Sunday Times 4632 by Dean Mayer

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
18:33. I found most of this straightforward. In fact some of the clues are very easy indeed, a feature that elicited some complaints in last week’s puzzle. But of course there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the odd easy, even very easy, clue. And in the end I got quite bogged down, with a few clues proving quite resistant at the end.

Overall I found it highly enjoyable, with some very fine clues in amongst the easier fare including a smattering of Mr Mayer’s trademark naughty ones and a couple of brilliant anagrams. Thank you Dean!

Across
1 You may see this as an orchestra, too
ALSO – A, LSO. Nice gentle starter.
3 Threw mud? Mud had to be thrown
BADMOUTHED – (MUDHADTOBE)*. Brilliant clue, and an anagram that was just meant to be.
10 Take advantage of down payments?
FEATHER ONES NEST – CD. Or possibly a two-in one: you could feather your nest figuratively with down payments of cash, or literally if you got paid in down.
11 May 23, these 50 cats will cuddle one
LIFELINES – L (50), FELINES containing (or cuddling) I. Because LIFELINES may COME TO THE RESCUE. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in wondering what’s special about the 23rd of May. Not much, as it turns out, but that is of course irrelevant.
12 Border around left edge
SIDLE – SID(L)E. We had a very similar clue for the same word not very long ago.
14 The morning crossword in a Sunday paper was stunning
AMAZED – AM, AZED. Azed is the barred-grid puzzle in the Observer I haven’t had time to do recently.
15 Author, given lines, leaves
GREENERY – GREENE, RY (railway = lines).
17 Piano is not TV studio equipment
PAINTBOX – P, AIN’T, BOX. The studio is of the artist’s variety.
18 Officer hiding behind one lieutenant
CASSIO – C(ASS, I)O. I’ve never read or seen Othello so I didn’t know this character, but the clue didn’t cause me any problems. The first slightly naughty clue: a regular feature with Dean’s puzzles.
21 Saucy writer starts to joke about assassin
NINJA – Anaïs NIN, Joke, About. I’m not sure how well-known the Cuban-French writer of erotica is, but with N_N_A, ‘assassin’ and ‘starts to joke’ you don’t really need her.
22 “Good Lord” goes around if that is given worship
GLORIFIED – G, LOR(IF, I.E.)D.
23 Wake up — there’s a suggestion to be a hero
COME TO THE RESCUE – COME TO (wake up), THERE’S, CUE (suggestion).
25 Atonement’s right in the end
EXPIRATION – one of those clues where ‘s looks like it means ‘is’ but actually means ‘has’. So it looks like you need a word meaning ‘end’ containing an R to give a word meaning ‘atonement’, but in fact EXPIATION (atonement) has an R in it, giving a word meaning ‘end.’
26 Poor or very good
MEAN – DD. That’s one mean clue!

Down
1 Lucerne footballers welcomed by all footballers
ALFALFA – AL(FA)L, FA. Purple Medick, or ALFALFA, is also known as ‘Lucerne’. You live and learn.
2 Stop assuming decline in recycling is an economic problem
STAGFLATION – STATION (stop) contains FLAG (decline) with the G at the front (recycling). At least I think that’s how it works. I think Dean has used a device like this before, and I must say I’m not keen. It’s too close to an indirect anagram for me. Apologies to Dean in anticipation of being told I’ve got the wrong end of the stick. As for STAGFLATION, it is of course the term for what happens when a supply shock startles a Philips Phillips curve, making it jump to one side like a frightened stag. The Philips Phillips is rarely seen these days, having been driven from its natural habitat by the more successful Nairu.
4 Complete authority needs no introduction
ARRANT – wARRANT. As in ‘arrant nonsense’.
5 Cloth skirts on trial
MINISTRY – or MINIS, TRY.
6 Set Sunday Times cryptic out of order
UNSYSTEMATISED – (SETSUNDAYTIMES)*. I thought the anagram in 3ac was brilliant but this one is pure genius!
7 The man carrying old gardening tool
HOE – H(O)E. As easy as anything ever devised by Jeff Pearce, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that.
8 Indecisive jockeys try and hide
DITHERY – (TRYHIDE)*.
9 A 4×4’s turn in the car’s role — looking ridiculous
CHELSEA TRACTOR – an anagram of THE CAR’S ROLE surrounding ACT. I am guilty of owning one of these, but in my defence mine is one of the tiny minority that actually goes off-road from time to time.
13 Theatre part for Garbo?
DRESS CIRCLE – or GARB, O. I loved this clue when I solved it but then I thought ‘this must have been done before’. Sure enough, in puzzle 25,606, for instance: ‘What might suggest Garbo’s place in the theatre?’ It’s still a great clue, though, and Dean’s version is more elegant.
16 Make a boob? Don’t worry
FORGET IT – or FORGE TIT. Fnarr fnarr.
17 Sweep with long flourish
PANACHE – PAN (sweep: think cinematography rather than housework), ACHE (long). I was convinced for a while this was going to be a word meaning ‘sweep’ starting with PINE (long).
19 Friend using jagged blade to cut leg
OLD BEAN – (BLADE)* inside ON (mandatory cricket reference).
20 Very rainy over some of Johannesburg
SOWETO – SO, WET, O (another mandatory cricket reference).
24 Plan starters of meat and potatoes
MAP – first letters of meat and potatoes. Another extremely easy clue.

