My first time blogging a puzzle by Beck, and I enjoyed it very much. I think it will be on the easier side of medium: it took me 10:16, giving me the heady sensation of briefly being at the top of the solver list on The Times’ website. Normally, by the time I’ve finished, two or three of the speedsters have snagged the top spots.
I started with AL CAPONE and finished with BASELINE, which gets my COD nod for the misdirection. If you don’t like hiddens, this one probably won’t be your favourite, as it has three, definitely more than normal.
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 | |
| 3 | American gangster turning on palace (2,6) |
| AL CAPONE – (ON PALACE)*
An American gangster with the enumeration (2,6)? That’s your starter for 10. |
|
| 7 | Beat habitué of gambling hall (6) |
| BETTER – Double definition | |
| 8 | Where one finds studs and peer with multiple awards (8) |
| EARLOBES – EARL (peer) with OBEs (multiple awards).
OBE = Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. |
|
| 9 | Golden California marine menace (4) |
| ORCA – OR (gold, from heraldry), CA (official postal abbreviation for California, where I live). | |
| 10 | Function of some museums (3) |
| USE – hidden in [some] mUSEums.
That’s the noun sense of “use”. |
|
| 11 | Poisons ruined nice days (8) |
| CYANIDES – (NICE DAYS)*
I’d never thought of there being more than one cyanide, but a little research (err, asking my wife) tells me that the common poison is hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and that the C≡N group can bond to many other atoms and groups of atoms, forming other types of cyanides. They all seem to be pretty unpleasant. |
|
| 13 | Ahead of time, king or queen possibly returned money owed (4) |
| DEBT – BED (king or queen possibly), reversed [returned] ahead of T for time. | |
| 15 | Raised moolah according to hearsay (4) |
| BRED – homonym [according to hearsay] for ‘bread’ (moolah). | |
| 17 | Most entertaining stories found in jar (8) |
| JOLLIEST – LIES (stories) found in JOLT (jar) | |
| 19 | Impersonator failing to start cassette (3) |
| APE – I presume the origin of the verb “to ape” must have been that apes were copying human behavior, therefore ape = impersonator seems OK to me. |
|
| 22 | Depraved French town lacks heart (4) |
| VILE – The French word for “town” is “ville”. Remove the middle letter [lacks heart].
And there was me trying to think of specific 5-letter French towns beginning with V. I even found one – Vichy – but VIHY isn’t a word. |
|
| 23 | Cheer up English resort town, I say (8) |
| BRIGHTEN – Sounds like [I say] the English resort town of Brighton. | |
| 24 | Empty lockers holding nine torn sheets? (6) |
| LINENS – First and last letters [empty] of L Let’s agree not to be persnickety about empty lockers holding something. |
|
| 25 | Remove wet Conservative accommodating metalworking union (5-3) |
| TOWEL-DRY – TORY (Conservative) holding [accommodating] WELD (metalworking union). | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Traitor bitter perhaps about carrying board (8) |
| BETRAYER – BEER (bitter perhaps) around [about] TRAY (carrying board). | |
| 2 | Stretch melody (6) |
| STRAIN – A double definition.
The first is slightly loose, a strain is often the result of not stretching. |
|
| 3 | Region situated in Far East (4) |
| AREA – Hidden [situated] in fAR EAst | |
| 4 | Drink freely on lake ride in US (8) |
| CAROUSEL – CAROUSE (drink freely) on L for lake.
We have an excellent one of these here in Santa Cruz, California. You should visit. |
|
| 5 | Called up somebody to interrupt Doctor of Philosophy (6) |
| PHONED – ONE (somebody) in PHD (Ph.D. – Doctor of Philosophy). | |
| 6 | Require newspaper man to go after leaders of Nigeria and Egypt (4) |
| NEED – ED[itor] (newspaper man) after the first letters of Nigeria and Egypt. | |
| 12 | Sad democrat kicked out (8) |
| DEJECTED – D for democrat, EJECTED (kicked out).
