Saturday Times 24287 (25th July)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Solving time 21:18, which felt quite fast for this tricky puzzle. I had a slight advantage in that someone mentioned in a comment on last week’s blog that it was a stinker, so I was prepared. Even so, the first one I got was the anagram at 14A. Unlike the previous week, most of the difficulty came from obscure vocabulary in the answers, although in the end the only one I had to check afterwards was CORBEL.

Across
1 HATPEG – odd letters of HeArTy PlEdGe.
6 I DECLARE – 1 DEC + (earl)*
9 TEQUILA – TEA around QUIL(t).
11 UNROPED – D(eparts) + EU (Brussels) around PORN, all reversed. Brussels is the de facto capital of the EU, but that’s a bit like clueing England with London.
12 OBEYS – (dela)Y inside OBE’S. Trying to be an &lit, but it’s a bit loose.
13 THE TATLER – (letter tha[t])*. Posh magazine first published in 1709.
14 GASTRONOME – (orange most)*
16 TORI – TRIO with the O shifted. Three little bears? I’ve heard of the three little pigs or Goldilocks and the three bears, but…
19 ROLF – L inside FOR reversed. Rolf is a German name I suppose, but the one everyone’s heard of is Australian.
20 PSYCHOPATH – S(car)Y + CHOP inside PATH.
22 MUSSOLINI – U (accepted) + LOSS reversed, inside MINI.
23 DOVER – DOVE (American past tense of dive) + (ou)R
25 COOL BAG – GAB (gossip) + LOO (gents) + C(lubs), all reversed.
26 AGREE TO – A + GREET + O
27 OUTPLAYS – P (little money) in OUTLAYS
28 FLUKED – FLED around UK.

Down
1 HOTDOGGER – HOT + GG in DOER. A show-off on a surfboard.
2 TOQUE – QU inside TOE. This one made me smile. Explanation here if you don’t know why a toe is a little piggy going to market.
3 EMISSARY – M.E. reversed + (Syria’s)*
5 DEUS EX MACHINA – (due)* + SEX (relations) + MA + CHINA (friend). Can anyone explain “late delivery” as the definition?
6 CARPAL – CARP + L(ine) around A(rea).
7 APPALOOSA – OO (pair of ducks) inside APPAL + S.A. (it).
8 ELDER – W(ith) removed from WELDER.
10 ASTONISHINGLY – AS (when) + NOT reversed + I + SHINGLY (like beaches, perhaps). Very good.
15 SPLASH OUT – SPOUT around LASH.
17 ISHERWOOD – IS HER WOOD.
18 FOLDEROL – hidden reversed in unexpLORED LOFt.
21 CORBEL – CO-REBEL without one of the E’s. Last one in for me, and solved from the wordplay. It’s a projection from the face of a wall, supporting a weight. I think I did vaguely know that, but only after checking it in the dictionary.
22 MACHO – MAC (protector in downfall) + HO (bit of a laugh).
24 V-NECK – V(ery) + NECK (down, in the sense of chugging ale).

9 comments on “Saturday Times 24287 (25th July)”

  1. 20:50 for me on this one. Last answers were: 27, 21, a correct guess at 15 not written in as lacking wordplay understanding, 22A, 22D, confirmation and writing of 15, 25.

    “Late delivery” in 5 must be “late rescue” – d ex m being defined as “an unexpected power or event sqaving a seeingle hopeless situation, especially as a narrative device in a play or novel.” There’s an implication that this usually happens near the end.

  3. 37:41 .. Last in, after much head scratching, were APPALOOSA and TORI.

    Round of applause for both ASTONISHINGLY and PSYCHOPATH.

    Good challenge.

  4. An enjoyable tricky but I thought fair puzzle that provided a good test. The thorough blog says it all.
  5. 40 minutes hard slog for all except TORI, APPALOOSA and CORBEL, which I didn’t know so were perhaps forgivable, but ISHERWOOD was also missing and he’s one of my all time favourite writers so that was not, and I need to borrow both the dunce’s cap and the self-kicking boot.
  6. Drew a total blank on tori. I figured out I had to move the o in a word suggesting the little bears but only considered moving it from the front or letter 3. Tori isn’t a word I know and unless someone can enlighten me I’m with Linxit in finding the bears bit misleading.

    It can be amusing getting “helpful” suggestions from frends who don’t quite get how cryptics work. One suggested that 16 had to be Yogi on the grounds that he’s a bear and probably stole doughnuts from picnickers.

    Recalled D ex m from having read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop at school.

    Tough puzzle but enjoyable – today’s much less so on both counts.

    1. I eventually got TORI (my last entry) but, I must confess, not before I had toyed for a while with YOGI, like your friend, if only because I couldn’t initially think of anything else. As I understand it, TORI is the plural of “torus”, which is a continuous, hollow, doughnut-shaped cylinder. I only know this because, back in the late 1970s, I was working as a journalist in Brussels where at the time there was much excitement over something called the Joint European Torus or JET, which was going to solve all our energy problems for ever. An experimental plant bearing this name was built at Culham outside Oxford. It was not dissimilar, on a much smaller scale, to the thing near Geneva that was supposed to tell us what happened when the universe was created but which unfortunately blew a fuse a year or so ago. Basically, the idea behind JET was to hurl sub-atomic particles round the doughnut and get them to collide at astronomic speeds, in an attempt to replicate nuclear fusion, the energy source of the sun. Wedgie Benn, then our Technology Minister, was a huge enthusiast. It was said, as I recall, that one of the main fuels for nuclear fusion was extractable, in inexhaustible quantities, from seawater. It all seemed too good to be true, and so, alas, it seems to have proved to date. At any rate, as far as I know, we are still no nearer harnessing nuclear fusion for practical use than we were 35 years ago.

      I agree with you, and Linxit, about the misleading “little bears” reference. It seems that this can only be an allusion to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but only one of these, Baby Bear, was little. The other two were Mummy Bear and Daddy Bear. But perhaps there is some other reference which is eluding us all.

      That quibble aside, this was a tough but enjoyable puzzle and, as Jimbo says, entirely fair.

  7. As far as I recall from schoolday Greek and Latin lessons, the “deus ex machina” in Greek tragedy was quite literally what it says on the tin: a crane lowered actors playing gods or goddesses onto the stage at the end of play so that they could rescue the hero/heroine from an impossible situation or resolve a hopelessly tangled plot. Horace, in his Ars Poetica, inveighs against the device, telling poets and playwrights that they should avoid improbable plots that can only be brought to a dénouement in this manner.

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