Sunday Times 4728 by Dean Mayer

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
DNF. I found this generally quite tricky, but had all but two clues solved in something like fifteen minutes. I then spent another ten or fifteen staring in increasing desperation at 12dn and 19dn. I got 12dn eventually, but at that point I was pretty fed up so I cheated for 19dn, which turned out to be the easier of the two. Goodness only knows why I couldn’t see it.

On top of this I have one wrong answer, which I assume (hope) is the ambiguous 22dn, and one I can’t explain properly: the blogger’s nightmare.

This comprehensive, miserable failure continued my run of form in 2017, with only two successful completions out of the five daily puzzles in the first week of the year. I always give up booze in January, so perhaps increased stupidity is a withdrawal symptom.

So I hope you had better luck with this one than I did. I think it’s a very good puzzle, but it’s hard to say with any certainty given how grumpy it made me, for reasons that have nothing to do with the puzzle itself.

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (THIS)*.

Across
1 Business with husband, also herdsman
COWHAND – CO, W, H, AND.
5 Crater about to swallow tree
CALDERA – C(ALDER)A. A ‘large basin-shaped crater at the top of a volcano’. I vaguely remembered this term, almost certainly from a past crossword, although if you had asked me ‘what’s a CALDERA?’ I wouldn’t have been able to tell you.
9 One complaint after the other?
MORNING SICKNESS – CD: after ‘the other’ (nudge nudge, wink wink, know what I mean, say no more) you might suffer from this complaint.
10 Brave, perhaps, to hold one’s tongue
INDONESIAN – IND(ONE’S)IAN. Not very PC, but NATIVISE AMERICAN isn’t a language, and doesn’t fit.
11 Fairy about to be given a small jumper
FLEA – reversal of ELF, A.
13 Team turned around court orders
EDICTS – reversal of SIDE containing CT.
14 Stop working after it’s paid back
DIAPASON – reversal of SA (it, sex appeal) PAID, ON (working).
16 Glass vessel
SCHOONER – DD. The fact that a SCHOONER is both a boat and a drinking glass is used reasonably often as misdirection, but I don’t remember seeing it done quite this directly.
17 Desire “freedom” by marital consent
LIBIDO – LIB, (freedom, as in women’s), I DO.
20 Love turning down work
OPUS – O (love), reversal of SUP (drink, down).
21 Top secret
OUT OF SIGHT – DD.
23 Park is, in part, green
PRESERVATIONIST – P(RESERVATION, IS)T.
24 Soviet troops dream about penetrating lines
REDARMY – (DREAM)* contained in RY (lines).
25 Hesitant when changing article in diary
DITHERY – DIARY with A changed to THE. This could equally be a clue for DIARY, but it isn’t.

Down
1 Turn up carrying scrap alloy
COMBINE – COM(BIN)E.
2 Always real?
WORLD WITHOUT END – I put this in from checkers and the definition, but I don’t really understand it. Is the idea just that if something is ‘of the world’ it is real? Or am I missing something?
3 Turning away false people
ALIENATION – or A LIE NATION, geddit?
4 Shorten long joke for an audience
DIGEST – sounds like ‘die, jest’. A relatively unusual meaning of the word, in verb form at least. The noun is familiar to me from Readers Digest. My grandmother used to have ancient issues on shelves all round her house, and I used to find the old adverts strangely fascinating: I couldn’t quite get my head round the descriptions (ultra-modern, wave of the future, hi-tech etc) of products (particularly cars) that were clearly from the olden days.
5 Of weather, exciting when cold has gone
CLIMATIC – CLIMAcTIC.
6 Fancy a match?
LIKE – if X is ‘a match’ for Y, it is like Y.
7 Promise of heaven revealing itself to be nonsensical
EVERLASTING LIFE – (REVEALING ITSELF)*. Great anagram. For this to happen heaven would have to exist, but in a really disappointing form.
8 Salt isn’t a compound to keep dry
ABSTAIN – AB (sailor, salt), (ISN’T A)*. What I’m doing at the moment.
12 Babies carry wet blanket
SPOILSTOUTPORT – SPOILS, TOUT. Not a word I can remember seeing before. I saw TOUT quite quickly but it took me forever to get SPOILS from ‘babies’. PORT (carry). See below: I am a moron.
15 Tripper turned up very unusual map again
RESURVEY – USER (as in drugs), (VERY)*.
16 One may pick up small receptacle
SHOPPER – S, HOPPER. As in ‘could you pick up some milk on the way home?’
18 Most of our tasty nuts last longer
OUTSTAY – (OUr TASTY)*. I wasted some time here trying to find an anagram of OUR TASTy.
19 Rank opponent slightly less than fair
FOETID – FOE, TIDy. I saw the TID bit, but couldn’t for the life of me see the FOE bit. It’s so incredibly obvious now, of course.
22 Show stomach
WEAR – at least I think that’s the answer. I had BEAR: if that’s the right answer I have something wrong somewhere else. The other day BEAR was the answer to another double definition clue, and I got it wrong (I put GEAR), so I was primed for it this time.

