Across
1 WATER-WHEEL – a sort of double definition, one part descriptive, the other functional.
6 HOOP – [w]HOOP; what American golf spectators do when they’re not hollerin’, I guess.
10 OPOSSUM – PO inside OS (here ‘outsized’; sometime ‘ordnance survey’ or ‘operating system’) + SUM.
11 COHABIT – CO + H[elp] + A BIT; the literal is ‘what some items do’, where items means ‘lovers’ (more or less).
12 LANDOWNER – N[ote] inside LAD + OWNER (where own means to own up to).
13 DITTO – I (one) + 2 x T (for time) in DO.
14 NIECE – N + [p]IECE.
15 MATRICIDE – an anagram* of A TERM I around CID (‘dept. investigating’); the literal is murder.
17 TASK FORCE – T[hey] + ASK FOR + CE for a group set up when either you already know what you want or you need to play for time.
20 LAPPS – sounds like (‘to get a hearing’ is a neat homophone indicator) lapse = ‘failing’.
21 RADON – A D[aughter] in RON (our arbitrary 3-letter geezer du jour).
23 SPLENDOUR – I wanted to get UR in there somewhere, but in my impatience wanted it to be bunged in early doors; it’s SPEND + O[ver] (an over is 6 balls in cricket) + UR around L[ake].
25 OFFBEAT – the literal is ‘wacky’ and the rest is an impish way of referring to policemen who have a desk job.
26 VERDICT – quite a bit of European culture today (deftly balanced by Preston); this time it’s Giuseppe VERDI before CT (court).
27 SIDE – double definition; SIDE for affectation is coming up these days almost as much as ORBIT[AL] (see 7d).
28 ROUND DANCE – ROUND (canon in musical terms) + C[hapter] in DANE.
Down
1 WHORL – R[ook] in WHOL[e] (‘almost complete’) to give the ring of leaves; the first of today’s two unknown/forgotten botanicals (ODO has ‘a set of leaves, flowers, or branches springing from the stem at the same level and encircling it’)
2 THORNLESS – TORN LESS around H.
3 RUSH ONES FENCES – SHUN FORCES SEEN*; not sure I’ve ever come across this before either.
4 HOMONYM – HO[use] + MO (Medical Officer) + NYM (a character in Henry V, if memory serves).
5 EXCERPT – if you see ‘save’, think ‘except’; it’s this around R[esistance] for the ‘part of article, perhaps’, which has also been popping up a lot of late.
7 ORBIT – R (‘king put down’, I take it in the sense of ‘rendered in written form’) in OBIT (‘death notice’).
8 PATRONESS – PRESTON AS*.
9 RHODE ISLAND RED – last time I blogged, we had RI; this time we add the ‘red’; it’s RHODE (‘vocal way’ – another neat homophone indicator) + I SLAND[e(uropean)]RED.
14 NOTORIOUS – NO TO RIO = ‘rejection of port’ + US (Uncle Sam).
16 IMPLOSION – IM = I’M = ‘writer’s’ = writer is + PL[ace] + O (cricket again thanks, Zed – it’s O[ld]) + SION.
18 RISOTTO – SIR reversed + OTTO von Bismarck.
19 ENLIVEN – with an N (knight in chess notation) for L in NEVILLE (Chamberlain) reversed.
22 DYFED – D[or]Y + FED (intransitive, as in ‘Baby has fed – now we’re putting her down’). I put ‘Dafyd’!
24 RATHE – a literary word meaning ‘blooming early’; hidden nicely and the surface is rather good once you latch on to the mild expletive in ‘blooming’ and the use of ‘centre’ as shopping mall.
COD to NEVILLE in reverse gear.
Like mct, the hidden answer was my last in.
Boys in blue, Pen-pushing, Beat! The setter must be thinking of the George Dixon era.
Edited at 2014-02-24 07:16 am (UTC)
I don’t think there’s any cricket in 16: I think its just O(ld). Having said that, I didn’t know Sion as any kind of Swiss town, old or new, just as an alternate spelling of Zion (which it probably is, in Swiss).
Nominate 1ac for barely cryptic of the day, and hooray for chickens I know!
