Quick Cryptic 525 by Dazzler

Author   mohn2Posted on Categories Quick Cryptic
A pleasant solve from Dazzler today, with no obscurities and some nice surfaces. Unfortunately I think this setter died in December of last year so regrettably we will only have a few more of his offerings to enjoy before the pipeline runs dry.

Today is Pi Day, so-called because (in American notation) it’s 3/14 – it’s also Einstein’s birthday. However when I Googled March 14th I found that the majority of entries on the first page of results referred to a rather less well-known celebration that perhaps doesn’t bear repeating on a family blog site. Live and learn.

The puzzle can be found here if the usual channels are unavailable: http://feeds.thetimes.co.uk/puzzles/crossword/20160314/13858/

Definitions are underlined.

Across
3 Dread man losing his head during film (5)
PANIC – {m}AN (man losing his head, i.e. the word “man” without its initial letter) inside (during) PIC (film)
7 Shopkeeper is more vulgar, we hear (6)
GROCER – homophone (we hear) of GROSSER (more vulgar). We’ve had this homophone a couple of times before, including from Dazzler himself in Quicky 31 (though in that case it was to clue part of greengrocer).
8 Obligation on American (4)
ONUS – ON + US (American)
9 Prison officer’s in front of islander (8)
MAJORCAN – CAN (Prison) with MAJOR (officer) in front. E.g. Rafa Nadal.
10 Affected part of week after returning (4)
FAKE – hidden reversed (part of … returning) in weEK AFter
11 Doctor amuses with a quote about one being hardly audible (5,2,1,5)
QUIET AS A MOUSE – anagram (Doctor) of AMUSES + (with) A QUOTE, about I (one). An expression in neither Chambers nor Collins but ODO has it.
15 Purpose of extremely divisive ending (13)
DETERMINATION – D{ivisiv}E (extremely divisive, i.e. the first and last letters of the word “divisive”) + TERMINATION (ending)
16 British rugby player almost forming league (4)
BLOC – B (British) + LOC{k} (rugby player almost, i.e. the word “lock” (rugby player) without its final letter). A lock is either member of the second row in the scrum.
18 Guard the wandering girl (8)
DAUGHTER – anagram (wandering) of GUARD THE
20 Arguments in banks (4)
ROWS – double definition
21 Dog runs from underground worker (6)
COLLIE – COLLIE{r} (runs from underground worker, the word “collier” (underground worker) without the letter “r” (runs))
22 Bring to mind agreement accepted by the first lady (5)
EVOKE – OK (agreement) inside (accepted by) EVE (the first lady)
Down
1 Make a fuss about heart of hurt animal (8)
CREATURE – CREATE (Make a fuss) about {h}UR{t} (heart of hurt, i.e. the middle letters of the word “hurt”)
2 Mirror in Quebec house (4)
ECHO – hidden in (in) QuebEC HOuse.
3 Make public declaration in favour of request (8)
PROCLAIM – PRO (in favour of) + CLAIM (request). I can’t say the claim=request equivalence immediately sprang to mind, but ODO has one definition of claim as “to formally request or demand”.
4 Time of day when nobody lacks energy (4)
NOON – NO–ON{e} (nobody lacks energy, i.e the word “no-one” without the letter “e” (energy))
5 Challenge prisoner over van (8)
CONFRONT – CON (prisoner) over FRONT (van)
6 Get rid of boat out East (4)
JUNK – double definition
12 Duty constraining queen to keep fit (8)
EXERCISE – EXCISE (Duty) around (constraining) ER (queen)
13 Reveal girl’s put on a little weight (8)
ANNOUNCE – ANN (girl) on OUNCE (a little weight)
14 Country a novel is written about (8)
SLOVENIA – anagram (written about) of A NOVEL IS
17 Take turns playing polo (4)
LOOP – anagram (playing) of POLO. I think you need to read “Take turns” in the sense of making turns rather than the usual meaning.
18 Repeatedly imitate bird once (4)
DODO – DO (imitate) twice (repeatedly)
19 On the radio totally divine (4)
HOLY – homophone (On the radio) of WHOLLY (totally)

18 comments on “Quick Cryptic 525 by Dazzler”

  1. It’s always nice to get the long ones early, so I’m sure it would have been if I had; I didn’t. I compensated for that by quickly spotting a non-existent hidden clue, 19d (HERA), which didn’t feel right (duh), but which I forgot to go back to. This made COLLIE my LOI, because I had CUR for ‘dog’. All in all, a dog’s dinner of a solve. But solve I finally did, in 9:44.
  2. It was looking good early on for a fast solve, but then became bogged down in the top left, MAJORCAN and CREATURE taking a while to get.

    I made up a word, CONFLOAT for 4d. Apparently “van” has as an obscure secondary meaning in the phrase “in the van of” meaning of “at the front”, related to the word “vanguard”.

    I had 17d as POOL, where I thought (clutching at straws a bit) of it meaning taking turns in a car pool, or pooling resources. This made getting BLOC tricky, which eventually went in unparsed.

    41m with a bit of cheating at the end to tell me where my mistakes were.

