Sunday Times 4802 by Jeff Pearce

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
9:21. This was what I have come to think of as the typical Jeff Pearce puzzle: quite straightforward, but all very neatly clued and fun to solve. I would recommend Jeff’s puzzles for beginners, but then every so often he gives us an absolute stinker.

There was nothing too out of the ordinary in this, although the required meaning of 27ac LIFE PRESERVER is perhaps not universally known. The clue that gave me the most trouble was 7dn: I could see what the answer must be but couldn’t for the life of me work out the wordplay. Eventually I just bunged it in and submitted, at which point I immediately got it. This is a pattern that often leads to a wrong answer, but I got away with it this time.

Definite clue of the day to 8dn today: a real cracker. I sometimes wonder what they would make of our current crop of politicians, but as I heard Armando Ianucci say recently it’s difficult to parody people who are ridiculous to begin with.

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (THIS)*, anagram indicators like this.

Across
1 Occasional pharmacist finally accomplished chemist’s work
PERIODIC TABLE – PERIODIC (occasional), pharmacisT, ABLE (accomplished).
10 After gym start to overexert in a cool fog
PEA-SOUPER – PE (gym), A S(Overexert)UPER.
11 Messages your compiler rejected are sick
E-MAIL – reversal of ME (your compiler), AIL. EMAIL can refer to an individual message or the body of messages, for example in the phrase ‘check your email’.
12 Rings dipso about drinking litre after litre
TOLLS – reversal of SOT (dipso) around LL.
13 Hard-headed about boxer’s movement lacking control
REALISTIC – RE (about), ALI’S, TIC (movement lacking control).
14 One knight cared for fiancée
INTENDED – I, N, TENDED. N for ‘knight’ is a counterintuitive (to me at least) chess abbreviation.
16 Deer one leaves loves woody grass
BAMBOO – BAMBi, OO (loves).
19 Almost new church in the country
GREECE – GREEn, CE. Anyone else waste time trying to think of a word for ‘new’ beginning FRAN?
20 Old vehicle initially left in a part of America?
CAROLINA – CAR preceding O, then L, IN, A. Is CAROLINA a place? Surely there are two of them? The northern version is home to glheard of this parish.
22 Drug den at home is busted
METHADONE – (DEN AT HOME)*.
24 Row about one starting marathon clock
TIMER – TI(Marathon)ER.
25 Russian author resident in St Petersburg or Kirov
GORKI – contained in ‘St Petersburg or Kirov’.
26 Cold nurse is horrible and not a very nice person at all!
SCOUNDREL – (COLD NURSE)*.
27 One with long sentence seizes leader of prison book club
LIFE PRESERVER – LIFE(Prison, RESERVE)R. I vaguely recognised this term for a club or cosh, much more commonly used for the rings used to keep people afloat.

Down
2 Earl with girl on his shoulder, a sign of his rank
EPAULETTE – E, PAULETTE. Are EPAULETTES worn particularly by earls? I suppose it doesn’t matter: an earl can also be an admiral or whatever.
3 Religious images prisoner found in Isiah
ICONS – I(CON)S. The book of Isiah: one of the few I have actually heard of. Edit: Actually it’s Isaiah, as pointed out below. I may have heard of it, but that doesn’t mean I know how to spell it.
4 Left role during Act
DEPARTED – DE(PART)ED.
5 Popular breakfast show in instalments on the radio
CEREAL – sounds like ‘serial’.
6 A chap entertains another by initially ordering a hot drink
AMERICANO – A M(ERIC)AN, Ordering.
7 Without base shed inclined
LEANT – LEAN-To.
8 Old show cruelly imitating ghastly politicians and egotistical stars primarily
SPITTING IMAGE – (IMITATING, Ghastly, Politicians, Egotistical, Stars)*. Great clue!
9 Something upon which you can vote
ELECTORAL ROLL – because to vote you have to be on it.
15 Exotic entrance with one type of tree
NECTARINE – (ENTRANCE, I)*.
17 Drunk Iberian carries mum’s pan
BAIN-MARIE – (IBERIAN)* containing MA. To my mind a BAIN-MARIE is a bit more than just a pan: you need something to hold the water and something else to hold whatever it is you’re cooking. But this is a minor nit and it didn’t cause me a problem.
18 Extremely hungry birds outside old university
RAVENOUS – RAVEN(O, U)S.
21 Cat’s right under part of PC
MOUSER – MOUSE, R.
23 Sailor is returning bones
TARSI – TAR, reversal of IS.
24 Note heard from this singer
TENOR – sounds like ‘tenner’. Bit of a chestnut.