That inclusion was pretty good, though RATHE is a bit of a Mephisto word, marked in Chambers as archaic (or Miltonic). Good way to start the week, though, not too tricky but no gimme either.
Edited at 2014-02-24 07:52 am (UTC)
I didn’t know that LAPPS were nomadic hunters. According to Wiki they’re semi-nomadic, and called the Sami nowadays.
ROUND DANCE, RUSH ONES FENCES, SION and RATHE also unknown.
Edited at 2014-02-24 07:57 am (UTC)
And that one was 4dn, where I had hominem (unparsed), which is, I guess almost a HOMONYM itself…
All went in in 30 mins or so, until I came to a halt at the SE. Finally limped home with LAPPS, RATHE and ROUND DANCE in just under the hour.
Did not know RATHE but clear from the clue and seeing crosswordland’s favourite chicken helped. Also, in a previous existence (ie working), I was involved in setting up an office in Sion so no problems there.
Edited at 2014-02-24 12:19 pm (UTC)
We seem to be getting more of the 1A type nonsense – I wonder why? At 7D “put down” is padding – remove the phrase and both definition and the cryptic still work. Then two real obscurities in SION as Swiss town and RATHE.
RATHE is a poor clue. It ignores the Mephisto convention that archaic words are signalled by indicators like “once” or “old” and it contains padding of “in the year” – again definition and cryptic work without this phrase.
25A shows a woeful ignorance of modern policing as Jack has said. We’ve been talking to our local Police and Crime Commissioner about giving every officer a portable computer.
Not sure how you were searching, but I tend to get the best results using the “site:” specifier within Google to restrict the results to just this site.
Whereas Tony Sever, reading between the lines, seems to remember every single clue he’s ever solved (or at least every clue in the past 10 years). Gets angry at himself when he can’t remember a clue from 5 or 8 years back.
Rob in Oz
I’m another whose LOI was RATHE, which I finally saw after I entered the ENLIVEN/ROUND DANCE crossers. I’m annoyed that it took me longer than it should have done to see the reversed “Neville” in the clue for 19dn.
I think we can expect more, not less, clues like 1ac under the new crossword editor if what he said after he was appointed is to be taken at face value.
Good to see Preston getting an outing – vale Sir Tom Finney.
Had no objections to Water Wheel or Offbeat.
Nairobi Wallah
FOI the write-in RISOTTO, followed by RUSH ONES FENCES – always a shudder of apprehension when a long clue falls to am easy anagram.
May have been just me, but today’s clueing seemed rather clunky and the whole exercise rather joyless.
My thanks to Ulaca for explaining why this was actualy SIDE. The increasing use of this to mean affectation has passed me by thus far but I shall hope to remember it for next time!
I took 1a to be a CD rather than a DD.
COD to 14D – liked the NO TO RIO device.
I for one wouldn’t want to see the overall level of GK reduced. Deducing things you don’t know from wordplay is a skill you have to acquire if you want to solve these things regularly, and it’s very satisfying. And it’s good to learn stuff. Much of my knowledge of classical mythology comes from doing these puzzles. And pretty much all my knowledge of plants.
I think the fact that 36 and 41 year-olds are relative young ‘uns is just in the nature of crosswords. They’re never going to be a yoof pursuit, and it does take a few years to get the hang of them.
in the days when Times crossword solvers were assumed to be thoroughly familiar with Lycidas.
Not sure about PATRONESS – I imagine many women would feel patronessized by that one.
Regarding the above comments on GK – I do think things have improved since I started failing to finish the Times cryptic. There’s still a heavy reliance on cricket, and far too many foreign place names for my liking, but at least the numbers of biblical and Shakespearean references seem to have declined (NYM being an exception).
I do still feel, though, that there’s a general disregard for anything we’ve learned or invented in the last 100 years – the Times cryptic is still not really of this age.
I sympathise with the younger solvers, but look on the ‘bright’ side, in due course you will be as geriatric as the rest of us. Thankfully, children, and now a grandchild, have kept me at least a little in touch with yoof culture and the wonderful world of children’s literature.