Quick cryptic 468 by Izzetti. Tis the Season.

Author   oliviarhinebeckPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic
It’s going up to 72F (sorry, we don’t do centigrade in NYC) today so it’s not very seasonal really.  I’ll be on this gig for the next few months and so will have time to renew my acquaintance with the excellent QC’s and the denizens of this part of TftT. This is a very nice tightly constructed puzzle to start off with.  I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and I hope you find just what you want under the tree tomorrow.  I’m not sure if it’s the done thing to give times here but it took me about 5 minutes, the blog rather longer.  Clues are in italics, definitions underlined and answers in caps.

Across
1. Drink making one complain audibly (4)
WINE.  Homophone of whine.
2. East Anglian town with ten involved in protest (7)
DISSENT.  I’m fuzzy on East Anglian towns but I did know this one in Norfolk.  Tack an anagram of “ten” on the end of Diss.
8.  Oxford and Cambridge crews will not be suffering similarly (2,3,4,4)
IN THE SAME BOAT.  The two eights are most definitely not.
9.  Part of formal wear as an obligation (3)
TIE.  Double definition.
10.  Gosh soldier gets a dog! (5)
CORGI.  Cor=gosh plus the setter’s favourite soldier, and you get the Queen’s favourite dog.
12.  Satisfying encounter (7)
MEETING.  Double definition.
14.  Sort of tax on agent abroad (7)
TONNAGE. Anagram of “on agent”, indicated by “abroad”.  The taxes of tonnage, poundage and ship money were just the beginning of Charles I’s troubles – all pear-shaped from there.
16.  Some bride terrified, put off (5)
DETER. Hidden containment clue.  Bri[de ter]rified.
17  Greek characters in student organisation (3)
NUS.  Greek letter NU and the N.U.S. – National Union of Students.
20  A-list pioneers, exceptionally distinctive folk (13)
PERSONALITIES.  Very neat clue.  Anagram of A-list pioneers, indicated by “exceptionally”.
21.  In despair I posted sprited reply (7)
RIPOSTE.  Another hidden containment clue.  Despai[r I poste]d.
22. Hide, being endlessly broke (4)
SKIN. Remove the end from “skin[t]”=broke.

Down
1.  Panelling I now cast out (8)
WAINSCOT.  Anagram of “I now cast”.
2  Short statement made by school after upset (4)
NOTE. Eton College Berkshire read from the bottom.
3  Ornamentation I’d made specially (6)
DIADEM.  Anagram of “I’d made”.
4.  Her (Peep’s) dish possibly?  (9,3)
SHEPHERD’S PIE.  Anagram of “Her Peep’s dish”.  Nice.
5.  One may be lacking in spirit after my visit (8)
EXORCIST.  Amusing clue.  Does the procedure work?  I never saw the movie.
6.  Monkey – it climbs repeatedly (4)
TITI.  “It”, read from the bottom, twice.
7.  With characters dispersing, distant noise ends for traveller (12)
DESTINATIONS.  Anagram of “distant noise” –  where travellers end.
11.  Bowler approaching the wicket maybe is second-best performer (6-3)
RUNNER-UP. Double definition.
13.  Body of soldiers in Saigon wickedly imprisoning bishop (8)
GARRISON. Anagram of Saigon (wickedly) enclosing RR- R[ight] [Reverend], abbreviation for bishop.
15. Infuriate someone finally, with anger stirred up (6)
ENRAGE.  Anagram of “anger” plus the final E in “someone”, all stirred up.
18.  Incentive needed with Tottenham team falling short (4)
SPUR.  A football team I’ve actually heard of – the Tottenham Hotspurs, known as the “Spur[s]”, dropping the last letter.
19.  Choose something to break up ground (4)
PICK.  Double definition.

20 comments on “Quick cryptic 468 by Izzetti. Tis the Season.”

  1. Congrats on your first blog, Olivia, and welcome to QC Corner.

    Giving solving times should be fine on a site calling itself ‘Times for the Times’ and for that reason I do it, but it has been a subject for discussion on occasion.

    I enjoyed this one. I think there are several taxes that end in -AGE but I can’t say that I’d ever associated TONNAGE which I think of as an indicator of the size of a ship with a tax levied upon it. So one lives and learns. Or not, as I came here to say I had never heard of TITI only to find that I said the same when it turned up in 2009. The fact that I didn’t comment on it when it reappeared last year suggests that it was still in my brain then but it was gone by today and I had to rely solely on wordplay.

    Thanks for taking over the Thursday slot and posting so early in the day.

