Across
1 PLAYWRIGHT – wary* in PLIGHT to give the luvvies’ luvvie.
6 IDEA – the even letters in mIdDlEmAn.
10 UNHINGE – [f]UN + [t]HING + [w]E.
11 SOPHIST – HIS in post* for Greek smart alecks Socrates made mincemeat of.
12 BARRICADE – CAD in BARRIE, and nothing to do with bard…
13 LOYAL – LAY + O + L all reversed.
14 BASIS – B + AS IS; the ‘lopped off’ version cropped up – again – in Moorey’s 12 May ‘Meg Ryan’ puzzle.
15 DEN+I+GRATE
17 DESCRIBED – nothing to do with scribes; it’s S (second) + CRIB (copy) in DEED (what was done).
20 TIPS+Y
21 ID+IOM (the island, that is).
23 UNSECURED – UNCURED (still having complaint) around S[id]E (wings in side). Nice, but the checkers rather gave it.
25 T+RAINED
26 ALLYING – it appears to be TALLYING without the ‘t’, but I don’t quite get it. Thanks to mct, who spotted that it’s a hidden answer.
27 ROOK – double definition (the rook or castle in chess starts off at the extremity of the board).
28 GRANNY KNOT – never having been a scout or a sailor, my knot-making skill set is likely to remain forever inchoate. Be that as it may, a granny knot, with a delightful whiff of the old sexism about it, refers to ‘a reef knot with the ends crossed the wrong way and therefore liable to slip’, AKA a ‘poor connection’.
Down
1 PLUMB – double definition.
2 APHORISMS – ship+oars* + M.
3 WIND INSTRUMENT – the wordplay is a tad superflous, but for the record it’s IN + DIN + STRUM in WENT.
4 I+RELAND – someone, somewhere will have put Iceland…
5 HAS-BEEN – double definition, ‘bean’ being a small amount of money, unless it’s being counted by an accountant, in which case it’s a large amount which is made to look like a small amount.
7 DAIL+Y
8 ARTILLERY – ILL in ARTERY.
9 APOLOGETICALLY – another where most will work out the wordplay after completion: A + POLO then (GET CALL around I) + Y .
14 BEDSITTER – D + (IS reversed) in BETTER.
16 ASPERSION – AS + PERS(I)ON.
18 B+L+UNDER
19 DISDAIN – did+as* + IN.
22 I(M)AGO – imago is the real McCoy, lepidopteristically speaking.
24 DIGIT – is the definition of a pedant someone who would insist on saying ‘piece of datum’?
I very much liked the clue for ARTILLERY. Reminded me of the days when ILL = “badly” was common. E.g., in the song “Tam Lin” where “ill” is used in two of its possible ways:
“Woe betide her ill-fart face, an ill death may she die”.
Nowt else to say. T’was bright and breezy. COD … TRAINED – very neat.
Nice easy start to the week too for me, just over 30 mins.
LOI: the hidden ALLYING
I felt things would go well today when I immediately thought of Sir Noël on reading 1ac and called the correct answer to mind.
BASIS was an absolute gift following the discussion here at the weekend on 13ac in ST puzzle 4537.
Mention of castles and rooks in the same breath would in the past have been enough to guarantee a visit and a tirade from the angry Colonel so I thought I’d give his pic an outing today.
The Romans (Cicero prominent among them, as I recall) used to have a construction specifically designed for such sneering at the outsider: ‘Sunt qui…’. ‘There are those who – believe it or not, Tsk! – …’
Edited at 2013-05-20 07:12 am (UTC)
I solved this online because my iPad app has reproduced Saturday’s puzzle, so I had to read the actual paper on the train. This after the club chose to take my £24.99 subscription, even though I’m now supposed to get it for free as part of my newspaper subscription. Not very impressed with the Times this morning.
Edited at 2013-05-20 08:13 am (UTC)
CoD to DIGIT. Pedantry might equally suggest that “data” in the clue might just as well be correctly a plural, though my 10 year old Chambers already identifies data as n sing.
not explained in the blog. My guess is the central character in both M15 and Ml6 is supposed to be the numeral 1 (one), while the central character in CIA is supposed to be a capital letter i(I), not the nuneral 1.
Hence the answer ‘digit is simply
‘one’ (the numeral)
Barbara
Most of the answers went straight in but a few – Sophist, Loyal, Bedsitter, Described, Digit, Unsecured, Disdain and Allying – took a few looks.
FOI Playwright, LOI Allying (from definition – didn’t see it was hidden!!)
24 minutes.
Cheers
Chris G.
Barbara
I hope this isn’t an anomaly because as you know there has been a whole uproar about non-renewals coupled with some pretty strong-arm stuff getting regular club members to sign up for expensive add-ons or drop out altogether, which sadly several have already done. Apparently the minions at NI have been instructed not to tell those inquiring of the least costly L2 per week package option (as opposed to the L17 per month one) – I know this from Puzzleplease who posts elsewhere on LJ and is a regular on the Club concise Forum.
There has been a claim that the matter was still under review, but for subscribers the silence and lack of info has been deafening. Based on your recent experience I would like to believe that the entire fiasco has caused complete reconsideration by the powers-that-be but I’m not holding my breath.
Does anyone KNOW anything further?
Edited at 2013-05-20 05:42 pm (UTC)
My existing Worldpay subscription for the crossword-only package simply renewed itself on the appropriate day – and only once (there was a time when every year it was so pleased with itself for successfully renewing that it did it a second time, just to prove it could). I would certainly advise all members to go to their “My Subscriptions’ page at The Times site and check their renewal dates and make sure that their registered credit card is a still valid one. So I have nothing to complain about. Drat. Or do I ….?
There obviously is a lot of confusion right now, and needlessly so. I wouldn’t blame anyone at the coalface of The Times subscriptions department, or indeed on the crosswords side. This whole thing smacks of memos descending from on high after meetings involving involving a lot of Power Point and flowcharts and talk of “rationalizing our revenue streams” with no one really stopping to think about it.
And it is nuts. When newspapers started waking up to the web there was widespread agreement – and there still is – that the one big plus would be consumer choice, allowing customers to build their own newspapers. That’s so obviously the future that NI should be concentrating on building a much better payment gateway, one that is easily customizable and easy to understand. The paywall which currently greets potential new customers seems to offer a choice of Everything or Everything Plus, which isn’t really a choice at all and must be losing them huge numbers of customers. I would really like to subscribe to Puzzles and Opinion, and maybe Arts. Would it be so hard to allow me to check those boxes and pay accordingly? And I might like to subscribe to the Sports section for a month, or a quarter. There are web services I subscribe to that give me just that kind of flexibility.
I also personally resent having to use a credit card to subscribe. That’s not the future either, but clearly that message isn’t getting through to the powers that be.
Edited at 2013-05-20 08:52 pm (UTC)
My thing runs out in September by which time I hope normal service will have been resumed. I wouldn’t actually mind a modest increase, but I hate being blackmailed and I really really hate losing some good people in the club.
I would love to see The Times being genuinely innovative in this area. They were the first in the UK to jump into the pay-only model and you would expect them to be leading the way, but…. we live in hope.
I suppose next week I will have a difficult Bank Holiday puzzle to blog.
Edited at 2013-05-20 06:21 pm (UTC)
Adrian