32 comments on “Sunday Times 4632 by Dean Mayer”

  1. Hugely enjoyable puzzle, with 16d setting off the inner Benny Hill, and 10a, 13d and 6d leaving me lost in admiration at the setter’s art.

    ALFALFA was LOI as did not know the Lucerne plant connection, and was trying to make something out of a ski resort (particularly when the A appeared and I went through Alpine contortions). Bunged it in eventually based on the (mercifully) large number of cross checkers and the word play, but without quite knowing why…

    Always good to see Ms. Nin getting a run out (and that’s not intended as a cricket reference…).

    Thanks for the blog Keriothe.

    Edited at 2015-03-15 03:00 am (UTC)

  2. MEAN did for me: I couldn’t get how it could mean “very good” so thanks for the example. I had LEAN as a tolerable alternative, which certainly can mean poor (“seven fat years and seven lean years” Joseph) but only means very good if you think that’s what lean meat is. It’s all I had!
    1. LEAN was my first thought for ‘poor’ but fortunately I’m firmly in Mrs Spratt’s camp so the idea that ‘lean’ could mean ‘very good’ didn’t occur to me.
    2. I went reluctantly for LEAN, on the basis that a lean team would be very good at managing with limited manpower.
    3. Another lean – mean was first guess for poor, but couldn’t make it mean very good. Unlike the blogger, whose example is excellent.
      Otherwise strange but enjoyable offering, some very easy some very chewy.
      Rob
  3. Have to say I didn’t like 2d at all, in part because I don’t care for gobbledygook management-speak financial whizz-kid words and in part because ‘decline in recycling’ can only be made to mean what it’s intended to mean by manipulation of the type practised by such whizz-kids. It was a toss-up for me between the ‘correct’ answer and ‘stafflation’, which is an even uglier word and in the context thus even better, I’d say.

    The rest was very nice, as we’ve come to expect from Dean.

    Edited at 2015-03-15 09:02 am (UTC)

  4. I wouldn’t really describe STAGFLATION as a ‘management-speak’ or ‘financial whizz-kid’ word. It’s dismal-science-brand impenetrable jargon. I recognise that’s unlikely to help.
    1. “Stagflation” Is pure politics, the word was coined by one (Ian Macleod) and was first sighted in Hansard. Don’t sully the great name of science in this connection, its jargon may be impenetrable but it is meaningful.
      Anyway I thought impenetrability was the whole point of having jargon in the first place?
      1. It may have been coined by a politician, but there’s no doubt that STAGFLATION is also an economic term. To be honest I don’t really think it is impenetrable – it seems pretty clear to me what it means – and it is also a meaningful term since at the time it was a new phenomenon and something that much of mainstream economics said wasn’t supposed to happen.
  5. Nice enjoyable easy puzzle, 15 minutes, thanks K for the blog and the economics reminder tutorial.
  6. No, that would be very much a ‘regenerational atrophy’ rather than a ‘decline in recycling’ scenario and I would have smoked it.
  7. Is the meaning of “stagflation” really impenetrable? It’s just a stagnation/inflation portmanteau, so seems to me no more impenetrable than Bakerloo or labradoodle.
    1. See above: no, I don’t really think it’s impenetrable at all. It should also be familiar to most people who lived through the 70s.
      And incidentally my tongue was in my cheek when I used the phrase ‘dismal science’, too. I’m not an economist but I take a reasonably keen amateur interest. I don’t really see how it is possible to understand the great political questions of the age without a basic grasp of macro.
      By the way is my interpretation of the wordplay correct here? Is ‘in recycling’ an instruction to turn FLAG into GFLA (or possibly AGFL)? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

      Edited at 2015-03-15 12:21 pm (UTC)

