15:06, with a silly typo. Another great puzzle from Dean, of medium difficulty.
There are a couple of cryptic definitions in here that I suspect will not be to everyone’s taste, and in one case you are going to be in trouble if you’re lacking a particular bit of classical knowledge. I for one quite like a CD. They are often amusing and tricking you into looking for wordplay that isn’t there is a fair part of the setter’s armory IMO.
How did you get on?
Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (TIHS)*, deletions like this, anagram indicators are in italics.
| Across | |
| 1 | Old storage media vs. opening corrupt files |
| FLOPPIES – (FILES)* containing OPP. ‘Opposite’ and ‘versus’ are not quite the same thing in my book, but close enough for government work I suppose. | |
| 6 | Young lion is first for this painter |
| CUBIST – CUB, IS, T |
|
| 9 | In which fighters may get whacked? |
| ALL-IN WRESTLING – CD. I think the surface meaning is inviting us to think of military fighters getting killed, and there is also a reference to ALL-IN meaning ‘whacked’ in the sense of exhausted. | |
| 10 | Lump one found in bed? |
| WADI – WAD, I. A river which is dry other than in the rainy season, so I suppose the idea here is that it is just a river bed without the river! | |
| 11 | Atrocity met by Sadat in old conflict |
| CRIMEAN WAR – CRIME, ANWAR. | |
| 12 | Precise time to open 23 |
| SPOT ON – SPO(T)ON. The SPOON (23ac) is a variety of golf club, along with the mashie, the niblick and of course the mashie-niblick. | |
| 13 | Criminal had a nice estate |
| HACIENDA – (HAD A NICE)*. | |
| 16 | See game that has knight in monster’s lair? |
| LOCH NESS – LO, CH(N)ESS. The question mark firmly part of the definition here! | |
| 18 | Channel that’s not introduced local game |
| ARROWS – |
|
| 20 | Dire Straits for lovers of the classics |
| HELLESPONT – CD. The Dardenelles, where Leander drowned as he was attempting to swim to his lover Hero in the classical story. Lord Byron was more successful but then he only did it once, and during the day. | |
| 23 | Order staff to strike |
| CLUB – triple definition, I think, the first in the sense ‘a body of people united in a particular aim or purpose’ (Collins). The second two are nounal and verbal versions of the same meaning. | |
| 24 | Delayed being strict on parade ground |
| PROCRASTINATED – (STRICT ON PARADE)*. Excellent anagram! | |
| 25 | Appear to cause embarrassment |
| SHOW UP – DD. | |
| 26 | Warning about depression, right? |
| RED ALERT – RE, DALE, RT. | |
| Down | |
| 2 | Dog has a filling drink thus |
| LHASA APSO – L(HAS, A)AP, SO. | |
| 3 | Left note to be received by long-ago reader |
| PALMIST – PA(L, MI)ST. | |
| 4 | Local church possessed by erstwhile purity |
| INNOCENCE – INN, O(CE)NCE. | |
| 5 | Just one hand’s on nose |
| STRAIGHT SHOOTER – STRAIGHT’S HOOTER. A hand in poker. | |
| 6 | Class project on Spain |
| CASTE – CAST, E. | |
| 7 | Steady job Alan certainly keeps |
| BALANCE – contained in ‘job alan certainly’. | |
| 8 | Medicinal plant, reddish brown, one’s taken out |
| SENNA – S |
|
| 14 | Humiliated, Charlie went with expedition |
| CHASTENED – C, HASTENED. Not CHASTENDD as I had. | |
| 15 | Irish county short of land for diggers? |
| DOWN UNDER – DOWN, UNDER (short of). ‘Digger’ being slang for an Australian. | |
| 17 | My talking, entirely to intimidate |
| HOLY COW – homophone of ‘wholly’, COW. | |
| 19 | Reading — next up, penning chapter one |
| RECITAL – reversal (up) of LATER (next) containing C, I. | |
| 21 | What frames pictures in our home? |
| EARTH – E(ART)H. | |
| 22 | Was bather quiet in flood? |
| SWAMP – SWAM, P. | |
I founhd this of more than medium difficulty. I didn’t know ‘whacked’ (or ALL-IN WRESTLING, for that matter), and looked it up after I had WRESTLING in. ‘Humiliated’ seemed a poor definition of CHASTENED. I especially liked WADI, STRAIGHT SHOOTER(‘just one’!), & HELLESPONT (although it’s only one strait). K, at 1ac I think you meant to italicize ‘corrupt’ not underline it.
