Saturday Times 25466 (4th May)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
This one went in fairly quickly until the last clue, 10ac. I agonised over that for about 10 minutes before putting in the answer as the best approximation I could think of, although in hindsight I don’t know what the problem was really. Apart from that there were no problems (apart from an enumeration error at 15ac, which maybe another dictionary allows).

Across
1 MALAPROPOS – hidden in “formal, a proposal”.
6 AGRA – A GRA(b). Indian city, site of the Taj Mahal.
9 PROPENSITY – R(un) + OPENS (begins) inside PITY (shame).
10 PARK – double definition.
12 REVISED VERSION – (Sion ver)* is suggested by the answer, if taken as a bit of wordplay.
14 POSSET – PO’S (ship’s officers) + SET (prepared).
15 LA-LA-LAND – LAND (come down), as said by a stutterer. Chambers has the enumeration as (2-2,4) though.
17 REMOTELY – (metro)* + ELY (city).
19 STIFLE – (itself)*
22 SUMMARY OFFENCE – SUMMARY (brief account) + OF (from) + FENCE (middleman).
24 ALLY – (fac)E removed from ALLEY (marble).
25 SONATA FORM – SON (boy) + AT A FORM (attending class).
26 TIDY – double definition.
27 LEVERKUSEN – LEVER (one applying force) + (nukes)*. Fairly well-known from their football team Bayer Leverkusen.

Down
1 MOPE – MOP (shock (of hair)) + (chees)E.
2 LIONESS – LONE (by herself) + SS (ship), around I (one).
3 PRESIDENTIAL – (dinner plate is)*, minus one N for name.
4 OUSTER – (j)OUSTER. A legal term meaning ejection or dispossession.
5 OCTAVIAN – OCT (a month) + AVIAN (of bird). Name of Augustus before he became the first Roman emperor.
7 GRANITA – I in GRANT (Ulysses, US president), + A.
8 ATKINS DIET – ATKINS (Tommy, slang for a British soldier) + DIET (parliament). Well-known low-carb diet.
11 BREAK THE BANK – BREAK (holiday) + THE BANK (riverside).
13 SPORTSCAST – SPORTS (displays) + CAST (problem with vision).
16 CLAYMORE – CORE (essence) around LAY (bet) + M(illions).
18 MUMBLED – …but MUM BLED.
20 FACTORS – F(ine) + ACTORS (players).
21 OF LATE – OBLATE (one into monastic life) with F for following replacing the B for bishop.
23 OMEN – WOMEN (ladies) with the W removed.

20 comments on “Saturday Times 25466 (4th May)”

  1. A pb for me for a Saturday, where I seldom take less than half an hour; and today’s was under 17′! I wonder if there’s a new setter in town. My guess is that the setter may have been influenced by his own wordplay at 15; the second hyphen is surely an error. DNK 26ac or 27ac (and now I’m told it’s fairly well-known! That’s what I get for not following soccer). Chuckled at MUMBLED. And I, too, dithered over 10ac, my LOI, although only for 2 or 3 minutes, thinking of ‘walk’ for some reason first, trying to justify it, and finally getting PARK.
  2. I agree that the second hyphen in 15ac is mistaken. I had not appreciated that the phrase was originally coined as a specific reference to Los Angeles
    I found this very easy, 12 mins in all.

    Edited at 2013-05-11 06:58 am (UTC)

  3. No solving time for this as I dozed off, but that’s a sign that I must have got stuck at some point.

    POSSET has made a comeback in recent years on restaurant menus but don’t expect a drink if you order it as it’s now a creamy pudding resembling a syllabub.

    I didn’t know LEVERKUSEN despite extensive travels around Germany (I don’t follow soccer), but I knew the marble reference at 24ac because I have met it several times in previous Times crosswords.

    Only one dictionary (Slang on-line) supports LA-LA-LAND but I hadn’t noticed the additional hyphen until mentioned in the blog.

