I found this one to be of medium difficulty, which is confirmed by my time of 14:39, just below my average time. Annoyingly, though, I had a careless typo in 3d which gave me the Dreaded Pink Square after submitting.
I also lost some time while doing this solve on my phone by managing to press something that caused the entire keyboard to vanish from the display. Why would you have a feature like that? It’s like having a “Detach wings” button in an aeroplane. I still haven’t the foggiest idea how I did that to myself.
Definitions underlined, synonyms in round brackets, wordplay in square brackets and deletions in strikethrough. Anagram indicators italicised in the clue, anagram fodder indicated like (this)*.
| Across | |
| 1 | Cold, strangely barren American city (8) |
| CANBERRA – C for cold + (barren)* + A for American.
I don’t recall seeing A as an abbreviation for American before, but it must be in dozens of acronyms, including ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). So that’s fair enough. I didn’t get this until I had both the C and the N, and then I spotted how it had to work. I had initially assumed that “American” was going to give US, so the letter count didn’t work for the anagram, even though “strangely” is such a common indicator. |
|
| 5 | Partly aloof or moody appearance (4) |
| FORM – Hidden in [partly] alooF OR Moody. | |
| 9 | A book published on the topic of … (5) |
| ABOUT – A + B for book + OUT (published). | |
| 10 | Extremely divisive newspaper reviews cause unhappiness (7) |
| DEPRESS – First and last letters [extremely] of D |
|
| 11 | Senior officer’s colleague is cut off (12) |
| DISASSOCIATE – DI’S (Detective Inspector’s, senior officer’s), ASSOCIATE (colleague).
Ah, “cut off” as a verb, not as an adjective, then. |
|
| 13 | Right editor with very good tabloid (3-3) |
| RED-TOP – R for right, ED for editor, TOP (very good).
So called because the name of the paper (The Sun, The Star, The Mirror etc) would appear in a big red box at the top of the front page. |
|
| 15 | A person who dresses smartly also (2,4) |
| AS WELL – A double definition, but you have to move where the space appears: the first version is “A SWELL”. | |
| 17 | Pantomime element of opera with element of ballet? (4,3,5) |
| SONG AND DANCE – SONG (element of opera) AND (with) DANCE (element of ballet). | |
| 20 | Disgusting stink about histrionic display (7) |
| OBSCENE – BO (body odour, stink), reversed [about] + SCENE (histrionic display). | |
| 21 | Decorating job is somewhat cosmetic, in general (5) |
| ICING – hidden in [somewhat] cosmetIC IN General. | |
| 22 | Small dogs ultimately aren’t so annoyingly boisterous (4) |
| TOYS – last letters [ultimately] of the last four words. | |
| 23 | Artist using only reds, weirdly (8) |
| REYNOLDS – (only reds)*
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) was a leading portrait artist of his day. But his greatest contribution to Crosswordland is surely being one of the founders of the Royal Academy of Art, which gives us the convention that “RA” can mean “artist”. Well done Sir Joshua. |
|
| Down | |
| 1 | Network supporting 100 people in a group (4) |
| CLAN – LAN (Local Area Network) holding up [supporting] C (Roman numeral for 100).
We had LAN in yesterday’s puzzle too. |
|
| 2 | One chap standing up to welcome old woman (5) |
| NAOMI – I (one) + MAN, all reversed [standing up] and then including [to welcome] an O for old. | |
| 3 | Estimated bonus accompanying top deal, possibly (12) |
| EXTRAPOLATED – EXTRA (bonus) + (top deal)*.
Not EXTTAPOLATED. Grrr. |
|
| 4 | Peppery veg is excellent — kinda! (6) |
| RADISH – RAD-ISH
I’ve always assumed that RAD for excellent is an abbreviation of radical, but have been too lazy to look up until now (it is). It has definite overtones of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure for me. |
|
| 6 | Insurance policy excluding first item is too old (7) |
| OVERAGE – |
|
| 7 | Minute details excitedly given out in the wrong way (8) |
| MISDEALT – M for minute (the time interval, not the size) + (details)* | |
| 8 | Somewhere that’s out of this world to an escapist, somehow (5,7) |
| SPACE STATION – (to an escapist)* | |
| 12 | Our cat’s unusually taking hours to fall asleep (5,3) |
| CRASH OUT – (our cats)* including H for hours. | |
| 14 | Dismally empty, filthy house (7) |
| DYNASTY – first and last letters [empty] of D |
|
| 16 | Stick plug in this spot (6) |
| ADHERE – AD (advertisement, plug) + HERE (in this spot). | |
| 18 | Take it easy, initially coming home sick (5) |
| CHILL – first letters [initially] of C |
|
| 19 | Anglers regularly departing for a long time (4) |
| AGES – Every other letter [regularly departing] of A n G l E r S | |
Slowest for a while, but I still had some fun along the way. I liked RED TOP (in the UK, the box on p1 showing the publication’s name / title is the masthead), REYNOLDS and EXTRAPLOLATED (well, the clue, if not the process – Thames Water, we’re looking at you).
13:37 FOI Form LOI Misdealt COD Song and dance
Thanks Jalna and Doofers
RAD a new one on me, gave up with about2/3 complete, should have stuck with it given number of ‘doh’s having read doofers’ elucidation.
A shabby 26 minutes.
How is it that solvers who don’t appear to attempt the 15 x 15 are able to beat me on the QC? Is all my toil on 15 x 15 for nothing? What’s the point in trying to improve when I still come here and perform badly?
88 minutes and a DNF this week and it’s only Wednesday! My completion times are unacceptable.
Failed by 4 on 15 x 15. Fed up.
PS Even more fed up after finding I had 2 of the answers but didn’t put them in as I thought they were wrong. That says it all.
Plodding slowly then held up by NHO LOI RED-TOP, DISASSOCIATE and NAOMI which added 10 mins.
We don’t seem to be on the same word or wavelength as Jalna…CRASH OUT, RAD, BO.
Nevertheless, enjoyed the challenge and many thanks for the blog.
26:04
Thoroughly misdirected by this one. Struggled with EXTRAPOLATED thinking bonus was part of the anagram, thought 1ac had to be a US city and thought you’d stick a plug for something in an advert.
11a and 20a stopped me from completing the puzzle. Thought of BO for smell, but it never clicked to reverse it! Enjoyed the puzzle, liked RADISH. Thank you for the blog 😁