Sunday Times 4898 by Dean Mayer

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
22:20. I’m writing this on Saturday evening, having just watched Brief Encounter with my wife. I’d like to thank jackkt in particular and others for recommending it, because it is a really wonderful movie.

The puzzle? Well I’m literally starting now, so let’s see how I get on…

I don’t normally do COD but I did like 1dn for the self-referentialnessism.

Also I don’t normally do music in the vinyl style because it isn’t relevant but this evening I have been mostly listening to the Wu-Tang Clan.

All in all I thought this was first-class. Thank you Dean!

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (TIHS)*, anagram indicators are in italics.

Across
1 Like this, stand right?
SOBER – SO, BE, R. Let something be = let something stand.
4 Immoral young woman longed to grab uniform
DEBAUCHED – DEB (young woman, of a certain sort), A(U)CHED.
9 Dog turned away — smile about that (7)
GRIFFON – GR(reversal of OFF)IN.
10 Mountainous country with over two rivers — Austria
ANDORRA – AND (with) O, R, R, A.
11 Bits of craft concerning ornaments
AFTERDECKS -AFTER (concerning), DECKS (ornaments). Not sure about after = concerning. Will check in the morning.
12 Drunk wife I turned on
WINO – W, I, reversal of NO.
14 Kinetic art noticed in school
INDOCTRINATE – (ART NOTICED)*.
17 New plan is source of striking report?
PERCUSSIONAL – (PLAN IS SOURCE)*.
20 Jazz genre, a style of Indian music.
RAGA – RAG (Joplin), A.
21 Soft old wine I consumed for boost
POTENTIATE – P (soft), O TENT (a crossword word for wine), I. ATE.
23 Drug trial arranged at home
RITALIN – (TRIAL)*, IN.
24 One to give up drinking a very strong drink
AQUAVIT – A, QU(A, V)IT.
25 Elba resident, British one, that’s kept in isolation
BONAPARTE – B, ON(APART)E.
26 Tough way to cut grass
HARDY – HA(RD)Y.

Down
1 Exceptional clue
SIGNAL – DD. Exceptional clue!
2 All-out effort to eat new pancake
BLINTZ – BLIT(N)Z. I didn’t know this version of blini but it seemed pretty close.
3 Vote on European split in endless rage
REFERENDUM – RE, F(E, REND)UM. A reminder that that our voluntary act of self-harm hasn’t gone away in spite of the virus.
4 Play, sure, and go under par on hole
DANGEROUS CORNER – (SURE AND GO)*, CORNER (difficult situation, hole).
5 Gap etc too old for advertising generally
BLANKET COVERAGE – BLANK, ETC, OVERAGE.
6 Your duty is to hold tongue
URDU – contained in ‘your duty’.
7 Battle-axe has reduced radius, bottom inverted
HARRIDAN – is this a sexist term? I had an interesting discussion today with my kids about the more modern ‘Karen’ and ‘Gammon’. Let’s keep discussing these things and trying not to be rude to one another.
8 Rats eating dead fish
DRAGONET – DRA(GONE)T. Not a fish I knew.
13 A good financial contact?
MIDAS TOUCH – a rather brilliant CD.
15 Cut of pork in box, hospital soap in the same place
SPARE RIB – SPAR, ER (cf. George Clooney), IB (ibidem).
16 Cow just spotted in marshland
FRIGHTEN – F(RIGHT)EN.
18 Surrender, perhaps as I have, in conflict
WAIVER – WA(IVE)R.
19 Watch the end of this item?
SENTRY – thiS, ENTRY.
22 Box of cold sauce
CLIP -C, LIP. Box as in ears. Sauce as in cheek, lip, front. The English language is wonderful, isn’t it? I don’t hold with the idea that it’s somehow richer than others, but who cares? It’s ours, let’s enjoy it.

38 comments on “Sunday Times 4898 by Dean Mayer”

  1. I don’t have a time for this, having gone offline at 30′ and then spent maybe another half-hour to finish. I don’t remember much about this, other than wondering about AFTER, and finally remembering DANGEROUS CORNER, a NHO from an earlier puzzle. I’ve marked SIGNAL as COD. Speaking of NHOs, ‘Karen’ and ‘gammon’ are new to me.
  2. (4dn) was the North West by North West corner was my downfall as I had the unparsed POSER at 1ac. Thus on 1dn I stayed on empty – a SIGNAL failure on this clue.

    FOI 6dn URDU جو میرے لئے آسان تھا

    COD 13dn MIDAS TOUCH 😉

    WOD 2dn BLINTZ I got as far as blini, but did not know if one substituted cream cheese for salmon it became a blintz.

    8dn DROGONET was a fish too far as was 23ac RITALIN!
    Warning! – RITALIN can cause rapid or irregular heartbeat, delirium, panic, psychosis and heart failure As I already have most of those – little point taking it.