38 comments on “Sunday Times 4728 by Dean Mayer”

  1. BEAR’s right; I assumed it was a dd (‘bears signs of …’). Your wrong’un is 12d, which should be SPOILSPORT. And what did you see quickly when you saw TOUT? I can’t see anything.

    Edited at 2017-01-15 03:56 am (UTC)

  2. I wondered about this too, and biffed from checkers and def; but it just now struck me that it’s REALM without the M.

    Edited at 2017-01-15 01:59 am (UTC)

  3. I failed to notice a typo in 3d, W for E. I knew CALDERA, but a brain malfunction kept me from recalling the word for some time. Crater Lake in Oregon is a stunningly beautiful caldera; I still remember the sight of it from when I was 5. LOI DIAPASON, one of those words I ‘know’ but didn’t know the meaning of; or, as it turns out, the pronunciation.
  4. 2dn REAL(M)and BEAR at 22dn. was good for me as was 12dn SPOILSPORT.

    It’s been a horrible week for The Senior Bloggers all round. Smarten up the lot of you!

    Reader’s Digest was weird!

    COD 7dn EVERLASTING LIFE WOD FOETID

  5. A technical DNF here too. Having struggled through everything to that point I found myself left with only 19dn and had no fight left in me so I resorted to aids.

    PB has said in the forum he will accept two alternative solutions at 22dn but as yet I don’t know what they are. I had BEAR fwiw.

    The correct parsing of 12dn has not been given so far, which is SPOIL (baby), SPORT (wear) – the latter element no doubt planting the seeds of an error at 22dn in some minds, assuming BEAR is the actual answer there.

    I have edited out my comment re 3dn as I’ve just realised where the first A comes from i.e. “that’s false” = “that’s a lie”.

    Edited at 2017-01-15 06:56 am (UTC)

    1. But the clue reads “Babies carry wet blanket”, so it can’t be SPOIL; rather, it’s SPOILS=babies, PORT=carry, def. ‘wet blanket’. ODE sv ‘port 5’ has (2. carry or convey)
    2. At 22D, WEAR and BEAR are the alternatives we’re accepting. I hope there is not a third choice that works.
  7. Clearly I need to either give up this blogging lark, or go back on the booze. My brain has rotted.
  8. Similar experience to yours, keriothe, but involving a different clue. I couldn’t get anywhere near DIAPASON. Once I’d cheated to find the answer I felt I had seen it before — in crosswords, where else? — but it had long been dumped into the recycle bin of memory. And it wasn’t the easiest wordplay for assembling an unfamiliar word.

    So I was also left grumpy, which is a shame because I absolutely loved the rest of the puzzle. Some lovely surfaces and quite a few smiles.

    I would say go treat yourself to an alcohol-free beer, keriothe, but I think you’ve suffered enough.

    1. I’ve resolved to do six weeks booze-free this year, so you could be in for a couple more entertaining blogs.
      One problem I had was that I was so convinced 22dn must be my error that I didn’t consider anything else. The other problem being a complete failure to engage what remains of my brain, of course.
      As for suffering, of course the humiliation of being monumentally stupid in a public forum stings a bit, but that part of me has become so covered in scar tissue over the years that I hardly feel it any more.
      1. I’ve done much worse than that Keriothe. I posted the blog for a prize puzzle out of turn and a week too soon and then blithely left for a long weekend out of reach of frantic emails saying “what the…”. You deserve the tipple of your choice say I.
      2. Dear keriothe,,

        we are too old to give up our grog now- besides
        “wine maketh glad the heart of man”, and as I am an educated v a contemporary woman, I understand and delight in the fact that the generic “Man” includes this old girl too.

        We do OK, and how much fun is it anyway!!

        Anna the Oz

        1. I wholeheartedly agree with you Anna, but wine maketh the heart of this particular man a bit more glad, and a bit more often, than is generally recommended by physicians, so I think it’s a good idea to give up once in a while, if only to remind myself that I can.
    2. Same experience here—cheated to get DIAPASON, then found it vaguely familiar. And I never seem to manage to spot “it” = “SA”, even though I know it’s a common trick. Bah.
  9. I very much wanted this to be “scooper” which seemed like a better fit for the definition so I dithered for quite some time. Post-submit I saw that, sure enough, the SOED says a “cooper” is a small wine basket. Oh well. DIAPASON I did know having once upon a time played the organ very poorly. Some of the Rolling Stones stuff (You can’t always get what you want) works quite well as church music. Didn’t think of “wear” fortunately. FOETID was in this morning’s NY Times puzzle but without the O.
    1. Meanings only in the SOED are occasionally used in Mephisto, but for use in the ST Crossword, I’d have to be convinced that they were well-known or easy to work out, but somehow omitted by the others. For this meaning, it would have been “sorry setter, but I’ve never heard of it”.
  10. I enjoyed this and my printout says 25 minutes, no problems, so it must be because I thought of having a booze holiday then the weather turned cold and nasty and I never quite went dry. keriothe, 2 glasses a day is the same as abstinence, in my view, especially if it’s decent red.

