Fun puzzle, middling difficulty.
Alex is one of our more approachable setters with an average quitch of 91. This felt tougher than that, but a generous sprinkling of double definitions (6) and anagrams (5) should help keep things ticking along.
I came home in 6:31, compared to a very rare 3:59 for yesterday’s done just before – thank you very much – so yes, definitely some trickier things going on for me.
My favourite was a toss-up between the lovely ONCE UPON A TIME, and the grimly excellent RHINO.
Many thanks to Alex!
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | California policeman starts to head off New York racket (9) |
| CACOPHONY – CA(lifornia), COP (policeman), H O (“starts” to Head Off), NY | |
| 6 | Objective conclusion (3) |
| END – double definition | |
| 8 | Animal horn I processed (5) |
| RHINO – anagram (processed) of HORN I | |
| 9 | Intimidates man beginning to demolish farm building (7) |
| COWSHED – COWS (intimidates) HE (man) D (“beginning” to Demolish) | |
| 10 | Refined fuel sat undergoing changes after time (8) |
| TASTEFUL – anagram (undergoing changes) of FUEL SAT , after T(ime) | |
| 11 | Ineffective European bloke (4) |
| DUDE – DUD (ineffective) E(uropean). DUDE has been cropping up a bit recently. There was an old playground urban myth that “dude” was another word for “camel penis” (or similar). Google AI seems to think it is still doing the round at schools. (Admittedly only citing “a source on Instagram.”) Either way, bizarre little myth to have gained any traction at all. | |
| 13 | Outgoing former partner right to keep collection of valuables (9) |
| EXTROVERT – EX( former partner) RT. (right) to keep TROVE (collection of articles) | |
| 16 | Old lady consuming a bread product (4) |
| NAAN – NAN (old lady) consuming A | |
| 17 | Carefully observe reserved books by head of education (4,4) |
| TAKE NOTE – TAKEN (reserved) OT (Old Testament = books) by E (“head” of Education) | |
| 20 | Incentives limit US supply (7) |
| STIMULI – anagram (supply) of LIMIT US. “Supply” as in “supple-y” | |
| 21 | Black hazard is sharp (5) |
| BRISK – B(lack) RISK (hazard) | |
| 22 | Scheduled fitting (3) |
| DUE – double definition | |
| 23 | Vanguard he parades around (9) |
| SPEARHEAD – anagram (around) of HE PARADES | |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Organise minister (6) |
| CURATE – double definition | |
| 2 | Nicks French fries (5) |
| CHIPS – double definition | |
| 3 | In favour of bold leader of your quality (8) |
| PROPERTY – PRO (in favour of) PERT (bold) Y (“leader” of Your) | |
| 4 | Continue a poem after rewriting opening phrase (4,4,1,4) |
| ONCE UPON A TIME – anagram (after rewriting) of CONTINUE A POEM. | |
| 5 | Mournful cry of Yangtze’s apex predator (4) |
| YOWL – Y (Yangtze’s “apex”, ie tip) OWL (predator) | |
| 6 | Empty engine part (7) |
| EXHAUST – double definition | |
| 7 | Shirker embarrassed about swallowing overdose by end of evening (6) |
| DODGER – RED (embarrassed) about = reversed, swallowing OD (overdose) and G (“end” of eveninG) | |
| 12 | Mark about to get part (8) |
| REMEMBER – RE (about) to get MEMBER (part) | |
| 13 | Devious first lady accepting travel permit in retrospect (7) |
| EVASIVE – EVE (first lady) accepting VISA (travel permit) “in retrospect” = reversed | |
| 14 | Remaining unacquainted (6) |
| UNUSED – double definition | |
| 15 | Knocked down clerk’s case in action (6) |
| DECKED – CK (“case” as in the outer cover of ClerK) goes in DEED (action) | |
| 18 | Have one’s home under old tree (5) |
| OLIVE – LIVE (have one’s home) under O(ld) | |
| 19 | Swear leaders of community undertaking suck sometimes (4) |
| CUSS – “leading” letters of the following four words. Cuss is simply a variant of CURSE. | |
I did not think this was so easy, and I also wasted time trying to solve the more difficult clues rather than moving on. I nearly put in yawk, before thinking of yowl – if you don’t see it right away, next clue. I ended up having a lot of trouble with the unused/naan crossing, which should not have been that difficult.
