Solving time: 22 minutes
A walk in the park, which is a mighty good thing because I had a very exhausting weekend, clocking over 22 hours of work time besides other activities. This puzzle does call for a little knowledge here and there, but nothing exceptional. There were definitely some weak clues that could easily be improved.
Music: Delius, North Country Sketches, Groves/RPO
| Across | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ON TIME, ON(TIM)E. I admit, I put ‘on edge’ as my first answer -hi, Edgar – but quickly erased it when I saw 2 could only be ‘tot’….unless it were ‘tad’. | |
| 4 | SLIPSHOD, SLIPS HO[L]D. It is obvious that slips must be some sort of fielders in cricket, and that’s what they turn out to be when this Yank went to the Wiki article on fielding in cricket after completing the puzzle. | |
| 12 | RICHTER, RICH TER[M]. I cannot seem to convince the setters that Richter is not a seismologist at all, but rather the greatest pianist of the 20th century. | |
| 14 | ENFIELD, EN(FIEL)D. Like many English towns, we’ve got one in Connecticut as well. The original gave us the Lee-Enfield rifle and the Royal Enfield motorcycle. | |
| 17 | HOPE FOR THE BEST, anagram of ‘HER BEEF HOTPOTS’. Long anagrams are seldom this easy. | |
| 21 | NIT-PICK. N(IT)(P)CK. Although a nick is a slang word for a local lockup, it can apparently apply to the whole police station by metonymy. | |
| 22 | LIAISED, L(I)A + I’S ED. Very simple for a multipart construction. | |
| 24 | CLOSE SEASON, CLOSE (SE) A SON. Anyone who jumped to the conclusion of ‘CEASE FIRING’ without understanding the cryptic will have a mess to untangle. I erased mine after 30 seconds. | |
| 22 | RECESS, RE CESS. This was my last to go in, but I reached into the back of my brain and remembered there is some tax or other called ‘cess’. Looking up to confirm, I see that it still exists in India. | |
| Down | ||
| 1 | ON PAROLE, ON(PAROL)E. I misunderstood this clue at first, thinking ‘released’ implied an anagram of ‘one’. But it is part of the literal, and only ‘polar’ is an anagram. | |
| 5 | LESSER ANTILLES, anagram of ‘Later, illnesses’. An easy anagram, but the four long answers in this puzzle are all rather straightforward. | |
| 7 | HOUSE OF KEYS, cryptic definition. Easy if you have heard of it. In the Aeolus episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is setting up a newspaper ad for spirit merchant Alexander Keyes that involves a graphical allusion to the Manx Parliament. | |
| 7 | DENUDE, DU([P]EN)DE. A weak clue, in my opinion | |
| 9 | AT A RATE OF KNOTS, anagram of ‘(too fast), a tanker’. I had not really understood this expression and its non-obvious meaning of ‘very fast’, but the anagram is clear enough. | |
| 13 | CAR BOOT SALE, cryptic definition, where ‘saloon’ is a type of car. UK-centric, but not hard for a record collector with international contacts. | |
| 16 | STUDENTS, STU(DE)NTS. I was very annoyed at this, it held me up for a long time and is a very easy and obvious clue. | |
| 18 | EVINCED, anagram of N + DEVICE. Another rather easy clue. | |
| 19 | ETAGERE. GATE backwads followed by ERE. A slight hold-up, but eventually guessed from the crossing letters and worked out later. | |
| 20 | IN TOTO. A clue so ridiculously easy I was in afraid there was some trick. There wasn’t. | |
Someone from Dorset — is that a real place by the way? — may complain.
My COD is 3dn because I like those straight charades.
McText (of Minjup)
One general point which applies to all of you who provide the explanations for the clues in the daily Times crosswords. Generally there are always several clues left out possibly because they are considered too trivial. These are often ones I have solved but haven’t fully understood the wordplay. Sometimes I am not even sure of the answer or that my answer is correct (I have an answer that matches the known letters). It would really help if all clue explanations/answers could be given at least in brief for those of us from overseas who are still getting familiar with the Times.
I believe that question about omitting some answers has been asked a few times before, and the answer is generally that it is asking too much of bloggers to cover all the clues, but if you have a question about a particular clue just ask – you are almost guaranteed a quick answer!
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Paul S.
For some reason I took quite a while to get going, but once I did progress was reasonably rapid (making up answers helped in this regard). My COD was SLIPSHOD, but I liked OVERDOSE, RICHTER and and URN.
it before encountering 27a which remained unfinished until I came here.
