Sunday Times 4426 (27 Mar 2011) – Normal Sunday service has been resumed?

Author   daveperryPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Solving time: Hard to judge. I did this in bits and pieces in five or ten minute sections. But I would guess well over an hour and a half.

This was certainly much harder than previous offerings. It also sees an unwelcome return of the mistakes that the ST was well-known for, but had been hitherto absent since the change in editor. There is one definite mistake, but I have queries against three or four others so there may be more.

The SE corner held me up the longest, with 18 being my last in. I made a couple of mistakes early on, which seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. Quite a bit of new vocab for me – LEMANS, PARGET, CANARDS were all unknown.

But it’s not all bad. There were some excellent clues in amongst the bad ones. 19 & 27 were both good, but I think my COD goes to 25, which looked clumsy at first glance, but turned out to be quite elegant. It might have been harder if the solution hadn’t been at the forefront of my (and probably everyone else’s) mind.

cd = cryptic def., dd = double def., rev = reversal, homophones are written in quotes, anagrams as (–)*, and removals like this

Across
1 ALCOPOP – I read this as POP (father) goes after (finally) anagram of (found) LOCAL without the last letter (bar ending). I like the ‘bar ending’ bit, that’s quite clever. I’m not keen on finally to mean follows, it seems the wrong part of speech to me, and I’m not convinced by ‘found’ as an anagrind, although I’m fairly sure I’ve seen it before.
5 MU(STAR)D
9 TRAILER = R in “TAILOR”
10 CAN + ARDS – ‘to be seen by’ is just padding, a wordy way of connecting the wordplay. The Ards Peninsula is the easternmost part of Northern Ireland, running round Strangford Lough to the north and east within Co. Down. A CANARD is a false or baseless, usually derogatory story, report, or rumor. I only knew it as the French for duck.
11 MINISTER OF STATE – I think this has to be a mistake. I can’t see any way of parsing the clue as it stands. I suspect the clue should have read ‘Suspect Times is often right…’, but (in the online version at least) the ‘is’ is missing. With the extra word, it would be (TIMES IS OFTEN + R)* about AbsenT.
12 S + H(A + M)AN
14 HE(DON)IST
17 MASTODON = (STOOD)* in MAN – A nice neat surface.
18 LEMANS – A leman is an archaic term for a mistress or lover. If it is ‘separated’ with a space, as in LE MANS, it becomes the famous motor racing venue.
21 JOINT ENTERPRISE – ‘Mary Jane’ is a colloquialism for marijuana, so this is a pun on the word JOINT. But there is no wordplay for ENTERPRISE which forms two thirds of the answer, making it a very weak clue. I had JOINT INITIATIVE for a long time which fits three out of five of the checkers in the second word, so I was convinced it was right.
24 RAG + BAGS – I don’t think I’ve come across BAGS for trousers before, but I’m certainly aware of ‘debagging’ meaning the removal of such. (It must be my private school education!)
25 TSUNAMI – My first thought was that ‘Craft minus aft’ was a weak way of cluing ‘CR’, but it’s much cleverer than that. ‘Craft’ is an anagrind, so it’s (MINUS AfT)*
26 AN + TWERP
27 SEEDERS = “CEDARS” – A drill of the sort invented by Jethro Tull in 1701. I struggled with this one, wrongly assuming it would end in FERS.
Down
1 AT TIMES – I don’t see the wordplay for this. If the compiler were named Tim, then it could be TIM in (SEAT)*. But I’m hoping someone else can provide me a better explanation than that!
2 CHAIN(SAW)S
3 P + mILES
4 PARt + GET – a rough type of plaster.
5 MIC(ROB)ES
6 SANDSTONE = (NOD ASSENT)*
7 A + TRIAl
8 DESSERT = TRESSED rev
13 A + BOUT + F + ACE – Another one I got wrong initially. I had ABOUT TURN, thinking a good turn was a service.
15 IN(AN + I)MATE
16 ROUNDS UP – I think this is another mistake. As far as I’m aware, a round of bread is a single slice, so ‘slices of bread’ must be ROUNDS. ‘Drink’ is SUP, which leaves the S doing double duty. Had the clue read ‘slice of bread’, then it would have worked fine.
17 MAJOR + CA
19 STEP(IN)S – Some neatly disguised wordplay here – ‘boring’ means ‘inside of’
20 RECTOS = (CORSET) – Recto is one of those words that crops up far more in crosswords than in everyday use.
22 INGOT – Is this another mistake? I read this as ‘bit of gold’ = G + INTO, then ‘cast’ is an anagrind. But that makes the ‘old’ utterly superfluous. Am I missing something?
23 P + A + USE

