Having penned my first blog ever on my wife’s birthday I now find myself penning my second on my mother-in-law’s birthday (which also incidentally happens to be New Year’s Day). The Universe must be trying to tell me something although I have to say that I find its clues a bit too cryptic for me.
Following that first blog I was overwhelmed by the number of friendly and welcoming comments from the community and it made me realise why people take on this responsibility. So many people made interesting comments (for instance about lead poisoning and Murmansk), and were complimentary about the blog, and said that it had helped them understand clues that they had struggled with, that it made me feel I had really done something useful. It was just such a rewarding experience. I also had a special welcome from johninterred who was the guy who got there just before me when I initially applied for the post, and a big welcome from sotira who stuffed the Christmas turkey, and… well I could go on and on. Thank you all so much for making me feel welcome. I started out with high hopes of responding to everybody, but then all the Christmas stuff got in the way, and I thought it better just to stay silent and put in a mention here in this blog and then try to be more on the ball for future comments.
But I must confess to a shortcoming which I am sure a number of you noticed but that you were all too kind to mention. I referred to verlaine as being one of the bloggers who has most impressed me during my time on this forum, but I am ashamed to say that in all that time of reading his (mostly Friday) posts I clearly failed to learn the simple lesson of courtesy exhibited by him and all the other bloggers. I failed to thank the setter. So I would now like to offer my belated thanks to Teazel for an entertaining puzzle and apologies for my omission. At the time I said it was a straightforward offering, and so it was for me. But there were several comments from people who found it more challenging and it made me realise that puzzles like that perform a very useful function. They educate those who have perhaps just started thinking of tackling cryptics and give them a welcome sense of achievement as they aspire to become regular solvers of the main Daily Cryptic. Certainly when I first started doing the Daily many years ago the QC did not exist, but it would have been very helpful to me if it had. (I have a further comment to make on this topic but for reasons which will become apparent I will leave it until my next blog.)
So today let me start off by thanking Flamande for another elegant and entertaining puzzle. From my comments below you will probably guess that my COD was 6D for the potential misdirection as to the cryptic mechanism and the ‘concealment’ of the crucial middle letter which caused me to give the clue proper respect and make sure that I had read it accurately.
As to timing, I think I have seen other bloggers say that it is not a very useful exercise to record times for the quickie, but if my time does show up on the leaderboard it will be a lot slower than it was in reality for reasons too boring to explain fully but which involved the fact that I was trying to solve it on my phone for the first time whilst performing some other tasks connected with family life. (I must confess, in any event, to being a bit of a Luddite with crosswords, still preferring to solve them on paper the way God intended. I have never quite got to grips with entering the letters on a screen and feel far more at home with a pen and paper.)
Once again though, I did find this puzzle straightforward, and what little blips I did encounter during solving I have tried to highlight in the clue comments.
Anyway, I look up from my keyboard and I realise that I have been going on for quite some time, so sorry if I have made you feel as though you were watching 12A! I will just shut up now and press the button.
Definitions are simply underlined. I have decided that italics are superfluous (subject to correction by anybody who can tell me why they are useful in addition to underlining). Clues are simply explained in plain English as I see them, without any particular indicators.
A happy New Year to one and all!