28 comments on “Sunday Times 4802 by Jeff Pearce”

  1. A walk in the proverbial, but a pleasant one. I was surprised to find LIFE PRESERVER, as I’d only come across it in 19th-century lit like ‘The Pirates of Penzance’. N is used for Knight, since the king has K. (Your knight is apparently gay, K; which is fine, but Jeff’s wasn’t. And while I’m in this parenthesis pointing out typos–this one’s Jeff’s, though– it’s Isaiah.) Some time ago I objected to DAKOTA precisely on the grounds that there is no such place; which led to a lengthy discussion. Although as someone mentioned, there is “Nothing could be fina/than to be in Carolina” etc.
    1. Apologies for the biblical misspelling. If I’d thought of the Glenn Miller version of Carolina, I might not have insisted on using “a part of” rather than just “part of”, in the hope of suggesting the singular of “Carolinas”. On edit, I satisfied myself that Gorki as the spelling was more common than Tchaikovski or Stravinski.

      Edited at 2018-06-17 07:46 am (UTC)

      1. I’ve always assumed–without much in the way of empirical evidence–that -ski was Polish and -sky (conventionally) Russian; but that of course doesn’t help much with Gorki.
    2. Thanks Kevin, this seems to have been a good week for typos: I will correct them. I was a bit puzzled by the error in the clue, since I use mohn’s automated routine to produce the blog, but then I remembered that the routine produces funny results for characters with accents which you then have to correct manually. I must have inadvertently changed the knight’s orientation at that point.
      The K for king point is of course blindingly obvious now that you point it out, but N still seems strange to me. I think if I had been in charge the king would have been R, but I am not a chess player, as you might have gathered.
      1. May I ask which device, operating system (and version) and browser (and version) you’re using, k? I’d like to investigate that accent problem as I’ve not seen it before and it doesn’t occur with my default iMac/OSX/Chrome set-up. Thanks!
          1. It works OK on my old Windows 7 laptop but unfortunately I don’t know anyone (nearby) with Windows 8. If you could perhaps send me the raw HTML created by the script (i.e. before you’ve done any corrections) then that might give me a clue as to what’s going on but it will be hard to successfully investigate this at the moment without access to an appropriate machine – sorry …
            1. No problem and thanks. I don’t have the original HTML script any more, I’ll try and remember to send it to you next time I do the blog. It basically produces a stream of 5 or 6 apparently random characters instead of the apostrophe. It’s not much of a problem: I just do a find/replace with that string, so it’s normally fixed in a matter of seconds. French accents obviously appear less often and in this case I guess I just deleted one character too many.
    3. Also ‘Carolina Moon’ a 1924 song that became a standard and was a big hit for Connie Francis in 1958. I can’t get myself too exercised of the omission here, but would probably take a different view if the clue had said ‘state’.
  2. One of the very rare occasions when my solving time (19m 18s) was less than the stated average according to the club site (20m 14s)
    I enjoyed being reminded of that wonderful programme, Spitting Image.
  3. 21 minutes. DK the club. GORKI came in useful later in the week! Since we’re doing typos, the anagrist at 8dn is IMITATING GPES (one too many I’s).
    1. I think you need to count again jackkt. There are three ‘I’s in both the angrist and the solution.
  4. 12 minutes with LOI BAIN MARIE. This must have been easy. COD to LIFE PRESERVER where a vague memory of its club meaning was stirred. For unto us a child is born. Let’s give him a name nobody spells right. I believe ISAIAH was misspelt in 3d clue. Mind you, as I’ve written recently in another place, I’d have spelt GORKY as in park. Thank you Jeff for a pleasant start to last Sunday and K for the blog.
    On edit, apologies for missing that Kevin had already mentioned Isaiah.

