Saturday Times 26058 (March 28)

Author   oliviarhinebeckPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
At 26.37 this took me a bit longer than last week’s, for no obvious reason.  Some good misdirection, perhaps aimed at fooling the more experienced solvers into thinking they’re looking for the usual crossword cliches.  One clue – 2d – I haven’t completely fathomed.  There may just be less there than meets the eye.  Nothing flashy or memorable here but a good solid representation of the setter’s craft.  Those who take part in the Christmas Turkey know how difficult this is.  As Vinyl and NY Kevin can attest, “the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces” in NY – finally.  Some brave bulbs are poking their heads up in the beds surrounding the street trees and there’s the faintest frosting of green on the sycamores in the park down the block.  What a god-awful winter, thank heavens for crosswords.

Across
1  After circulating papers, sound preoccupied (8)
DISTRAIT – Papers=ID reversed plus sound (as in Nantucket Sound)=STRAIT.  Some pronounce it a la Francaise as if it were spelled “distray”.
5  Extremely minute number dropping ecstasy (6)
MIGHTY – M=minute (as in minnit not mynewt) plus [e]IGHTY.  Tricky.
8  Account for where something used to be (10)
EXPOSITION – Double Definition.  EX=used-to-be and POSITION.
9  Complains unofficially about limiting responsibility (4)
ONUS – Hidden in [complain]S UNO[ficially], reversed (about).
10  No quarrels recollected with dead officer (8,6)
SQUADRON LEADER – Anagram of NO QUARRELS  and DEAD.
11  Smallest and narrowest central US state – one annoying person describes (7)
POKIEST – OK (Oklahoma) plus 1 surrounding by PEST.
13  Cops making visits  (5,2)
COMES BY – Double definition.  COPS as in gets or takes.
15  Time in which uniform’s no good for nurse (7)
HARBOUR –  HOUR=time surrounding [g]ARB=uniform.  As in nursing a grudge.  Another tricky one.
18  Funny man‘s name withheld from criminal (7)
GAGSTER – Remove the N (name) from GANGSTER.
21  Supporter pursuing claim in expert fashion (14)
PROFESSIONALLY – Claim=PROFESSION with ALLY=supporter.
22  One brief moment – almost rejected republic (4)
FIJI – 1 JIF[fy] reversed (rejected).  Took me a while to nail which 4-letter republic it could be (Iran, Iraq, Eire etc).
23  Headline: “Drug given backing by policemen” (3,3,4)
TOP THE BILL – The other kind of headline – the verb.  POT=drug reversed with THE BILL=policemen.  I was slow to cop this one.
24 Facing archdeacon, fellow appears powerless (6)
VENEER – VEN (as in venerable which seems to be the way an archeacon is supposed to be addressed or referred to) and [p]EER=fellow, as in a jury of one’s peers.  The only archdeacon I know is in Trollope.
25  Turn, heading for exit, during boring comedy (8)
DROLLERY – This took some doing too.  ROLL=turn plus E[xit] contained in DRY=boring.  I think we had “droll” meaning “bizarre” just recently.

