ST 4403 (Sun 17 Oct) – Pipe dream

Author   talbinhoPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 4:02

Not bad but it should probably have been faster after I spotted the most difficult word (MEERSCHAUM) quickly. I don’t think anything really held me up apart from 13ac, but I was lucky that the wordplay for 10ac (GUAM) was so kind as I’m not sure I’d have remembered the name otherwise; the other unknown (If…. at 6ac) was obvious.

There were some dodgy clues this week as ever, but the real howler was at 20dn (STRONG) where the definition was, er, ‘strong’. Genius.

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.

Across
1 CAN OF WORMS (2 defs) – ‘Problem’ as in ‘to open a can of worms’.
6 AS IF; A + S[econd] + IF – If…. was a 1968 British film. The definition here is the wrong part of speech.
9 ASTRONOMER; (STAR + MOON)* + rev. of RE (= ‘on’, as in ‘regarding’)
10 GU(A)M – a Pacific island at the southern end of the Mariana Islands.
12 CREATE; E in CRATE – ‘just’ is superfluous to the cryptic reading.
13 AS GOOD AS [gold] – I misread the enumeration here as (2,2,4) so wasted time on ‘as it were’. ’21’ refers to PROVERBS, the answer to clue 21.
15 ELEPHANTINE; (THE PLANE)* + IN + E[ngineer]
18 HALF-CENTURY – ‘Good score’ as in cricket, and a score is 20 so 2.5 scores are 50.
21 PROVERBS – ‘saw’ as in a wise saying, and ‘book’ as in ‘book of the Bible’.
22 PAR + ROT
24 H + EEL
25 SAN ANTONIO; A + N[ew] + ANT (= ‘worker’) in SON, + I + O[ld]
26 PASS; ASS after P[iano] – another verbose clue with ‘despite being’ superfluous.
27 SKIPPERING; SING around KIPPER – ‘to kipper’ means ‘to cure’ (e.g. a herring).

Down
1 CHANCE (2 defs) – nearly blundered into ‘Strand’ here.
2 NUTTER; [institutio]N + UTTER
3 FRONTBENCHER; FRONT (= ‘face’) + BENCH (= ‘judges’) + ER (= ‘sign of hesitation’)
4 OBOE; “HOBO” with a dropped H
5 MEERSCHAUM; (MUM REACHES)* – not sure where I plucked this from. It’s a kind of tobacco pipe made from a particular sort of clay (or the clay itself).
7 SQUADDIE; QUAD with (DIES)* around
8 FAMISHED; AMISH, with FED around – another ungrammatical clue, with ‘is’ ruining the wordplay.
11 BOUNCY CASTLE (cryptic definition)
14 PENNY BLACK; PENNY (= ‘Female’) + L (= ‘student’) in BACK (= ‘support’) – ‘when without’ meaning ‘when around the outside [of the previous word]’.
16 CHOP, CHOP
17 BLOOMERS; BOOMERS around L – had a block on ‘kangaroos’ and went through ‘roos’, ‘joeys’ and ‘euros’ before trying the definition instead, which worked instantly.
19 BRUNEI; B + RUN + I around E[urope]
20 STRONG (reversed initial letters) – seriously, how does this happen?
23 CAR + P

7 comments on “ST 4403 (Sun 17 Oct) – Pipe dream”

  1. 5:45 for me, which is as quick as it gets for me these days. I was slightly held up by 20D though, as I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. Then I remembered it was the Sunday Times and just stuck it in.
  2. Yes, easy.. one curious thing about this particular crossword is that the new Crossword Club “website” listed it twice, once as the ST cryptic, and once as a Times cryptic. so I submitted it twice, presumably failing to win both times..
  3. ‘As if!’ among US teenagers, anyway, is equivalent to, say, ‘Fat chance!’, or ‘Highly unlikely’.
    1. Yes, I see what you mean. One of those cases where in another crossword I’d probably have tried harder to justify it, but because it was in the Sunday Times I just assumed the clue was faulty. Thanks for the explanation.
  4. 5:30 for me – so not quite such a poor showing as usual.

    Looking at the Times Crossword Club’s Cryptic leaderboard, I see that your 4:02 would have landed you in 26th place and my 5:30 would have made me 45th. (I rest my case for the separation of the two functions currently assigned to the Submit button!)

    I’m pretty sure “As if!” has exactly the same meaning among British teenagers – or perhaps more generally since I don’t have a great deal of contact with teenagers these days and I’m quite familiar with it.

    1. In the version I solved, the clue read “Senior MP’s to face…”, so the definition was the singular “Senior MP” with the apostrophe-s acting as a cryptic link (“is”, i.e. “equals” or “is given by”) between definition and wordplay.

      Of course, this being the ST it’s quite possible that your version said something else!

Comments are closed.