Quick Cryptic 2124 by Izetti

Author   CuraristPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic
Well this was fairly straightforward, though nothing like as easy as the one I blogged by mistake this morning (always remember to refresh your tabs, boys and girls). I came in at a more or less target 6 minutes

Across
1 Criticise one Conservative leader acting out of fear? (9)
PANICKING – PAN + I + C + KING
6 Country knocked back in great lamentations (5)
MALTA – reverse hidden word: greAT LAMentations
8 After short break, pressing to be on the up again (9)
RESURGENT – RES[T] + URGENT
9 Type of music when Georgia goes to student event? (5)
RAGGA – RAG + GA
10 Spirited community? (5,4)
GHOST TOWN – cryptic definition
12 Strangers in a story by Poles (6)
ALIENS – A + LIE + N and S
13 Jumps around plants (6)
CAPERS – double definition
16 Former abstainer, party-goer at heart who is outward-looking? (9)
EXTRAVERT – EX-TT (tee total) with RAVER inside
18 One getting up only a bit of the stairs (5)
RISER – double definition
19 Football player, male with little energy and out of view (9)
BACKSTAGE – BACK + STAG + E
21 Teams start to struggle before day in Rome (5)
SIDES – S[truggle] + IDES
22 More than one African agent I spy being ”shifty” (9)
EGYPTIANS – anagram (‘shifty’) of AGENT I SPY

Down
1 Model soldier beginning to get on (7)
PARAGON – PARA[trooper] + G[et] + ON
2 Wise man in comfy position getting nothing right (6)
NESTOR – NEST + O + R. King of Pylos who was very wise
3 Artist shows bird crossing river (5)
COROT – COOT with R inside. French landscape painter 1796-1875
4 Female lacking in passion and anger (3)
IRE – FIRE minus F for female
5 Accepted things from dealer and was sacked (3,4,5)
GOT ONES CARDS – Double definition
6 Fit for the match (12)
MARRIAGEABLE – cryptic definition
7 Member joining top celebrities: one sticking to the law (8)
LEGALIST – LEG + A-LIST
11 In charge of you and me. editor may be worn out (8)
OVERUSED – OVER + US + ED
14 Bill with long hair is a performer (7)
ACTRESS – AC (account, bill) + TRESS
15 Northbound David in an American state (6)
NEVADA – DAVE inside AN, all backwards
17 A second group offering something worth having (5)
ASSET – A + S + SET
20 Odd characters in Corby yell (3)
CRY – alternate letters of CoRbY

32 comments on “Quick Cryptic 2124 by Izetti”

  1. 22 minutes from FOI: PARAGON to LOI: LEGALIST all parsed.

    R/H side fell first helped by seeing GOT ONE’S CARDS on reading the clue and enumeration.
    L/H side a little tougher until MARRIAGEABLE fell, my candidate as COD although there are many contenders like GHOST TOWN and EXTRAVERT.
    NHO the artist but luckily COOT for bird came to mind. And CAPERS was the only word I could think of for 13ac that worked as a DD.

    Reading the blog had me double-checking if I had the correct puzzle. But as I was about to comment it disappeared.

  2. Ooh that’s the second time ‘rag’ has come up recently, I’m glad I remembered it. Never heard of RAGGA though.

    Today I learned the word EXTRAVERT. I had in ‘extrovert’ and assumed that a rover could be a party goer (who knows about British slang lol). That killed all of my hope of getting ASSET

    I didn’t know Nestor nor Corot but the wordplay plus the crossers helped. Same with get ones cards, I have never heard that phrase.

    I also had to google ‘Latin word for day’ so I’ll have to remember that too

    Getting MARRIAGEABLE early helped me a lot, again, the years of reading period romances have come in to save me!

    Why was there a full stop after the word ‘me’ for the OVERUSED clue? It threw me for a bit

    Thanks for the blog!

    1. I’m pretty sure that full stop is unintentional, as the surface of the clue works perfectly well without it.
  4. Slow but sure. Thanks setter and blogger. Only reservation is that I’m never keen on answers that you don’t really know but have to fit. Corot and Nestor are not exactly familiar are they?
    1. “Familiar” varies a lot from person to person. I knew Corot but not Nestor nor Ragga.
      1. I’ve vaguely heard of Nestor and Ragga came up in another crossword recently before which it was unknown to me. You are right but I would still say familiar to not many people.
  5. Knew the name NESTOR(details forgotten though), but not COROT, so followed the wordplay. My EXTROVERT was also converted by ASSET. Not as difficult as some Izettis. PANICKING was FOI and SIDES LOI. 5:50. Thanks Izetti and Curarist.
  6. familiar with RAGGA from my misspent youth.

    I liked my LOI MARRIAGEABLE best. I do like a brief clue.

    COROT went in with hope rather than expectation.

    Still, a fairly easy Izetti.

    4:42

  8. Tense trouble. ‘Get’ at the start of GOT THE SACK gave me today’s pink square. A tricky week made worse by carelessness.
  9. 10 minutes. I knew the names NESTOR and COROT but nothing about either so I trusted the wordplay. Similarly RAGGA which rang the faintest of bells as a type of music that probably wouldn’t interest me. It was nice at least to bookend the week with two puzzles solved within target.
  10. Have to disagree with Curarist, I thought this was incredibly difficult and for the first time in quite a while I had to abandon with a substantial number of clues not solved.

