Quick Cryptic No. 90 by Oran – pleasant pot pourri

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic
I arose early to find a little tranquillity in which to blog this, but the grandchildren mayhem started eleven minutes later just as I finished solving and started typing. I haven’t had the pleasure of an Oran blog before, but I found it a well balanced mix of arty, musical and scientific flavoured clues, and the parsing of 4ac and 12ac took me a minute or two of reflection.

Across
1 JOLT – JO (small girl) meets LT (lieutenant), def. ‘shock’.
4 GO POSTAL – (STOP OLGA)*, def. ‘flip’. This was obviously an anagram, but personally I wasn’t familiar with the phrase, which the urban dictionary online tells me results from US Postal Service workers going beserk and shooting people in the 1990s,
8 CHARISMA – CHAR (daily) IS (one’s) MA (mother), def. ‘allure’. Derived from the Greek charis, grace, also the root of words like charm.
9 ILLS – Def. ‘problems’. I’ll (the setter is going to), followed by S, the first letter of solve.
10 LEGATO – Hidden word in reversed SAB(OTAGE L)IKELY, def. ‘such smooth playing’. Italian term used in music notation, literal meaning ‘tied together’.
11 EULOGY – (GET YOU)*, indicated by ‘specially’, def. ‘high praise’. Another Greek word.
12 WELL THOUGHT OF – WELL (source), THOUGH (however) T OF (anagram of OFT), def. ‘respected’.
16 TURNER – TURN (go) with ER (queen). Joseph Mallord William Turner, the painter most famous perhaps for his ‘Fighting Temeraire’ and celebrated now at the posh gallery in Margate, well worth a visit. (The gallery, I mean).
17 COBALT – CO (firm) followed by BALT(I), def. ‘hard metal’. I’d never thought of cobalt being a particularly hard metal, it measures 5.0 on Moh’s scale, and it’s better known for being ferromagnetic and having colourful compounds. And a balti is the Indian cooking dish as well as the resulting food cooked in it.
19 BASE – BAS (graduates) E (English), def. ‘base’, as a verb.
20 OVERAWED – OVER (finished), A (article) WED (united), def. ‘in great wonderment’.
21 TELEGRAM – TRAM with E LEG inside, def. ‘cable’. Old fashioned word for an old form of urgent message. Wiki tells me that BT sold the rights in 2003 to a private company, for its greetings-card potential. I’ve not had one since my wedding day in 1973.
22 SINK – Double def.

Down
2 OCHRE – Initial letters of O ften C olour H aving R ed E ffect, an &lit. def. i.e. the whole clue is the definition.
3 TURN A BLIND EYE – I guess we all wrote in the answer and tried to parse it afterwards. A BLIND (a Venetian) fits inside TURN (ER) EYE (sounds like I). EDIT: Apologies. As pointed out by Mr Anon (why do we allow anon postings?) it is more precisely parsed as TURNE (R) and YE meaning you. Under the circumstances of early morning 2 and 4 y-o bombardment while blogging, it was surprising I got the answer, never mind the parsing.
4 GUSTO – GUST (blow) O (over), def. ‘fervour’.
5 PLATEAU – (PAL AT EU)*, indicated by ‘gathering’, def. ‘high level’.
6 SPILL THE BEANS – Cryptic def. For once ‘can’ doesn’t evoke ‘tin’ in the answer.
7 ALLEGRO – (GET A ROLL)*, def. ‘fast’. At first I saw ‘break fast’ as one word on my little screen, so pondered over this one longer than most. Clever misdirection for the meaning of ‘fast’.
10 LOW – L (end to serial) OW (hurting), def. ‘sad’.
13 EMULATE – EMU (bird) LATE (dead), def ‘ape’.
14 HARBOUR – H (bottom of patH) ARBOUR (sheltered garden area), def. ‘shelter’.
15 FIT – Double def.
17 CREAM – Well, CREAM is off-white, and CREAM is a sort of flour, which sounds like flower, hence the query mark at the end? Or is there more to it?
18 LIE IN – LIE (story) IN (at home), def. ‘extend bedtime’. I wish!

25 comments on “Quick Cryptic No. 90 by Oran – pleasant pot pourri”

  1. re 17dn: cream is off-white, yes, and it is the flower of something as in eg the cream of the crop = the flower of youth
    1. Not convinced Jerry, about the flower of youth. Flower of Scotland maybe? Mrs K thinks it is cream as a liquid that flows, a flower… my ‘cream flour’ is an Irish-ism I think, but widely used.
      Or, if you are ORAN, I surrender!