“Straits” is a recognised as an alternative, as in “Straits of Dover” by the first four dictionaries I looked at – presumably for the same reason as “narrows” with the same meaning. “All-in wrestling” seems to be a British variety, and a somewhat confusing name – I think it matched “no holds barred” rather than allowing physical whacking.
Thanks, corrected.
Enjoyed this, although my lack of knowledge of the classics meant HELLESPONT was never going to come. I found everything else pretty straightforward with the exception of ALL-IN WRESTLING which I got but never really parsed. Anwar in the clue for CRIMEAN WAR meant it was a write-in. Liked ARROWS for the ‘local game’. EARTH from ‘eh’ and ‘art’ was good and we seem to be getting the ‘what/eh’ quite often of late, not complaining. Thank God we don’t use FLOPPIES any more. COD to INNOCENCE which brought to mind the fairly recent ‘nocence’ for guilt.
Thanks K and setter.
Good challenge, although it was more often than usual a case of putting in the answer before understanding the parsing.
Don’t really accept ‘club’ to mean ‘order’ in 23a. and that held me up.
(Re “order”) Welcome to the CLUB!
From memory we’ve had a few easier puzzles from Dean over recent months but this wasn’t one of them for me as I needed 65 minutes to complete it with one use of aids. The look-up was the dog which has come up only twice before, once in a Jumbo (2022) when I didn’t comment on it, and once in a 15×15 (2015) when it was clued as a straightforward anagram, so I managed to work it out although with some difficulty apparently.
I had MERs at FLOPPIES, WADI and CLUB as ‘order’ but having checked the blog I now think were okay.
23A: I think “staff” and “strike” have to count as different meanings of the same word – you could say “he struck him with a staff”, but not “he staffed him with a strike”. Using a verbal and noun meaning is one way of avoiding the crime of using the same def twice in a double definition clue, though not bulletproof – “cudgel” seems to have both meanings, and there could conceivably be another four-letter word with both meanings.
Cane?
And “cosh”, still just with the vicious initial C …
I meant nounal and verbal meanings of the word ‘club’.
74m 36s but used aids to get HELLESPONT which I wouldn’t have got in a month of Sundays…to coin a suitable phrase. I also have a ‘mer’with CRIMEAN WAR. I don’t accept that a crime is, of itself, an atrocity. Thanks for other decryptions, keriothe. I’m annoyed with myself for missing the hidden BALANCE.
Tricky in parts. Thanks to keriothe and Dean Mayer.
11a Crimean War. I was surprised to find Anwar Sadat to be already in Cheating Machine, so maybe he’s been mentioned before.
21:04 but with a careless tryping error in HELLESPONT. In the medium to light range for Dean I thought. I rarely like CDs but the wrestling one wasn’t bad.
DNF in 45 or so
I found this tricky though in retrospect there were plenty of gentle clues. However I didn’t know the dog which was not the easiest to come up with from the w/p. WADI was also (consequently) a miss. Although I got CLUB and SPOON and for the right reasons the eyebrows were on high twitch alert. Ditto HELLESPONT where my smattering of a classical education helped but is close to a GK clue
CRIMEAN WAR and LOCH NESS were clever though and STRAIGHT SHOOTER very good.
Thanks Dean and Keriothe
I also found this of medium difficulty for Dean, although it took me 50 minutes, and delightful as always. Of course I expect some of the clues to be very tricky, but they are always fair, so even the more obscure ones were actually solvable (LHASA APSO just from wordplay, though I must have seen it before). At the very last moment, just before submitting, my misgivings about my initial entry of RED ALARM resurfaced and I improved it to RED ALERT, which really did implement the wordplay.
Thanks Dean and keriothe
Found this tough going for a start, taking 40 minutes in a cafe to get a little under half of the right hand side in – took a break and finished the rest in another 10 minutes. Struggled with the definitions of some of the ones already mentioned here. After seeing County DOWN at 15d, the rest of it came immediately with a smile.
Finished in the SW corner with SWAMP (not sure why that took so long, probably with the clever definition of ‘was bather’ for SWAM), HELLESPONT (did remember ‘Hero’s fateful swim) and EARTH (clever and took a little while to see why).
Too clever for me: quite a few look-ups , which didn’t help me get going. I’d put 6a and 8d in straight away, so thought I was in for an easy ride, but it was not to be, and I felt that it was written in a different language! Missed the only hidden, which might have helped, and still don’t understand ‘e’ for Spain (6d). I usually enjoy Dean’s offerings, but not today.
E is the international car registration for Spain – comes from España (the Spanish word for Spain).