Sunday Times 4625 by Jeff Pearce

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
This took me 18 minutes, but I made a silly mistake. I seem to be doing this a lot at the moment.

I found this quite tricky: there’s a lot of stuff in here I didn’t know, starting with 1ac. But it was all gettable and this was an enjoyable solve.

Across
1 Tool takes nasty slice out of ancient chief
COLD CHISEL – (SLICE)* surrounding OLD CH. Not a term I was familiar with so I needed some checkers. I assume chisels also come in hot varieties.
7 Married man goes behind a pulpit
AMBO – A, M, BO. BO is a ‘familiar term of address for a man’, and an AMBO is an ‘early Christian raised reading-desk or pulpit’. I was dimly aware of both: I’m not sure how I’d have got this otherwise.
9 Left a person selling scent
LAVENDER – L, A, VENDER. I was a bit puzzled by this because I thought it had to be VENDOR, but the E version is also used according to Collins.
10 Storm warning outside old city
FURORE – F(UR)ORE. UR, the setter’s favourite ancient city.
11 Legendary stripper’s zip on short sofa
GODIVA – GO, DIVAn. This took me far longer to see than it should have.
13 Accelerator and choke
THROTTLE – DD.
14 Unpleasant people race after power — but it’s not likely!
PIGS MIGHT FLY – PIGS (unpleasant people), then FLY (race) after MIGHT (power).
17 Dwarf got up and cooked Afro nosh
ROSE OF SHARON – ROSE (got up), (AFRO NOSH)*. A species of hibiscus, apparently. Whatever that is. ODO defines this as a ‘low shrub’, which I guess is where the ‘dwarf’ comes from. Not a terribly kind definition.
20 Prison bed briefly conceals a source of booze
BASTILLE – B(A STILL)Ed.
21 Take advantage of what piggy bank has?
CASH IN – DD.
22 Banker entertains Doctor Swift
NIMBLE – NI(MB)LE. ‘Banker’ for river is a crossword staple.
23 Petal is bending on a plant
STAPELIA – (PETALIS)*, A. Another unknown plant. This one looked a bit likelier than SPALETIA or the other alternatives.
25 Manage work in church
COPE – C(OP)E.
26 Mineral obtained from high quality vegetables, primarily
GREENSTONE – GREENS before TONE.

Down
2 Speaker I love on religious music
ORATORIO – ORATOR, I, O.
3 Drone regularly captured female in the field?
DOE – alternate letters (‘regularly captured’) in ‘drone‘.
4 Stars appearing in trashy drama
HYDRA – contained in ‘trashy drama’. A ‘large southern constellation’, and yet another DNK for me.
5 Bit of exercise makes you gag on street
STRETCH – ST, RETCH
6 Fit flares when at sea in these?
LIFERAFTS – (FIT FLARES)*.
7 Kirkstone is a bad place to be
A PRETTY PASS – Kirkstone Pass is in the Lake District, apparently, and it does look pretty.
8 Not quite how streakers like to act?
BARELY – DD, one humorous. I’m not really sure how BARELY means ‘not quite’ (rather than ‘only just’), but it’s in at least one of the dictionaries.
12 Drunk public servant losing head, and very hard to understand
INSCRUTABLE – (pUBLIC SERvANT)*. It’s very dangerous when you think you know how to spell a word but don’t. I put INSCRUTIBLE without paying proper attention to the wordplay.
15 Hill hilariously resembling male parts
INSELBERG – (RESEmBLING)*. I’d never heard of this, but it’s pretty clear where to put the letters.
16 Put Sulphur and Iodine into magic drink
POSITION – PO(S, I)TION. I’m not sure why ‘Sulphur’ and ‘Iodine’ have capital letters.
18 Keep an eye on closed court
OVERSEE – OVER (closed), SEE (court).
19 Upset working with one top Hollywood star
PACINO -reversal of ON, I, CAP.
21 Feature about a distance for a run?
CHAIN – CH(A)IN. I’m not sure what ‘for a run’ is doing here. Edit: it’s a second definition. Thanks mctext. Edit of the edit: a CHAIN is the distance between the wickets in cricket. This takes crossword-related cricketing obscurity to new heights, but as I proved you don’t need to know it to solve the clue. Thanks Peter.
24 Take in breath
EAT – contained in breath.

