Time taken to solve: Off the scale. I resorted to aids after an hour.
I might have appreciated this excellent tough puzzle more if it hadn’t been my day to blog. As it was I’m afraid I found it an absolute nightmare and I took 8 minutes before writing in my first answer at 17d. The SE corner was the only quarter I completed without looking anything up and in the NE I needed only to check the meanings of Agnate and Morse, but the LH side was like a war of attrition.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | CON,T(RA)RY |
| 5 | AG(NAT)E – A person descended from the same male ancestry as another. King Cole is a reference to the fabulous singer Nat of that name. |
| 10 | ULURU – An alternative name for Ayers rock apparently. Extracted from “mUsic bLaring oUt fRrom aUditorium”. |
| 11 | BAND,WAG,ON |
| 12 | TH,UNDER,ED – A reference to The Times a.k.a. The Old Thunderer |
| 13 | TUSKS – “Tasks” with U(niversity) substituted for A. Morse is a walrus apparently known to Chambers but not to COED or Collins |
| 16 | EXOTIC – CIT(OX)E reversed |
| 20 | BY,THE,BY – “By” meaning “multiply by” here |
| 23 | LOOK (AFT)ER – After yesterday’s “dish” today we have “looker” |
| 25 | HIT,OR,MISS |
| 26 | 1,CI(N)G – The “N” comes from (cardiga)N |
| 27 | NERUDA – A Chilean poet and politician unknown to me before today. Extracted from “oNcE aRoUnD hAs”. |
| 28 | FRIGHTEN – Anagram of F(ollowing) + RING THE |
| Down | |
| 1 | C,OUR,TIER – Very amusing! |
| 2 | NAURU – It’s (p)U(b) + R(U)AN all reversed. I’ve never heard of this country but it was formerly called the Pleasant Island which I know from my stamp collecting days. |
| 3 | ROUND,SHOULD,ERE,D |
| 4 | RU,BYRE,D – Having got the answer I wasted ages trying to explain it by taking the the G out of RUGBY. |
| 7 | AUGUSTINE – Anagram of (pila)U + EAT USING. St Augustine of Hippo, founder of the Order. |
| 8 | ERNEST – If thou art deserving something I suppose thou earnest it. That’s all I can think of. |
| 15 | RED-LETTER – “Permissive chap” = “Letter” here. “Red-letter day” is an important occasion. |
| 17 | HYDRO,GEN – I got all the way to here before entering my first answer |
| 19 | TALKIE – Anagram of (r)AT-LIKE. “One shot with rabbit” is the definition |
| 20 | BRO,W,S,ER – “Rivals playing tricks” are W and S at bridge |
| 21 | UTAHAN – My last one in. A very well-hidden word. |
| 24 | TWI(X)T |
Had to check the Wik to be convinced.
Whilst there, I found the following comment that completely chucks the wet blanket over Lewis Carroll’s poem:
“Although Carroll accurately portrays the biological walrus’s appetite for bivalve mollusks, oysters, primarily nearshore and intertidal inhabitats, in fact comprise an insignificant portion of the benthic foraging walrus diet, even in captivity”.
So what is the answer to 6dn?
GO WITHOUT SAYING
Had lightly pencilled-in BY AND BY without any justifcation and so was left with second word ending in “a”. Thought it must be Latin which we didn’t do at my South London comprehensive.
I did feel the setter was pushing the limits at times – I’m not sure if the definition of RED-LETTER is consistent with it being adjectival only (and only used in “red-letter day”) -it seems to be clued as a noun, and I share jackkt’s slight puzzlement at 8dn. Very good puzzle, though.
Personally I could never believe in him as I reckon that doing this crossword and listening to The Ring are mutually exclusive exercises.
I recently looked at, I think a Jimbo blog on Mephisto, and didn’t recognise one word. Am I to understand this is the point of such puzzles and that use of a dictionary is expected? If so, you will be reassured to know that as we speak Amazon is charged with delivering Chambers.
The use of Chambers is pretty well mandatory. After 45 years I don’t use it as much as I once did but I very rarely manage to finish one without some reference. I suggest you go back through the blogs on this site and find an easy one, download the puzzle from the Times site and have a go. It doesn’t matter if you don’t solve a single clue because you can then run through the blog and see how it all works. There are also some tips and tricks in the memories section of this site.
As ever, don’t hesitate to ask questions. There are a number of Mephisto solvers who comment on the daily puzzle who started their Mephisto solving by using this site.
Barry
See my comment on Peter’s Mephisto blog.
