ST 4393 (Sun 8 Aug) – Stop gap

Author   talbinhoPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 4:42

I printed this off at the same time as another puzzle, then got them mixed up. The result was I thought this was a daily puzzle from The Times until I’d finished solving it, so it can’t have been too bad (although the realisation did stop me puzzling over 3dn (STOP) which I then assumed was erroneous). First impressions count for a lot and I solved 23dn early on which is a very nice clue, and which probably prevented too much tutting over some of the clues of which several, in hindsight, would be considered weak in a daily Times crossword. I didn’t know Cortona (no football team) which was the last in (bar 3dn).

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.

Across
1 PEERS OF THE REALM; (E[nglish] + E.R. + SOFT + HERE) in PALM (= ‘prize’)
9 COR + TON + A – a town in Italy.
10 MATADOR – M[ove] + A TAD + O.R. (= other ranks = ‘[other] soldiers’)
11 NAIF; rev. of FAN around I (= ‘something upright’)
12 STATIONER’S; (STRAIN TOES)*
13 CURATOR; CUR around (RAT + O[ld])
15 RISIBLE, from VISIBLE
17 LANDAUS; AUS[tralia] after LAND (= ‘territory’)
19 MINARET (hidden)
20 EASTERTIDE; (IDEA SETTER)* – ‘Let’s have…’ is superfluous and a bit clumsy.
22 GNAT; rev. of TANG
25 TEMPLAR; TEMP + LAR[k]
26 CRUISER; “CREW SIR” – but the ‘S’ in ‘cruiser’ is soft, like a ‘Z’.
27 RECORDED MESSAGE (cryptic definition) – quite well-worded.
Down
1 PECAN; PEN around CA (= circa = ‘about’)
2 EARLIER ON; EAR, + (LONER)* around I
3 S + TOP ? – not sure about this. The definition would have to be ‘Finished’, which doesn’t seem to work. I tried to make ‘shot’ work (in the sense of ‘tired’ or ‘done in’), but ‘first’ = ‘hot’ isn’t quite right either. I suspect that this is another Sunday Times error and that ‘Finish’ was intended.
4 FLATTER
5 HAMSTER; H[enry] + AMSTER[dam] – the henry being the SI unit of inductance.
6 RAT-POISON; (PATIOS)* in RON
7 ADDLE; ALE around DD (= ‘designated driver’)
8 MARE’S NEST – there’s some light shed on the origins of this phrase here.
13 COLLECT + OR
14 TRAVELLER; TELLER around RAV[e] – as in a ‘traveller’s tale’. Both ‘rave’ and ‘jabber’ can mean ‘to talk as if delirious’.
16 BERING SEA; (GREBES IN A)*
18 SET + FREE – one of those weak breakdowns which should have alerted me that this wasn’t a Times puzzle.
19 MODICUM; ODIC (= ‘of poetry’) in MUM – a clever use of ‘of’ whose merit is devalued by the gratuitous use of superfluous and (cryptically) ungrammatical link words in ST puzzles (though there seem to be fewer today than usual).
21 SUM + AC
23 T + ERSE, &lit
24 BUNS; rev. of SNUB

12 comments on “ST 4393 (Sun 8 Aug) – Stop gap”

  1. Amazed at your times on these. About 20-25 minutes for me while watching. what else, baseball. Agree on 3d STOP which held me up for quite a while plus needed to confirm CORTONA as I had some time in the south of Italy and CROTONE kept popping into my head. Can’t see the tree SUMAC without thinking of YMA SUMAC’s amazing voice. Came in at under 15 in today’s ST.
  2. Had to look up CORTONA to be sure. I realised from this blog that for years I’ve been assuming Henry=H from the king rather than the unit. I suppose it doesn’t matter if the answer’s the same. STOP, by my reckoning, makes three weeks in a row where there are clear errors. Must be really frustrating for setters, or embarrassing for editors, or both. Perhaps when the bulletin board starts running again we can learn more of the processes. Perhaps the gap now very evident in the Mephisto series will get filled in.
    1. Yes, ‘henry’ = H is one of those abbreviations that most cryptic crossword solvers know and probably many fewer understand. In fact I have a friend (a good solver) who set a puzzle a while back of which I looked over a draft version, and it was clear from the clues that he thought (from solving experience) that any personal name in a clue could indicate its initial in the answer.