Until JOLLIEST came along, I thought this was going to be an anagram of ‘democrat’. |
|
| 14 | Hacked Balinese server location? (8) |
| BASELINE – (BALINESE)*
Oh, the tennis meaning of server! |
|
| 16 | Hang loosely some letters from Brendan Gleeson (6) |
| DANGLE – Hidden in [some letters from] BrenDAN GLEeson.
Our third hidden-word clue of the day. |
|
| 18 | Create popular outlet (6) |
| INVENT – IN (popular), VENT (outlet) | |
| 20 | Group temperature raised in free-for-all (4) |
| TRIO – RIOT (free-for-all), with the T (for temperature) raised. | |
| 21 | Just covering large yard (4) |
| ONLY – ON (covering), L (large), Y (yard) | |
Enjoyable puzzle, finished in 30 minutes, and a good mix of quick ones and more difficult ones to solve. Favourite clues go to CAROUSEL and JOLLIEST. Thanks for the blog 😁
A fast start in the NE corner filled me with hope, but I couldn’t maintain the pace and had serious trouble even making it to the line. Two pairings, DEJECTED/JOLLIEST (is that a real word?) and BETTER/STRAIN (my LOI) held me up for nearly a quarter of an hour at the end.
At 17a I could only think of siLIEST and funnIEST, and at 7a I didn’t know what ‘habitue’ meant. Mrs R just said I should know more French.
My favourite clue today was TOWEL DRY.
Many thanks to Doofers and Beck.
Relatively new to the QC as only started in January. Got the solves down to around 12-15mins in general, but today’s took 27:45 and earned a visit to the SCC. Was beguiled by some of the misdirections which seemed more left field than normal. However, couldn’t really complain once the answer had loomed through the fog.
EARLOBES is interesting because in reality it is not possible for a person to be given more than one OBE, so the Earl with “multiple awards” doesn’t really work. The OBE is one of the ranks of the Order of the British Empire, which start with the MBE and progress through OBE to CBE, KBE and finally GBE (Knight/Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). Where someone with an honour is given a new one, then the honour is upgraded to the new rank, so that the recipient still holds only one honour.
Good puzzle despite that, and thanks for the solve which in these parts is much needed!
Welcome, crowdedcat. The EARLOBES clue is a classic example of ‘lift and separate’. A person may not hold more than one OBE, but ‘peer’ is cluing EARL, and separately ‘multiple awards’ is cluing OBES – more than one, but not awarded to the same person.
Welcome to the blog!
31 minutes.
Total, absolute, utter nightmare. I just cannot do this to anything like the standard to which I aspire. Five years and I’m still deep in the SCC territory. I spend ages trying to improve by attempting the 15 x 15, and I still can’t solve a QC in under half an hour! There is no pleasure for me in being this bad. Another week blown to smithereens.
we know the feeling, but keep going and enjoy the comments and challenge.
Thanks ianelin. I appreciate your encouraging words.
Was working with ‘weld’ for ‘union, plus ‘dry’ but inexcusably failed to find TOWEL-DRY
10 minutes; LOI TRIO.
COD candidates TOWEL-DRY and ONLY amongst others.
I was going to say pretty straightforward but I see I have written BRIGHTON on my paper; so a DNF.
David
Contrary to the snitch scores, I found this harder than Hurley’s QC yesterday. The bottom half of the grid was troublesome. Doofer’s blog didn’t say but it eventually struck that the king or queen was referring to bed sizes. Thought that was a clever mis-direction.
Took a while also to work out Baseline, Better, Only, Trio , Brighten and Towel-ready.
Thanks all.
Took me about 45 mins, despite thinking I was off to a flyer with the NE corner write-ins. A fair chunk of the time spent trying to reshape Democrat and think of a three letter word for just.
FOI Al Capone
LOI Trio
COD Baseline
thanks
Very dull today, and my 22-minute solve was topped off with a careless, exhausted BRIGHToN (“I solved it in my head!”). The write-in AL CAPONE certainly led me to expect an easier solve than it turned out to be. Spent far too long going through my list of French towns, couldn’t see jolt for jar. Until I got tired of trying this and that here and there, and gave up the task to my back office, couldn’t see much of anything in fact. So I was lucky to finish in spite of my WOE.