As a new solver I was surprised to finish even though the puzzle was apparently easy. I guess the solvers who can do the daily in no time need something to get their teeth into. But I defer to Peter’s and Jimbo’s advice that my daily speeds will improve as a result of doing Mephisto. ( I managed to complete both the daily and jumbo yesterday, both of which I thought pretty difficult, but it took me from about 9am until 3pm with breaks for normal activities, so as much as I enjoy the challenge life is too short.
Some of it is for me too obscure for the daily puzzle and had the feel of a bar crossword. I would include ULURU, morse=walrus, NERUDA (who?), NAURU (where?), UTAHAN (took me ages to see it was somebody from the state of Utah rather than the United Nations). Even TWEED=flower (river) on border (Scotland-England) will be tough for overseas solvers.
I don’t understand ERNEST, which was my last in and just a guess at a man’s name that fitted the checking letters.
Much of it is very clever and it would have made an ideal Saturday puzzle when one can afford to spend nearly an hour sorting it all out but as a puzzle to do on on your daily commute it is out of place.
Very tough – never heard of Nuara and didn’t understand the cryptic element of BROWSER, which was my last to go in, until I read jackkt’s blog, despite being a keen bridge player. 17 mins,which felt quick under the circumstances.
Nauru is a tiny Pacific nation which made huge amounts of money from allowing foreign corporations to take away its only asset – guano phosphate deposits.
At one time it had so much money that if it had been conservatively invested no citizen would had to work again. However the government in its infinite wisdom employed some rather “colourful” financial advisers with the result that the nation is now bankrupt.
For a while its main source of income was rent from the Australian government for a camp for asylum seekers to keep them off Australian soil, a policy abandoned by the new Labor (sic) government in 2007.
It probably won’t matter before long anyway – if the sea level rises another metre or so Nauru won’t exist.
This crossword could not have been much harder if all the clues had been omitted. Well done Jack and thanks for explaining Ernest, Courtier, and Uluru. On checking, I find that I wrote in Uhuru, which is apparently one of Kilimanjaro’s peaks, because I did not understand the wordplay.
“One shot with rabbit” gets my prize for the most obscure definition of the day.
In a crossword of this difficulty it is unnecessarily underhand to capitalise the word Morse. What happened to the convention that setters put such words at the beginning of the clue if they wanted to deceive by capitalisation?
I think the convention is to put words which MUST be capitalised at the start of the sentence. However I agree that capitalising common nouns in the middle of a sentence is sometimes taking deviousness too far.
anyway its done!
A real swine of a puzzle
congrtaulations to jakht-must have been a nightmare and to the setter…but come on give us one not quite so hard next Friday please!
I really liked 1 across but it took me ages to see!
I’ve been reading this blog for a while now, trying to get to grips with the crossword (and I must admit it’s been incredibly useful to help getting up to speed, so thank you!). Having only been able to get 5 clues today before resorting to t’internet I’m glad that it’s not just me who found it tricky..
If it’s not too much trouble I was wondering if I might be able to get someone to explain to me two things?
why ‘c’ in courtier = three (1d)
why hydro=hotel (17d)
Thanks very much.
17d – a hydro is a hotel in a spa town.
thanks
> 10. ULURU – An alternative name for Ayers Rock.
If anything it’s the other way around.
You would probably use the latter description at your peril these days.
Ayers rock I have heard of but Uluru, never, so relating it to something I know seemed the thing to do.
No worries, just needs to be said and recorded.
And Kurihan, if you have travel agents on that North Shore, where will they send you to on a tour?
Bet it’s not Ayers Rock.
Whether this is quite right for the daily puzzle is, as Jimbo says, open to question. But this was a heck of a workout for the old grey cells.
COD – could be any of several, but TWIXT and TALKIE certainly raised a smile when the pennies dropped.
Well done, Jack – fine blog on a truly devilish puzzle.
My entry of TASKS at 13A came after a lot of “Is it supposed to be TUSKS or TASKS?” head-scratching; one of those where the indicator, placed in the middle of clue, makes you think either answer could be right.
8D went in quickly as the “art” bit immediately made me think of the chestnutty TEA CHEST = “art tutor” device, but I had real problems with the interlocking 27A and 21D. I agree with Jack; UTAHAN is amazingly well hidden.
I think there were several outstanding clues to balance the handful of obscurities, and lots of clever misdirection in the defs. 19D nearly got my COD for its brilliant “one shot with rabbit” but I settled on 28A – straightforward but beautifully smooth with deceptively used components “shot” and the falsely nounal “alarm”.
