Saturday Times 25275 (22nd Sept)

Solving time 15:28, so fairly straightforward considering it’s a pangram, as they are often quite tricky. As I had a bit of time on my hands today, I’ve decided to introduce a small innovation that readers of Fifteensquared will be familiar with – hover over the clue number and the clue will appear. I think I might introduce this permanently in my blogs from now on (when time permits), as it’s hard to remember what the clue was from a week ago when you’re just given the wordplay.

Across
1 WHITE MAGIC – I (one) + GAME (pastime) inside (witch)*, &lit.
7 AFRO – hidden inside permafrost.
9 HOSPITAL – (this OAP)* + L(arge).
10 IMPALE – I(ce-crea)M + PALE (pasty).
11 MISLAY – M1 (road) + SLAY (kill).
13 IGNORANT – (s)IGNOR(a) (d)ANT(e), i.e. SIGNORA DANTE (Dante’s wife), with the ends removed from both words.
14 LAST JUDGMENT – LAST (final) + JUDGMENT (sentence).
17 INTROVERSION – VERSION (model) behind INTRO (bars to start with).
20 DIHEDRAL – DI (girl) + (her lad)*.
21 CASALS – CASA (Spanish for house) + L(ie)S. I could only think of a couple of famous Pablos, and PICASSO doesn’t fit!
22 IN TOTO – IN (at home) + TOTO (Dorothy’s dog in The Wizard of Oz).
23 QUIXOTIC – double definition, the second one whimsical.
25 BASK – AS (whilst) inside BK (abbreviation for book).
26 TOY SOLDIER – cryptic definition.

Down
2 HOOLIGAN – “hooley” (party broadcast) + alternate letters of granny.
3 TUP – PUT (threw weight, i.e. shot put) reversed.
4 MATEY – MATE (a type of Paraguayan tea) + (sympath)Y.
5 GELDING – GEL (lass who’s posh) + DING(y) (dim almost).
6 CLIENTELE – (I, excellent)*, losing the X for ten.
7 APPARATUSES – PA (old man) reversed + PAUSES (has a rest), around RAT (canary, both synonyms for an informer).
8 RELENT – RECENT (happening not long ago), changing the C to L (i.e. Conservative to Labour).
12 LATTICEWORK – (Walk, trot)* around ICE (frozen surface).
15 UTTERMOST – UTTER (say) + MOST (mass).
16 POOLSIDE – SID (bloke) inside POOLE (seaside town, in Dorset).
18 OBLOQUY – O(ld) + BUY (corrupt, e.g. bribe) around first letters of “leave office quitting”. Tricky wordplay that I only figured out while doing the blog.
19 ZINNIA – Z (unknown) + IN N.I. (in Northern Ireland) + A(rderin).
21 CHINOCHINOOK (Indian) without OK (fine).
24 OLD – alternate letters of collude.

21 comments on “Saturday Times 25275 (22nd Sept)”

  1. 29:06 .. I found it much harder than you did, linxit. I had particular difficulty with the SW corner – ZINNIA etc.

    Love the innovation, linxit. Doesn’t it take a long time to do?

    It’s probably been suggested before, but wouldn’t it be helpful if the online puzzle included a saveable jotter pad. It sounds feasible. It would be useful for solving (I always have a text editor window open for jotting anyway when solving online) and it would be somewhere to save your thoughts on a puzzle where you wouldn’t have to go digging for them later. I realise it wouldn’t help paper solvers, but at least they can keep a stack of previous puzzles to hand.

    1. It won’t take more than 5 minutes longer, but it took me about an hour this morning as I had to figure out how best to do it, then edit my blog template accordingly first. All I need to do now is line up the LiveJournal entry window and the puzzle window from the Times site next to each other and copy-n-paste.

      I don’t recall your jotter pad suggestion being mentioned when Peter first put together a list of suggestions for the redesign of the Times Crossword Club site. I never solve online myself (except for the quick crosswords) so it’s of no interest to me. I always print them out, then scan in the completed puzzles as PDFs.

      1. Then I’ll upgrade it to ‘formal suggestion’. It doesn’t sound so hard to have a, say, 300 character text box that saves to the database along with one’s solution… but then, a lot of things don’t sound that hard when you say them fast. I’ll leave it to the experts to explain why it’s a nightmare/unfeasible/a threat to global security/dumb/laughable.
  2. Not too difficult, about half an hour. The things that held me up were

    (i) LAST JUDGMENT; it just didn’t look right, though I see my Chambers does not capitalise “last judgement”; so Last Judgment must be the one we’re all waiting for.

    (ii) Took a while to parse APPARATUSES. I don’t think I knew that apparatus had a plural, and I thought that canary was alluding to someone who wore a yellow uniform. (Have I imagined it, or did nursing auxiliaries used to wear yellow and get called canaries?). Or, given the arch reference to “Friend of Dorothy”, I did wonder whether it might be rhyming slang.

