ST 4326 (Sun 26th April) – Attention: theca

Author   talbinhoPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 8:20

This puzzle had a hard act to follow after last week’s excellence, but it stepped up to the plate – generally accurate, albeit with a few ST-isms, some good clues and no mistakes that I detected.

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.

Across
1 FINE ARTS; NEAR (= ‘close to’) in FITS
5 MARRAM; rev. of RAM, + RAM – not absolutely convinced that ‘facing each other’ can really apply to two words; ‘head-to-head’ maybe?
10 UN + DER + WE + AR[e] – the question mark here is necessary for the cryptic reading (because ‘pants and vest’ are only examples of underwear) but makes the surface reading awkward.
11 FLUOR, from FLOUR
12 DRY + AD
13 ASTRADDLE; T[he] R[ider] in A SADDLE – ‘starts with…’ for ‘the first letters of…’ is very Sunday Times.
14 M(ORAL)ISERS
17 PENN[ants] – William Penn founded Pennsylvania.
20 STEAM RADIO (cryptic definition)
22 INTERDICT; INT[ernational] + (CREDIT)* – very topical.
24 DR + OWN – a reference to Dr Foster of nursery rhyme fame, who went to Gloucester, fell in a puddle right up to his middle and never went there again. If only he’d taken inspiration from Gloucester City AFC, whose stadium was wrecked in the 2007 floods and still play at Cirencester as a result, but who against the odds have this week made the Southern League Premier Division play-off final and stand just one win away from a place in the Conference South (two divisions below the Football League).
26 NE(ED)Y – crossword favourite Marshal Michel Ney.
27 CON + G(R.U.)ENT – ‘winter sport’ for ‘rugby union’ is innovative misdirection, but I’m not sure it’s really fair.
28 LA + TENT
29 COINCIDE; COIN + (DICE)*

Down
1 FOUR-DIMENSIONAL (cryptic definition) – ‘the enemy’ is almost always ‘time’ in crosswords, which is also known as the ‘fourth dimension’.
2 NODDY (hidden)
3 AIREDALE; AIRED (= ‘given an outing’) + ALE (= ‘something at the pub’)
4 THE + C.A. – my last entry; I don’t remember seeing this word before and worried about this for a while at the end. It’s defined by Chambers as ‘a sheath, case or sac (zoology)’ or ‘a spore-case (botany)’. A bit of research suggests I should have thought harder: the root of this word is Greek theke which also gives discotheque, bibliotheque and apothecary (apo = ‘away’, so ‘storing away’).
6 A + F,F + RAY – ‘particular’ is a bit superfluous.
7 ROUND + HEAD
8 MARIE ANTOINETTE; (I ENTERTAIN AT ‘OME)*
9 PRETORIA; (A PIERROT)* – one of the three capitals (technically the administrative capital) of South Africa, along with Bloemfontein (home of the judiciary) and Cape Town (the legislative capital). Apparently there are 12 countries in the world with split capitals; award yourself 1 point for each, then check the answers here.
15 ROAST MEAT; (AMARETTO’S)* – good anagram.
16 SET PIECE; SET + “PEACE”
18 GRIDIRON; (RIGID)* + RON
21 CRAY + ON – clever: ‘on’ misleadingly looks like a preposition in the wordplay.
23 TAN + GO
25 O.B. + ELI

14 comments on “ST 4326 (Sun 26th April) – Attention: theca”

  1. Don’t remember my time, but I do remember confidently writing in BERG for 19ac before I had any checking letters. It was a long time before I could persuade myself that it was wrong as it seemed to fit the clue perfectly. Anyone else see this alternative answer?
    1. Actually I do remember my time now. I did it during my sons’ swimming lessons. They get half an hour each, and I put in the last answer just as the second one finished. So about an hour with a short break in the middle.
      1. BERG is a perfectly valid answer, as far as I can tell – except that it doesn’t fit the rest of the grid. I had it as well.

        I suspect that this is not by any means a coincidence.

        1. I see what you’re both thinking, but that would require “taking” to act as an insertion indicator for the words following it. Sorry, but there’s no way that can work. It is the ST though, so anything’s possible, but I’d have been seriously miffed if that had been the right answer.
              1. I didn’t notice the possibility of BERG when solving (think I already had the ‘N’ before looking at it) but while it doesn’t quite work, as linxit points out, I’ve seen far worse in the ST!

                [I actually missed out this clue from the blog by accident: for anyone reading this and confused, the clue was

                Floater taking limited number — gosh! (4)

                and the correct answer was NOAH (NO + AH).]

  2. Is it me, or was today’s unbelievably easy? I take it with me when I take my two sons to their swimming lessons on Sunday morning. They have half an hour each in the pool so I generally get an hour to mull over it with a short interruption in the middle to help get the first one changed. We were there five minutes early, and I had it finished barely half way through the first lesson. I clocked it at 21 minutes, which is definitely a record for me.
  3. Just for the record …

    A blog for the syndicated version in the Ottawa Citizen points out that although there’s such a thing as a crayfish, cray does not mean fish. Next stop fish=LUMP, DOG, STOCK, etc.

    Edited at 2009-06-07 05:53 pm (UTC)

  4. I actually had 19 across as NEAT:

    “gosh!” = “neat!
    floater = net [a stretch]
    limited number = ‘a’ (one)

    Not as good an answer as NOAH, but still fits the grid.

  5. This was fun but quite a quickie until I reached my LOI at 19a N?A?. At least I did not go for the quite credible BERG as a hidden answer as I already had the checkers but it was a DNF because I did not get NO for “limited number” being fixated just with N. I was then looking in vain for a word meaning “gosh” in ?A?. I could not believe that this was the only one omitted from the blog. Not on purpose as it turned out and I was relieved to see it mentioned and explained in the comments.
    I don’t know what it is with me and 4 letter answers?

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