That is, counting Saturday and Sunday’s, which were both very chewy. Several unusual items of vocab in this one, and some canny cluing, took my time to 1’18”. While the NW put up the most resistance, my mistake was in the SW.
Across
1 BRAINPAN – I (one) in BRAN (refuse – noun) + PAN to give the first unusual (at least, for Limeys) item of vocab.
9 ABERRANT – very cunning, ‘out’ being the literal; R (king) + RAN in ABET.
10 EDGIER – LEDGER without the L (pounds down – we had ‘down’ for ‘off’ the other day) around I.
11 SOUNDPROOF – a double definition of sorts; some say one finds proofs only in logic, others in logic and pure mathematics. I stay out of it.
12 GNUS – my last in; just a DD (‘latest sounds’ translating to ‘sounds like “news”‘), even if I was looking for a word ending in S, where the S was taken from animalS.
13 FIANCHETTO – FIANCE[e] + an anagram* of OF THE to give another chess move, this time ‘the development of a bishop by moving it one square to a long diagonal of the board’ – whatever that means. I was envisaging someone in Dante’s third circle of Hell, but, alas, no.
16 GAMELAN – ME in GALA + [productio]N to give a Javanese/Balinese instrumental ensemble that makes a lot of noise.
17 COSTARD – COSTAR + [finishe]D to give a cooking apple which I’d forgotten.
20 BOTTLENECK – double definition; easy enough, but not for me, having been ground down by the others.
22 AIDE – smart this; it’s the middle letters of [m]AIDE[n].
23 LAY CLAIM TO – another cunning clue with a well hidden anagram of L[arge] + CALAMITY + O[ld], which leaves ‘bag’ as the literal.
25 WARDEN – first letter of W[illiam] + ARDEN (once a forest in the Heart of England – now mainly Birmingham); Collins for ‘warden’ has ‘3. a person employed to patrol a national park or safari park’ – before it becomes Legoland, presumably.
26 NEUTRINO – NEU (sounds like ‘new’) + TRI (ditto ‘tree’) + NO (ditto ‘know’) to give the naughty peeps who use two computers to record times of 1′ 50″ on the leader board, which is usually enough to beat Mark Goodliffe. Neither of the two dictionaries I consulted mentioned a lack of charge, but perhaps that follows of itself when you are ‘a neutral subatomic particle with a mass close to zero and half-integral spin, which rarely reacts with normal matter’. Substitute ‘people’ for ‘matter’ to get the cruciverbal variety.
27 NURSLING – RUN (work) reversed + SLING. Very nice.
Down
2 RED PANDA – NAP (sleep) in ADDER (snake) both reversed.
3 IRIDESCENT – indiscreet*.
4 PERSIFLAGE – quite the toughie this; it’s I (one) + FLAG (standard) in the PERSE School, Cambridge. The sort of thing those ‘flyting’ poets in late 15th century Scotland got up to, typically with aspersions about the other chap’s manhood. Medieval ‘sledging’, if you will.
5 NATURAL – a simple cryptic definition which held me up.
6 WELD – L[eft] in WED[nesday].
7 RAGOUT – AG in ROUT for a culinary creation I’ve heard of.
8 STAFFORD – O (no) + RD (way) on STAFF.
14 CLOCK TOWER – the literal is ‘high time here…?’ and the wordplay a cringeworthy ‘one pulls a face’, where TOWER must be taken as if it’s, say, a tug. Better not to explain further, I think.
15 EXTRAMURAL – another DD of sorts; ‘another painting’ is rather good.
16 GOBBLING – ‘taking fast food’ in the sense of taking one’s food [too] fast; GOB is British slang for mouth and BLING comes up most weeks now for the kind of stuff chavs wear.
18 RED QUEEN – an allusion to Alice through the Looking Glass.
19 NEW MOON – the literal is ‘start of the month for some’, as the Buddhist, Hebrew Hindu and Muslim calendars start with the crescent moon, but not others, for example, the Chinese or the Gregorian calendar; it’s WOMEN* + ON (forward).
21 THYMUS – my wrong ‘un; it’s THY (your) + MUS[e] for the ‘lymphoid organ situated in the neck which becomes much smaller at the approach of puberty’; I had ‘thyrus’, with a truncated RUS[h] and a prayer.
24 ARID – A + RID[e]; finally, an easy one.
In particular, PERSIFLAGE gave me a fair old bit of trouble, not being au fait with posh schools. (Mine will never appear in a crossword I suspect.)
CLOCK TOWER was almost as hard to spot, but worth a laugh when sorted.