    1. Thanks Jack. Question. I’ve attempted to change the colour for the clues (as you do) by going to A on Visual Editor and fiddling about with the spectrum etc. but nothing happens. What obvious thing am I missing?
      1. Hi, Olivia. The short answer is that I’m not aware of doing anything like that and when I view my own blog there is no colour deployment.

        I think the appearance varies from browser to browser and across devices. For instance if I view Mohn’s QC blog or Andy’s 15×15 on Saturdays I see the clues in blue on my phone and tablet but just in black on my PC using Firefox. I used to occasionally use colours to highlight letters to be saved in deletion clues and applied them using the spectrum thingy in Visual Editor, but I think that got changed in one of the upgrades and I started using curly brackets instead.
        Your clues in italics look fine to me but other contributors who are more technically-minded may be able to advise about using colours.

  2. Hi
    I reached this answer by thinking of what little Bo Peep, the shepherdess in the nursery rhyme, might eat.
    This is only the second ever quick cryptic I have completed. (first was 466)
    thanks for your blog and analysis.
  3. A typically interesting QC from Izetti. I might have posted a reasonable time, but I’m hopeless with long word anagrams until most/all the checkers are in place. CoD for me was 5d.
    A (warm) welcome to Olivia. Invariant
  5. A very enjoyable puzzle with a mixture of what I regard as easy and difficult clues and answers. I didn’t know the monkey at 6d but guessed it correctly. I thought 4d was very clever and was pleased to solve it. My LOI was 7d which took me a while to unravel.
    It’s the time of year to wish all a Merry Christmas. Also many thanks to all bloggers and setters and particularly to Izetti who gave me some encouragement at a seminar in Oxford a while back when I was setting out on my crossword journey. David
  6. Well done Olivia – a worthy addition to the pantheon of bloggers. Special icon for you.
    I know what you mean about posting times – sometimes it seems like immodesty on one’s part and can be disheartening for those that take rather more time than others. This is especially so when with great satisfaction and pride you solve it in what for you is a stonking time, only for others to say how trivial they’d found it and that they’d completed it in the same time it takes for you to actually read the clues, let alone solve them.
    In the end, it’s what you set for yourself as “success”. For instance, par time for me is 5-10 minutes, like today’s for instance. But that’s down to lots of practice and also learning the devices and conventions – which is where these blogs come in especially useful.
    If anyone’s still reading this, didn’t know TITI either, but I do now…
    1. . . .I’m just pleased to be finally using minutes rather than hours as the units. Invariant
      1. Believe me when I started I was using a calendar. You know the old joke, “I’ve been doing the Times crossword for two months now. And when I finish that one I’ll start another.”
  7. A very enjoyable puzzle with a mixture of what I regard as easy and difficult clues and answers. I didn’t know the monkey at 6d but guessed it correctly. I thought 4d was very clever and was pleased to solve it. My LOI was 7d which took me a while to unravel.
    It’s the time of year to wish all a Merry Christmas. Also many thanks to all bloggers and setters and particularly to Izetti who gave me some encouragement at a seminar in Oxford a while back when I was setting out on my crossword journey. David
  8. Didn’t find this one too difficult and so reasonably quick (for me) between batches of xmas pastry baking! Thanks to all setters and bloggers for an enjoyable year of puzzling and sometimes solving correctly!
  9. Very many thanks to Semperconare, Invariant, David, deezza (I loved Noddy when I was a kid!) and Andrew. You’ve all got better things to do than read this tonight, and probably next week too, but I enjoyed your responses. It’s taken me more than 15 years to get reasonably adept at cryptics, but I did at last reach the point where I could leave the reference books on the shelf and skip google. I only discovered this site about 3 or 4 years ago, before the QC came along. If you’re sitting for hours in the airport, on a horrible bumpy flight, waiting around on hospital time or otherwise bored and anxious, there is no better antidote than these puzzles. Back next week.
  10. 27 minutes. Took a while to get going (sounds like the blogger would have finished while I was still staring at a blank grid). Lots of anagrams once again.
  11. Don’t know if you are still reading these posts Olivia, but on a point of pedantry I think you will find that Charles I undoing was Ship money (John Hampden etc) which was a charge on coastal towns rather than on ship operators (as tonnage is). Tonnage actually still exists today as an alternative to Corporation Tax for ship operators.
  12. Thanks Olivia. Just in case it comes up again in a different form, and for the peace of mind of those of us who are fans of Spurs (note, no ‘the’), the team name is Tottenham Hotspur (no ‘the’ again, and no plural). English football teams don’t tend to be named similarly to American ones (Chicago Bears, Dallas Cowboys, etc.) apart from as nicknames (the Reds, the Hammers, the Foxes) and some (Wolves, Spurs) don’t include ‘the’ (possibly because these are abbreviations?). Cheers, Pete

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