Some of this was straightforward and I thought for a while I might be in for an easy ride, but several clues put up quite a lot of resistance and time gradually slipped away from me. In the end I finished with everything parsed in 60 minutes give or take a couple. I note that 3 hours after publication there are only 7 entries on the leader board and 3 of these are over the half-hour, which suggests it’s not exactly a doddle that I made heavy weather of. There are some good surfaces and an even mix of clues I had to solve from wordplay and others where I spotted the answer from the definition and then had to reverse-engineer to understand how they worked. Only Z is needed to complete the pangram so your task this morning is to find a home for it somewhere in the grid…
Note added 09:13: All the while I was editing this in LJ the webpage tab in Firefox showed it continually loading, and now whenever I view the blog to read comments I am getting the same. Am I alone in in this?
* = anagram
“xxx” = sounds like
Across |
|
---|---|
1 | GO DOWNHILL – GO (energy), DOWN (drink, as in ‘down a pint’), H (husband), ILL (having complaint) |
6 | OFFS – The first letters of Orange Falling From September. I’m not sure I have met ‘off’ as a verb meaning ‘leave’ before, but COED has it. |
9 | FOUR OCLOCK – OUR OC (officer commanding us) inside FLOCK (Suffolks perhaps, Suffolk being a breed of sheep). Some solvers may have expected to see an apostrophe here but there seems to be a convention not to include it in the enumeration as it would make the answer too obvious. |
10 | AREA – Hidden |
12 | PARADE-GROUND – AD (plug) inside PARE (clip), GROUND (earth) |
15 | OLIVE DRAB – 0 LIVED (there were no survivors), BAR (except for) reversed. US solvers may have an advantage here. |
17 | SHARP – In music sharps may be considered the opposite of flats |
18 | IN-LAW – IN (home), LAW (rule) |
19 | CRESCENDO – (CONCEDES R)* – another music reference |
20 | MAN IN THE MOON – A NINTH (a fraction) inside MEMO (jogger, as in something that jogs the memory), ON (leg, in cricket) |
24 |
ALLY – |
25 | FRAUD SQUAD – FRAU (German woman), DS (detective – sergeant), QUAD (yard) |
26 |
PAYS – P |
27 | TEXT EDITOR – EX TED (former fifties youth) inside TITO (communist dictator, of Yugoslavia), R (resistance) |
Down |
1 | GIFT – GIF (image PC may have – Graphic Interchange Format), T (time) |
2 |
DRUB – |
3 |
WHO DARES WINS – (WISE WORDS AN H |
4 |
HILDA – |
5 | LOCKERBIE – LOCK (embrace), then BI (British Isles) inside ERE (before) |
7 |
FORMULA ONE – (MORE OF AN U |
8 | STAND UP FOR – STAND (where spectators are), UP FOR (keen to have a go) |
11 | CRISSCROSSED – C (cape), then SCISSORS* inside RED (brightly coloured). Collins omits the hyphen I would have expected to see; Chambers has without as an alternative. |
13 | SODIUM LAMP – ODIUM (hatred) inside SLAM (verse competition), P (quiet). The poetry contest is a new one on me. |
14 | WILLY-NILLY – WILL (boy), then NIL+L (nothing + left) inside YY (two years) |
16 | RACEHORSE – RACE (people), “hoarse” (sounding rough). Great definition here – ‘hope for better’! |
21 | MOULT – Alternate letters of aMmO bUlLeTs |
22 | JUST – S (spades) inside JUT (stick). I’d have thought ‘jut’ meant ‘stick out’ rather than simply ‘stick’. |
23 | ODER – “odour”. The German river |
The only place I could put a Z is in 26ac, if PHYZ is a word. Is it?
Now that we’ve had a week with a range of difficulties, my vote is definitely for the harder offerings.
And, completely off topic, is your photo reverse printed, or is that really left-handed?
Edited at 2014-03-07 04:01 am (UTC)
Edited at 2014-03-07 04:15 am (UTC)
I have never heard of GIF (I have since read the Wiki entry but am still none the wiser) which made 1dn tricky.
At 9ac I was fooled by the enumeration of O’CLOCK, as I have been many times before – I always forget that one!
Edited at 2014-03-07 05:42 am (UTC)
I thought this a good puzzle, with clever anagrams for WHO DARES WINS and CRISSCROSSED and some nicely hidden definitions, e.g. ‘champion’ and ‘hope for better’.
Felt so happy to have it all completed correctly and unaided (in about 90 minutes on and off) …or so I thought until coming here (bit of a pattern here, what with MORECAMBE the other day…). Today my OE was at 13dn where I too had podium lamp (which, according to t’internet, does exist as a thing).