Liked DEBT and TOWEL-DRY for the misdirections. Loved the empty/nonempty lockers. But COD to ONLY for the elegance and misdirection combined.
Thanks to Beck and Doof.
After a little Al Capone write-in enticer, Beck led me a merry dance from bear trap to bear trap -(Democrat)* fitted the crossers at the time – with the occasional rabbit hole (Baseline server, King and Queen, French town), thrown in for good measure. Needless to say, this wasn’t a quick solve, with loi and CoD Towel Dry ensuring that the 30min post was in plain sight.
Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed parsing Beck’s teasers (Trio and Only were excellent) and thought this QC was a fine example of why the time taken isn’t the be all and end all of solving. Well played Beck. Invariant
Thanks for your reply the other day all germane. The Times newspaper doesn’t have a timing machine but it’s very good for doodling on. I once read that watching your solving times was the quickest way to improve your skills. I soon stopped that it made me nervous, what is life for …
👍
we know the feeling, but keep going and enjoy the comments and challenge.
10 – good in the north east.
Misdirected time after time by Beck’s clever clueing. Lots of wry smiles as the pennies dropped. Nice one Beck. Lots of nominees for COD, including BETTER, EARLOBES and BRED, but the award has to go to TOWEL-DRY for the surface 😆 Many thanks D.
Medium to easy? We obviously enjoyed lunch with our friends rather too much today! 16:32 with our downfall being in substantial part due to LOI TOWEL-DRY where we were too focused on C (or CON) for conservative. We’d still have been slower than our average without that though. Nevertheless, good fun and perfectly fair so thanks to both Doofers and Beck.
Ah! Thought of RIOT but not quick enough to cotton on to T raised, clever. Started slow and got quicker, not going to mention BRIGHTON … silly. Fun today thanks
Thanks for the explanations for jolliest and trio. I had the answers but did not understand the clues.
According to Mr. Chambers Carousel is spelt carrousel in the US though he does day it is a North American merry-go-round.
Best clue for me was Towel-dry.
Tricky in places (TOWEL-DRY, which seems a bit green paint to me, INVENT, STRAIN) and very enjoyable. Terrible typing but good proof reading for a change. All done in 09:52 for a Sluggish Day. Many thanks Doofers and Beck.
15:14
Lots of crossers and downs on the first pass.
On balance I really liked this, I thought there was a nice spread of really easy through to quite taxing clues. With the easier clues giving crossers to the harder ones.
More the 3 minutes added to my time with the last 2 in TOWEL DRY and TRIO.
FOI: AL CAPONE
LOI: TRIO
COD: BETTER (made me smile)
Thanks to Doofers and Beck
The second day running where the quickie took only a few minutes less than the biggie! I did wonder if there was a connection between the two today, bearing in mind the answer to 6a in the 15×15!
Me Merlin! I was looking for some sort of Spanish palace 😅
Is CAROUSEL especially American? That’s what I would call the old fashioned gallopers, just like the ones we saw in Weymouth last week.
Not much to say really otherwise – I’m clearly not getting the same vibes as others today. This one seemed pleasant but that’s about it. In fairness, I did like the misdirection of king or queen at 13a (not a chess piece or a monarch, or K, Q or R then) so I’ll give it a tick.
12:14 FOI Orca LOI Towel dry COD Debt
Thanks Beck and Doofers
Over an hour on 15 x 15, with three incorrect answers. One was so easy that I could scream at my inability to see what was staring me in the face.
☹️
Well this is odd. I wrote a comment at about 9.00 am, have just revisited the site to read comments by later posters, and it’s gone! So you will all just have to take my word for it that it was long, witty and erudite, a real gem, and make do instead with this brief post in its place.
10:19 for the solve, and I agree with those who found this pleasant, enjoyable but not particularly taxing. AL CAPONE an excellent starter and pretty plain sailing from then on. Many thanks Doofers for the blog and brickbats to whichever IT gremlin did for my earlier comment.