Saturday Times 24706 (27th Nov)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Solving time 12:25. Another in a run of fairly gentle Saturday puzzles. Some GK required for this one, but none of it very 18D.

Across
1 JOCOSE – JOE (i.e. GI Joe) around CO’S (military leaders).
4 CHAMPERS – C(onservative) + HAMPERS.
10 RESILIENT – R.E. (Royal Engineers) + SILENT (mum) around I.
11 LORCA – LOR(e) + CA (about). Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), Spanish poet.
12 ONE – seen twice inside honeymooner. Joke is the definition, as in “have you heard this one?”
13 DRAG AND DROP – DROP (fall) after DRAG (tedious person) + AND (with). Computing terminology.
14 TOBAGO – GAB reversed inside TOO (extremely). Pretty small island – at 116 sq mi, about 3/4 the size of the Isle of Wight.
16 EMOTIVE – E + MOTIVE
19 SMETANA – (A N team’s)*. Scorer = Czech composer Bedřich Smetana (1824-84).
20 BETTER – double definition.
22 TIGHT-FISTED – TIGHT (drunk) + FISTED (punched).
25 RIO – alternate letters of “Try it on”.
26 RANGE – double definition.
27 CULMINATE – (clue)* around (man, it)*
28 CRAFTILY – CRY (keen) around (AIL around FT). Russian doll wordplay there.
29 INSECT – IN (burning) + SECT (group of heretics?). We’ve had discussion before here about IN for burning. Seems it’s a Northern usage, e.g. “the fire is in.”

Down
1 JARROW – JAR over ROW. The Venerable Bede died at Jarrow on 26th May 735.
2 CASSEROLE – ASS inside C.E. ROLE. I wasted a bit of time trying to make an anagram out of “dish idiot”, but that was never going to work.
3 SALAD – DALLAS reversed after losing one of the L’s.
5 HOT-WATER BOTTLE – HOT WATER (trouble) + BOTTLE (heart).
6 MALADROIT – (radio)* inside MALT.
7 ERROR – (t)ERROR.
8 SHARP-SET – SET (band) around HARPS. Definition is “keen to scoff”, which fits with Chambers’ definition: hungry; keen in appetite for anything, esp food or sexual indulgence.”
9 MEGALOMANIACAL – (A MacMillan ego, a)*
15 APARTMENT – ART + MEN inside APT. Good lift-and-separate of “fitting rooms”.
17 INEBRIATE – BE reversed inside (inertia)*. Unusual to see it as a noun.
18 ESOTERIC – E (point) + SOT + ERIC.
21 MOMENT – double definition.
23 GENOA – (wh)EN inside GOA. A large jib which overlaps the mainsail.
24 DJINN – DJ (Jock as in disc jockey) + INN.

7 comments on “Saturday Times 24706 (27th Nov)”

  1. no problem here apart from delay caused by an unfortunate tendency to spell megalomaniacal as megalomanaical
  2. 45 minutes. Might have been much quicker but for some careless errors on my part. Didn’t know GENOA as a sail (spent an age trying to justify GANGA, half remembering something in The Waste Land) and SHARP-SET is a term I have never used. Some unusual touches and clever diversions in this puzzle: 12 a “double hidden”, 29 (clueing IN as burning), 14 (TOO as extremely).
  4. 2.5 hours, so the coffee was a tad tepid by the time I clocked off. Had to resort to aids to get LORCA and SHARP-SET, neither of which I’d heard of. Gettable from the cryptic, of course, but I was never very close to either.
  5. I never finished this. I did all but three or four without too much trouble in about twenty minutes but then someone threw the newspaper away before I got back to it.
    The paper got binned this week as well for particular reasons I won’t trouble you with (let’s just say the cat is in the doghouse) so I’ve been trying to solve online properly for the first time. The site lost my half-finished solution, so I started again, and then when I tried to save it I got an error message and then my original solution reappeared again! I still haven’t finished it – I’m totally stuck on one clue.
  6. A brisk 29 minutes for this, giving rise to a feeling of optimism that was dashed to pieces by the following week’s daily puzzles. Last in was SHARP-SET, whose craftiness only became evident after I’d checked the meaning in the dictionary.

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