Q-1 E-9 D-9 COD 28A FRIGHTEN
The quibble is based on the two instances of fairly obscure answers intersecting. Had they been stand-alone I imagine they’d have caused much less grief.
I got up and said: “OK, suppose you had to blog this. Can you complete it by whatever means necessary?” The answer was yes, but I still didn’t understand some of the answers, such as ‘courtier’ and ‘Neruda’.
As for knowledge, it is very useful to have heard of Neruda, the Tweed, Nauru, and agnate. Some of these appear in vowel-hungry US puzzles. The one I had not heard of is ‘Uluru’, but that is evident from the cryptic.
Possible mistakes: ‘authorise’, ‘beet red’, which I had and erased.
Looking back, ‘talkie’, ‘browser’, Utahan’, and ‘frightened’ should not have taken as long as they did.
At least I can say that if it was my turn to blog, then a blog would have appeared.
Re COURTIER. I rationalised the C to myself by by noting the quotation marks in the clue, and reading the answer as “See our tier”. Is this obviously wrong.
The clues I liked best were TALKIE, BROWSER, TUSKS and (best of all?) BY THE BY.
Far too many I didn’t understand before I read the blog – I don’t envy having to unpick some of these, so well done!
A lot of the definitions were very well hidden, though there were a lot of obscurities too, which added together made for a rough ride. At the end, I felt quite pleased to have managed to finish!
COD 18ac.
“One shot with rabbit” as a definition is just cringe-making. “Don’t hold adage” as wordplay for “go without saying”. is pretty lame also.
I cannot find a definition of ‘piece’ (14) as an intransitive verb in COD or Chambers; perhaps it’s in Collins; or is there some other explanation that I’ve missed?
What’s “put” doing in 21? It seems completely superfluous to the hidden container. If it’s intended as a logical link, “puts” would make more sense, referring to the single word, “Statesman”.
I’m sure that many will think these clues are very neat, but not me (pardon the solecism).
It works as a literal, too – “when he saw the cryptic, he put in the answer”.
I also thought “put” in 21 was odd, running through alternatives such as “is” and “sat” all of which imply card games, so I think the only way to tie it in with the extremists part is to have some action word such as “reached out a hand” or “stuck out a hand” and put is the least offensive of these types.
Despite the difficulty, I enjoyed this and was able to understand the wordplay as I conquered each clue. I found the wordplay more useful than the definitions in many cases. I walked around the base of Uluru last year so that clue wasn’t too difficult once I had got two Us. It’s definitely known by the Aboriginal name of Uluru these days.
I hadn’t heard of NERUDA but the wordplay dismissing the odd letters from the phrase was quite clear.
I thought the clues to AUGUSTINE, BROWSER and THUNDERED were excellent. Although this was difficult, I didn’t feel that it was too far toward the barred crossword standard. To me, it was a simply a difficult but fair daily crossword.
Pablo Neruda famously died shortly after Pinochet seized power. Commentators argue about his fate had he been in Chile at the time of the coup. Not even his Nobel Prize or illness might have saved him.
As to the definition for TALKIE,it was intended as a piece of humour: I realise that, as with all jokes, it will not be to everyone’s taste. It seems tho as if this puzzle would indeed have been more suited to a Saturday. Then again, Friday is perhaps the next best thing 🙂
As for the TALKIE def, it’s exactly the sort of thing that can raise anything from a smile to a belly laugh – and if we can achieve that we can sleep easy. The only danger, of course, is that as soon as you venture into humour you’re venturing into the subject of what tickles the individual.
Monty Python? Sheer genius to many, incoherent nonsense to others. Jimmy Carr? You either wet yourself or throw things at the TV. I firmly believe everyone has at least some sense of humour – I also believe everyone has a different sense of humour and you can’t appeal to all.
Thank you for a very entertaining puzzle.
An excellent puzzle: I did it in dribs & drabs over the weekend. Is Neruda really that obscure?!
Last understood (though one of first in): ON EDGE.
BTW What was the clue for TWIXT? Missing in my copy too.
I’m sure somebody referred to the capital “O” in “Old King Cole” on Friday but I can’t find it now. It’s either hidden in one of the collapsed threads or it may have been deleted. I think the poster dismissed it as being okay whilst still objecting to the “M” in “Morse”. I remember it because I didn’t understand the logic.
Personally I didn’t object to Morse & Old KC — glad you shared my feeling that the objectors were being a tad inconsistent!
Overall verdict on the puzzle? A sweet-smelling stinker.