ST 4368 (Sun 14 Feb) – Muscle memory

Author   talbinhoPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 4:25

Pretty good this week with the anagrams at 21ac and 4dn being my favourite clues. There was some difficult vocabulary, of which I didn’t know or couldn’t remember 29ac (MASSETER, a muscle that raises the under-jaw).

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.

Across
1 S(CRAP)PED
6 AMAZON (2 defs) – ‘banker’ in the sense of ‘something that, or with, banks’, which might very tenuously describe a river.
9 HO(O)P
10 ASSOCIATES (2 defs) – not much difference in the two definitions used here; one is just a nounal form of the other.
11 ASS + AIL
12 OUT(LY)ING – ‘extremes of Lombardy’ was obviously LY but I still couldn’t see this straight away. Perhaps ‘outskirts’ was originally intended instead of ‘extremes’ (which sounds strange in the surface reading), but was replaced because of the ‘out’ in the answer.
14 BEDRAGGLED; BE (= ‘live’), + DRAGGED around L[ake]
16 LOPE; LOP (= ‘cut away’) + E[ast] (= ‘a [compass] point’)
18 STOP; ST (= street = ‘way’) + OP[us] (= ‘work’)
19 TIRELESSLY; (TRELLIS YES)*
21 FORENSIC; (CONIFERS)* – nice anagram.
23 WELKIN; ELK in WIN – cognate with the German Wolke meaning ‘cloud’.
25 CAMEL TRAIN; CAME (= ‘arrived’) + TRAIN (= ‘school’), all around L (= learner = ‘student’)
27 VIAL; VI (= ‘small girl’) + AL (= ‘[small] boy’) – not sure what ‘sharing one’ adds to this clue. Originally I was expecting the two names to overlap by one letter and ‘share’ an ‘I’ or ‘A’, but that’s not the case unless I’ve missed something.
28 AGATHA; AGA (= ‘ruler’) + (HAT)*
29 MASSETER; rev. of [Uncle] SAM, + (STEER)* – a lucky guess, I was nearly lulled into the faux-French ‘masseret’. A bit of Greek might have helped as this is from the word for ‘chew’.

Down
2 CROW’S FEET (cryptic definition)
3 ALPHA[bet] – nice idea although this clue felt verbose to me.
4 PEARLY GATES; (A PLAYER GETS)* – good anagram.
5 DESPOIL; (LIP DOES)* – ungrammatical (‘Rob is lip does tremble’, when what’s meant is ‘Rob is lip does trembling’).
6 ARC; A + R[oman] C[atholic]
7 AMARYLLIS; (MARY’S ILL A)*
8 OCEAN; (A/C + ONE)*
13 TIDDLYWINKS – just a pun on ‘flipping’ I think, although perhaps this word is used colloquially/dialectally to mean ‘trifles’?
15 RE + PRESENT
17 PALPITATE; PIT in PALATE
20 RECLAIM; (MIRACLE)* – I don’t think ‘characters’ is sufficient as an anagram indicator, even if you accept that nouns can act as such.
22 ORANG; O (= ‘nothing’) + RANG
24 LEVEE; EVE (= ‘First lady’) in LE (= ‘the French’) – an archaic word for ‘a morning reception of visitors’.
26 TEA (cryptic definition)

8 comments on “ST 4368 (Sun 14 Feb) – Muscle memory”

  1. After the trials and tribulations last Sunday with the wrong puzzle having been up all day on-line I eventually got to do this one on Monday and took 38 minutes with a little assistance in the SE corner where I had never heard of WELKIN or MASSETER and for some reason couldn’t spot PALPITATE with two of its checkers missing.

    Not very pleased today to find the clues that were posted incorrectly last Sunday and were available on-line for over 24 hours, have been put up for this Sunday’s puzzle. As I amused myself solving them last week I had nothing to do this morning. I’d have thought after such a cock-up they would have thought to ditch that one or hold it back for a month or two and give us something completely new.

  2. 5:58 for me for a reasonably straightforward puzzle.

    This isn’t the first time that “banker” has come up in the ST puzzle to indicate the name of a river – previously we’ve had “This banker’s central to many services (4)” = YSER – but I can’t say it’s a convention I’m terribly fond of. On the other hand, I wasn’t too worried by “characters” as an anagram indicator in 20D.

    Hark, how all the welkin rings. No? (No place for you in the Musical Mafia then 😉

    The lazy so-and-so responsible for typing in the solution once again failed to check what s/he’d typed, so we have REPPRESET for 15D, which contaminated 21A (FORRNSIC) and 26A (CAMSL TRAIN).

    1. Yeh, we frequently get this in the “Sunday Times” puzzle that’s specially (and badly) written for the Weekend Australian. Last time it happened, they withheld the prize because there were no “correct” solutions!
      Who’s editing this stuff at your end? Is it still Barbara Hall? If so, she needs to know such things are happening on her watch.
  3. So I’m a miserable bugger at the best of times, but last Sundays was a day I’d rather forget. The first Valentine’s Day in three years I haven’t been single, so after being told a bunch of times I really have to do this, I staggered into town to buy a box of chocolates from a chocolatier that is conveniently just down the road from a brewpub. My exceptionally-well-thought-out plan was to buy chocolates, walk to brewpub and reward myself with lunch and the crossword over a pint or two.

    Long line at chocolatier (I guess I wasn’t the only one thinking along these lines) where someone spilled coffee on my shoulder by trying to carry a tray of cups over everybody in line’s heads. To the brewpub, where it’s practically empty, so the maitre d’minus waves at a row of seats and tells me to sit anywhere. I do, and am promptly ignored by server after server for about half an hour (15 minutes spent doing the Everyman, the rest of the time waving and smiling to people carrying trays). A seat at the bar opens up, and I snatch it, figuring that it will be easier to get the attention of someone if I’m staring straight at them.

    Hurrah! I’m poured a pint and offered a menu. Look down to find that I’ve printed off either the wrong grid or the wrong set of clues. And then the Mardi Gras parade came past the bar, the place completely filled up and they decided to stop serving food. Just bloody marvellous. Took another 20 minutes to push through the mob out the door.

    Oh, the second version was filled in one coffee break and memories of bitterness. Now I see those clues from the bar are back to haunt me. O Happy Day.

  4. This is probably too late for anyone to read it, but here goes. ‘Banker’ has been used MANY times in the past in the ST cryptics. Banker = RIVER full to the top of its banks (Australian and New Zealand)[Chambers]. ‘Character’ = ‘(archaic) to engrave, print or write; to REPRESENT, delineate or describe’ [Chambers]
  5. I thought it was VI+AL but my partner in crime pointed out that it was V(I)AL.

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