Club Monthly No. 20112 – January 2010

Author   JerryWPosted on Categories Monthly Club Special
Solving time: 45 minutes, and I was pleased to get through it in one session, rather unusual for me. I prefer to put it aside and come back to it later, if I get at all bogged down. Amazing how that can help.

At the time of writing the facility to submit this crossword to The Times is still live, but I think it is now safe to post this blog as I have heard from the winner! Congratulations, you know who you are 🙂

Doubtless, this month’s puzzle will appear on Friday, when it is due.

Many crosswords are likely to include one or two words you haven’t heard of before, and the Club Monthly serves to show that even if there are more than that, it doesn’t necessarily matter much. Out of curiosity, I went through the solution and counted 12 familiar words, five obscure words I have heard of previously, and 11 words I don’t remember encountering before.. Overall I thought this effort elegant and fair, with some top class surface readings. Once again I have no technical faults to find, apart from 1dn and a minor quibble at 19dn.

Across
1 MISPRIZE – minutes = M + one’s = IS + reward = PRIZE, an easy one to start us off that I nevertheless managed to get wrong at first, thinking it was mistreat..
5 ABACAS – muscle = AB + ACAS, the well-known arbitration body, at least to any Brit old enough to remember the winter of discontent, and similar
9 CALQUING – about = CA + LQUId + NG = no good. This one took a while, calquing being a somewhat unlikely word, until I remembered my useful “wherever there’s a U, look out for a Q” crossword rule..
10 POLEAX – OLE = “encouragement to Spaniard” inside PAX. Poleax is a familiar word, though seldom used to describe a weapon these days..
12 WITWATERSRAND – (WWI STARTED)* containing RAN = smuggled, to make the place where 40% of all the gold ever mined comes from, so they say
15 ARIOT – chARIOT, to make a word that rhymes not with chariot, but with quiet.
16 UNWATERED – posh = U + top left = NW + (A TREE)* + D = “would ultimately,” def. = “dry.” – a pleasing clue this one, neat with an elegant surface. My COD.
17 MEGAFARAD – say = EG + way off = AFAR, contained in very cross = MAD, to make this week’s token venture into what most setters (and solvers, Jimbo & me excepted?) seem to regard as the black arts of science and technology
19 CHILE – hidden in putsCH I LEd – A country blighted in the 1970s and ‘80s by the appalling Pinochet regime. I originally thought the clue contained some reference to the equally appalling (though unaccountably more popular) Che Guevara but it seems it doesn’t..
20 MATINEE JACKET – (CAN’T MAKE EEJIT)*, a slightly laboured and rather obviously indicated anagram, though in its defence I would not care to provide a better one (any offers?) and slightly to my surprise “eejit” is a word in Chambers.
22 ALBUMS – AS = when, going about L + BUMS = “left behind,” (ooh I say, missus!) to make a “collection of tracks.”
23 ADVOCAAT – a medicinal drink though for me, this one would be more of an emetic. From A + DV (= deo volente, Latin for “god willing”) + O CAT swallowing an A
25 AUBADE – an aubade is a poem or song “of or about lovers separating at dawn,” ie adulterers, I suppose, or someone working a very early shift.. formed by gold = AU + BAnD (“group releasing new”)+ E = “single finally”
26 GYMKHANA – A NAG to go round HY containing KM, all rev. Clever surface.
 
Down
1 MACAW PALMS – OK, let’s see now.. MA = “Outer Mongolia,” + WPAL = “Western China,” (and not “C,” as you might think) inside CAMS, which are apparently supposed to = shafts but they don’t, as cams are not shafts but projections on shafts..
2 SOL – SOiL, as nearby as stars get
3 ROUSANT – (RAN TO US)* = a heraldic term that will no doubt come in handy, one day
4 ZANTE CURRANT – Z, an unknown quantity along with x and y, and RANT, to hold forth, containing ANTE = before and CUR = swine to make something Chambers defines as the “small seedless fruit of a Zante grape”
6 BLOKART – BLOKe + ART, a type of land yacht and actually originally a trade name according to Wikipedia, but not Chambers
7 CHEDDAR PINK – (HAND PICKED + R)* with “gorgeous” used to mean relating to a gorge, hence the inverted commas, which do however slightly give the game away. Nice anagram, though.
8 SEXT – relations = SEX (ooh again!) + T to make one of the seven“canonical hours” beloved of setters: matins, lauds, terce, sext, nones, vespers and compline, all of which I know exclusively from crosswords, sad to say.
11 ASH WEDNESDAY – A + SHoWED oNES + DAY to make a “fast start,” the first day of Lent. Clever.
13 THINGAMYBOB – rare = THIN + high = GAMY + bounce = BOB to make an unspecified item.. this is one of no less than nine alternative spellings Chambers gives for this and its close relative thingamyjig.
14 ADVENTITIA – arrival = ADVENT + two islands = I, and AIT rev., to make an “item covering vessel,” in this case a blood vessel.
18 FATIMID – Farm + After + TIMID
19 CHABOUK – husband = H inside taxi = CAB “chasing” O + UK = round Britain. Though I always thought Britain and the UK were different places, the latter, but not the former, including Northern Ireland.
21 KAKA – AK, or “bAnK regularly” reversed and repeated to make a “New Zealander with bill,” relative of the (slightly) better known Kakapo, and one in the eye for those of us who thought he played football for Real Madrid
24 ABA – AA, not motorists this time but a “group wanting to be dry,” containing B = black.

Author: JerryW

I love The Times crosswords..

