This morning we have a puzzle by City that left me with slightly mixed feelings. I solved it in routine time – 10:19, par for me and also the fastest I have completed a puzzle by City – but there were a number of clues that I wasn’t entirely sure about and a number of definitions which are from way left field. I think I have managed to deduce the parsing of all of them by the end, but there was quite a bit of biffing and eyebrow motion while I was in flight.
There is one clue which I think has a fair chance of causing some comment, as 2D refers to 7A. Cross-referencing clues have been known to excite some quite strong reactions in the past from some in the TfTT community, and in this one the referencing is not even in a very straightforward way. But no doubt others will welcome its innovative ingenuity …
How did everyone else get on?
Definitions underlined in bold italics, (abc)* indicates an anagram of abc, ~ marks insertion points and strike-through-text shows deletions.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 7 | No one verifies internally (5) |
| NEVER – A hidden, in oNE VERifies.
And the first instance of having to think hard what the definition was – but “Never!” can be a (very) emphatic way of saying No. |
|
| 8 | Rare to remove coat before competitor’s appearance (7) |
| ARRIVAL – AR (middle letters of rARe, with the deletion of the first and last letters given by “to remove coat”) + RIVAL (competitor).
And more serious thought required for the second clue as well, as I was fixated on appearance having something to do with one’s looks until the penny dropped. |
|
| 10 | Gathering the VAR’s broken (7) |
| HARVEST – (harvest)*, with the anagram indicator being “broken”. | |
| 11 | Element 10, next to nothing brought back (5) |
| XENON – NONE (nothing) + X (10), all reversed (“brought back”).
A very sneaky clue, in which one has to lift-and-separate Element from 10, as the 10th element in the Periodic Table is not Xenon but Neon – Xenon itself is the 54th element. Two facts I (thankfully) did not need to know to solve the clue and only discovered later. |
|
| 12 | Playing words with care — this gives one point for each (5,4) |
| SCORE DRAW – (words care)*, with the anagram indicator being “playing”.
In football (soccer) league tables, a draw earns both teams one point – in fact it does whether or not there is any score, as a 0-0 draw is also worth one point to each side. |
|
| 14 | Prime time with Oscar (3) |
| TWO – T (time) + W (with) + O (Oscar, being the name for the letter O in the NATO alphabet). And 2 is indeed a prime number. | |
| 15 | Amazing card (3) |
| ACE – A DD. | |
| 16 | Gossip about mushy sprout in eating establishment (9) |
| GASTROPUB – GA~B (gossip) around (sprout)*, with the anagram indicator being “mushy”.
A nice play on “mushy peas”, a standard accompaniment to fish and chips. And very tasty mushy peas are too, though whether mushy sprouts would be is more debateable. |
|
| 18 | President’s cap (5) |
| TRUMP – Our second DD. And both of them so far 2 word clues, thus demonstrating once again one of the more reliable rules of crosswords, that “Two Word Clues Are Usually DDs”. | |
| 20 | Drums beat — I’m panicking to a certain extent (7) |
| TIMPANI – A hidden, in beaT I’M PANIcking, with the hidden indicator being “to a certain extent”. | |
| 22 | Dish from California area (7) |
| CALZONE – CAL (abbreviation for California) + ZONE (area).
Calzone is a style of pizza, and while I’m sure you can get very good calzone in California, it actually originated in Naples. |
|
| 23 | Convict following gut, mostly in prison camp (5) |
| GULAG – GU (gut, “mostly”, ie with the last letter deleted) + LAG (convict).
The Gulag was a system of forced labour camps in the USSR. The actual word Gulag (in Russian, Гулаг) comes from the phrase Главное управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей, or “Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps”, and originally referred to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the camps, but in English usage it became a generic term for the camps themselves. The term Gulag is probably best known in English from the book The Gulag Archipelago, by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident in the post WW2 era, in which he writes about the system of the camps. The book is part autobiographical and based on his own time as an inmate of the camps. |
|
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Cuisine that’s surprisingly warm (12) |
| ENTHUSIASTIC – (cuisine that’s)*, with the anagram indicator being “surprisingly”. | |
| 2 | Suggestion upset 7 too (8) |
| OVERTONE – An anagram of never (the answer to 7A) and too, with the anagram indicator being “upset”.