| Across | |
| 1 | Famous person suffering setback in Arab elections (5) |
| CELEB – in crossword land if you are famous then you are a star! Unless of course you are an abbreviated CELEBrity. In this case the truncated talent ‘suffers a setback’ in the rest of the clue: AraB ELECtions. Just as it should be, this was my FOI. | |
| 4 | Do away with prison cell briefly (6) |
| CANCEL – a prison, colloquially, is a CAN. Add on CEL (cell briefly) and there you have it. | |
| 9 | Effective medicine? Criticise one with added vitamin (7) |
| PANACEA – criticise = PAN and one = ACE. Add a vitamin, in this case A, and you have an effective medicine. | |
| 10 | School transport (5) |
| TRAIN – double definition. | |
| 11 | Sailor‘s expression of gratitude, reaching harbour at last (3) |
| TAR – expression of gratitude = TA. Add on R (harbouR at last) and you have the ubiquitous Jolly Jack. | |
| 12 | Initially bored as you view US TV series (8) |
| BAYWATCH – just what it says, really. First letters (initially) of Bored As You + WATCH (view) gives BAYWATCH. A US TV series which I have never in fact watched for the very reason suggested by the clue – I would have been bored rigid (preferring as I do to spend my time on crosswords like this and similar pursuits). The only reason I have heard of it at all is because of Pamela Anderson who later became a 1A for other reasons. I think that’s right anyway although I may have got her confused with someone else. I have a similar relationship with Neighbours and Kylie Minogue. | |
| 15 | Inclined to steal lamp, getting rumbled (5-8) |
| LIGHT-FINGERED – a lamp is a LIGHT, and if you get your collar felt, or FINGERED, then you have been rumbled. Which of course is what might happen if the definition applies to you. | |
| 17 | Fellow author‘s work oddly included in erotic novel (2-6) |
| CO-WRITER – take the ‘odd’ bits of WoRk and include them together in that order in the jumbled up (‘novel’) EROTIC. | |
| 18 | Sound made by dove and another bird mostly (3) |
| COO – I am no ornithologist (along with plants and geography (see below) birds are one of my main crossword blind spots), but reputedly this is the sound made by doves. It is also what you get if you have ‘most of’ a COOt (another sort of bird, or so I am told by the twitchers). | |
| 20 | Woman left home with American attorney (5) |
| LINDA – L (left) + IN (home) + DA (District Attorney, American attorney). I was a bit surprised that we were ‘given’ the word attorney in the cryptic bit (‘American lawyer’ might have held us up for a fraction longer), but I guess it must just be our lucky day. | |
| 22 | Close relatives are visiting home (7) |
| NEAREST – as in ‘nearest and dearest’. Put ARE into NEST (visiting home). | |
| 23 | Royal Engineer‘s forged papers (6) |
| SAPPER – anagram (‘forged’) of papers. The Royal Engineers are colloquially referred to as sappers, a term that goes back to the 1600s. | |
| 24 | How to water a bunch of flowers? (5) |
| SPRAY – double definition, the first one slightly cryptic. | |
| Down | |
| 1 | A place to sleep, some say, in California’s big cities (8) |
| CAPITALS – A PIT is a bed and if you put it in CALS (California’s) you get the definition. | |
| 2 | Ship — large one — with name “Queen Elizabeth” (5) |
| LINER – L (large) + I (one) + N (name) + ER (Elizabeth Regina). | |
| 3 | Vicious gossip‘s molar? (9) |
| BACKBITER – cryptic definition. Being towards the back of your mouth, a molar could credibly be described as a ‘BACK’ BITER. | |
| 5 | Tread the boards at Criterion theatre, taking leading parts (3) |
| ACT – initials (leading parts) of At Criterion Theatre. | |
| 6 | Opportunist has change of heart, becoming poet (7) |
| CHAUCER – I had a bit of a double take here: which was the definition? The opportunist (CHANCER) or the poet (CHAUCER)? The changing middle letter (change of heart) is unchecked and so no help there. Reading the clue again however the answer must be CHAUCER. There was also a potential bit of clever misdirection as ‘change of heart’ could suggest an anagram of ‘heart’ to anybody who has been doing cryptic crosswords for any length of time, and in this case if you had filled in the crossing letters H and R (and perhaps surmised a probable E before the R) it could have looked plausible. | |
| 7 | Portion of oil in this dressing (4) |
| LINT – hidden in oiL IN This. | |
| 8 | Job for which the charges are small? (4-7) |