23 comments on “Sunday Times 4426 (27 Mar 2011) – Normal Sunday service has been resumed?”

  1. My take on 22dn was that “turn” is the anagrind and GO(ld) + INT(o) the anagrist, with “old cast” meaning lose the “o”. It’s a bit iffy though and there is probably a better answer.

    At 16dn COED has ROUND meaning the quantity of sandwiches made from two slices of bread.

    No idea about 1dn or 11ac though.

    1. I could see that 22d could be an anagram of GOLDINTO with the OLD removed, but then ‘bit of’ is superfluous. I don’t like ‘bit of’ meaning half as you’re suggesting, it seems such an arbitrary quantity. Having said that, I remember blogging something similar recently and not liking that either, so you may be right.

      I don’t buy ‘slices of bread’ = ROUND because of the sandwich meaning – it would be a pretty poor sandwich that just consisted of two slices of bread, and the clue doesn’t mention any filling, so they cannot be synonymous.

  2. Unfortunately I have lost my notes on this one but I know I had queries over some of the clues.

    Today’s offering raises more and I am not alone in thinking this, going by the comments on the club site so far. I used to expect quirks on a Sunday but at least the puzzles were generally easier than during the week so one bunged in the answers fairly quickly and put the puzzle aside. Now the puzzles seem harder and require more brain work so it’s discouraging when after all that effort one is left with several clues that seem a bit dodgy in one respect or another.

  3. At Times is defined by ‘now and again’. me = the setter = Tim (Moorey) inside anagram of ‘seat’ ie hot
  4. Same queries as others with this. INGOT seems like a bit of a mess to me. If “Tim” really is supposed to be part of 1dn it’s hardly fair. How are we supposed to know?!
  5. From 27 March, bylines for the compilers were included on the printed version of the crossword. I forgot to add this information to the club version this time around, but will endeavour to remember in future.

    Peter Biddlecombe
    Sunday Times Puzzles Editor

    1. And 11A’s clue should have included “is” – I managed to get this changed for print, but not the online version, when substituting this puzzle for the one whose solution was mistakenly printed in the paper on 20/3.
    2. Thanks Peter. Accepting the understandable oversight on the club site I now like this clue a lot!
      As a more general point I agree with jerrywh’s comment below: there is absolutely no need for the ST puzzle to conform to the style of the daily.
      There were some rumblings on the forum today about one of the clues (the last across) that I perhaps wouldn’t expect to see in a daily Times puzzle but really rather liked. I’ve been doing a few Guardian puzzles recently and a bit of artistic license is really quite enjoyable. We Times devotees need to learn to let it all hang out from time to time!
  6. Hmm, interesting.. I had no great problem actually solving this, but confess that the problems mentioned above do seem real. In particular, including Tim Moorey’s christian name in an anonymously set crossword seems a bit harsh, if that is what happened.
    Tim seems to reuse his clues from time to time, maybe this one was originally in a different grid?
    On the other hand, I rather like the Sunday Times’ quirky approach and would not want it to become a clone of the daily cryptic, with its boring rules and its accuracy :-))
    2. Stretching ‘boring’ rules is one thing but inaccuracy is something quite different which undermines trust between the solver and the setter as far as I’m concerned.