Down
1  Coercion, you, say, escaped from with revolting disguise (5,2)
DRESS UP – D[u]RESS=coercion minus the U (you) and UP=in revolt.
2  Dupes flier we hear looking for bugs (9)
SAPSUCKER – Two dupes, a SAP and a SUCKER giving us the bird (flier).  It’s a kind of North American woodpecker apparently that taps into trees and feeds on the sap (maple syrup anyone?) and insects there.  I don’t see a homophone so not sure where “we hear” comes in unless it’s something to do with “flier” vs “flyer”.  Or it may be redundant.. Score one for the setter – I’m the sap.  There is no homophone.  “We hear” means that we hear the woodpecker tapping away looking for bugs.
3  Remains on team holding United in second half (7)
RESIDUE – RE=on plus SIDE=team containing U.
4  Elected left-winger welcomes one piece of church music (7)
INTROIT – We’ve had this quite recently.  IN=elected.  TROT=leftie containing 1.
5  State of the old lady full of tensionafter breakdown (9)
MINNESOTA – MA=old lady (oh dear) holding an anagram of TENSION.
6  Northern chap say will turn on soldiers before long (7)
GEORDIE – Chap from Newcastle or thereabouts.  GE=say reversed OR=soldiers (other ranks) and DIE=long (for).
7  In never-ending race feel sorry for part of body (4,3)
TRUE RIB – RUE=feel sorry for contained in TRIB[e]=race.  “True” because it’s one of the pairs attached to the sternum.
12  Resentful about sweet found in bits in hat (9)
SOU’WESTER – Anagram of SWEET contained in SOUR=resentful.  The non indication of the apostrophe was no problem here, but sometimes it can be very confusing when it’s a French term (coup d’etat) or an Irish playwright, and is clued as a single unbroken word (which it always seems to be or it would probably be too easy).
14  Subordinate position receives a command (9)
SATELLITE – SITE=position contains A TELL (a command).
16  Inform judge, ignoring second of answers (7)
APPRISE – APPR[a]ISE dropping the second A (answer).
17 Platitude from bishop, I had seen visiting capital (6)
BROMIDE – B=bishop plus I’D (I had) inside ROME (capital).
18  Cheat in America runs into present queen (7)
GRIFTER – US con artist.  R[uns] in GIFT=present with ER=queen.  Dovetails with the nameless gangster in 18a.
19  Terribly polite word on The Weald, oddly enough (7)
GENTEEL – GEN=word (info) plus T[h]E [w]E[a]L[d].  Nothing to do with a famous feature of the S.E. counties.
20  Two boys getting extremely timely payment (7)
ROYALTY – The lads ROY and AL getting together with T[imel]Y.  Do the setters receive these for their work or is it all the property of their employer?

31 comments on “Saturday Times 26058 (March 28)”

  1. Thanks for the blog Olivia. Found this quite tough going with little in the way of light relief: GAGSTER was my favourite.

    Re. SAPSUCKER yes, I was also a bit mystified by this. Best I could come up with (though maybe a bit of a stretch) was that we hear the woodpecker tapping away in his (or her) search for the bugs. Possibly.

    Re. your observation at 20d on the remuneration of setters, coincidentally I happened on this thread yesterday where someone had the temerity to ask Dean Mayer what he was paid for his puzzles: (on edit – deleted link as it goes to spam…)

    100 to 200 quid per puzzle (particularly when they can take a couple of days to pull together apparently) does not seem a lot for a world class setter. If that was your full time job (albeit as a freelance) you’d be looking at around GBP 25K per annum, about the same as a junior engineer on an IT Help Desk! Then again, I guess it’s the price you pay for “living the dream…”

    1. Thanks for this Nick. I attempted to unspam you and to my dismay I managed to make you disappear altogether so I’m thankful you’re back. I really need to figure out some of the tech stuff around here. Jack is the one who unspams me so perhaps he’ll give me a primer. When I get up tomorrow I’ll go in search of the link you mention.
      1. I won’t attempt to post the link again for obvious reasons… However, if you do a Google search on meet-the-setter-anax it should be top of the results
  2. At 25:25 a very similar time for me too. I agree that “flier we hear looking for bugs” must be a marginally cryptic def for a bird known for the pecking noise it makes while hunting for tasty insects.
  3. Setters are notoriously underpaid for their work, and it would add injury to insult if the crossword becomes the property of the employer. Re SAPSUCKER, I guess the setter wasn’t aiming for brevity by using six of the clue’s seven words for the definition. Thanks for the blog.
  4. Nice blog Olivia.. I’m assuming that sapsucker is a straightforward dd, the two dupes on the one hand and a bird that makes a noise while looking for lunch on the other.. they are a kind of woodpecker, I believe.

  5. I don’t set out to race the clock at weekends, and this one was solved over a couple of sessions so I don’t have a solving time but I know it wasn’t easy. I think I may have used aids for my LOI, BROMIDE as I’d never have linked the definition with the answer without a little prompting.