| BABY-SITTING – the charges here are the ‘small’ sort you have to look after rather than the (hopefully large) ones you make for providing your services, but that little misdirection leads to a very pleasing surface in the context of the clue. | |
| 13 | North Africans affected by rain and gales (9) |
| ALGERIANS – anagram of RAIN and GALES, although the passive voice (‘affected by’) makes me pause and consider whether this is an entirely accurate anagrind. Comments welcome! | |
| 14 | Lady performing with trio in skilful way (8) |
| ADROITLY – ‘performing’, however, is a perfectly acceptable anagrind for LADY and TRIO. | |
| 16 | Adult articulated complaint before the judge (5-2) |
| GROWN-UP – a complaint could be a groan, and when you ‘articulate’ it, it sounds like GROWN. Then of course if you get into trouble with the Law you could well find yourself ‘UP’ before the beak. | |
| 18 | Food and drink always provided after church (5) |
| CHEER – churches in crosswords are usually either CE or CH. In this case the second obviously applies. Similarly, ‘always’ normally falls out as one of the two poetic alternatives, ‘ay’ (as in ‘Yours ay’) or the contracted ‘ever’ (E’ER). Again, the second applies here giving CHEER, a definition which is particularly apposite during this season of heavily groaning tables and even more heavily groaning dyspeptics. | |
| 19 | There’s no time for Morocco’s mountains, unfortunately (4) |
| ALAS – geography was always my worst subject at school (alas!) and so for a few moments I couldn’t quite remember the name of the Atlas mountains (much to my shame). Then I looked at the definition and rather amazingly had a mini mental block so that the answer didn’t immediately come to me either (even more to my shame – no geography excuse there!). Thus instead of just writing this in as I should have done straight away I migrated briefly to the SE corner then came back over here by which time the answer was obvious. And the point of all that laboured explanation was to tell you why this clue (which would normally have been one of the most straightforward) ended up as my LOI. Delete T (no time) from ATLAS and you have ALAS. | |
| 21 | Wonder Woman’s first admitted to A & E (3) |
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AWE – woman’s first is W, and if this is ‘admitted’ to A & E you get that sense of wonder that used to be so rare. And then along came ‘shock and awe’, and the now practically meaningless ‘awesome’, and suddenly there it was right back in the national stream of unconsciousness. In connection with this word I remember the no doubt apocryphal story (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) of when John Wayne was playing the Roman centurion in the crucifixion scene in Jesus of Nazareth. Something like the following exchange is said to have taken place between him and the director:
John Wayne (surveying the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died, and commenting in his usual flat, deadpan manner): Truly this man was the son of God. You will probably be grateful if I leave it there. |
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8 minutes marks a welcome return to form for me – my last sub-10 minutes having been two weeks ago to the day. Very enjoyable.
Edited at 2018-01-01 02:14 am (UTC)
Eventually completed in 22 minutes with COD going to 8d.
Happy birthday Mrs F-mother-in-law.
Edited at 2018-01-01 10:47 am (UTC)
Your John Wayne story reminds me of the Yorkshire widower berating the stonemason for carving “she was thin” instead of “she was thine” on his wife’s headstone. “Tha’s missed the bloody E off, gerrit fixed!” When he returns next day, the inscription reads, “Eeee, she was thin.”
Happy New Year to setters, bloggers and solvers – almost 12 months since I took up this cryptics lark, and here’s to further improvement in 2018.
The warm-up helped as I raced through many of the clues but then got a bit stuck. After 15 minutes I had two left -23a and 19d. I thought 23a had to start RE which I am sure was what the setter intended; and I too could not remember for the life of me the mountain range- which I have seen. Anyway a quick rethink led to Sapper and then Atlas immediately occurred to me. 17 minutes.
COD to 23a but also 17a which cleverly pointed to an erotic novel. Great work by setter -and blogger. David
And yes, if everybody could blog their own puzzles we’d all get great times! Reminds me a bit of a friend of mine who is trying to reduce her drinking by hiding bottles where she thinks she won’t find them again! (An oblique connection I know, but my brain made it for some reason so I thought I’d mention it.)