Before, with all the NW corner solved but for 3d,
I tried to think of policeman in a British context
before I finally saw MO and UNTIE…and I’m Canadian, eh?
before I finally saw MO and UNTIE…and I’m Canadian, eh?
Not all UK readers will know that eh is perceived (in Canada, at any rate) as the archetypal Canadian sentence-final tag. Who knows, this arcane bit of information might come in useful one day in solving a XW …
28 minutes.
2 was the one that held me up; it is TOT, isn’t it? Nip of drink and nipper as in child?
Dorset? It’s the county of Thomas Hardy Tess and Thomas Hardy Kismet, isn’t it?
Dafydd.
It’s just occurred to me while looking at the clues again that 2dn must be TOT, not the slightly risqué TIT that I’d written in without thinking. That’s what happens when you start the day with the Private Eye crossword.
Clue of the Day: 4ac (SLIPSHOD).
Dafydd.
I was interested by the inclusion of “liaised”. At one time there was a school of thought that “liaise” was not a proper English word, being a false derivation from (the French) liaison. It attracted extra opprobrium in some quarters because it was seen as “business speak” along with phrases like touch base, out of the box etc.
The second “i” is often omitted, a frequent misspelling, although I’ve heard and seen people argue that, since there is no such English word, it cannot be misspelt; or alternatively that, if a neologism, the alternative or Anglicised spelling is just as valid. Inclusion in the Times crossword would seem to suggest that the word is now accepted as valid English vocabulary. Good news I think: it’s a useful word, with no obvious synonym, and the pedants’ objections to it always seemed to me a little silly. bc
Slightly amusing for me were 1ac, 4ac, 13dn, and 9dn, as I had a car accident this morning probably I was travelling to fast as we were late.
Guessed house of keys, and had to look up cess and etagere
Still, woo!
House of Keys rang a vague bell, but only as the Manx parliament. The Ulysses reference was lost on me entirely. I’ve not heard of etagere but got it from the wordplay, similarly the cess in recess. Surprising to see such similar construction in both 1ac & 1dn, I thought. A lack of imagination on the setter’s part?
COD probably 13, but I liked the &lit aspect to 9.
i.e. O (= round) + OS (= over size or very large) contained in (= having … load) (Cape) Verde, a republic rather than a cape off the NW coast of Africa.
When I was writing computer software in Paris, I discovered that French programmers tend to call scratch files Toto, in the same way that English programmers tend to call them Fred.
I had never heard of the Lesser Antilles but the Antilles bit was obvious and the rest could be got from the anagram. Fortunately I did not have to rely on my knowledge of Ulysses to get the House of Keys as I have not got further than page 50 in three attempts.
My heart sank when I came to the last word with a checked letter pattern of ?E?E?S but, like others, I managed to deduce the obsolete cess.
I went through exactly the process Peter describes above to get the ‘down’ component, having plumped for RECESS on the same vague recollection vinyl1 relates.
I see the issue of blogging/not blogging all the clues has come up, and from memory the rationale is (also) to preserve Mr Murdoch’s revenue stream from the premium rate phone line. It would be interesting to know if that facility is actually much used….?
Neil
A jaunty sorta puzzle, though. Toto was, of course, not only the pooch in the memorable movie, but the name of the 1980s supergroup who pretty much summed up everything wrong with American rock music (though, dammit, I can still hear at least three of their songs).
That song is ‘in Toto’.
My last one was OVERDOSE. I was sure there would be a C or a NESS in there for Cape, but wrote it in thinking ‘take too much’ was overdo and ‘very large load’ was the definition of overdose and the rest was something I didn’t understand. I now realise ‘take too much’ is the def, round is ‘o’, cape is ‘verde’ (as in Cape Verde Islands) and very large is ‘os’ – outsized, a crossword favourite – loaded into it.
Favourite clue SLIPSHOD, last one in was RICHTER, but only because I went back to it last after finishing off the bottom right.
CESS is a fairly common tax in barred crosswords and ETAGERE pops up in that arena fairly frequently as well, so I wasn’t held up by the SE corner. I liked the clue to 24a – CLOSE SEASON.
Hope microsoft has corrected liaise. Always had to persuade admin that my spelling was better than microsoft’s!
Until coming here, I wasn’t too sure of the wordplay for RICHTER, CAR BOOT SALE or OVERDOSE, though I now see that I probably should have been.
Could some one explain 23ac? Is it (n)OVA? How does ‘losing face’ = ‘without the n’? Thanks.
… and, together with Brno, the Bren gun.