Saturday Times 25053 (7th Jan)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
At last! I can finally get onto the site to post. When I first tried at 7 o’clock this morning the site was up, but only showing Jack’s blog from yesterday and nothing else. I couldn’t even access the comments from that. The new post page was also available but just came back without posting anything.

17:52 for the first Saturday puzzle of the new year. Not too hard, but I got a bit stuck for a while in the NE corner, as well as the unknown 13D, which went in by guesswork and a bit of hope that I’d unravelled the wordplay correctly.

Across
1 UPPITY – (p)UPPY (headless dog) around IT.
4 POT BELLY – OP (work) reversed + B(oot) inside TELLY (box). Great definition of which I unfortunately have personal experience!
10 METHOD ACTOR – (a doctor, them)*.
11 NAG – GAN(g) reversed.
12 RAFFLED – RAF (fliers) + FLED (went fast).
14 FEATHER – FATHER (old man) around E(nergy). In rowing, it’s to turn the oars parallel to the water to lessen resistance.
15 EVERY INCH A KING – INCH is a Scottish/Irish/Crosswordese word for an island. Quotation from King Lear Act IV Scene 6, by which time Lear is anything but!
17 COMMON OR GARDEN – pick a green space, what’ll you have…?
21 GABRIEL – G(ood), then B(ye) inside ARIEL (an airy spirit). More Shakespeare, this time from The Tempest. Shouldn’t Gabriel be an archangel, or would that be too much of a giveaway?
22 CHELSEA – CH (chess abbreviation) + ELSE (different) + A(nswer).
23 TEA – TEA(t).
24 TRAVEL AGENT – (great Levant)*, &lit.
26 ANDERSEN – AND (with) + ERSE (Irish) + N(ame). Writer with Danish name.
27 BETONY – BET ON (trust in) + Y (unknown).

Down
1 UNMARRED – UNMARRIED without the I.
2 PUT – PUNT (kick) minus the N (last letter of conversion).
3 TROLLEY – “off one’s trolley” means mad.
5 OUT OF CHARACTER – you can make “the car car” out of “character”.
6 BARRACK – B(ritish) + ARRACK (spirit made from fermented palm juice). Strange definition, but Chambers says it’s OK as Australian/NZ slang. The usual meaning over here is the opposite.
7 LANTHANIDES – (hasn’t lead in)*. A group of elements comprising 15 of the 17 rare earths (and not including lead).
8 YOGURT – GO up (climb) inside YURT (tent).
9 GARDENING LEAVE – cryptic definition.
13 FREE ON BOARD – FREE (not obliged) + ON BOARD (in agreement with). Not a term I’d come across before, and I agonised over it for a while. Last one in.
16 INFANTRY – IN TRY (attempt) around FAN (cooler).
18 MOISTER – RETSINA minus NA (not available) + OM (Order (of Merit)), all reversed.
19 ACETATE – hidden reversed in “diet, ate cake”.
20 AGATHA – AHA (expression of surprise) around GAT (gun).
25 EGO – E(nglish) + GO (a Japanese board game).

10 comments on “Saturday Times 25053 (7th Jan)”

  1. I thought this was a bit pedestrian and churned through it in about 25 minutes

    I don’t think 6D is satisfactory as a clue. If the setter wants to use an antipodean meaning that is almost the very opposite of the UK meaning then that should be signalled. So “Down under encourage British spirit” for example. When combined with the use of a somewhat obscure “arrack” this made for a very difficult clue. Personally I knew about the opposite meaning of barrack from comments made by some of our OZ bloggers – thanks lads!

  2. Yes, there’s not much to frighten the horses here except LANTHANIDES and YURT were unknowns and BETONY had disappeared into the dark recesses of my mind. Having completed both this and today’s puzzle in 34 minutes each and with reasonable ease it seems Saturdays are going through an easier spell at the moment.

    We had a debate about BARRACK here re puzzle 25044 but I just checked the dictionaries again. Collins has this meaning as ‘Brit, Austral, NZ informal’ which I think justifies not indicating as Jimbo suggests, but all the usual sources have this as ‘barrack for’ so I’d say the clue is inaccurate in that respect.

    Edited at 2012-01-14 02:24 pm (UTC)

  3. Just over the half hour mark for this, with difficulty on the unknowns: BETONY, FREE ON BOARD, LANTHANIDES.
    I’m 100% with Jimbo on 6dn. I was relieved and a little surprised to get it right because it was pretty much a pure guess for me.
  4. I’ll second Jimbo’s objection (or third); I was happy enough to have remembered BARRACK from an earlier cryptic (it’s not in US dialects, to my knowledge), and then to have it mean the opposite? I was also puzzled by NAG being defined as a feeling (a nagging feeling, yes; but a nag?), and EGO as morale, but there was no doubt about either. I knew about yurts, luckily; and I’d give 8d a COD.
    1. COED has NAG: a persistent feeling of anxiety -‘he felt a little nag of doubt’.

      Collins has EGO: morale – ‘to boost one’s ego’.

      2. That’s why I put it in the past tense: ‘was puzzled’. I assumed that Collins or Chambers or someone would enable the setter to cover his proverbial.
  5. I have ‘good puzzle’ written at the top of my print-out of this one, even though I had, like Kevin, question marks against EGO and NAG and had not a clue how OUT OF CHARACTER worked.

    Thanks to Jack for indicating that the multifocals need to be replaced by dedicated reading glasses, after my foray into Chambers resulted in my thinking the NZ usage of ‘barrack’ required ‘for’ – and the Australian not – while in fact the dictionary makes it quite clear that in both ‘dialects’ the verb is intransitive. 87 minutes.

  6. 16:33 for me. With two clues to go, I was heading for a reasonable time, but I’d managed to read the enumeration for 5ac (POT BELLY) as (5,3) – doh! not the first time I’ve done something similar – and I was panicked by the mention of “food” in 8dn (YOGURT) – which I parsed correctly but failed to remember YURT.

    I’ve no real objection to 6dn even though I’ve only come across the “Aust and NZ” meaning fairly recently.

    1. I feel for you Tony. I hate it when that happens, as I always mark up the grid with bars at the start (a habit I picked up from my dad about 35 years ago). It more usual for me to mark up the wrong answer than to get the bar in the wrong place though, although both are a nightmare to recover from.

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