comments on “Times Jumbo 912”

  1. Off topic, I’m afraid. Trying ‘club monthly’ puzzle for the first time. Seems more difficult than an AZED ‘plain’. When will it be blogged?
    Regards
    Andrewjk
    1. Andrew

      As with all prize puzzles, the blog won’t go up until the deadline for submissions has passed – I must admit I don’t regularly do the Club Monthly (so little time, so many crosswords) but as far as I am aware, that means the last Thursday of the month. Unless there’s been a change in the regular schedule, you should find a report from jerrywh appearing pretty promptly around that date.

      Tim

  2. NGWEE is a word that pops up a lot in scrabble and other word games e.g. boggle. not that common in crosswords however.
  3. 24:16 for me – which in retrospect looks a bit slow for a reasonably straightforward puzzle, though I can’t remember anything that particularly held me up.

    NGWEE rang a faint bell (presumably from some previous crossword), but I’m generally not too keen on obscure currencies either.

  4. Sorry, I forgot to say that I agree with your parsing of SADNESS, except that I had (S SEND AS)rev.
  5. A fairly quick, for me,76 minutes. Given the number of words that were new to me –brass neck, oncer, clearways, toastie,–it’s ironic that I actually knew NZWEE. Only it’s not nzwee, of course, it’s ngwee, which I finally realized once I spotted the hidden letters. Re 7d: I agree that in general, clues that say, in effect, ‘it doesn’t end with the letter you think’ are a bit of a cop-out on the part of the setter, still, when you have NORMA? and you know it’s not NORMAN, …
    1. Indeed, I don’t complain too loudly about things like this because the test has to be “Does it prevent you solving the clue with near total certainty?” and if the answer is, as here, “No”, there’s no problem.

Comments are closed.