      A similar one from my own experience is ‘won’ = W, which for years I’d assumed came from football league tables but is in fact the Korean currency. I should probably have asked myself at some point why ‘lost’ = L wasn’t allowed, but it never occurred to me.

    1. Oh dear. Thanks for dropping by to explain. These errors must be as frustrating for Sunday Times setters as for solvers (happening as they do on an almost weekly basis) – could you by any chance shed any light on the editing process? I’m sure all blog readers would be interested, and not all of the errors can be the fault of the printer (e.g. the faulty anagram from a few weeks ago).
  4. 9:10 for me, despite knowing CORTONA. I’m afraid I’m right off the pace at the moment, and can’t really claim to have spent all that much time agonising over 3D.

    I see the setter doesn’t reveal what the clue to STOP was supposed to be, but (like you) I assume it should have been “Finish second, then first (4)”. And (like you again) I wasn’t impressed by “crew sir” being supposed to sound like CRUISER.

    1. An interesting thought, ‘off the pace at the moment’. I often wonder about this question of ‘form’ – does a run of good times (‘good’ in this instance meaning relative to the puzzle’s difficulty) suggest that a solver is ‘in good form’, or is it really just chance, and a reflection that those puzzles (or perhaps the more obscure answers in them) happened to suit that solver’s way of thinking or general knowledge?
      1. I wish I knew the answer.

        When it comes to the daily cryptic, I’m in the difficult position of being slow but steady: I probably stand a less-than-evens chance of getting to the final at Cheltenham; but if I make it, I stand a very good chance of getting all the puzzles right within the hour.

        So far this year, I’ve made two mistakes – both down to carelessness rather than ignorance – and I’ve taken more than 20 minutes four times (20: 47, 20:58, 22:29 and 25:26 – this last for a Saturday puzzle when I’d just done the five weekday puzzles at a sitting). However, I’ve only taken under 7 minutes ten times, and well over half the time I’ve taken more than 10 minutes.

        I suspect what that really means is that rather than being ‘off the pace at the moment’, I’m just past it as far as speed is concerned. (Deep sigh!)

        1. So far this year, I’ve made two mistakes – both down to carelessness rather than ignorance

          This is the sort of consistency of which I can only dream!

      2. For times on daily puzzles, I think form plays a part – I’m pretty sure that if I recorded a relatively quick time for yesterday’s puzzle, I’m a bit more likely to do so today.

        If you imagine a straight-line graph of your times from quickest to slowest, there are two things that matter about the line for competition purposes – height and slope. (Slowest successful solving time and number of mistakes in the last six months are very strongly correlated, I think.) The height of the line seems to reach a minimum some time between your 30th and 50th birthdays and then starts creeping up inexorably. But it seems that you can carry on reducing the slope for another 20 years or so, and that’s partly why the same old hands keep on getting into the final – if I was a betting man, I’d count evens for Tony making the final as worth a punt. [Another part must be the confidence gained from the knowledge that you usually qualify.]

  5. Setter confirms Finish. My understanding is that puzzles get keyboarded again from the setter’s copy and in the newspaper world that can esily lead to trouble. That said, your setter (like several others) is quite capable of making his own mistakes and therefore feels less than inclined to cast the first stone! ‘Cruiser’ doesn’t sound exactly like ‘crew sir’ I agree, but it’s within the toleration zone for an approximate homophone as far as I’m concerned.
  6. I got cruiser by changing BRUISER, a big aggressive person, not BRitish. About is C for circa, and I added it to the front….

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