Solving time : I started on this one and then a call and a few texts, so I wasn’t completely engaged in it, putting in the last entry at 26:33 on the club timer. I found this a tricky one, and there were several that went in on wordplay alone (including the unlikely-looking 13 down).
A couple of very well concealed or crafty definitions this time around – let’s just say whatever I don’t include in the wordplay is the definition.
Away we go…
Across | |
---|---|
1 | SCISSOR: (CROSS,IS)* with CARVED as the anagrindicator |
5 | BEN,ARES: One that went in from wordplay, it’s in India |
9 | GUNPOWDER: GUN(shoot),POW(enemy captured),DER(“the” German) – that’s quite the charade! |
10 | IRKED: add the S and H and you would get SHIRKED |
11 | ARRAS: hidden reversed |
12 | OPPRESSED: P and PRESS in OED |
14 | ASIAN ELEPHANTS: (PALESTINE,HAS,AN)* |
17 | OLIVER(musical),C(chapter),ROM(memory),W |
21 | ENTER INTO: (RETENTION)* |
23 | SUM,ER |
24 | OINKS: or 0 INK ‘S |
25 | ASTRODOME: TROD in A,SOME – my brother lives not too far from this – it’s abandoned now |
26 | SCRUNCH: C |
27 | CANONRY: ANON(soon) in CRY(prayer) – cloth being the churchpeople in this case |
Down | |
1 | SIGN,AL |
2 | IGNORES: SIGNORE with the S moved to the bottom |
3 | SNOWSCAPE: this is a tricky clue – SNOW is cocaine, then E missing from ESCAPE – and the cards would be Christmas Cards (at least in the northern hemisphere) |
4 | RADIO BEACON: anagram of DO,AEROBIC with A inside, N |
5 | BAR: alternating letters in BiAfRa – sovereign being the coin in this case. |
6 | NOISE: 1 in NOSE(snitch) |
7 | RAKE,SIN |
8 | SIDE(arrrogance),DISH(ruin) |
13 | PAEDODONTIC: (POINT,ODD,ACE) and the first set is one of teeth – needed all the checking letters to sort out the anagram |
15 | HOWLS DOWN: H |
16 | NOSE JOBS: Cryptic definition… though TONE ROWS (with bridges being musical bridges) may also be justified |
18 | INTONER: one of the best hidden definition clues I’ve seen in a long time – hidden in appoINT ONE Reverend |
19 | LAMPOON: |
20 | GREENY: (ENERGY)*, since jade is a green-ish colour |
22 | RISEN: more tricky wordplay – I put it in from definition – S |
25 | AS,H |
All sorts of tricks in this one, including a notable example of the def being central to the clue in 10ac — which doesn’t quite work for me. But then non-terminal* defs never quite do.
* Terminus ad quem OR terminus a quo.
The anagram at 13ac had it written all over it. But … what the hell was the word and what the def? Once I had it worked out (ditto for RISEN) I had to utter the possibly-intentional NINA at row #4 of the unches.
My suspicion is that it is intentional because it’s repeated (backwards) in row #14.
Our setter obviously scored the door prize at his/her local apiarists’ meeting!
[Occurs to me that, homophonically, the first could read: FOR (4) + NINA; and the second (backwards again): FOR (4) ONE (1) + NINA.]
Edited at 2014-03-27 07:13 am (UTC)
Edited at 2014-03-27 09:37 am (UTC)
I was already running low on gas by the time I tackled this one having taken 45 minutes to get it to print off when it inexplicably failed after Print Preview. The job sat at the head of the queue, jamming it up, and refused all attempts to cancel it in the normal way when commanded to do so. In the end I took advice on-line and eventually cleared it by delving deep into system files, deleting things there and rebooting the computer twice.
Having eventually got round to solving I thought I would never get started, let alone finished, but I did complete it eventually after 90 long minutes of continuous struggle.
I appear to have lived my life to date without ever meeting BAR meaning a pound sovereign coin, though the expression ‘half-a-bar’ rings the faintest of bells.
In my book ‘muffle’ is to do with making less noise whereas ‘howling down’ involves making more, so that clue doesn’t work for me. The second word was obvious but I sweated blood over the first.
DK the PAEDO-word and the somewhat unfamiliar BENARES, SUNER and CANONRY didn’t help matters.
All I needed was for this to have been my blogging day and my worst crossword nightmare would have been realised.
Edited at 2014-03-27 08:04 am (UTC)
Five went in immediately and I was initially hopeful of a finish. Hah! No chance.
Like janie_l_b, I got BAR and ARRAS from wp but had never heard of either.
Thanks for the excellent blog glheard. I wouldn’t have understood quite a few of them without your explanations.
I’m off to the Guardian to lick my wounds. Thanks ulaca.
Too tricky for me, but managed all (in shocking time) except the unknown INTONER and OINKS, the latter of which was impossible, as I had ‘bone mass’ at 16dn, which I thought worked pretty well as a cryptic…
Knew it was going to be tough when I didn’t know if 5dn was going to be the unknown BAR or ifa until I had a checker or two.
SUMER and ARRAS from wp, both unknown.
Had I not been familiar with the Indian town, I may well have scored my first momble: beneros!
Incidentally, you seem to be getting much better at this lark very quickly.
Not sure muffle works as a def in 15: that would be like saying you quieten the sound of your exhaust (parlez vous Mercan?) by playing drum ‘n’ bass music really loud outside my front door. I can tell you form experience it doesn’t work.