  3. Glad you enjoyed the film, keriothe!

    Technical DNF as I gave up with three squares unfilled and used aids for the unknown BLINTZ.

    Also DK RITALIN but got to it from wordplay. It’s a trademark but I think the ST doesn’t worry about this – nor does the daily Times now apparently.

    DANGEROUS CORNER is an excellent play by J B Priestley, the first of his ‘Time’ plays. Best seen on stage though, as the 1934 American film is terrible and the 1965 remake for TV was feeble.

  4. We had no newspaper delivery last Sunday. I eventually obtained a copy via Phil. That was after I’d conducted a lockdown DIY Communion service at breakfast involving a piece of toast and the dregs of a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. In the general confusion, I don’t have a time but I remember struggling in places. I was holding a royal flush instead of showing the MIDAS TOUCH for some time. I did know the Priestley play once I saw the corner, written in with a screeching of tyres. It was as well it was only a golf buggy I was driving. I‘d wasted time trying to fit in ‘birdie’ for ‘under par’. Not one of my better days. Decent puzzle though.Thank you K and Dean.

    Edited at 2020-04-19 06:43 am (UTC)

  5. Came a cropper on MIDAS TOUCH. I couldn’t really make sense of it so I ended up with FINAL TOUCH.
    Like Kevin G, I’ve never heard of ‘karen’ or ‘gammon’.
  6. This was too hard for me. Blanks in the NW and, despite having all the checkers, I could not get the play at 4d. In fact I did have Dangerous Corner noted down at the side as one of the possibilities. I think my knowledge of UK drama is pretty good so I’ll label this as an obscurity too far whilst understanding completely that many will regard this as general knowledge. BLINTZ another obscurity hard to find in the clue.
    I was able to get the rest including the unknown fish DRAGONET. David

  7. No, not in my neck of the woods. But HARRIDAN was a good description for phase 2 Dastardly Denise.

    I took almost twice as long as usual with this, not helped by confidently entering “albert” at 19D.

    FOI GRIFFON
    LOI AFTERDECKS
    COD REFERENDUM (closely followed by MIDAS TOUCH)
    TIME 20:05

  9. Biddlecombe will have an awfully long list of verboten words if some are deemed by, no doubt, a puzzles blue pencil subcommittee, to cause offence to a few. It’s also the proverbial (without being slopist) slippery slope.
    2. Well obviously there is a list of verboten words, and as a general rule I think it’s better to avoid offence.
      I don’t mean to suggest that HARRIDAN should be banned, but I do think it’s a bit of a sexist word. The male equivalent would probably be described as assertive.
  10. 32:30, but I spelt Boney the warrior with an E in the middle at 25A. No wonder I couldn’t parse it! Like others I found the NW corner hardest – NHO the dog and SOBER my LOI once I’d seen SIGNAL. Quite hard, but fair. COD to DEBAUCHED for the surface. Thanks Dean and K.

    Edited at 2020-04-19 09:01 am (UTC)

  11. 46:54 my solve was a little bit laboured but there were plenty of gems in this one to reward the effort. I thought Midas touch was excellent. I was a little hesitant at the unknown crossers: blintz (more familiar with blini) and afterdecks and at the unknown play at 4dn. I’ve never heard Karen used that way. Things like that cause me even if only momentarily to wonder if it’s possible that I’m no longer hip, young and cool.
    1. Well I’m obviously all of those things but tbh I only know about Karen because of my kids.
      1. It was just a moment’s flirtation with doubt on my part. Of course I’ve still got it, Daddy-o.
  12. I seemed to be on the wavelength for this one, though delayed by inventing a new word that seemed to fit the definition: SUPERSONICAL, anyone?
  13. I was somewhat taken aback when the smellin’ salts we’re out for the old HARRIDAN! Old French word for nag/old horse – ‘haridelle’. Eng.slang overheard c. ‘Bartholomew Fair’ time – something to frighten the horses?
    The male equivalent is termagent, or hereabouts – ‘horrydon’ and hardly ‘assertive’ as you suggest.
    1. ‘Termagant’ is another word for an overbearing woman. You are rather making my argument for me!
  14. Too convoluted and ambiguous. I knew Referendum must be right, but the derivation was too contorted. I had Poser instead of Sober (and I think Poser still seems to fit the clue better), and Harsh instead of Hardy (equally fitting); but, of course these shut me out from getting the other clues and finishing the puzzle. I might have tried for alternatives if my own answers hadn’t seemed so right, and I couldn’t see which ones I had to doubt. It’ more than high time to return to making clues out of whole cloth instead of scraps.
    1. I see POSE (stand) + R (Right) possibly but how could ‘Like this = POSER’ work? HARDY might be ‘tough’ but you’re ignoring ‘way to cut grass’ which also needs to be accounted for. It’s not high time to change anything as the clues are almost without exception meticulously crafted.
    2. As jackkt says, I don’t see anything in the clue that serves as a definition for POSER. HARSH would almost work if R were an abbreviation for ‘road’, but it isn’t (in English English at least – Collins has it as an American abbreviation but I’ve never seen it in a crossword). Even if it were HASH and grass are not the same thing, although admittedly the distinction is one that might not be fully appreciated by all Times setters!

