Sunday Times 4715 by Jeff Pearce

13 comments on “Sunday Times 4715 by Jeff Pearce”

1. PS

   21ac fyi RAT-ARSED can be categorised as ‘vulgar’

   and please note that conservative types do not ‘hang out’-

   not even in Brent Cross!

   1. Obviously an allusion to J.-P.’s philosophical work, Being Out Of It and Nothingness.
      In Chapter 22 (“Bad Faith and Reverting to Type”) he notes that a classic symptom is leaving double carriage-returns between lines of text — often noted among certain minor poets.

      Edited at 2016-10-16 05:45 am (UTC)

      1. And what did you do in the war?
2. re- 1dn life is too short

   re 6ac OPUS this was the company Jessica Leeds kept on an aeroplane a few years ago.
   21ac

   26ac OTTO (or ATTAR) is an ‘extravagent’ oil per se.

   horryd Shanghai

3. This being a Sunday cryptic, I wasn’t particularly surprised by 21ac; or wouldn’t have been if I’d known the term. As it was, it took a while, and all the checkers. Memory trouble at 10ac, finally overcome, but I think it was my LOI. ‘The Octopus’ was a once famous muck-raking novel (1901) about California farmers fighting the Southern Pacific Railroad (the octopus). COD RIDING CROP.
4. There are a couple of clues that don’t follow every letter of modern Ximenean clue-writing rules. But in both cases, my assessment was that the clue was solvable, so in the absence of an easy change to make it strictly “correct”, I let it stand. 21A as “vulgar”: in Collins dictionary, it’s now counted as simply “slang”. And so far, any comment by letter or email from the “ordinary solvers” who don’t look at blogs seems to be completely absent. It’s also a fact that “arse” as part of Marseille in Tim Moorey’s final puzzle raised no adverse comment, here or by post.
5. Not that keen on 21a – not because I’m squeamish but because I don’t think it works – or 2d, which I think is a bit too clever for its own good. But, altogether an enjoyable puzzle. 30 minutes.
6. 44 minutes for this enjoyable puzzle. FWIW I think I’d go for semi &lit at 26ac. I’m no expert on that type of clue but I can’t see that “primarily” plays any part in the definition. “Oil” does obviously, and the Wiki entry for “Attar of Roses” (aka OTTO) mentions that one of its features is that it’s costly to produce in its natural form so “extravagant” seems pertinent to the definition in addition to giving us OTT as wordplay.
7. No time for this one: I had to deal with a minor domestic emergency half-way through and left the timer running.
   As Peter says 21ac doesn’t quite conform to strict Ximenean rules: the definition would have to be ‘too many’, which doesn’t really work. However as he also says the required answer is pretty clear and the overall idea is very neat, so strict Ximenean rules be damned. Likewise the definition in 26ac (which I take to be &Lit) is a bit odd but what the hell.
   ENDIVE was my last in, very sneaky.
   All in all I enjoyed this one a lot, and thought it all the better for the unconventional touches.
8. God save us from Ximenes and Ximeneans.. his “rules” were useful in their day but just a creative straitjacket now. Good work Peter, and Jeff, please keep the inventiveness coming
   1. Skip if you’ve read me on this before …

      I’m happy to follow Ximenean rules most of the time, and ones like “there must be a definition” all of the time. The historical context is that in 1966 when his book appeared, and even more so in about 1949 when Afrit produced a much shorter set of principles, there were clues in most if not all the major newspaper cryptic crosswords with missing definitions, partial wordplay and other features that in most papers would never be seen today, and would be likely to cause unsolvability / unexplainability if they did. I’m happy to save our solvers from those. But there are some Ximenean rules these days which seem to be “what we believe X would have wanted, or what his successor Azed has said” rather than what X wrote. Any puzzle that uses a cryptic definition clue without other wordplay is non-Ximenean in one way, so insistence on all the other rules can seem inconsistent.

9. For 16d, there aren’t enough esses in espresso to account for all the bits of the clue: es + press+ so.
   1. E can also be used as an abbreviation for Spain, according to something called the European System of Social Indicators. If you do that it works.

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