  7. Logging in was quite easy yesterday. Now it won’t apparently let me do so.

    Are the print and electronic versions of 22dn the same? I’ve got ‘Turn bit of gold into this’. Nothing about ‘cast’ or ‘old’.

    Wil Ransome

    2. The online version says: “Turn bit of gold into old cast and you could get this,” which is a bit of a dog’s dinner. Your version has the merit of brevity, but is still a tad opaque..
  8. i thought that this was just a sort of double definition, one of which was slightly cryptic. also the print version does not have any of the problems you mentioned.
  9. Can I assume that the puzzle was created and scheduled for publication before 11 March?
  10. Well, given that over 10,000 people were killed by a tsunami on that date, I would have thought that choosing the word for a puzzle so shortly after that would have shown poor judgment, to say the least, on the part of the setter; hence my question. (And Peter, if you’re out there, it was a (non-rhetorical) question.) ‘O-ring’ has appeared a couple of times recently, but not, I suspect, immediately after the Challenger exploded.
    1. Sorry, Kevin, but I’m afraid I don’t see why a tragic event should preclude the use of a word coincidentally related to it in a crossword puzzle. If one goes down that road, at what point does the word become acceptable again?
    2. Kevin,

      This puzzle was substituted at a late stage to avoid a different problem in the newspaper version. I’m afraid I didn’t have time to spot the use of Tsunami and use another puzzle.

      Because the setters work weeks or months ahead of time, it’s pretty difficult to avoid this kind of thing. In the Daily Telegraph xwd, the answer BLUE MURDER appeared very shortly after the Conservative politician Ian Gow was killed by the IRA and that was felt by some people to be too distasteful though of course a coincidence. For that reason, there is apparently someone at the DT who checks the clues and answers each night, and substitutes a deliberately anodyne emergency puzzle if necessary. I honestly don’t have time to set up that kind of thing at present, and for what it’s worth I have had no other comment about this particular word.

      Peter Biddlecombe, Sunday Times Puzzles Editor

  11. Oh, soon enough, no doubt; hence my ‘O-ring’ example. I just thought 2 weeks was unfortunately soon; which is why I assumed that in fact the puzzle was in the pipeline already, and why I asked my original question to verify that.
  12. Here’s the mistakes I made:

    10a de NI als (NI for N. Ireland and deals; container)
    11a -at large (leg member missing anag)
    27a spruces (brushes up like drills) or needles (dd)

    2d tablesaws (multiples are like tables)
    4d stucco (homophone; stuck?…oh!)
    15d barbarian (a prisoner behind bars (twice), a barbarian feels nothing)
    19d slip ons (flight = slip dd)
    22d sauce (au for gold and turn is like sauce)

    only got sandstone and pause. A few weeks ago I got not a one. Thanks, I appreciate your blog.

  13. ……….for all the Blogs. From corresponding with people at The Toronto Star it’s become obvious that they have absolutely no idea how cryptics work. Arrogantly unhelpful.

    I doubt The Star will ever include a by-line; as it is they call the puzzle “The Prize”. We only found the ST connection by accident. For 1d. we guessed “at times” and assumed there was a mistake in the clue.

    For once we, here in the Dominions, got a puzzle without the mistakes. After more than 10 years of doing the puzzle we have come to appreciate the “quirks”. Until recent tightening it was fun to spot the clues with mistakes. Disadvantage of that is that you can’t teach people how to do cryptics. I try to interest people in cryptics because they are easier to do than regular xwords. You have two shots at the the answer, one from the cd and one from the straight. However with the “quirky” clue writing, it’s impossible to explain 21a. to a novice when there is no wordplay for enterprise.
    This week we got 18a. from the cd. and found later from the dictionary that leman was an old word for mistress. If it had been a straight puzzle with the clue “Old lovers” we would never have got it, even with the -e-a-s cross letters.

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