      Edited at 2020-04-19 12:58 pm (UTC)

  15. A tricky puzzle which almost stretched me to the hour. I was help up at the end by SIGNAL, GRIFFON and BLITZ. Didn’t know the pancake and looked it up to confirm. BLANKET COVERAGE was laboriously constructed from wordplay once I had most of the crossers. CORNER came easily but DANGEROUS didn’t, and I didn’t know the play anyway. Liaisons, yes. 56:26. Thanks Dean and K.
  16. Every now and then, for what purpose I don’t know, someone posts a message that is simply a solver’s message repeated verbatim. K, maybe you could delete that posting, as well as this one?
    2. Yes, I’m aware of this and delete them as spam whenever I see them as I think they are computer generated. I haven’t seen one on this thread though, nor deleted anything today other than porn in the ‘suspicious messages’ bin.

      Edited at 2020-04-19 04:24 pm (UTC)

  17. Done in 2 sessions this afternoon. (Interrupted by long phone calls from friends anxious about my wellbeing in these strange times.) Like most of Dean’s puzzles, it took me ages to get started but then I made steady but unspectacular progress.I almost gave up with the NW corner still incomplete – not helped by my having POSER at 1a. Then I had a moment of inspiration with BLINTZ, which I’ve vaguely heard of, and finally checked out in 45 minutes. Very enjoyable. Ann
  18. …for the longest time, on the computer, but then I finally did. I also managed to get a workable grid printed out (fuzzy clues, but I’d read them all by then) and I finished, finally, on paper. Was held up by not getting the two long Down ones until very late; in fact, the unknown play was my LOI. For the other, I had BLANKET COVERAGE at first, but eventually opted for BRACKET, trusting there was a sense to BRACK that I had not yet come across (and there is, an archaic sense of “gap, fissure”); I only saw the sense of BLANKET COVERAGE referring to insurance…. Another unknown was AFTERDECKS—an odd word, with “after” referring, I guess, to position in space rather than time.

    Edited at 2020-04-19 08:42 pm (UTC)

  19. The fresh blueberry BLINTZes are one of the many things I will miss from my all-time favorite restaurant, Teresa’s, which closed only months before the lockdown was put in place. (A Polish place, obviously, but they made the world’s best Irish coffee.)
    1. Man I want to go to Teresa’s.
      This lockdown is extremely hard on the restaurant trade. I’m a small shareholder in a restaurant in the city that has a chance of survival because of the aid that our government has put in place. At this point it looks like we’ll get through but I would gladly accept the loss of my equity investment if the franchise and jobs could be secured. If we get through and you are ever in London we must have dinner there: the burgundy list is exceptional.
  20. Hello and my first time commenting, although I have been doing the Sunday Times xword for longer than yonks.

    I appreciate that this ship is well since under the horizon but can anyone tell me why “under par” is referenced in the clue for DANGEROUS CORNER?

  21. Welcome, alphalpho, and no problem – that’s what we’re here for!
    ‘Under par’ is the anagram indicator. I always indicate these by italicising them, although admittedly that my not be very obvious.
    1. Thanks for that and for being so prompt in reply. I did not figure and would not have figured that out.

      Please keep up the good work. As an occasional lurker I am more than impressed by the efforts of those blogging here and in this case you have dispelled a diaphanous “?” that has been hovering over me for some considerable time. Most grateful.

  22. When AQUAVIT and BLINTZ appeared early on we were looking for a pangram. The little known ‘Dangerous Joiner‘ ( the play about the mad carpenter ) , was considered but finally rejected. Lack of an X was also a problem. All correct finally in 46mins. Hats off to Dean Mayer again.
  23. Thanks Dean and keriothe
    Playing catch up … and another Dean puzzle. Found this one actually hardest of the last few, taking ages to get a start, until ANDORRA landed.
    They are not hard in hindsight, but nearly all of the clues had to be pried open to get into them. Did try AQUAVIT a couple of times in younger days – left a disgusting hangover if I remember correctly. Had tried blini, after being introduced to them by a Russian friend, but hadn’t heard of BLINTZ. The play, DRAGONET and GRIFFON were also new learning from the puzzle.
    Finished in the NW corner, like most others by the look of it, with the ‘exceptional’ SIGNAL, that BLINTZ and the tricky SOBER the last few in.

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