  3. I raced through most of this but struggled to finish with the long 15ac holding out to the bitter end and failing to come to mind until every last checker was in place; the arrival of the M of PROCLAIM finally put the seal on it.

    Apart from Mara’s last two outings (512 & 521) I’ve not had any solves over 10 minutes in the past three weeks, but this one took me 14 minutes.

    With regard to 11ac I’m not sure that we need sayings such as similes to be in one of the standard dictionaries to qualify for inclusion. I’d tend to look for confirmation in Brewer’s or ODE as our blogger did today. Incidentally having checked Brewer’s on this one it informed me that the original expression was “as quiet as a mouse in cheese”.

    Mention of “pi day” reminded me that the subject came up last year, or possibly the year before (time flies so fast for me these days!) and I thought we had a Nina or an otherwise themed puzzle to mark the occasion, however a search of TftT has revealed nothing of the kind and I’m starting to wonder if I dreamt it. I imagine it would have been in the main puzzle.

    Edited at 2016-03-14 05:58 am (UTC)

    1. Re similes, I must admit that I only check them against a dictionary if they seem unfamiliar (“quiet as a church mouse” rang more bells than the actual answer) so I’ve no idea how many actually reside in the pages of the dictionaries. But thanks for the reminder re Brewer’s – I was lucky enough to win one last year so I should probably start using it.

      Re pi, there’s been at least one Listener puzzle on that theme. I can’t remember anything in the Times cryptic but my crosswording long-term memory only goes back about a month …

  4. Kind of hard to know how to rate today’s main cryptic, as solving times on the Crossword Club leaderboard are all over the place (by which I mean that some normally fast solvers have been slow and vice versa), but I think that members of the Quicky ranks should be able to have a good stab at it.
    1. I agree Mohn. Also there is the Rufus cryptic in today’s Guardian which has a generous sprinkling of helpful anagrams.
  5. Yes, I should have expanded on the van=front equivalence – it often pops up in the main cryptic so it seems a lot more common than perhaps it actually is.
  6. For PI day the challenge is to construct sentences whose word length mimics PI. How I love a novel challenge. (314159)

    Edited at 2016-03-14 06:39 pm (UTC)

  7. Back in the game today with a 30 min solve. ‘Doctors’ as an anagram indicator a new one for me, as is ‘on the radio’ for a homophobe. 16a LOI as I thought it might be an actual British Rugby player, perhaps one of those Pacific slanders which might end in a ‘C’. Not sure about ‘make a fuss’ as definition for ‘create’, but liked the more obscure use of ‘van’ as in ‘vanguard’. As a semi-newbie, it’s always good to check for secondary meanings of common words, such as ‘banks’, ‘duty’ etc 9a is COD for me with the neat misdirection of “Prison Officer’

    In 13d the ‘little weight’ was ‘ounce’, as I recall, last week it was ‘gramme’. Both are useful for setters, and make tidy clues.

    Edited at 2016-03-14 11:37 am (UTC)

    1. SOED has this for CREATE: verb intrans. Make a fuss, complain loudly, (about). slang. E20.

      K. Farrell: If my old man doesn’t get ‘is bit of fish at one…he’ll create.

    2. One of the Listener puzzles with a pi theme was titled “Godly Mix-up”, both of which are other meanings of pi.
  8. Found this one a bit more tricky than the last one by Dazzler a couple of weeks ago. I needed two sittings to work some of the clues out. Also, I hope I wasn’t the only one to waste time trying to make a girls name for 18ac. . . Invariant
  9. A strange on for me this as I got through all of it fairly quickly but got completely stuck on 1d and 14d. For 1d I wasn’t sure what the definition was, once I’d settled on animal (as opposed to make a fuss), I spent an age going through an inventory of exotic animals before finally seeing the light. For 14d (LOI) I completely missed the anagram indicator for some reason and had a major doh! moment when the penny finally dropped.
  10. A fairly average 45 mins for me today. Creature and Majorcan held me up most.
    On Saturday I decided to give the main crossword a go as there was no quickie. I got about 7/8 of it done in three hours and then decided enough was enough and to go to the blog to find out the remaining answers and how some of my answers parsed, only to find that the Saturday blog runs a week in arrears. Does anyone know why that is the case?
    1. Well done on your attempt at the Saturday puzzle! You may wish to return to it at some point, as spending time away from a puzzle can often mean that when you return to it the remaining answers will fall quickly.

      The Saturday puzzle (like various others such as the Saturday Jumbo and the Sunday puzzle) is a prize puzzle, so the convention is that we don’t discuss those puzzles until the submission date has passed.

  11. On a train for much of today so had time to do crosswords. This was enjoyable and easy enough until I got stuck at 17d and 19d (my usual homophone problem).
    So I switched over to the main crossword and nearly finished that.
    Returning to the QC I got 17d and then wrote in Halo for 19d to complete it, only to think instantly of the now obvious Holy. Enjoyed Dazzler’s clues. David
  12. I once got my solicitor to change “on determination of the lease” to “on termination of the lease” when he agreed that lawyers should stop using antiquated language. And there is an Irish rebel song – Kelly the boy from Killane, where his friend Harvey leads his soldiers from the van. Mind you, I thought that was from the back, like the Duke of Plaza-Toro.

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