    I’ve only ever met DIHEDRAL as an angle in aircraft design.

    Liked CASALS, which was clever, and HOOLIGAN for the image of Giles’s Grandma setting about the television after a party political broadcast.

    Being able to see the clues again is a brilliant innovation; thank you for that.

  3. I liked this one, 22 mins in all though I spent some time wondering what an “impykb” was (10ac) and choosing between the two different hairdos available in 7ac. And, isn’t 4dn a very beautiful clue?
    Sadly I discovered, only after submission, that I couldn’t spell obloquy.
    More famous Pablos: Neruda, Escobar..

    Re the clues, Andy, how do you do it exactly? surely not retyping all the clues? They are easy to capture in digital form of course, and maybe could be pasted into a spreadsheet in order. Whether I could do that at midnight is another matter, but it might suit for the Club Monthly.

    Edited at 2012-09-29 12:45 pm (UTC)

    1. It’s just a bit of html markup, which would be rendered here if I tried to show you, so I’ve emailed you separately with the details.
      1. For those who want to know how to do it — though I’m not sure I’ll get to it just yet:
        In place of the clue number (in this case: 7), use the following code, but with HTML angle-brackets in place of the square brackets:

        [span title=”Barnet’s gripped by permafrost (4)”]7[/span]

  4. I found out that ORANT was Christian Art (of the sort found in Florence) and that Dante’s wife’s name was Gemma. So parsing was IN ORANT with stripped G(emma) Your solution was more elegant, mine totally obscure!
  5. I had a very busy weekend last week, and only had a 20-minute window for this. As a result I rushed through it in 15 minutes and made THREE mistakes:
    > CASTLE instead of CASALS. Pablo is a Spanish name, CASTILE might be where he lives… I’ll get me coat.
    > OBLIQUY. A combination of not being able to spell and rushing too much to look at the wordplay properly.
    > TOY POODLES. I didn’t know a terrier was a soldier, and the absence of that knowledge makes the clue pretty much impossible. This was the best I could come up with.
    Thankfully I picked the right unknown for 19dn: XINNIA, YINNIA or NINNIA would have made it four.
    I very much like the innovation, linxit. Very handy indeed, particularly for a prize puzzle.

    Edited at 2012-09-29 02:45 pm (UTC)

  6. I found this hard and required assistance on the last couple of clues as the 60 minutes barrier approached. This was yet another puzzle where some answers were clear but I spent ages afterwards working out the wordplay. Didn’t know MATE for ‘tea’ at 4dn but greatly enjoyed the definition part of that clue.
  7. I failed to finish this without aids. After 25 minutes I had just the NE corner left. !0 minutes later there was no progress so I had to resort to aids. I discovered there was no word fitting the checkers in 7d. That’s the point when I realised that the hairstyle at 7a was not a PERM but an AFRO. After that it all fell into place quite easily. Done this morning from a printout but I think linxit’s innovation will be very welcome and maybe attract a few more comments on a Saturday. There were some lovely surfaces here. I was amused to see the “friend of Dorothy” making an appearance. Very cheeky!
  8. Can someone help me with who or what a / the Barnet is? I will say that guessing the equally hidden Erma did not help my completing this week’s!
    Also, the remind-a-clue bit is very nice.

    Thanks,
    Thoughtful in London

  9. Thank you. The difficulties of being American go beyond missing the occasional ‘ou’ v ‘o’, or ‘s’ v ‘z’. (The quid pro quo is knowing all the US States and abbreviations).
    Thoughtful in London
    1. Here’s one American who doesn’t know all the abbreviations. Of course the main difficulty of being American will be seen in the upcoming election.
  10. (As ever on weekends.) But a great puzzle with full marks to the difficulty of SIGNORA DANTE. What kind of mind can come up with that?

    Baulked at first on “kebab” as a verb (10ac) but it seems it’s OK. Also not familiar with the canary/rat thing (7dn) — outwith any of my dialects.

  11. Lost track of the time after an initial 45′, but no doubt well over the hour. Couldn’t (until I came here) justify INTROVERSION to myself, although I knew it had to be. But my real problem came with 8d: I initially had ‘decent’ (=moderate; a decent amount of money), where the R of ‘recent’ stood for Republican, and changed to the D of Democrat; American blinkers at work again. IN TOTO reminded me: Was anyone besides me bothered that at the end of the movie, when everything seems to be tickety-boo, the nasty Miss Thing still has a court order to put Toto down? Thanks for the clue innovation, linxit; very helpful.
  12. 69 minutes but another careless obliquy. DNK terrier = member of TA tho it makes sense now nor hooley. Nice puzzle, helpful blog.

    Edited at 2012-09-30 06:59 am (UTC)

  13. 12:22 for me – rather disappointing because I went off at a brisk pace but then slowed almost to a halt in the SE corner. A delightful puzzle full of goodies – my compliments to the setter.

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