I note that today marks the two-year anniversary of the death of one of my namesakes, the (unrelated) composer and pianist John McCabe. When I was selling off some stuff in advance of moving from New York back to the UK in the mid-2000s, I got an email from a student at the Juilliard who had seen my Craigslist post advertising a low-end synthesizer and was wondering if I was THE John McCabe. He was to be disappointed, as was I – he had no interest in what I was selling and had merely wanted to converse with my namesake. At that time, I had just resigned from a company where I also had a namesake, who was significantly higher up the food chain than myself – I had frequently received emails intended for him, many of which contained confidential information, but my favourite was an in-depth analysis of the best electric toothbrushes on the market, that he had outsourced to his wife who was an executive at the same company. Since then, though, opportunities for McCabe-related confusion have been few and far between and life has maybe been a little duller for that. I may need to move to New Zealand.
The puzzle can be found here if the usual channels are unavailable: http://feeds.thetimes.co.uk/puzzles/crossword/20170213/22427/
Definitions are underlined, {} = omission
| Across | |
| 1 | Great fun, though not for Jonah? (1,5,2,1,4) |
| A WHALE OF A TIME – this is a reference to the Biblical story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale, with the suggestion that sloshing around with a load of cetaceous gastric juices for three days and three nights might not have been a barrel of laughs | |
| 8 | Took an attitude, keeping one balanced (6) |
| POISED – POSED (Took an attitude) around (keeping) I (one) | |
| 9 | Careless soldiers don’t hit target (6) |
| REMISS – RE (soldiers, i.e. Royal Engineers) + MISS (don’t hit target). Nice surface. | |
| 10 | In winter, noticing seabird (4) |
| TERN – hidden in (in) winTER Noticing | |
| 11 | Woodman dismembers ferret so (8) |
| FORESTER – anagram of (dismembers) FERRET SO | |
| 12 | Enticement to hide source of considerable wealth (5) |
| LUCRE – LURE (Enticement) around (to hide) C (source of considerable, i.e. the initial letter of the word “considerable”) | |
| 13 | Asian parent put down (5) |
| MALAY – MA (parent) + LAY (put down) | |
| 15 | Graph of British catarrh needing amendment (3,5) |
| BAR CHART – B (British) + anagram of (needing amendment) CATARRH. Rather disappointingly, when I Googled “Graph of British catarrh” there were no results – surely there’s a PhD to be had in such a neglected area of medicine? | |
| 17 | Musical film soldier’s seen twice (4) |
| GIGI – GI (soldier) twice. A film already screened three times at the cinema in the Quicky neighbourhood of Crosswordland. Not a fan of musicals at all but the songs I Remember It Well and Thank Heaven for Little Girls are somehow familiar. | |
| 19 | Protect home with safe (6) |
| INSURE – IN (home) + SURE (safe) | |
| 20 | We must take on very bad, destructive beetle (6) |
| WEEVIL – WE + EVIL (very bad) | |
| 21 | Enterprising set manoeuvred craftily (13) |
| ADVENTURESOME – anagram of (craftily) SET MANOEUVRED | |
| Down | |
| 2 | Complete? With gap (5) |
| WHOLE – W (With) + HOLE (gap) | |
| 3 | As seen in chemical table, it’s a poison (7) |
| ARSENIC – double definition, the first mildly cryptic since As is the chemical symbol for arsenic (in the periodic table). There are a number of chemical symbols that look like “normal” words (e.g. As, At (astatine), I (iodine), He (helium), etc) which, when slipped into a clue, can be very deceptive. Teazel has been generous in this case but in the main cryptic I would expect setters to use this device in a more devious way. | |
| 4 | Transmit, dropping header, and stop (3) |
| END – {s}END (Transmit, dropping header, i.e. the word “send” (Transmit) without its first letter) | |
| 5 | Nowhere near what you are looking for? On the contrary (3,4,2) |