Time: 9:21
I found this very much to my liking, with a 8:33 finish, helped greatly by putting in ONCE UPON A TIME almost immediately from the enumeration alone. DECKED held me up a bit at the close, as did UNUSED, which I struggled to see as a synonym for unacquainted – and to be honest I still do.
Many thanks Roly for the blog.
I am struggling too. ‘Unacquainted with’ / ‘unused to’ maybe, but different words following makes the substitution invalid in my view.
Yes meant to mention that, and agree: the OED does specify that it’s “unacquainted with”. “Remaining unaccustomed” or something would have worked better.
The online version has been updated to “remaining unaccustomed”
Oh goody, thanks for mentioning: now I can tell people I have dabbled in a bit of clue setting for the Times cryptic crosswords. My particular speciality is troubleshooting problem clues.
Another still struggling with ‘unacquainted’/’unused’.
8:07
I didn’t like UNUSED (LOI), and held off putting it in until I was forced to.
12 minutes. The lower half seem much harder than the top.
Zipped through three quarters but had to work hard in the NE. Briefly wondered if a cowery might be a thing – like a granary but for cows. Finished with DUDE. Enjoyed it! All green in 11.23.
I really enjoyed this one (despite similar doubts re. UNUSED to some earlier commenters).
Started with CACOPHONY and finished with DUDE in 8.00. COD (with some stiff competition) to YOWL.
Thanks to Roly and Alex
22:05… couldn’t exhaust brisk property dude
TaRAA
A comfortable distance from the SCC.
Found lower half slower.
Held up by DECKED, UNUSED, REMEMBER.
Liked ONCE UPON A TIME and CACOPHONY.
Thank you Alex and RolyToly : )
Just about got there, with STIMULI and LOI REMEMBER the most difficult (“mark” can be so many things). But POI – with shrug of shoulders – was UNUSED; how can unacquainted = unused, please? Ah, found it (above): thanks, Cedric and others. Agree!
Love the most felicitous anagram continue a poem = ONCE UPON A TIME – brilliant.
I concur with others re UNUSED. I made heavier weather of this than, in retrospect, I feel I should have done.
FOI END
LOI REMEMBER
COD STIMULI
TIME 5:06
26 mins..
Personally, I thought it was on the harder side. Started off well, but slowed down the further I went into the grid. 12dn “Remember” took far longer than it should have – annoying, as I’ve been caught out by this one before. Obviously, I didn’t remember.
FOI – 1ac “Cacophony”
LOI – 12dn “Remember”
COD – 1ac “Cacophony” – a great word, pleased to see in the QC.
Thanks as usual!
21:31. Hello SCC. I was brought here today by the south-west corner – UNUSED, EVASIVE, NAAN, STIMULI and DUE. I had done pretty well with the rest. Thanks Alex (it really wasn’t that hard) and thank you rolytoly for the blog
10:27. Fast start then slowed down. I share the common dislike of UNUSED. LOI was REMEMBER.
Thanks to Roly and Alex
I really dislike DDs, especially 2 word DDs so todays was not for me.
Limped home in 16:47
Also stuck on UNUSED and half expected a DPS on hitting submit. Not a great clue.
Elsewhere I held myself up with a careless “cacophany”, which caused much head scratching over 4d until I spotted the mistake. Grr! Lots to enjoy and I really liked both RHINO and COD TAKE NOTE.
Home in 08:37 for an Undistinguished Day. Many thanks Alex and Roly.
“Epiphany” messing with your mind? ‘Tis the season.
Ha – I will gratefully clutch that straw!
22:21 – about average for me. Held up like some other solvers by REMEMBER, EVASIVE, UNUSED and DECKED.
From CACOPHONY to TAKE NOTE in 7:56. Needed the checkers to see UNUSED. Thanks Alex and Roly.
26 minutes today, which is slightly faster then average for me. I started with END, RHINO and EXTROVERT before moving on to the Down clues.
ONCE UPON A TIME was my favourite answer (didn’t it crop up here recently?) and the BRISK/REMEMBER combo delayed me for 5-6 minutes at the end.
Many thanks to Roly and Alex.
No great problems here, though zi was slowish.
Liked YOWL, TAKE NOTE, PROPERTY
Thanks Alex and rolytoly
8:56
Over my average for an Alex (7:00), but quicker than the Quitch of 109 would suggest (10:00 for me), so a middling puzzle with some chin-scratching and brow-furrowing fodder. Slowed up towards the end, where it took a while to justify PROPERTY, which gave EXTROVERT, then another pause for REMEMBER and finally BRISK.