Just re-read The Ambidextrous Universe, so the negative charge of the neutrino wasn’t a problem. Worth a look for the whole fiasco of the neutrino bomb hoax. And on the radio over the weekend, a bad joke about a neutron. One goes into a bar and asks how much a beer costs. The barman says ….
Is 12ac (GNUS) a DD or just your common-or-garden homophone type?
Edited at 2013-10-07 03:54 am (UTC)
Yes, this was another disaster of a solve for me, though not a hat-trick as Sunday’s was without incident, if a bit on the slow side.
I took 1hr 10min and eventually resorted to aids a couple of times to kick-start when I was completely stuck. I recognised BRAINPAN from another puzzle but only after I had found it by looking up BRAIN. I didn’t know FIANCHETTO, PERSE or NEUTRINO (other than having something to do with cheating at the on-line puzzle).
I wonder if I was the only one to wreck my chances in the SE corner by putting LASS (hidden) at 22ac?
Edited at 2013-10-07 05:42 am (UTC)
Like Jack I slowed myself down by putting in LASS at 22ac.
I knew Perse Scool from having played rugby against them ( for a definitely non-posh school!) and had vaguely heard of PERSIFLAGE.
LOI was ARID where for a long while I had ASHY, until the penny dropped for NEUTRINO.
Edited at 2013-10-07 07:23 am (UTC)
Edited at 2013-10-07 06:52 am (UTC)
COD … AIDE, small but perfectly formed.
COD was 23c and laughed as I remembered schoolyard cries of “Bags, I get to be……”
GNUS: if only I’d thought Flanders and Swann, or even our own domestic persiflage.
THYMUS: trying to work yr into it somewhere, not knowing the stuff about it disappearing in adults, gennerally being ignorant. Good clue, though.
RED QUEEN: got fixed on having AN (one) at the end, cats being whips, red something being wine, especially in a glass. Basically, misled all over the place.
Thank goodness I didn’t see the hidden LASS, even though I was looking for a “hidden” by this time. Fortunately, I already had a tentative EXTRA-something (CURRICULAR didn’t fit) for 15d.
My unlocker for the bottom half was the excellent BOTTLENECK, and my unfair advantage for the day my missus’ attendance, in her youth, obviously, at the Perse Girls’ variety. I also remembered FIANCHETTO, but not what it was nor (without the wordplay to help) how to spell it. Fine puzzle, just a bit too interesting for a Monday.
Not a lot of people gnew that…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPgo6s1lBbw
The OED gives a single pronunciation nu: (not nju) which (as ulaca says) suggests that the homophone is more likely to work in US English than in British English.
Edited at 2013-10-07 10:24 pm (UTC)
At 1ac I was held up for a while because I felt sure that “refuse” was the definition. NURSLING took longer than it should have done because I am more aware of the “nurseling” spelling so I discounted it until I had all the checkers. CLOCK TOWER also took a while to see but it raised a smile when I got it, as did BOTTLENECK.
Like I said a couple of weeks ago, chess terms aren’t my strong point, so FIANCHETTO, went in from the wordplay with fingers crossed. The only one that went in from definition alone was PERSIFLAGE because I didn’t know the school. ABERRANT was my LOI after NATURAL, although in retrospect neither of them should have taken as long as they did.
1ac LOI – knew FIANCHETTO as I liked to play it occasionally, and knew of Perse School having gone to Cambridge (though don’t know its whereabouts).
CLOCK TOWER is COD for sheer cheek!
So my total time was not great, but I thought it was a fine puzzle. This isn’t a bank holiday, is it?
PS: There’s still a typo in 20a the E and L in Bottleneck are the wrong way round! Mind you, if I had to solve this and then blog it, there would be more than just typos to worry about.
ClockTower a vaguely unsatisfactory clue, and I winced at the vulgarism in 16d.
Oddly enough, given other comments, Persiflage and Fianchetto were among my first in, both of which I owe to time misspent in my college JCR aeons ago.
Sorry this reply is so late. I’m not permanently hooked up to LiveJournal, and don’t usually go back over comments.
I have my LiveJournal set up so that I get an email whenever someone replies to one of my comments. I’m not sure how you do this mind: it seems to have been set like that automatically for me.
Tried my hardest today, but still ended up with having 5 missing, despite returning to it a couple of times.
My goddaughter studies at Perse, so managed 4dn, but didn’t get: BRAINPAN, FIANCHETTO, COSTARD (all unknowns), EXTRAMURAL or NATURAL.
Edited at 2013-10-07 11:07 pm (UTC)
The Guardian is kind of graded, so that it gets harder as the week goes by. Certainly, for most people, Rufus’s Monday is a gentle pipe-opener.
Edited at 2013-10-08 02:22 am (UTC)