| FAR FROM IT – FAR FROM (Nowhere near) + IT (what you are looking for). Chambers has as its fourth definition of the word “it”: “The ne plus ultra, that which answers exactly to what one is looking for (informal)” | |
| 6 | Mark seen in neckwear for periods (5) |
| TIMES – M (Mark) in TIES (neckwear) | |
| 7 | Daisy is within my control (7) |
| MASTERY – ASTER (Daisy) in MY. Chambers has for “aster”: “A plant of the Aster genus of Compositae, with showy radiated heads, white to lilac-blue or purple, flowering in late summer and autumn (hence often called Michaelmas daisies), or a related form” | |
| 11 | Force teenager to get changed? She can’t be forced (4,5) |
| FREE AGENT – F (Force) + anagram of (to get changed) TEENAGER. Collins: “a person whose actions are not constrained by others”, though I would guess that the most common use of the term these days is in relation to a sportsperson who is out of contract. | |
| 12 | Being erudite, left and made money (7) |
| LEARNED – L (left) + EARNED (made money) | |
| 14 | Drunk like a fish? (7) |
| LEGLESS – I’m not sure if leglessness is a defining property of fish but the surface reading and the question mark make up for any quibbles (and the whole clue is good enough that Teazel is entitled to recycle it from his own Quicky 320) | |
| 16 | Clever move, getting last of chocolate ice-cream dessert (5) |
| COUPE – COUP (Clever move) + E (last of chocolate, i.e. the last letter of the word “chocolate”), to give us (Chambers): “A dessert, usu made with ice-cream and often fruit, served in a glass bowl”. I can’t say with any degree of certainty that I knew this word, but the wordplay was helpful and the answer didn’t make me uneasy enough to want to revisit it. | |
| 18 | Stern-sounding fairytale brothers (5) |
| GRIMM – homophone (-sounding) of GRIM (Stern), to give us the surname of the German brothers who popularised stories such as Cinderella and Snow White | |
| 20 | Take up bloody fight (3) |
| WAR – reversal of (Take up) RAW (bloody) | |
Mohn2, would you be so kind as to look at the LJ PM I sent you and reply? Thanks in advance.
Certainly more PBs in the offing as long as 1ac A WHALE OF A TIME is one’s FOI.
DNK 16dn COUPE but then who did!?
COD 21ac ADVENTURESOME WOD COUPE
Edited at 2017-02-13 02:28 am (UTC)
Around an hour, 20 minutes for most of the clues, and the remainder for poised, lucre, insure, adventuresome, arsenic, free agent and coupe.
Couldn’t parse arsenic although the word was obvious.
Some other tougher bits:
Took an attitude = posed
clever move = coup
daisy = Aster
lucre.
COD 14d
I took chemistry at a level so it was just me being slow.
WHALE in the expression at 1ac refers simply to something that’s big
I had no problems with COUPE myself as I came across “Coupe Jacques” on the menus of countless modest restaurants and cafes in the 1950s and 1960s as a name intended to sound exotic but in my experience inevitably meant tinned fruit and ice-cream served in a glass bowl.
I also looked for a NINA finding APT in the first unch column and ESR in the last one (it’s an inflammation indicator that my doctor has been monitoring for the past 10 years), but down the middle we have a somewhat spooky question in text jargon, namely OO R U?
Edited at 2017-02-13 05:36 am (UTC)
Was there a Lady Daisy Aster I wonder? If not there should have been.
found this too? Diana
Also, I took the surface reading to refer to the situation faced by a parent when their offspring wants to go out dressed unsuitably and I’m guessing that situation crops up more with daughters than sons, so “She” fits the surface better.
The feminine form of familiar words can be difficult to spot. Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph by Brian Greer had a particularly good example which I won’t reveal as it is a prize puzzle.
Very easy today – interrupted by a phone call but close to 5 mins.
forgotten what a NINA is – perhaps someone will remind me? Thx.
DNF; COUPE did not know.
I knew Coupe and found the rest fairly straightforward. Got there in the end. David