Saturday Times 25532 (20th July)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
I’m working today (again) and trying to type up the blog as I’m sat here, but I logged on at 7:30 this morning and have hardly had a chance to look at it yet! And they said weekend support should be pretty quiet this time!

Well, finally I got there! This was a cracking puzzle which took just under the half-hour for me, although I don’t remember getting really stuck at any point. I also don’t remember having any trouble with 12ac, but I can’t see how the wordplay worked at all today. I do remember reading the clue to 4ac and thinking I was in for a treat though.

Across
1 HOCKEY – KEY (crucial) after HOC (Latin for this, which could loosely mean “the event” I suppose).
4 BOWL OVER – “BOW LOVER”.
10 NARRATIVE – NATIVE (Mother, as in motherland or mother tongue) around (c)ARR(y).
11 TENET – straight definition + palindrome indicator.
12 KIDNEY STONE – I’m sure I figured this out last week, but I can’t remember now. The definition is “calculus” (Latin for little stone).
14 ADO – because A.D. 0 didn’t exist – the year after 1 BC was 1 AD.
15 NESTFUL – (r)ESTFUL (still, failing to start) after N(ew).
17 DEPOSE – DE(spot) (i.e. “spot”less) + PO(i)SE (heartless composure).
19 ARMADA – hidden in “near Madagascan”
21 CLEANSE – LEANS (is inclined) inside CE (church).
23 AWN – FAWN (flatter) without the F for female. A bristle of barley.
24 COLLAPSIBLE – CO + (bills leap)*
26 TEMPI – T(ortois)E + [ I (one) + PM (afternoon) reversed ].
27 SUGAR CANE – alternate letters of “is, Jung” + ARCANE (mysterious).
29 NONSENSE – NON (refusal of French) + SENSE (import, i.e. meaning).
30 RETARD – (trader)*

Down
1 HONG KONG – HONK (sound of car horn) + GONG (bell), with a new meaning of “concatenating” for me. In computing, concatenate means “add to the end”, but the correct meaning is “linking together in a chain”.
2 CARED – (s)CARED.
3 ERA – middle letters of “men are sad”.
5 ONEFOLD – double definition.
6 LETTERPRESS – ER, PRES (heads of state briefly) inside LETTS (Latvians).
7 VENIAL SIN – (in navel is)*
8 RATION – I (one) inside A TON (a hundred), after (winte)R.
9 MISSAL – A book of masses, hence “mass medium”, which sounds like the American pronunciation of “missile”.
13 ENFRANCHISE – (her finances)*
16 STRONGMAN – not sure why “able to work”. I think just the last two words would make an adequate cryptic definition.
18 REVEREND – EVER (always) inside R.E. (scripture) + (a)ND. That’s a couple of times recently Spooner’s been invoked in a clue for something other than riding a well-boiled icicle or fighting a liar!
20 ATLASES – SALT (sailor) in SEA (where he drowned), all reversed.
21 CHARGE – quadruple definition.
22 FASTEN – EN (EustoN without us to), after FAST (fare avoidance).
25 BRAVA – i.e. a toast to Dame Nelly Melba, the Australian opera singer.
28 RUE – sounds like “roo” (a type of bounder).

12 comments on “Saturday Times 25532 (20th July)”

  1. 12ac: KIDNEY (class),S(eems),TONE (go well)

    This was one of a bad run of puzzles for me taking only a minute or two under 2 hours with a few references to the dictionary along the way.

    I don’t really understand “event” = HOC or the overlapping concept re “concatenate” which I only knew as a spreadsheet function for joining one thing to another.

    At 16dn I took “shower” as the definition, a sort of crossword clue style variation on “showman”. So “able to work” = STRONG and power = MAN as in “manpower”. Don’t know if it’s right but that was my reasoning.

    Edited at 2013-07-27 02:31 pm (UTC)

  2. 34:28 .. quite a work-out.

    I had trouble parsing a number of clues and still can’t quite accept the ‘gong’ bit of HONG KONG as a concatenation.

    STRONGMAN occupied me for ages. I read it as ‘able’=strong+’to work’=man and ‘power shower’ as the def., but for some reason it doesn’t quite satisfy.

    Good level for a Saturday, though.

  4. I enjoyed this a lot – it had a bit of everything, even the place I’ve called home for 26 years. Same queries as those already mentioned, but the fun this gave me, MISSAL above all, makes up for that. Ran out of steam in the SE, where I couldn’t see beyond ‘blame’ at 25 and had ‘roo’ for an age at 28 – none of this would have mattered had I got RETARD, but – hats off to the setter – by the time I got there, I had been ground down.

    My take on 16d is able = STRONG and work = MAN (?), but this is one if those where it would be nice to hear from the setter.

    Edited at 2013-07-27 03:48 pm (UTC)

  5. I didn’t time this one but remember it being on the tough side. I parsed STRONGMAN the same way sotira did, KIDNEY STONE the same way jackkt did, and I have the same reservations about the way HONG KONG works. I thought the clue for ATLASES was excellent.
  6. 42m exactly for me. I mostly enjoyed this but there were a few clues that really annoyed me:
    > 1ac HOCKEY. I think the parsing is that KEY comes after HOC, so it’s post-HOC, which is after the event. Too clever by half.
    > KIDNEY STONE. Two obscurities for the price of one. My last in, based purely on checkers.
    > HONG KONG. I just don’t buy it.
    “Melba toast” is rather brilliant though.
  7. For some reason, this went quite smoothly for me. I think 25d was my LOI, although I was confident early on that it was Nelly Melba; lovely clue. I keep forgetting the ‘nonsense’ sense of ‘rhubarb’–for me it only means ‘argument’–even though it’s appeared here before. Didn’t notice STRONGMAN at the time, but it is problematic, isn’t it? But there were a number of nice clues: 25d, 15ad, 17ac, 27ac among them.
  8. Can’t see a problem with this: a paper chain is made by linking ‘hoops’ of paper together in a chain. The setter is using the same concept to ‘slip’ G-ONG round HON-K.

    Edited at 2013-07-28 01:17 pm (UTC)

  9. I struggled with this one and wasn’t enormously fond of some of the clues that others have mentioned, but there were some good surfaces (the unfortunate tortoise raised a laugh). Mulled over STRONGMAN for quite some time as I’ve always thought of shower as meaning a group rather than an individual but the wordplay indicated the latter. Also didn’t realise that BRAVO came in several different forms, which held up 30A for a while.
  10. Loved it, brilliant surface readings and great fun, but… DNF. Some of the vocabulary and usage just beyond my grasp, without spending days on it. My thought in solving was strong man = able to work, as a labourer soliciting casual employment might describe himself, though not sure that works completely.
    Concatenate no problem, know both its meanings. In ancient times Unix had a CAT command.
    Rob

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