    Each to his own I know, but I was definitely not on Izetti’s wavelength today.

    FOI — 1ac “Panicking”
    LOI — dnf
    COD — 16ac “Extravert”

    Thanks as usual!

    Edited at 2022-04-29 12:20 pm (UTC)

  11. The Random’s also disagree with our blogger, as we both found this offering by Izetti a real challenge. Neither of us had ever heard of the wise man (NESTOR), the artist (COROT) or the type of music (RAGGA), and I DNK that MARRIAGEABLE was a legitimate word. I was also under the impression that CAPERS equates more to larks (rather than jumps) around. Despite all of these question marks, we both got home successfully – Mrs R in 47 minutes (slow for her) and me in 51 minutes.

    The inclusion of several rather obscure elements of general knowledge (e.g. NESTOR, COROT and RAGGA) in a QC is, for me, not really on. Would others agree, or should I just improve my GK?

    Also, is it just me or have the setters upped the stakes recently? I had been getting used to solving these QCs in around 30-35 minutes and sometimes below, but during the past 3 weeks I have gone sub-40 only 3 times. Roll on Monday!

    Many thanks to Izetti and curarist.

    1. If you were into the dance culture of the late 80’s and early 90’s, then you would more than likely have heard of Ragga when it tipped into mainstream along with rave and other electronic dance music.

      At its most basic level, it’s a dance/hip hop version of reggae.

      1. As, primarily, a prog rock dinosaur from the ’70s, and even though I don’t mind a little reggae, dance music from the late ’80s and ’90s just passed me by. However, thanks for the intel.

  12. Lost time having to rethink and correct original entries backspace, extrovert, resurging, and panically. Thanks for helpful blog!
  13. Can’t put my finger on why, but I didn’t think that this was up to Izetti’s normal (very high) standards. Had some of the GK but not all of it, but maybe I was just out of synch. Finished in a tardy 11.20 with LOI CAPERS.
    Thanks to curarist
  14. ….and was comfortably within my target. Even if, unlike me, you’d not encountered NESTOR or COROT before, the parsings were perfectly fair, and thus the solutions could be worked out correctly.

    FOI MALTA
    LOI GHOST DOWN
    COD MARRIAGEABLE
    TIME 4:09

  15. Back online after a holiday, this Izetti took me 15:21.
    LOI CAPERS which I had looked at several times en route.
    I knew all the GK and, as ever, Izetti’s clueing was very precise.
    COD to EXTRAVERT.
    David
  16. Well, since I never heard of RAGGA, I’d agree with you that it’s obscure! NESTOR is in the Iliad, and I’d say that Trojan War characters (Hector, Achilles, Priam, et al) are fairish game; and COROT is a fairly well-known French artist (not that I could name or identify any painting of his). But one man’s GK is another’s arcana.
  17. Never heard of the artist. The only bird I could think of was CHAT so I went with that, coot never occurred to me. So pink squared and a DNF.
  18. Took a long time to see MARRIAGEABLE even having twigged where the clue was going and thought EXTRAVERT had a O in the middle so the SW corner took far too long. Limped home over 3 minutes outside target.
  19. I found this very difficult and needed to leave it for a while before comng back to (eventually) finish. Bemused for ages by extrAvert (NHO) not extrOvert, which did not help.
    This week has been a tough one.
  20. My misspent early twenties were at the local club on a Friday night hoping a girl would talk to me but ending up dancing to SL2 – On A Ragga Tip. So that went in second. There was a little bit of a ragga-rap phase circa 1993 along with Snow – Informer; Arrested Development – People Everyday, DJ Jazzy Jeff with the Fresh Prince – Boom! Shake the Room off the top of my head.

    Persevered for 2hr43 to finally get a DNF. Very disappointed to find out 1A was not “pandering” with 3D not being “egret”.

    GOT-ONES-CARDS seems overEnglish to crowbar it in.

    FOI IRE
    LOI BACKSTAGE. Lot of alphabet trawling to get there. Football player = BACK= pisspoor clue IMHO.
    NHO COROT, NESTOR, MARRIAGEABLE, LEGALIST, IDES (with regards to be days).

    Weekly update
    – 5 DNFs (now 13 in a row)
    – 1hr10, 1hr25, 1hr, 52min, 2hr43 = 7+ hrs

    Maybe I just need to buckle down and try a bit harder if I’m ever to get good …

    Thanks to Curarist for the blog explanations.

  21. No problems finishing today but took me a very long time! NHO COROT but guessed from wordplay. FOI PANICKING, LOI CAPERS (needed all the checkers), COD MARRIAGEABLE. Many thanks Izetti and Curarist
  22. No problems finishing today but took me a very long time! NHO COROT but guessed from wordplay. FOI PANICKING, LOI CAPERS (needed all the checkers), COD MARRIAGEABLE. Many thanks Izetti and Curarist

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