Saturday Times 24843 (May 7th)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
No time for this one. I solved it on the train on Monday morning, having already tackled Monday’s and Sunday’s puzzles. By that time I was too tired to concentrate (I’m not a morning person), and even nodded off at one stage. However, I got about half way through it in half an hour or so, then had another look on the way home in the evening, and polished the rest off in 5 minutes. I’m sure Jimbo will have appreciated 10ac!

Across
1 CLANSMEN – C(old) + LAN(d)SMEN
5 EMBALM – cryptic definition, albeit a very transparent one.
10 WEAK INTERACTION – WE (us) + AKIN (alike) + [E(nergy) inside TRACTION]. As I’m sure everyone knows, this is one of the fundamental forces of nature. Chambers says “an interaction between particles complete in about 10-10 seconds, such interactions involving neutrinos and antineutrinos and being responsible for radioactive β-decay”.
11 RATTLER – double definition, although it could pass for a single definition too!
12 MEDULLA – ME (this person) + “duller”. Dodgy homophone aside, this isn’t strictly true. A medulla (Latin for marrow) is the inner portion of an organ, hair or tissue, and an anatomical term for bone marrow. The bit of brain is the medulla oblongata, which tapers off into the spinal cord.
13 LEAD-FREE – LAD + FREE around (stor)E.
15 NYALA – (any)* + L.A. A large S. African antelope.
18 MEDOC – ME DOC (one of the seven dwarfs). A variety of red wine.
20 PRESS-UPS – PRESS around SUP.
23 LACONIC – L(eft) + A + CONIC (section).
25 PALERMO – PALER + MO
26 CIRCUIT TRAINING – RAINING (pouring) next to CIRCUIT (course) + T(ime).
27 TILLER – triple definition – Shoot / old girl (see Tiller Girls) / (in) boat’s bar.
28 RECKONER – ON inside (w)RECKER.

Down
1 COWARD – RAW (inexperienced) reversed inside COD (jest), for Sir Noël Coward.
2 APARTHEID – A PART (a role) + HEID (Scots word for head).
3 SKILLED – SKI (use poles) + DELL reversed.
4 ESTER – ESTE (Ferrara family, probably more familiar to American solvers – at least, they seem to have appeared in nearly every American puzzle I’ve ever solved) + R(uns).
6 MACEDON – M(ark) + ACE (one superior to king) + DON (assume).
7 ARIEL – (Lear I)*. A spirit who appears in The Tempest.
8 MANDALAY – MANDALA (religious circle) + (pra)Y. I’m not sure, but I think the setter might be confusing this with Manderley, the house in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the first line of which is “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Edit: I stand corrected (see falooker’s comment) – Rudyard Kipling’s poem Mandalay is the correct reference. Here’s the first verse:

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
“Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can’t you ‘ear their paddles chunkin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!
9 PREMIERE – MI (note) inside PRE, ERE (twice “before”). Last one I got.
14 RAPACITY – RAP (criticise) + A CITY (London, say).
16 ASPERSION – AS PERSON (like chap) around I.
17 IMPLICIT – PL + I + C(laim), inside I + MIT (college, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
19 CONSUME – CONE (an ice) around SUM (quantity).
21 SELKIRK – KRIS (dagger) reversed around ELK. Alexander Selkirk was a Scottish castaway whose story was supposedly the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
22 FORGER – double definition, one mildly cryptic.
24 CORAL – COR (My!) + AL(e).
25 PER SE – PERE around S(on). There were two novelists in the family, father and son, so they’re known as Alexandre Dumas père and Alexandre Dumas fils. It was the father who wrote The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo etc.

8 comments on “Saturday Times 24843 (May 7th)”

  1. Surely MANDALAY is a reference to “The Road to Mandalay” which has the line “Come ye back to Mandalay”.Have just done this puzzle. An enjoyable 40 minutes. Didn’t know WEAK INTERACTION but easily got from the cryptic. Amazing the things you learn from this crossword!
    1. Thanks, falooker. I’d forgotten about the Kipling poem. In my defence, I read Rebecca less than a year ago, and also not long afterwards watched the Hitchcock film, both of which have the quotation I had in mind as their opening lines.
  2. Just under the half hour mark for this. An aggreeably knotty Saturday puzzle.
    I almost came a cropper, because I initially had REASONER for 28ac. I’ve probably come across “kris” before, but it didn’t spring to mind and the SELKIRK connection is a disgraceful obscurity something I really ought to have known but didn’t. Fortunately I went back and checked and found that my thought of “treasoner” for “saboteur” was weak and didn’t fit the wordplay. With the K in the right place and the deer I managed to guess SELKIRK, my last in.
  3. Just 30′, quite speedy for me.The only clues I flagged for pondering over were 27ac–learned the ‘shoot’ meaning, never got the ‘girl’ meaning–and 9d; thanks, linxit. I was a bit misled by the ‘college’ in 17d referring to MIT, a university, but I believe this objection has been raised before here and dealt with.
    The April 18 issue of The New Yorker has a piece on Selkirk and Robinson Crusoe, but I didn’t start to read it until yesterday; but Selkirk’s name was somehow in my memory. COD to 21d, 10ac, and 28ac.
  4. Hang on – isn’t this No. 24843?

    13:14 for me – which seems a bit slow for a reasonably straightforward puzzle, but I seem to be off the pace at the moment. I enjoyed it nonetheless.

  5. Three cheers for the setter for using WEAK INTERACTION. I never thought I’d see such scientific terms in the Times. A pity the definition of MEDULLA is a bit awry but one can’t have everything.

    Loved the reference to the TILLER Girls. My grandmother thought it a disgrace for such women to appear on TV – what was the world coming to!

  6. Tuning in to provide solace to anyone else who might have come a cropper on this one. I notice with shame a whopping 10 As (for aids) on my piece of paper. Had ‘mass gravitation’ at 10 for a while, until checking letters sent me off to Google …

    Liked yesterday’s a lot, though.

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