Saturday Times 25765 (19th April)

Posted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Solving time 14:05, so I found it much easier than the previous week’s one, although a lot of people commented on how tricky this one was (and the leaderboard tends to back them up). Good puzzle.

Across
1 UNCLE – UNCLEAN (spotted), minus A + N(ote). Def: relative.
4 ALBACORE – (A cable)* around OR (yellow). Def: tuna.
8 BLOW HOT AND COLD – BLOW (a powerful stroke) + HOT AND COLD (taps). Def: be inconsistent.
10 EASTBOUND – (to a sunbed)*. Def: not chasing the sun (as the sun goes from east to west).
11 OZONE – sound like “owes own”. Def: something refreshing.
12 LAPUTA – LA (city) + PUT (to place) + A (last letter of “sea”). Def: Island king could move – the flying island in Gulliver’s Travels.
14 CRABMEAT – CREAT(e) (fuss endlessly) around ABM (antiballistic missile). Def: hermit’s flesh?
17 PORTRAIT – I (one) inside RAT (desert), east of PORT (harbour). Def: oil perhaps.
18 CRUSOE – C (high speed – symbol for the speed of light) + RUSE (device) around O (nothing). Def: lonely islander.
20 NAAFI – cryptic definition. The acronym stands for Navy, Army and Air Force Institute.
22 SOAP OPERA – SO (it follows) + A POP (each) + ERA (time). Def: a TV programme.
24 COUNTERSIGNING – COUNTER (bar) + SIGNING (new recruit).
25 SNOWED IN – hidden inside “blizzards – now Edinburgh’s”. Def: this?
26 SCARF – FRACAS (scrap) reversed but with only one A. Def: stole.

Down
1 UMBRELLA PINE – (MP, unreliable)*. Def: supplier of timber. Another name for the stone pine according to Chambers. I’d never heard of it.
2 CHOPS – HOPS (proceeds with one leg) below C(aught). Def: trap, i.e. mouth. Last one in for me, and it took me a minute to see it at the end.
3 EXHIBITOR – EXIT (leaving) around H I B (first letters of Hanging In Bathroom) + O.R. (other ranks = men). Def: shower.
4 ARTHUR – EARTH (world) minus the first letter (leader’s departed), + R.U. (Rugby Union = game) reversed. Def: king.
5 BENIDORM – BEN (high rise for the Scots) + I (one) + DORM (room for the rest). Def: resort.
6 CACAO – CA (circa = not exactly) twice + O(utsiders). Def: seeds.
7 ROLLOVERS – ROLL OVER (readily surrender) + S(mall). Def: extensions to prize fund.
9 GET THE HANG OF – GET (receive) + [HE (man), H(usband) inside TANGO (dance)] + F(ollowing). Def: master.
13 PORTADOWN – PORT (pilot’s left) + [W, N (directions) after ADO (trouble)]. Def: Irish town.
15 BURROUGHS – RUB (polish) reversed + ROUGHS (preliminary sketches). Def: American writer. Edgar Rice or William, take your pick.
16 AIRSPEED – (praise)* + ED (one who might manage Times). Def: Jumbo with such rapidity?
19 KANSAN – KAN(e) (Citizen famously filmed, briefly) + SAN (hospital). Def: American statesman.
21 I KNOW – sounds like “aye”, “no” (referendum options). Def: Here’s an idea.
23 EVITA – ETA (estimated time of arrival = predicted showing time) around VI (six). Def: film.

14 comments on “Saturday Times 25765 (19th April)”

  1. 31 mins but I noted at the time that I was a little tired while I was solving it. CHOPS was also my LOI, and it took me a while to get AIRSPEED, but both were very good clues.
  2. I found this a nice Saturday: enjoyable clues, but hard and time consuming work due to a half dozen unknowns plus a lot of definitions that didn’t exactly click for me (eg – none of the dorms I know are high-rise, and I still don’t get jumbo and airspeed). I must have tried every combination of climb, cinch, catch and etc which made up a word before crossers restricted me and the penny dropped.
    1. That’s what I decided too, but it’s jumbled linkage to my ear.

      Edited at 2014-04-26 10:23 am (UTC)

    1. ‘Own’ is the fifth definition of ‘private’ in Chambers, so if there’s sloppiness it’s on their part!
      I’m not sure what happened with this puzzle, but I seem to have found it much easier than everyone else: my time was 11:48. I’m sure this must be a PB if measured in Magoos.
      1. Thanks keriothe. I am happy to stick to the convention that if a definition is in one of the big dictionaries, it is fair crossword game, whatever I think of it personally.
    2. I think it could be justified on the ground that ‘my own files’ would be my private ones.
  3. 27 minutes, with quite a few of them trying to make sense of 2d even with all the checkers. It did, of course, make perfect sense, but only when you’d somehow stumbled on the answer and sorted out what was wordplay and what definition.
    Good crossword to play with.
  4. Umbrella (or stone) pine is where the pine kernels that go in your pesto/on your salads come from. We were perturbed to discover that a lot of those in our local supermarkets are imported from the far east instead of coming from the Mediterranean.
  5. I was going great guns on this but was then interrupted by a phonecall. When I picked up the puzzle again 12 minutes later I seemed to have lost momentum and could only stagger to a finish. Enjoyable and no real problems – except that I sometimes feel I need a new brain! 36 minutes
  6. 36 min: with 2d LOI – eventually failed to think of anything better, so guessed CROPS, taking ‘proceeds’ as the definition.
  7. I wasted enough time on this puzzle not to want to go through it all again today however I thought I would mention my alternative at 2dn having failed miserably to come up with anything better (i.e. the correct answer).

    I had CIONS from C (caught), I (one), ON (leg), S (trap, as in S-bend in a waste pipe). As for the definition, CIONs is an alternative spelling of SCIONs = descendants, and if descendants can be termed ‘issue’ (as they so often are in crossword-land) it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch that they may also be described as the ‘proceeds’ of a union.

    Edited at 2014-04-26 11:09 pm (UTC)

    1. I wasted some time trying to justify CROSS, as that was the first word I thought of. I then considered other letters for the second letter, and H was the first one that fit – the answer HOPPED out immediately. I often think with difficult clues it’s easier to retrofit the wordplay to a guess of the answer rather than trying to create an unknown word from the wordplay elements. The opposite is true for the Listener or Mephisto, but the normal puzzle rarely has obscure vocab.

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