No other complaints, really, though. I may have invented a memory today of BAR for pound, BENARES was in the deeper recesses though I couldn’t point to it on a map. LAMPOON was slow because I was convinced eccentric was CAM, as it always is when it isn’t card. For me, jade is just GREEN – and I wish I hadn’t just looked up GREENY as it might also provide an ancillary clue to NOSE JOBS.
Anyone else get 4d before 1d?
Quality fare throughout, IRKED gets my CoD for being clever.
Edited at 2014-03-27 09:38 am (UTC)
And I believe ‘a bar’ in the City is a million
At the end I was left with BEN_R_S. If you haven’t heard of the city there’s nothing to stop you putting in BENEROS. If I wanted a general knowledge test I’d join a quiz team, but I prefer cryptic crosswords.
There was some good stuff of course – I particularly liked the CD at 16dn, for instance – but all in all I wish I hadn’t bothered.
I particularly object to BANARES which simply isn’t well known enough to be clued in such a manner as to not rule out the equally likely BENEROS. I used Google to sort that out.
To his list I would add “on the cards” for SNOWSCAPE – it’s too far removed. I used a dictionary to get the completely unknown 13D – thank goodness the anagram fodder was obvious! I recall BAR from my youth – but it’s really rather obscure
There were some slightly off-piste definitions, I agree, but for me the only wholly unacceptable one was “muffles” for HOWLS DOWN, which is plain inaccurate. Otherwise a good tough puzzle.
malcj
An object lesson in the magnitude of the gulf between the Quickie and the “real thing”. Same rules, same tricks, same conventions – but somehow leagues apart: it’s the difference between village green cricket and an Ashes test. You score a quick ton every time you go to the crease in the former, but struggle to even lay bat on ball in the latter.
Ah well, keep plugging away…
Thanks very much to glheard for shedding light into all the dark corners of this puzzle.
Edited at 2014-03-27 11:04 am (UTC)
I agree the definition of 15dn is simply wrong.
I knew about Benares because of the mathematical story of The Tower of Bramah (or sometimes Hanoi) as below
“In the great temple of Benares, beneath the dome that marks the centre of the world, rests a brass plate in which are fixed three diamond needles, each a cubit high and as thick as the body of a bee. On one of these needles, at the creation, God placed 64 discs of pure gold, the largest resting on the brass plate, and the others getting smaller up to the top one.
This is the Tower of Bramah. Day and night unceasingly the priests transfer the discs from one diamond needle to another according to the fixed and immutable laws of Bramah, which require that the priest on duty must not move more than one disc at a time and that he must place this disc on a needle so that there is no smaller disc below it.
When the 64 discs have thus been transferred from the needle on which at the creation God placed them to one of the other needles, tower, temple, and Brahmins alike will crumble into dust and with a thunderclap the world will vanish.”
No panic. Transferring discs at one a second day and night will take some 600 billion years to do this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_City_of_Benares
Edited at 2014-03-27 12:29 pm (UTC)
I think ‘lecher’ is wrong for ‘rake’. Chambers defines ‘rake’ as ‘a debauched or dissolute person, esp a man of fashion’. That’s what I think a rake is, and to me a lecher is something quite different. Chambers goes on to define the verb ‘to rake’ as ‘to make a practice of lechery’, but this kind of justification by Chambers is archetypally Mephistoish in my book. Same goes for cry/prayer, especially in the context of an unusual word like CANONRY.
Of course there’s nothing technically wrong with any of this, I just don’t like it.
We have forms here printed on green paper so known as a ‘greeny’ so no problems with that one. OINK (singular and plural) seems to be the setters’ current word of the month.
I was almost mombled by BENEROS, but then remembered BENARES as the name of an Indian restaurant. That’s twice Indian restaurants have aided me recently, having had NAMASTE a couple of weeks ago.
Edited at 2014-03-27 01:46 pm (UTC)
Benares must be one of very few cities in the world with three officially recognised names, the others are Varanasi and Kashi; Varanasi, as indicated by someone here, being the most commonly used. I agree that it is rather an obscure place and the setter should at least have indicated it was Indian.
Ah well, let’s see what tomorrow brings.
Nairobi Wallah
Thanks for yours, not sure I can agree with it entirely. I think that “Not bad” is the answer we give when all is not well and we don’t want to lie, and “Well” is the answer we give when all is indeed well. That, at any rate, is how I answer.
Nairobi Wallah
Nairobi Wallah
Agree with mctext’s opening statement and keriothe’s first para. HOWLS DOWN is just wrong.
Funnily, had no problem with BENARES – I remember playing an Indian peasant starving on the banks of the Ganges in a dreadfully socially-conscious (and dreadful) improvised playlet during my student days … So the late 60s were useful for something after all …
No complaints though. BENARES was an easy win for me: but then you’d have to be extraordinarily ignorant not to have heard of it if you were my age, and (as a comparative oldie) I feel I need something to balance the new stuff that comes up now and then. (I remember in a Championship final, back in the 1970s or early 1980s, having to choose between NARES and NEROS for the name of a matinee idol. Luckily I picked the right one, but the old hands were all quite familiar with him.)
One of the definitions of “muffle” in my 1986 Collins is “to prevent (the expression of something) by (someone)” which I think covers HOWLS DOWN quite nicely.
All in all, an interesting and enjoyable puzzle.
I’m glad that others found the Guardian puzzle a relief today: not me, I got two wrong in that one.
Good night all.