A not entirely straightforward 15:19, with some pretty obvious clues interspersed with some less obvious, nay downright cunning ones. Not to mention a couple of quite obscure bits of knowledge which, I am ready to discover, are not regarded as “general” by other solvers. Though as usual, that remains to be seen.
| Across |
| 1 |
AUGUSTINE – AUGUST (stately) + IN (home) + English. With the lift and separate, the saint doesn’t actually have to be English, of course, so we can take our pick from leading thinker of the early church, English martyr, or first Archbishop of Canterbury. |
| 6 |
PILOT – double def. A pilot isn’t an actual air traffic controller, of course, but each pilot undeniably controls some traffic in the air. |
| 9 |
TRACT =”TRACKED”. |
| 10 |
OVERPOWER – OVER(spare) + POWER(juice). |
| 11 |
PAST PARTICIPLES – (ITSPAPERPLASTIC)*. Nice misleading examples of the form. |
| 13 |
BROWNING – double def., the gun and the poet (or the poet). |
| 14 |
GABBRO – BAG(rev.) + BRO. Possibly obscure knowledge #1, an igneous rock. |
| 16 |
ASPECT – A SPECTRE without the RE:. |
| 18 |
SANCERRE – Small A.N.C. + ERRED. |
| 21 |
STRAPPED FOR CASH – (FORCEDPASTSHARP)*. There’s a ruder way to clue this expression, possibly involving mention of Max Mosley. |
| 23 |
CAESAREAN – CAESAREA + New. |
| 25 |
TRIER – TRIGGER (set off) without two Goods. God loves a trier, they say. |
| 26 |
SKEIN – European in SKIN (on the ground, geese form a gaggle, in the air it’s a skein). Is a skin really a film? I wasn’t entirely convinced. |
| 27 |
ADHERENTS – A Democrat, HE RENTS. If you’re being picky, of course – and who could imagine a picky crossword solver? – the hypothetical man in the surface who doesn’t buy doesn’t necessarily rent either. Even if we’re talking about property, which is the obvious inference, he might go on living rent-free in his parents’ basement, but I digress. And once I spotted the wordplay, I chuckled. |
| |
| Down |
| 1 |
ACT UP – Camping in A TUP. |
| 2 |
GRASSHOPPER – (RAGS)* + SHOPPER. |
| 3 |
SET UPON – SET UP(organisation) + ON(working). |
| 4 |
ISOPRENE – (PIONEERS)*. I’d never heard of this, but deduced the correct anagram from knowing about neoprene, which is a similar substance. |
| 5 |
EMETIC – [ITEM in C.E.]all rev. |
| 6 |
PAPRIKA – [KIR]rev. in PAPA. |
| 7 |
LOW – double def. Even before the obvious help given by two checkers in a three letter word, the required Hereford sprang quickly to mind after the Jersey we had quite recently. |
| 8 |
TURNSTONE – TURNS TO NEST without the STreet. |
| 12 |
LIBERTARIAN – TAR in LIBERIAN. This sort of libertarian rather than the political sort. |
| 13 |
BRASSICAS – BRASS(cash) In CASe. “plants that are grown” isn’t the strongest definition, but if the surface makes you picture a load of cabbages with the stalks chopped off before they’re put in a box prior to sale, that makes it an &lit. |
| 15 |
HALF INCH – IN is literallly half INCH, while HALF-INCH is Cockney rhyming slang for “pinch”. |
| 17 |
CAPTAIN – APT in CAIN. |
| 19 |
CURATOR – RAT in [Cu (symbol for copper) + OR]. |
| 20 |
SENECA – possibly obscure knowledge #2, double def., 1) (American) Indian, 2) Roman philosopher. |
| 22 |
HORUS – CHORUS minus the Circa gives the Egyptian god famous for his Eye. |
| 24 |
EYE – MorlEY Experiment. |
That said, Sotira, I’m delighted to be in your club.
Other unknowns arrived at through wordplay were ISOPRENE, TURNSTONE and GABBRO but apart from these I found the puzzle quite easy so I was surprised when what had started as a walk in the park turned into a DNF.