    GRIFTER was unknown but solved from wordplay and like some others I didn’t fully understand 2dn before coming here. If I’d known SAPSUCKER was a bird, that might have helped, and if I’d further known it was a woodpecker I might have worked out what “we hear” was doing.

    Edited at 2015-04-04 01:09 pm (UTC)

  6. Around the half-hour for this, so a toughie, rather like today’s.
    I was in two minds about 2dn: I thought the homophone misdirection was quite clever once I’d looked up the bird, but I had never heard of it so before that I was just baffled. Or Yaffled.
    I was confused by 11ac: ‘poky’ doesn’t specifically mean ‘narrow’ so I spent a while wondering how Oklahoma could be described as the ‘narrowest central US state’. There is a narrow bit in the north-west corner…
    1. Collins has ‘small and cramped’, which covers the width angle.

      Edited at 2015-04-05 12:31 pm (UTC)

      1. I don’t think it does. Poky means small with an implication of confinement. That’s what ‘cramped’ gives you, but I don’t think it specifically implies ‘narrow’. It’s not a big point.
        1. Unless one’s talking of the low ceilings of Floor 71/2 in being John Malkovitch, one can make a reasonable assumption that a cramped space will be a narrow space. This is why the wide but low open office idea works so well.
          1. Narrow implies smaller in one direction than in the other. ‘Poky’ just means small, with no such implication.
            1. Granted, but If someone says they’ve been put in a pokey bedsit, then he will mean it to be and we will understand it to be narrow. But, I’m cheating, because bedsits having typically one single bed tend to narrowness by their nature! But using pokey in this context – rather than small – enables the speaker to generate an implication of narrowness, otherwise missing.
              1. We’re not going to agree here! I think that using ‘poky’ here generates an implication of confinement, of crampedness, but not narrowness. A poky bedsit is not necessarily narrow. I suggest we call the whole thing off!
  7. Thanks, Olivia. You’ve solved my “Tre Misteri” for me: SAPSUCKER, HARBOUR and APPRISE. In 16d, I was focused on “second of answers” being n. Excuse my continued ignorance but where is the homophone in 2d?
    1. Martin, the joke (on me for one) about the homophone is that there isn’t one. “We hear” refers to the noise the woodpecker makes when it goes foraging for food.
  8. Thought this one was a little harder than average, and I spent a few minutes at the end wondering about DISTRAIT/SAPSUCKER, neither of which were familiar. I knew GRIFTER from a John Cusack film (also a Raleigh bike from my youth, but presumably there’s no connection).
  9. 28 mins. POKIEST was my LOI after SAPSUCKER. The note I made at the time said that I thought there were quite a few clues where the wordplay took a lot of unscrambling, and plenty of definitions weren’t obvious either, so all in all a tricky puzzle.
  10. Well the setter had me nicely duped. Homophone forsooth. And I had all week to think about it too…
  11. I had terrible problems with this one, not least with that pesky bird. I sort of got the definition in the end, but I never did see the Dupes=sap+sucker bit, which you would think was the easy part.

    Thanks to all above for the elucidation. The truth is out there …

  13. Is the Saturday crossword still a prize crossword? I’ve just solved today’s on the ipad and it has an answer checker which would lead me to think it might not be a prize one any more.
    1. Yes it most definitely is still a prize one pootle so that is an anomaly for sure. I really don’t know enough to opine further.
  14. Terrific puzzle – loved the GEORDIE in the north-east corner. Just over the hour.
  16. Another underwhelmed by 2dn – not knowing the sapsucker made a noise, and guessing it ate sap not bugs, so totally mystified. And one wrong at 1 ac – a known unknown as The Other Donald might say, so popped in the first thing I thought of that fit: DISTRAIN, a strain is a snatch of sound. Almost. Oh, well, otherwise quite difficult, 28:40. Various unknowns: SOU’WESTER as hat, only come across it in old novels and guessed it was a jacket; and ven for archdeacon.
    Rob

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