    If you’d asked me what a DIAPASON was, on a quiz show, I’d have flunked, but given a definition to use, it was deep in the grey cells somewhere.

    Edited at 2017-01-15 04:54 pm (UTC)

    1. I certainly agree that 2 glasses a day is the same as abstinence. Also a terrible shame to waste the rest of the bottle like that.
  11. I went for scooper rather than Shopper, and missed entirely how the (very smart) W W E worked. Diapason went in on a wing and a prayer based on the wordplay which I fortunately spotted.

    Other than that, I actually found this one a little bit less taxing than most of Dean’s offerings (i.e. extremely hard rather than utterly mind blowing) – which must be attributable to the excessive drinking that continues apace in my household as we polish off the wine mountain that we stocked up on for the festive season.

    Loved 9ac. Thanks for the blog K, and thanks as ever to Dean for a cracking puzzle.

  12. Had a bit of a chat with a mate about this one. Came to the conclusion that, if you had EVERLASTING LIFE, you wouldn’t die and so have no chance of going to heaven — or indeed to the other place. Hence “nonsensical”; and so a touch of &lit??
    1. I’m no bible scholar but I believe EVERLASTING LIFE (or life everlasting, depending on your translation) is explicitly promised in the bible. And doesn’t JC himself say something about living forever, or never dying, if you believe in him? So by its own terms the phrase treats life as something that continues after death.
      So I’m still envisaging a situation in which you wake up in heaven, but your initial euphoria at discovering that the place exists at all is quickly dampened when a passing angel tells you not to get too excited, this is just for a couple of years and then you’re properly dead.
  13. I always enjoy the puzzles from this setter. I do them a week late to coincide with the blog. Another great offering. 31 minutes. Ann
  14. This is a play with homonyms.

    To show something is to bare something. To stomach something is to bear it.

    Can’t see how wear could be as acceptable.

    Diapason is a painful munge…

    1. See Peter’s comment above: BEAR is the intended answer, but WEAR is also acceptable.
      1. Thanks for the reply

        I had seen it – so here’s a question. I’m fascinated. If this had been set as a competition puzzle would it be possible for two separate responses delivered at the same time using different answers to be acceptable? Or just one? Or is there a rule in crossword solving that says if there is sufficient ambiguity ( and who judges that) then more than one answer is acceptable?

        Maybe the setter has to answer this?

        1. Yes, if there are two valid answers to a clue (as in this case) both will be accepted. And in fact this is a competition puzzle! Whether the alternative answer is valid is, in this case, up to Peter, since he’s the Sunday Times crossword editor.
          1. Ok – thanks

            I guess if the setter is provably ambiguous leading to multiple answers then so be it. Perhaps they should improve their encryption skills a little to remove doubt

            We get it published here in an OZ weekend broadsheet – without competition. Lags the UK but it’s always good to do it and then see if you’re right rather than waiting a week for the answer.

            1. This sort of thing happens by accident, and it’s bound to from time to time. There are so many possible words that fit a pattern like _E_R, it’s a bit much to expect the setter/editor to consider every possible alternative to be sure that one doesn’t also happen to fit the wordplay. And as long as both are accepted as ‘correct’ answers I can’t really see the problem.
          2. Ok – thanks

            I guess if the setter is provably ambiguous leading to multiple answers then so be it. Perhaps they should improve their encryption skills a little to remove doubt

            We get it published here in an OZ weekend broadsheet – without competition. Lags the UK but it’s always good to do it and then see if you’re right rather than waiting a week for the answer.

      2. Thanks for the reply

        I had seen it – so here’s a question. I’m fascinated. If this had been set as a competition puzzle would it be possible for two separate responses delivered at the same time using different answers to be acceptable? Or just one? Or is there a rule in crossword solving that says if there is sufficient ambiguity ( and who judges that) then more than one answer is acceptable?

        Maybe the setter has to answer this?

  15. This is a play with homonyms.

    To show something is to bare something. To stomach something is to bear it.

    Can’t see how wear could be as acceptable.

    Diapason is a painful munge…

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