      1. You’ve got the right idea with the recycling. It’s an unusual idea but the number of possibilities for an N-letter word is N-1 rather than the (N factorial)-1 for an anagram – e.g. 3 rather than 23 for a 4-letter word.
        1. Thanks Peter. My problem with it isn’t so much the number of possibilities as the fact that, to me, and in the absence of an established convention, ‘in recycling’ is not a sufficiently clear indication of what you’re supposed to do with the letters. I think I’ve seen it twice now, though, so as far as I’m concerned this is now a Dean Mayer convention that I will be on the lookout for in future!
    2. As you say, Peter, obviously a portmanteau word, but this does not really assist in defining precisely what it means. If you had not come across the word before, how would ‘stagnation-inflation’ help, apart from pointing to economics?

      Edited at 2015-03-15 12:49 pm (UTC)

      1. Combining words in a portmanteau can mean various things, but my guess is that “a combination of A and B” is the most common, so any one identifying the two words involved would have a fair chance of working it out. I’d certainly put money on non-experts defining “stagflation” more accurately without help than “Phillips curve”.
        1. No wish to stir up a peaceful Sunday evening but

          a) if sotira below with an Economics A-level has no idea what stagnation is, it will be yet harder for the rest of us, and
          b) gotta contest N-1 anagrams for an N-letter word, if only because STOP, OPTS,POTS, POST, TOPS, SPOT.

          Edited at 2015-03-15 06:33 pm (UTC)

          2. I’m sympathetic on the ‘recycling’ device. If it were an established convention then I would accept it, but it isn’t and personally (sorry Dean and Peter) I would prefer it didn’t become one.
            As for STAGFLATION, I don’t know. It’s always difficult to judge the obscurity of words you’ve heard of. I suppose in forty years it will perhaps be unfair to expect people to have heard of ‘credit crunch’.
            1. I wouldn’t claim this makes it “established convention”, but I did see it in a puzzle published in another broadsheet paper in the last week.
          3. on point b –
            N-1 is number of ways to ‘recycle’ : i.e. letter order not changed, so SPOT gives POTS, OTSP & TSPO only.
            N!-1 is number of all jumbles : 23 for SPOT, including all the anagrams, and lots of non-words.
  8. A few minutes over the hour in what is becoming an embarrassing succession of c60 minute solves usually ending with aids brought in for the last one or two clues (or in one recent weekday puzzle, the very first, because I couldn’t get started). Still I managed to complete this one without aids, which is mildly encouraging in a difficult time.

    Didn’t know NIN or understand how STAGFLATION worked but at least I knew the word.

    I would have liked some acknowledgement in the clue to 18ac that transatlantic sensitivities were being referenced with regard to “behind”. On this side of the pond an arse is an arse, and not a donkey.

    Edited at 2015-03-15 01:53 pm (UTC)

  9. Around 27 minutes, though I did look up CASSIO, who should have rung a bell but didn’t (and, refined as I am, I was reluctant to trust that particular wordplay).

    I seem to remember finding most of this much easier than usual for DM, but I then got horribly hung up on several different misspellings of SYSTEMATISED, before finally admitting defeat and resorting to “When all else fails, write the blessed thing down!”

    I’m one of the countless 1980s ‘scholars’ who plumped for Economics as that pesky third A’Level and spent two years regretting it. STAGFLATION is one of the few terms I remember (though don’t ask me what it means). In case anyone’s wondering, Grade C. And I have no idea how I got that.

    1. Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist Strikes Back is a very engaging explanation of basic macroeconomics, should you ever feel the inclination to give the subject a second chance.
  10. I’ve been waiting for this blog, as I couldn’t make sense of 9d; it’s a comfort to see the solution, and to know that I’ve never heard of a CHELSEA TRACTOR. (Also didn’t know what a 4×4 was.) I still should have worked it out, but. Surprised at CASSIO, which struck me as a bit TLS-y.
    1. I guess if you don’t know either, this is a tough clue. This is what I think you would call an SUV. I’m sure it’s obvious but they’re known as CHELSEA TRACTORs because certain models (notably the Range Rover) are very common in particular areas of London. Less than one in twenty such vehicles will ever do what they are designed for.

      Edited at 2015-03-15 08:51 pm (UTC)

  11. Even with the explanation I still can’t quite work out why it is correct. Can anyone help please?
    1. ‘Officer’ = Commanding Officer = CO.
      ‘behind’ = ASS
      ‘one’ = I
      So the officer – CO – is ‘hiding’ (contains) ASS, I.
      The definition is ‘lieutenant’, because in Othello that’s what Michael CASSIO is.

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