      Edited at 2014-07-11 08:59 am (UTC)

      1. I’m sure Jerry’s right, Pip. See ODO:
        > Flower: ‘the finest individuals out of a number of people or things’.
        > Cream: ‘the very best of a group of people or things’

        Edited at 2014-07-11 09:06 am (UTC)

      2. I was all set to provide supporting evidence but I see keriothe already has.. still this is Collins, which I had already copied:

        the prime; peak ⇒ “in the flower of his youth”
        the choice or finest product, part, or representative ⇒ “the flower of the young men”

        M’lud, despite not being Oran, I rest my case & consider it proven 🙂

  2. About 25 minutes but with 4a 12a and 17d unparsed. Took some time to twig the setter’s reference in 9a. LIE IN last one and favourite ALLEGRO.

    Thinking about 17d post solve I see cream and flower as synonyms of best.

  3. 5 mins, held up slightly at the end by the ALLEGRO/ILLS and TURNER/EMULATE crossers. I parsed CREAM the same way as Jerry and Keriothe. Another enjoyable QC.
  4. Found this more straightforward than most of the recent ones – nice puzzle to ease into the weekend prior to the weekly battle with the rigours of the main cryptics on Sat & Sun.

    Did not spot the cream / flower “best” thing – but I think that must be right. I’d parsed it (somewhat uncertainly) on the basis of cream being a substance that flows – which admittedly ignores the reality of clotted cream which helped harden my arteries when growing up in Somerset…

    The Postal reference in 4ac I fortunately knew as a result of an enquiry I made just last week as to why a newly hired software developer in our company had rapidly earned the nickname “Postal Paul” (he is a “scary looking dude who keeps himself to himself” explained my younger colleagues): without that, I wouldn’t have had a clue!

    1. I agree.

      nb: your comments will get more attention if you give a name. I don’t even read anonymous contributions normally

    1. Sorry, I don’t wish to be a wet blanket but that’s wrong. There is no comparison whatsoever between a river flowing (down to the sea, for example) and whatever happens to cream.
  8. Nice and straightforward. 34 minutes for me, so near personal best. The longer clues popped right in, making the rest that much easier. I agree with cream as in cream of the crop…..
  9. As someone new to the quick cryptic, I found this one quite satisfying. Got stuck on “emulate”. Did not pick up link between dead in clue and late in answer. Cream also caught me out but guessed from letters I had and the confirmed with the solution. Love “Time for the Times” as it explains the answers. Thank you to all.
  10. When one accesses this site by googling it the options given for ‘from” are live journal, facebook, twitter, openID, google+, mail.Ru, VKontakte or anonymous. I don’t do facebook or twitter and don’t even know what the others are, so this is why this particular contributor comes as ‘anonymous’ as I suspect others do to. My initials are JC if anyone is interested.
  11. I tried to explain why this comes as ‘anonymous’ and got a message saying that my contribution was categorised as SPAM. One doesn’t get an option to identify oneself on the Comment Form.
    1. Your message will be sidelined as spam if you include a hyperlink or any dodgy words. Can’t see this in your previous message (now unspammed) but mentioning so many website names may have triggered the defences.

      You can identify yourself by writing a name at the foot of your message. So…

      jackkt

      Edited at 2014-07-11 01:15 pm (UTC)

      1. Perhaps the mail dot ru bit – I’ve seen similar spammed messages where the only possibly dodgy thing was a construction with a dot and no spaces on either side.

        Edited at 2014-07-11 05:23 pm (UTC)

  12. I slowed myself a bit by blithely entering ‘sums’ here. It sort of works, so long as you allow sum = I am. And often one gets sums = problems, not that they really are.
  13. I assumed flower meant as in the “flower of youth” ie. the “cream of the crop” perhaps?
  14. TURNER – TURN (go) with ER (queen). Joseph Mallord William Turner, the painter most famous perhaps for his ‘Fighting Temeraire’ and celebrated now at the posh gallery in Margate, well worth a visit. (The gallery, I mean).

    For ‘artist to go with the queen’ I had ‘Prince’. Seemed to work quite nicely, but slowed me right down… Thanks for the blog, belatedly. Working my way through the Times Quick Cryptic books during lockdown.

    Tim

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