25 comments on “Sunday Times 4625 by Jeff Pearce”

  1. Over the half-hour, by how much I have no idea. Like keriothe, I didn’t know STAPELIA but thought it looked the most likely (some botanist named Stapel discovered it, I suppose). Also DNK INSELBERG; liked the ‘male parts’. Never heard of Kirkstone, either, or, come to think of it, GREENSTONE, but checkers to the rescue. I’m sure we’ve had AMBO a couple of times in the last couple of years, and I somehow managed to remember it.
  2. My suspicion is that we have two literals: distance (66ft) + a run. A chain is a sequence, hence run.
    2. 22yd = 1 chain is also the distance between the wickets in cricket. If that was the idea, the editor forgot that the distance between the popping creases is what matters for a run, and that’s a bit shorter.

      Edited at 2015-01-25 08:30 am (UTC)

  3. Would never have guessed this was a Jeff Pearce, due to the number of unknowns which made this his hardest puzzle for ages – COLD CHISEL, ROSE OF SHARON, STAPELIA, GREENSTONE, Kirkstone Pass, etc. 9A produced one of those awful solving moments where you have to guess which of two well-known words is going to have a variant spelling in the answer.
    1. Potential variant spellings: the choice seems to be lavendor or vender. Vender is unusual but the -er ending matches the vast majority of “person who …” words. Lavendor isn’t something I thought of. I hope that if we used a spelling as strange as that, we’d ensure that you had a good reason for choosing it.

      Edited at 2015-01-26 07:39 am (UTC)

  4. Beaten by AMBO and INSELBERG. Other than that (after an arm wrestle lasting several hours!) managed to get the rest.

    This week’s seems to be more fun (and somewhat racier, if I’m not mistaken!)

  5. Also defeated by ambo. I have never come across bo as a familiar term of address for a man. Could someone please give an example.
    1. ‘Fraid not. The only Bo that immediately springs to mind is Bo Derek who in the film 10 made it very clear that she was not a bloke.
    2. I can’t find one either. If you google it you get lots of reference to Derek and Diddley. It’s in Chambers, but not in Collins or ODO. I suspect it was only even vaguely familiar to me from crosswords.
      1. It’s in the same vein as bud, guy, bro, mate, etc.

        Edit: sorry, meant that to be a reply to redlew.

        Edited at 2015-01-25 12:52 pm (UTC)

  6. Yes I had a longish think about this but AMBO turns up with some frequency in the NY Times puzzles (must be useful filler for setters) so it couldn’t be anything else. Plus BEAU seems to be a popular boys’ name in some parts of the US. One of the regular commenters on the Club Forum got very exercised about BARELY but it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch. The one that I took issue with was ROSE OF SHARON because we’ve got one and I’m sure it’s at least 10 feet tall and almost the same width. It’s very nice and it’s certainly not a redwood but it’s not a dwarf either. Nice puzzle. 25.35
    1. The Chambers use of ‘bo’ was intended.

      “Rose of Sharon” is a biblical name applied to several different plants, a bit like “Jacob’s Ladder” as a stock geographical name for a steep climb. As a horticultural dunce, I snapped up the RHS Encyclopaedia of Plants and Flowers when it was on offer in a well-known newsagent/bookshop, and it uses this name only for Hypericum calycinum, a dwarf shrub. On that basis, I thought the definition was justified.

  7. Finished in an hour after resorting to aids for STAPELIA and AMBO (DK the word nor BO in the wordplay – surely one obscurity per clue is sufficient?). Am I mistaken thinking ‘in’ is doing double duty at 24dn?

    Edited at 2015-01-25 02:04 pm (UTC)

  8. Had the same unknowns and guesses as most above, and like Nick got knocked by inselberg and ambo. Wasn’t helped by assuming banker = Humber was the definition.
    Well set, Mr Pearce. Well edited Mr PB, and very well blogged Mr K thanks.
  9. All said, except: ROSE OF SHARON guessed from checkers and put in with a shrug, presuming the dwarf was more likely a character from The Hobbit than Harry Potter.
    Can I nominate minerals as on a par with plants and Scottish words as obscurities that shouldn’t be in crosswords: almost any combination of letters with INE on the end is a mineral.
    Rob
  10. It’s a geographical technical term.

    Inselberg, ( from German: Insel, “island,” and Berg, “mountain”) isolated hill that stands above well-developed plains

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