Not much time to say anything this week what with recovering after the hollowed out Christmas which I hope you all managed to enjoy as well as you could in the circumstances.
FOI was the obvious 1A and LOI was 21D as you would expect from a puzzle of this level of difficulty where I found most of the clues to be straight write-ins. My COD was 11D. I don’t particularly know why, I just really liked how it fitted together. Many thanks to Trelawney for not taxing my poor little grey cells too much after the Christmas revels.
Hi to 
plusjeremy with whom I have been corresponding about his project of revisiting the very basics of cryptic clues. I meant to comment on his blog last Wednesday but didn’t get to it until the end of the day and as I have said before there isn’t much point in posting at that time as everybody has moved on. So just to say quickly here good work and I applaud and support his approach.
Wishing you all a happy New Year and hoping it will be a better one for all of us. Definitions are underlined and everything else is explained just as I see it as simply as I can.
| Across | |
| 1 | Furry creature to relax in the country (10) |
| CHINCHILLA – CHILL (to relax) ‘in’ CHINA (country). | |
| 8 | Villain is after British accent (6) |
| BROGUE – ROGUE (villan) ‘after’ B (British). A brogue is a type of accent, usually applied to the sound of English spoken with an Irish accent, but it can apply to any regional accent. Another meaning for the word that you will often meet in crosswords is a type of shoe. | |
| 9 | Footballer you wouldn’t want to release? (6) |
| KEEPER – double definition. Footballer, as in goalkeeper. And a ‘keeper’ is also something you would not want to release. I bought a guitar recently and I took it to a local guitar shop to get it set up properly, checking the action, frets, electrics etc. When the technician gave it back to me he said: “That’s a keeper that one. If it was mine I’d definitely hang on to it.” | |
| 10 | Stagger back and stare (4) |
| LEER – REEL (stagger) reversed (‘back’). | |
| 11 | Praise cook drinking coffee (8) |
| FLATTERY – FRY (cook) ‘drinking’ LATTE (coffee). | |
| 12 | Clear I cooked a rich dessert (6) |
| ECLAIR – straight anagram (‘cooked’) of CLEAR I. | |
| 14 | The lady’s adopting a bird — big mistake! (6) |
| HOWLER – HER (the lady) ‘adopting’, i.e. ‘taking in’ OWL (bird) gives one of those things that a 9A is always in danger of committing (viz. recent Arsenal performance in Carabao Cup). | |
| 16 | Ban for greeting segment (8) |
| PROHIBIT – PRO (for) + HI (greeting) + BIT (segment). | |
| 18 | Story‘s thread (4) |
| YARN – double definition. A pretty old and big chestnut in crosswords. | |
| 20 | Italian food around a public square (6) |
| PIAZZA – PIZZA (Italian food) ‘around’ A. | |
| 21 | Make money if port is drunk (6) |
| PROFIT – straight anagram (‘drunk’) of IF PORT. | |
| 22 | Lend heroes recycled gear for Oktoberfest? (10) |
| LEDERHOSEN – another straight anagram (‘recycled’) of LEND HEROES. Lederhosen are the traditional German leather trousers worn particularly in Bavaria, especially at festivals such as the Oktoberfest. | |
| Down | |
| 2 | Mob store, reportedly (5) |
| HORDE – sounds like (‘reportedly’) HOARD (store). | |
| 3 | Earing I prepared for African Country (7) |
| NIGERIA – straight anagram (‘prepared’) of EARING I. At first I thought this was a misspelling of ‘EARRING’ (although it did not affect my solution of the clue because the anagram indicator was so obvious) but when I looked it up I learned that an EARING is “a rope attached to a cringle and used for bending a corner of a sail to a yard, boom, or gaff or for reefing a sail.” So now I know. But I bet deckhandiana knew that already. And probably lots more of you did too. |
|
| 4 | Desire to get rid of power tool (3) |
| HOE – HO |
|
| 5 | Large furniture shop’s popular very quickly (4,1,4) |
| LIKE A SHOT – L (large) + IKEA’S (‘furniture shop’s’) + HOT (popular). | |
| 6 | Spy is a polite fellow (5) |
| AGENT – A GENT is a polite fellow. As in ‘You’re a proper gent, Sir’. Abbreviated form of GENTLEMAN. | |
| 7 | Absurd greed over English qualification (6) |
| DEGREE – anagram (‘absurd’) of GREED ‘over’ E (English). This has to be a down clue as we are instructed to put DEGRE ‘over’, i.e. above, E. | |
| 11 | If upset, change the image of troublemaker (9) |
| FIREBRAND – IF ‘upset’ i.e. reversed (or even anaground, if you can talk about an anagram of a two letter word) = FI. Add on REBRAND (change the image of) and you have the answer. | |
| 13 | Expression of surprise over serving American’s dogs (6) |
| CORGIS – COR! (expression of surprise) + GI’S (serving American’s, a GI being an American soldier (‘GI Joe’) roughly equivalent to a British Private (‘Tommy’). | |
| 15 | A potential route — bravo! (3,2,2) |
| WAY TO GO – staying with the Americans, WAY TO GO is a phrase often used across the pond as an expression of encouragement. And I can just imagine Basil Fawlty interpreting the phrase as ‘a potential route’. As when an American in one of the Fawlty Towers episodes threatened to “bust somebody’s ass” and Fawlty politely translated the threat down the telephone as “he says he’s going to break your bottom”. | |
| 17 | Smog left brown colour (5) |
| HAZEL – HAZE (smog) + L (left). | |
| 19 | By the sound of it, completely destroy lift (5) |
| RAISE – another homophone. RAISE sounds like RAZE as in RAZE to the ground. | |
| 21 | Golfer’s target in jeopardy (3) |
| PAR – hidden word: ‘in’ jeoPARdy. | |
I though this was quite tricky, and couldn’t immediately see CHINCHILLA. On a phone solve I work differently to my paper MO, thus I started with NIGERIA – on paper it would have been BROGUE which was actually my LOI.