I have no quibble with “doesn’t buy” = “rents” as it works perfectly the other way round and that’s good enough for me.
I am grateful to “Only Connect” (new series started only yesterday evening) for making me familiar with the Eye of Horus. Can we expect the horned viper and twisted flax any time soon, I wonder?
Tim, you have some typos at 23ac.
Edited at 2012-08-28 02:44 am (UTC)
GABBRO and SENECA proved tricky too. Only finished at all by a bunch of flukes.
Sotira can be delighted to know that I had the “I” version too in 23a. Only when I remembered that I’d been to the (amazing) port did I remember that it, at least, had the “E”. SENECA was then a guess on the basis that he was a Roman I had heard of. Prior to that I had sketched in the (wrong spelling and nationality, nothing to do with Rome) philosopher De(r)rida.
Bordering on the not quite fair, perhaps, but with some fine cluing, of which the economical HALF-INCH. was my CoD.
12d called to mind perhaps the best of the David Beckham Jokes.
Obviously GABBRO which is not going to be in many vocabularies and has some unhelpful checkers. The same can be said of SENECA which I obtained from a list of American Indians. The fact that it intersects with obscure and odd spelling of CAESAREAN, that I also looked up, borders on the unfair.
I think “are grown to” is pure padding at 13D to assist surface reading but contribute nothing to either definition or cryptic.
This to me is the sort of puzzle that the Crossword Editor should sort out before publication. Not for the first time I find him falling short.
I’m surprised you take exception to GABBRO, since it definitely comes under the heading of science. I can’t claim to have a vast knowledge of geology, but I’ve known it for years, and certainly not just (if at all) from crosswords.
CAESAREAN is the normal spelling as far as I’m concerned. (My wife did midwifery as part of her health-visitor training, so this is familiar territory.)
Surely most people who do the Times crossword can be expected to know one or other meaning of SENECA. In any case, you only have to have been doing the puzzle for just over seven years to have come across “A native American philosopher of old (6)” in No. 22,970 (7 May 2005).
And objecting to the odd bit of padding which assists the surface reading seems to me overly picky.
I don’t know how much the Crossword Editor contributed to this puzzle, but I see nothing whatsoever to object to in the final result.
Despite the fact that most of the old hands on here couldn’t solve the puzzle without resorting to books? What about the “other 99%”, the everyday folk who can’t normally polish it off in under 20 minutes. What chance do we have?
Read the rest of the paper and Seneca popped to mind as a Roman, unknown as a philosopher; possibly a Native American though definitely not an Indian. And Caesarean looked feasible. So finished despite the unknowns.
Rob
PILOT: an air traffic controller friend tells me that some pilots can be a real nuisance, particularly when they appear unannounced on the radar or refuse to speak English; so there might be an “& lit” in 6 across.
We had IPECAC a couple of Saturdays ago and now EMETIC; is the setter trying to tell us something? Actually, I thought 5 down was a neat clue.
SKIN as film? I wondered about this, but eventually thought about skins or films on the surface of sauces or rice puddings.
That was before the programme was taken over by young women agitating on behalf of crested newts, in the days when there was a man on a crackly telephone line from Birmingham wholesale market intoning “the proice of flat lettisss, waertercress and dairty celery”.
A real curate’s egg this. I very much liked “air traffic controller” as a definition, for example, and I also liked the clues for ADHERENTS, CAPTAIN and ASPECT.
Some dodgy stuff too, though, as already noted. Neither GABBRO nor BANBRO looked likely to me so I wasted ages trying to find another three-letter word meaning either “get” or “get back”. In the end I couldn’t and decided that GABBRO looked marginally the less outlandish.
SENECA was the only thing I could think of for 20dn, without which I would undoubtedly have picked the wrong spelling for CAESAREAN. Chambers is subtly judgemental about this spelling:
Edited at 2012-08-29 01:43 pm (UTC)
Not that I am addicted or anything like that!
No trouble with seneca, but never heard of gabbro; but entered it anyway.
Enigma
Loved Half-Inch and thought the Eye clue was neat with the reference to the famous M-M experiment.