    Edited at 2018-06-17 07:27 am (UTC)

  5. Agree with our blogger’s assessment:enjoyable and not too difficult.
    Starting with Gorki I had over half done in 20 minutes but then slowed down.
    Struggled to parse 7d and was slow to see Bamboo. My last two were Bain Marie (unknown but I seemed to know it when the letters emerged) and Life Preserver which I parsed successfully but did not know the meaning. David
  6. I almost got below 10 min with this one. I was at 8 min and some seconds with just one to get. Life Preserver. I didn’t know this was a type of club. 10:52.

    Not that long ago Ed Miliband’s fortunes were seriously damaged by an Electoral Roll – of the bacon variety. Well, OK, an Electoral Sandwich. And David Miliband’s by a banana. Strange how food items undermined both brothers political ambitions. There’s food for thought.

    COD: LEANT

    Edited at 2018-06-17 08:33 am (UTC)

  7. 23:37, fairly easy-going but with a slight struggle to recall bain-marie and a slight shrug at the unknown “club” definition of life preserver.
  8. I’m pretty sure this meaning of LIFE PRESERVER was a memory from The First Great Train Robbery, which determinedly used Victorian underworld slang even when it made the dialogue incomprehensible. There’s one also in Bill Sykes possession in Oliver Twist.
    A gentle 16 minutes to finish this one, so smooth I missed the Isiah bish and cruised past any misgivings on CAROLINA. And yes, the clever &lit that produce Fluck and Law’s shenanigans was my favourite.
    Cheers K, especially for the Ianucci quote. There are those who try the art of political parody – Tracey Ullman for one, but Fluck and Law had Thatcher to play with, so it’s hard to -um- make much of and impression these days. And Trump, of course, is way beyond parody.
    1. These days parody creates impossible-to-parody reactions of its own: Ullman had a mild dig at Corbyn’s handling of anti-semitism in Labour, and some of the faithful declared that this blasphemous traducement of the Dear Leader was, you guessed it, a Zionist plot.
      1. Only fair, I suppose, when any criticism of Israeli government policy is automatically labelled as anti-Semitism. Incidentally, I’ve been following the Labor/anti-Semitism ‘discussion’, as far as it shows up in the Guardian, anyway, and am still waiting for an example.

        Edited at 2018-06-17 10:47 am (UTC)

  9. As I was submitting this at 12:31, I found myself double checking that I wasn’t doing a QC! A definite PB for a Times cryptic. An enjoyable puzzle too. I failed to notice the ISIAH or the lack of a geographical identifier for CAROLINA. As others I was helped by the previous outing of GORKI. I somehow knew the required meaning of LIFE PRESERVER too. Thanks Jeff and K.
  10. The convention nowadays is for ’email’ to be unhyphenated. Hence the clue stating (1-4) is incorrect, or at least, outdated.
    1. A cursory google search shows that both e-mail and email are in current use, and all three of the go-to dictionaries I use (Collins, ODO, Chambers) list both versions. The non-hyphenated version may be more common these days (and is listed ahead of the hyphenated version in ODO and Chambers, although not in Collins) but to describe it as ‘incorrect’ is a stretch.
  11. In the blog: The northern version is home to glheard of this parish.

    Haven’t heard of glheard before. What is he/she/it? ;>) ;>)

    Thanks for all the blogs.

    Jan and Tom. Toronto.

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