    Edited at 2013-05-11 07:06 am (UTC)

  4. I found this very tough, taking 90 minutes and getting two wrong, ‘yank’ for PARK and ‘oyster’ for OUSTER. Leverkusen, on the other hand, no problem for this football fan. They’re one of the few teams in Europe at the highest level which are, more or less, genuine works teams. Congratulations to Kevin and Jerry for top times.
    1. The other that springs to mind being PSV. Perhaps Dutch football not “at the top level” at the moment, but PSV are ex-European champions. (Trivia: won the European Cup in 1988 without winning a single European Cup game in 1988 and scoring only 2 goals in 480 minutes of football: 5 draws -> 2 wins on away goals, then draw at 90′ and AET in the final.)

      I’m with you on finding this tough, many unknowns OBLATE, MALAPROPOS (though knew APROPOS), TOMMY ATKINS, SONATA FORM, POSSET, even AGRA as a tourist area.
      PARK also LOI after an alphabetic traverse.

      Rob

      1. I’ll squirrel that nugget away, Rob, for future quizzes. Problem is they are mostly set here in HK be people with very little knowledge of sport so they are much more trivia than GQ based. Like, who scored the winning run in last week’s baseball game?
  5. Nearly half an hour and a couple of mistakes – unsurprisingly with OUSTER and PARK.

    When you reopen a completed puzzle (eg. this one) you see corrected answers in black but is there any way to see what you originally entered? I’m not sure what I put in for either of my mistakes. I thought I had entered OUSTER but apparently not. And I’m wondering if I put ‘bank’ at 10ac, which would seem more or less okay as a double def.

      1. Ah, thanks. Who knew?

        For some reason I had ‘ousted’ and I did indeed have ‘bank’, which I still feel is plausible.

  6. I took 23 minutes over this one – luckily being a mother of sons, I had heard of the football team with the German town’s name.
  7. Well, I just don’t like the definition of “temporarily leave” in 10ac as park. Like others I took ages before I put something in just to complete the puzzle. Didn’t think talk was right but then I didn’t much like park either.
    1. Really? How would you describe what people do with their cars?

      Edited at 2013-05-11 12:39 pm (UTC)

        1. At the risk of restarting examples of management speak, I’m sure I’ve stayed awake in meetings for long enough to hear one pointy-haired boss or another decide to “park that idea, going forward”…
          1. This was the way I read it. I don’t know if this meaning is in any of the dictionaries (it’s not in Chambers) but I hear it all the time, unfortunately.
            This clue took me a few minutes because I wanted to put in something else. I can’t now remember what it was, but it may have been BANK.
        2. Of course one can, but that doesn’t negate the most usual meanings of the word in that context as set out in Collins: vb to stop and leave (a vehicle) temporarily, to manoeuvre (a motor vehicle) into a space for it to be left. Also (tr) informal, to leave or put somewhere.
  8. Two errors for me (Ousted at 4dn and Pale at 24ac) and Posset and Sportscast missing. Took an age to see the hidden Malapropos.
    Loved Atkins Diet. I wonder if that answer ever appeared in a grid before the diet gained popularity in the early 2000’s?
    Hadn’t heard of a posset, but now that I’ve looked up its meaning (sweet spice hot milk curdled with ale or beer) it sounds rather nice!
  9. 19:52 for me. I had a senior moment with ATKINS DIET, but otherwise things had gone swimmingly and I was hoping for a decent time – that is, until I was left with 10ac. I desperately wanted this to be WALK (as in cricket), but reasoned that you wouldn’t really return to the “pitch” if you were fielding, and indeed you wouldn’t return to the field if this was the final innings, so I decided to work through the alphabet to find a better alternative.

    The annoying thing is that I’m almost certain I’ve come across “temporarily leave” = PARK before. I’ve certainly no objection to it – ODO has “bring (a vehicle that one is driving) to a halt and leave it temporarily, typically in a car park or by the side of the road” which is good enough for me – and actually rather like it.

  10. Not a great result, because I also had PALE, thinking the setter’s knowledge of the different types of marble might be limited to the pale variety, and the wordplay seemed so obvious. And I invented the word ‘sportsspot’, possibly a TV sports programme/spots before the eyes.

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