It would be too strong to say I was “upset” by this clue, but when the answer to one clue provides part of the anagrist for another (just part of it, not even all of it), there was definitely some mild eye-rolling, and I am left slightly wondering where the QC boundaries are. |
|
| 3 | Scottish island without one large plant (4) |
| TREE – TIREE (Scottish island) with the I deleted (“without one”).
A challenging clue I think, as Tiree is not the best known of Scotland’s myriad islands – it is not, for example, in the same league as Skye – but it is the most westerly island in the Inner Hebrides, and reputedly one of the sunniest places in Britain. I can’t vouch for the latter, as on the only occasion I have been there it was overcast every single day of our holiday, but it was certainly one of the windiest islands I’ve been to, on account of its largely exposed position and very flat terrain. |
|
| 4 | Sportsperson covering for fish? (6) |
| BATTER – Another DD, making use of the modern custom of calling batsmen and batswomen, words which were good enough from the dawn of cricket till about 3 years ago, by the now-preferred gender-neutral term. | |
| 5 | In favour of axes, at first we always recommend indirect fighting (5,3) |
| PROXY WAR – PRO (in favour of) + X Y (the two axes of a graph) + WAR (the first letters of We Always Recommend, given by “at first”).
A complex clue, which I biffed from the definition and enumeration and then sat thinking about the parsing for some time until the penny dropped that “axes” was the plural of “axis” not of “axe”. |
|
| 6 | Shakespeare was associated with this rising star (4) |
| AVON – NOVA (star) reversed (“rising”, as this is a down clue).
The association is not so much with Avon itself as with Stratford-upon-Avon, as the town was Shakespeare’s birthplace, home for large parts of his life and final resting place. Born there in 1564, he grew up in the town, raised his family there, and returned to live there for his final years before being buried in the town’s Holy Trinity Church. |
|
| 9 | Twisting or bending old collapsible spanner? (6,6) |
| LONDON BRIDGE – (or bending old)*, with the anagram indicator being “twisting”.
A very quirky definition, playing firstly on bridges spanning things and secondly on the old nursery rhyme “London Bridge is falling down”. |
|
| 13 | This makes room for soldiers to encourage limiting ops in retreat (3,5) |
| EGG SPOON – EGG~ON (encourage) surrounding (“limiting”) SPO (ops “in retreat”, ie reversed).
The soldiers here are toast fingers which one dunks in boiled eggs, and to make room for the dunking one has to eat some of the egg first, and for that one needs an egg-spoon (with or without a hyphen; I prefer with) to scoop it out. I hope that’s all clear? But actually, with the first word going E-G, I suspect many will have just got this from the checkers. |
|
| 14 | Best opportunities to buy broadcast equipment for boats (8) |
| TOPSAILS – TOP (best) + SAILS (sounds like SALES, or opportunities to buy, with the homophone indicator being “broadcast”).
Topsails were the largest and main driving sails of square-rigged ships; typically each mast would carry a lower sail, called a Course Sail, then a Topsail, then often a sail above that, called a Topgallant. |
|
| 17 | Easy chance to score with model (6) |
| SITTER – A DD, the first meaning being common in British English for a very easy play in eg football or cricket, so easy in fact that the player could almost make it “sitting down”. | |
| 19 | Unpleasant fruit mostly ending in jelly (4) |
| UGLY – UGL (ugli, a fruit, with the last letter deleted, given by “mostly”) + Y (ending in, ie last letter of, jellY).
I can’t help feeling that City has somewhat overcomplicated this clue, as just the first two words of it (“Unpleasant fruit”) would have given a straightforward DD. Unless there are unwritten rules for how many DDs a puzzle can have? City has already given us four … |
|
| 21 | Wizard of 1000 years (4) |
| MAGE – M (1,000, represented in the Roman notation by the letter M) + AGE (years).
I am not entirely sure about Years = Age, but by this stage of doing the crossword I felt it was probably close enough to go straight in. |
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