Thanks Roly and Alex
20 on the first pass, and remaining 6 fairly quick except dude which took a while. thanks Alex and rolytoly. Had no problem with unused, if you are used to something then you are aquanted with it – I am used to travelling on the no 6 bus, I do it every day, I am acquainted with it. So the reverse surely applies. Pronounced unyoost not unuzed.
I expect dude = camel penis will be in collins next week.
Also switched off dark mode yeasterday and no problem getting in today, and my picture is back. (but others arent)
Toughest of the week so far, and tougher than average I would say. I would have finished under target but couldn’t parse MAKE NOTE for 17ac. I returned to it before stopping the clock, and TAKE NOTE was corrected. In the end a little over target at 10.18, but I will happily settle for that.
14:23, no problems.
UNUSED = unacquainted, didn’t seem a stretch to me, although to be fair it’s “unused to” and “unacquainted with”.
COD CACAPHONY
I hope you got that right before submitting 😀
Oh yes, all green.
10 after 20 minutes, 16 after 30.
Chuffed that I parsed 1ac straight away and followed with 2ac and 3ac.
👏
Apologies, “unacquainted” is not interchangeable with “unused”; “unaccustomed” would indeed be preferable, as noted above.
5.12
Just as well I didn’t spend too long cogitating UNUSED which seemed a little off but what else could it be?
Also liked ONCE UPON A TIME.
Thanks RT and Alex.
Managed to get onto blog at first try today. Pictures aren’t back yet but that’s a minor quibble. Nice to see what you look like Merlin as your actual pic is showing rather than your avatar 😃 I found this a little tough in places and had the same issue with UNUSED, although I note JC’s comment above – thanks. Still missing a bit of humour in this week’s puzzles but all enjoyable nonetheless. Many thanks for the blog.
From RHINO to UNUSED in 8:05. I think it has all been said re UNUSED. Thanks Roly
23:20
I found this quite tough with half of the south ensuring a seat in the SSC.
Pleased to read everyone’s comments re UNUSED – it just doesn’t work for me. Shame, otherwise another nice workout.
Also, am I the only one to have a MER with EXHAUST being part of an engine as opposed to an ancillary part – or is that just the pedantry Engineer in me that should not be brought to QC Land?
FOI: END
LOI: DUDE (that took a while)
COD: PROPERTY
Thanks to Roly and Alex
I had the same thought, there is no such thing as “the” exhaust on a car there is the exhaust system which consists of the exhaust manifold, the silencer and possibly a catalytic converter with the exhaust pipe to fit them together. Arguably the exhaust manifold is part of the engine, but the other bits certainly aren’t.
Thanks Ham – I agree the exhaust manifold could be considered as part of the engine in that it connects the engine to the exhaust system.
And a big thank you for making me feel less of a ‘nitpicker’! 😁
I concur. Exhaust is not part of the engine. An engine will function without an exhaust pipe, but an engine does have exhaust valves and exhaust ports. If we are really being pedantic exhaust refers to the combustion products which are definitely not part of the engine.
12:21 and I had to do some careful parsing with only a few write-ins. EXTROVERT should have been a write-in but I initially rejected it as the wrong part of speech. Liked many, especially ONCE UPON A TIME, YOWL (I was tempted by “yawp” as in Whitman), and DUDE (my POI). I had trouble equating “bold” and “pert”, which made PROPERTY my LOI. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the “supply” trick. I was baffled by the purpose of “to get” in the clue for 12d REMEMBER.
Thanks Alex and roly. How very weird about “dude”. I hadn’t made the grim connection for RHINO, sad.
I have only just been able to access the blog. It is frustrating to be told ‘too many attempts to access….’ when every attempt has simply been an attempt to access it for the first time.
I didn’t get onto Alex’s wavelength for most of this. I agree with all the comments above re definitions and would add another:
Hazard and Risk are different concepts. They are not synonyms.
I always remember a colleague trying to explain to University staff the finer points of COSHH (Control of Substances Hazardous to Health) when the legislation was introduced. He came from the south coast and always used the following example:
A reef beneath the sea is a hazard but the risk is that you might hit it.
I was slow to see UNUSED. BRISK and DUDE were my last in after a slow trawl.
Agree – very frustrating, and seems to be happening to a few of us now. I’ve had terrible trouble accessing the site for the last few days – same messages and circumstances as you.
I got the dreaded message after waiting 3 hours after my post. Too many attempts……? I think not.