COD to LIKE A SHOT, with honourable mentions to PROHIBIT and LEDERHOSEN.
I am really sorry if I gave the impression that the puzzle was easy and in any way put you or anyone else off. That is the exact opposite of my intention.
All I ever say (or hope I do) is that I personally found the puzzle easy or more difficult. As you will see from a lot of the comments on my blogs I am very often at variance with a good number of the contributing solvers. Sometimes I say it was more difficult than usual and a lot of other people say they found it very easy, and, as today, vice-versa. It all comes down to that indefinable quality ‘wavelength’. Are you thinking the way the setter is on any particular day? If you are then quite surprisingly you just ‘notice’ definitions jumping out at you before you have even thought about the clue and on other days that doesn’t happen and you just have to go through everything and work it out.
I deliberately don’t post my times on these puzzles because they are so subjective. And that means I could easily be taking the same time as you at about 20 minutes or I could be taking more or less than that and either way saying that the puzzle was easy or difficult. But it would have no bearing on how any other solver found the puzzle.
Looking back I do note that I said CHINCHILLA was obvious without saying ‘to me’. OK, I put my hands up there, perhaps guilty as charged. But later on I do say that I FOUND most of the clues to be write-ins. It is almost a truism that I can only speak for my own experience.
To put it another way there are some really top solvers out there who can just write in every clue in every one of these puzzles without even thinking about it, but that has no bearing on whether the puzzle is easy or difficult for the rest of us. They are just very good at crossword puzzles full stop. And a good number of them are that way with 15×15 puzzles as well. Some people have commented on their times to the effect that they can’t even type that fast, let alone solve the clues as well (such that on some days they have been known to beat the ‘neutrinos’!)
But having said all that I take everything you say on board. I am only here after all to try and help people and if the way I say something discourages anybody then I have to think about that. I will therefore try to make it clearer in future that if I find a puzzle or a clue easy or difficult I am only speaking for myself!
Kind regards
Don
About 25 today. A lot quicker than an IKEA flat pack. Johnny
Incidentally, if any of you other bloggers pick this up could you tell me how to insert those neat little arrows that some of you use which obscure the blog until you click on them? So that you can only see the preamble and you don’t accidentally catch any answers as you are scrolling down to look for something else?
This happened to me today on the 15×15 where my eye ‘snagged’ on one of the answers as I was scrolling down to find something else. I don’t think it was a difficult clue (for me anyway – see previous post!) and I think I would have got it without much trouble but how do I know unless I actually had to do the clue cold? It sort of spoils the experience, a bit like completing a jigsaw and then finding there is a piece missing.
Thanks very much!
Don
When posting in Live Journal, simply highlight all of your clue explanations and click on the Scissors icon on the Visual Editor toolbar. A pop-up dialogue box defaults to ‘Read more…’ which you can change to something else if you wish, then click the Insert button.
Mrs Random calmly knocked it off in 21 minutes to secure the family point for the day (as she almost always does).
Many thanks Trelawney and Don.
Templar
But let me just say that I try not to be competitive but just to explain. For the record my solving time for these puzzles is probably between 5 and 11 minutes. So if I say something is easy or difficult then perhaps you can set it against that scale. But so what? My function here is to explain, not to set a target.
I’ll think about how to present things better so as not to intimidate!
Kind regards
Don