15 comments on “Club Monthly No. 20112 – January 2010”

  1. 1 dn: CAM is also used to refer to a camshaft (I specifically checked this!)
    19dn: Great Britain and the UK would indeed not be the same thing at all. “Britain” itself is a fairly vague term. As both Ireland and Great Britain make up the British isles, and as N. Ireland is referred to as part of Britain at least if not more often than part of the UK, then, while the two terms may not be exactly the same, it would be pedantic in the extreme to disallow an equivalence here I feel.
    1. Hello Setter.. I hope you noticed the compliments, and not just the “minor quibbles!”
      Re Britain, that seems a fair cop, I can’t disagree.. usually, I prefer the term “England” anyway 🙂
      Re cam = camshaft, it is not a usage that I would ever employ, and it is not mentioned either in my 10th Ed. Chambers or in the online OED (the only dictionaries I possess, sadly) as a possible usage.. so you may well be quite right, but I can’t comment further.
  2. I do enjoy these Club Puzzles and am surprised that more people don’t do them. This one was well up to standard I thought.

    I made life difficult for myself by entering “misprise” for some reason at 1A and didn’t get that sorted until 4D had to be a currant and I remembered Zante. I got 17A straight from the definition – thank you setter for even a token nod towards the scientific community. I agree with the setter that the differences between UK and Britain are real but hardly significant in the context of this puzzle.

    Good blog, Jerry. I hope you get some comments but as you will have noticed from the Mephisto blogs these more difficult puzzles don’t seem to attract a large blog following. Perhaps that’s because there are no beginners doing them?

    1. No beginners, no non-Crossword Club members, and nobody with a poor memory for a puzzle done weeks ago – which usually includes me! But I think it is good that the blog provides a comprehensive service. There was some talk of blogging the TLS crossword, hope that may come to something idc..
      1. It’s mainly because of the time-lag rather than the difficulty. Even the weekly Saturday puzzles that I blog rarely get more than 10 comments, and Jumbos with a two-week gap often get no more than one or two. Still, I may volunteer to do the odd TLS blog just to see if anyone’s interested.
        1. I’m up for taking a turn with blogging the TLS puzzle (a weekly treat, even though I don’t always get it right without reference books within the half-hour).
    2. As a newcomer to the crossword club this was my first attempt at the monthly puzzle, so perhaps i can chip in here. it was enjoyable, certainly, but a completely different experience to the daily puzzle. after a certain point (half-way, perhaps) there was no way i could have got any further without resorting to all manner of online aids, so the purity of the daily challenge is lost.
      i suppose there are no hard and fast rules here, but i do feel guilty about such brazen use of outside assistance. and apologies in advance if you’ve seen similar comments from new solvers many times before…
      1. That is quite a personal thing.. I would feel guilty about using any support at all for the daily cryptic, but do not about using a dictionary or Thesaurus for this puzzle, or for the Mephisto or Azed. I never use anything beyond that(eg google, wikipedia) except for confirming or explaining answers that I have already entered. To me there doesn’t seem any point in letting them solve a clue for you, or using any more specialised website or tool like anagram finders etc. Better to own up to yourself, and wait for the solution or blog.. but it is personal as I say and others may differ.
        I remember doing the Mephisto for months when it first came out, before I finished one
      2. Good to hear from you Rich. I’m not certain why you feel guilty. If you’ve cast an eye over the 1960 puzzle blogged last Monday you’ll have seen direct quotations from poets, such as the one from Keats. There was no way we used to solve most of those without looking them up.

        People talk about “cheating” but who suffers? How an individual solves a puzzle is a private matter for them. These harder puzzles and the bar crosswords are designed to be used in conjunction with a dictionary. They develop your ability to analyse a clue, synthesise a solution and then look up the derived answer to verify its correctness.

        Do whatever gives you most satisfaction and enjoy the experience!

  3. I should have thanked you, Jerry, for an interesting blog. I’m not sure how many setters read these blogs but I for one find them very useful.
    CAMSHAFT for CAM is in COD, at least. And according to Wikipedia, at least, Britain is another term for the UK. My earlier point about Northern Ireland may have been lost due to my omitting to point out that N. Ireland is the bit added to GB to make the UK. It is interesting that different people have different ideas of what “Britain” constitutes.

    As far as using aids for this puzzle goes, we fully expect solvers to have to do that for the Monthly Online Puzzle, however we try to compensate for the exotic vocabulary of the solutions by using more everyday words for the wordplay, and constructing the wordplay hopefully in a manner that might lead a fair number of solvers to arrive at the solution via that path alone, even if it may then be necessary to check the solution in a dictionary.

    As for the daily puzzle, there we do try to keep the solver away from the dictionary rather more, but only out of consideration for him/her 🙂

  4. I’d intended to keep this puzzle after solving it but seem to have failed. It took me less time than the “nightmare” puzzle on 6th Jan but I did use Chambers to some extent – I certainly had to check the currant.

    With the setter on “Britain” – informally (and certainly by implication from “British”) it includes NI, in the way that “England” at least sometimes used to include Scotland and Wales (and still does for some Americans – “Cardiff, England” and all that).

  5. Wonder why no one’s mentioned the pangram. Must be the very devil to compile. Can’t give a time as it sat in Pile #2 for about a week — this is where I keep the slow-movers and there have been some A*a*c*r*as in there for years. And … to add to the debate … not a chance without Chambers to hand. Thought this puzzle could have been titled “Wet and Dry”: advocaat (23) with double water (12, 16), ending up in the AA (24).

    And, if the setter’s still reading, thanks for the ÂŁ100 (AU$180)!

  6. 28:32 for me under Championship conditions (no reference books; no break).

    Not a terribly fast time (worth 1 measly time bonus point), but at least I made no mistakes – all too often I find I’ve made some unforced error, particularly if I’m feeling tired.

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