Sadly, I am beginning to wonder whether to continue with the blog. Getting access is harder work than the QC itself. It would be a real loss for me but I have just so much patience.
Perhaps a sabbatical with a possible future return when/if it is sorted reliably?
Apologies for the frustration it causes. We are trying to solve the problem. We have found a bug in one of the plug-ins that we use that results in excessive calls to create pages and are expecting a fix to that soon. But there is something that happens just after the hour mark the triggers the problem. When it does, the site will be back by 2 minutes after the following hour.
Many thanks for your reply and your efforts to get to the bottom of this problem.
It must be at least as frustrating for you as it is for us. I’m equally sure that we all appreciate what you do.
Many thanks John
Most of this went in without too much difficulty, but Dude (wrong end – again), Naan and, of course, Unused ensured that the SCC window seats were again in short supply. I see the crossword editor has since admitted there was a problem with that clue.
Getting hopelessly stuck on the last few is certainly becoming an unwanted habit.
CoD to Property for the pdm. Invariant
PS I think it would be helpful if we could have a little update on the ‘Too many attempts’ issue, even if it’s just ‘still working on it’
See my reply to Blighter above.
Thank you for the update, John. I know how hard it can be to find software bugs.
I never seem to be on Alex’s wavelength – some definitions always seem a bit stretched – and so it was today. No problems with the top half but the bottom seemed more chewy. I was held up by TAKE NOTE, REMEMBER, STIMULI, UNUSED and NAAN, eventually finishing well into the SCC on 25 minutes.
FOI – 1ac CACOPHONY
LOI – 16ac NAAN
COD – 9ac COWSHED
Thanks to Alex and ROLYTOLY
18:49. Fun with a couple of toughies at the end.
I’m not wild about pert = bold and like others I didn’t like UNUSED.
Thanks to both
Definitely not a middling puzzle. Very much on the hard side. No complaints just not easy
DNF.
A lot of things I did not like about this puzzle. Here’s one:
’20 Incentives limit US supply (7)
STIMULI – anagram (supply) of LIMIT US. “Supply” as in “supple-y”’.
Yet another misleading way to say that something is an anagram. Just what I didn’t need.
We join others in having started off well …
Finished in 13:26, a bit below par but no disaster. UNUSED, NAAN, DUE and REMEMBER all took a while. Thanks, all.
14:04, which isn’t bad but I was zooming along until I hit EVASIVE and REMEMBER, both of which threw me for six. I really shouldn’t have struggled so much with the former but somehow forgot that “first lady” = Eve. Schoolboy error, no excuses.
Thank you for the blog!
It depends how your pronounce unused.
As in ‘I am unused to this kind of coffee machine so it remains unused’. (A frequent hotel room experience of mine). Also I know some grandmothers (nans) in their forties who would object to being called ‘old ladies.’
16.49 Very breeze-blocked by STIMULI and UNUSED. Thanks rolytoly and Alex.
Tough for me and dnf, but the many I did get were entertaining and COWSHED was my cod – fun clue. If you’re unused to foreign customs I suppose you are unacquainted with them, but clunky clue. I biffed TAKE HEED at 17a and only realised error when OLIVE had to be the tree of life. The NAAN eluded me – grr – as I was casting round for roll, loaf, just couldn’t see it! Thanks nonetheless setter and blogger
Concur re. UNUSED, otherwise something of a breeze
Hardest QC of the week but still accessible. 26 minutes.
I was quite taken with the ONCE UPON A TIME anagram.
Tried OPINE for 6d (old tree) but its didn’t parse and then saw OLIVE.
Thanks both.
Fast start, but slow to finish. Needed hints with part of SE.
Liked e.g. CUSS, OLIVE and SPEARHEAD and DUDE made me smile. Biffed ONCE UPON A TIME.
Thanks vm, Roly. CNP various e.g. DECKED.
Yesterday – 16 mins
Today – 15 mins
Decent week but for Monday’s idiocy
Couldn’t get 12D because I got the wrong answer for 21A – SLICK (double definition: oil slick = Black hazard, slick = sharp i.e. well-turned-out).
This is my first full solve of a Times quick cryptic with no checking! Bottom right corner was very tricky with several pencilled in, I’m going to read the explanations now.
Chipped away at it through the day with a total time of 2:38. HOURS, that is…
books = Old Testament = OT?? Pfft some received cryptic knowledge required there, I suggest. Thanks to rolytoly!
Perhaps you will enjoy the NT when that comes along? 😉