Thought it a great puzzle, creative and sneaky (loved all the misdirections), and probably just about the right difficulty for me. Thanks both to setter, and Jack for working out the parsings that I failed to see.
As Jack says, there’s a good mix in here of “spot the definition” clues and others where you have to construct the answer from wordplay. I only got FOUR O’CLOCK when I eventually figured out that “officer commanding us” was OUROC, for instance.
DRUZ seems a tad obscure to me. I’d change 8dn to STOOD UP FOR and 10ac to ORZO.
Tough going, agonising over JUST and entering it with a defiant “I can sort of justify it”. The girl was my LOI, (Helga? Hilma? Hylda? Hella?) eventually twigging just after deciding Hilda would have to do how the clue worked. Girl’s name clues eh? Ban ’em? Who’s with me?
Lots of good stuff here.
SODIUM LAMP went in (eventually) ignoring the verse bit, as slam=competition was in my sphere of knowledge. Having wised up, I hope never to attend such a competition, an ambition which I think I can easily fulfil.
FOUR O’CLOCK is apparently not just an arbitrary time, which looks to me like a setter’s cheat, but also a flower, which looks to me like something I wouldn’t know without looking it up.
CoD to CRESCENDO for unaccustomed accuracy. For everyone else (especially sports commentators): it doesn’t mean the peak of noise. It might not even get there.
Edited at 2014-03-07 10:08 am (UTC)
I thought the clue for MAN IN THE MOON was excellent, as were those for FRAUD SQUAD and TEXT EDITOR.
Edited at 2014-03-07 03:06 pm (UTC)
First class stuff throughout with crafty definitions, clever synonyms and much misdirection. A puzzle worthy of the brand
Good to see IT usage like GIF appearing. Like others SLAM as poetry was new to me. In a very good collection I thought the anagram at 3D, the misdirection at 8D, and my personal appearance at 27A made these stand out clues.
Hope I’ve said enough today
I hadn’t heard of that sort of SLAM either, but the lamps are only too familiar, being right outside my bedroom.
Back in the day, my work colleague and I had to finish the Cryptic (separately) before starting work. Then came sudoku. And killer sudoku, Tredoku and various other things. It ended up being a miracle that anything got done.
Edited at 2014-03-07 11:51 am (UTC)
Cheers
Chris.
I liked almost everything in this, but RACEHORSE most of all. Great def.
I raised an eyebrow at lock for embrace and like it or not for willy-nilly but otherwise all seemed on the level. The wordplay for a couple (he who dares wins Rodney and crisscrossed) passed me by at the time as they were pretty obvious from def and checkers but overall this was a challenging but fun solve. My favourite clues were man in the moon and moult for the marvellous definitions. Like others I didn’t know what slam had to do with verse.
Like Ulaca I was expecting Jimbo to be hanging out the flags on account of ted not being alluded to as some kind of yob.
Incidentally, Jack, re LJ I’m not getting the issue you describe but the site isn’t loading properly for me at the moment. I just get rather untidy text, no background, links in the worng places and the only graphics are avatars. It’s a bit pants.
Happy week-end everyone.
Nairobi Wallah
Excellent surfaces on FORMULA ONE and PAYS. Enjoyed DRUB, once I’d extricated it. TEXT EDITOR one of those intricately-put-together solutions I don’t particularly enjoy, but it was good of its kind. And liked the clever punning surface of FRAUD SQUAD. As with many others, I hadn’t heard of a “slam” in a poetry context, but clue solvable, if unparsed, without that knowledge.
Well done, setter! More, please.
Nice puzzle, clever clues, enjoyable to do, great satisfaction when completed. Who could ask for more?
Lack of the checking C in FOUR OCLOCK was one of the reasons I didn’t get LOCKERBIE, though I should have – it’s one of the few (two, at last count) Scottish towns I can bring to mind. Come to think of it, most of the foreign towns I’ve heard of are usually suffixed with “disaster”. I blame my geography teacher.
I’m also not convinced by “WILLY NILLY” (although the answer was obvious enough) – is the literal meant to be “like it or not”? Am I missing something obvious?
I liked 7d, with its misdirection of “GP”. I spent a while trying to recall if “formula man” was a term for a doctor. I’ve heard my colleagues called many things, but not that. Only twigged after the checking “N”. 17ac was also nicely done, I thought, as was 20ac.
All in all, this was an enjoyable hour which I would otherwise have wasted on patients.
Maybe it’s time I tried learning two new things every day.
I note that the OED includes the verse competition under the card-games-related definitions of “slam”, whereas Chambers includes it under the bang-related definitions.
but i googled for “livejournal page keeps loading” and landed here. so yes, everywhere on LJ, the tabs (only FFox, not IE seems) keep loading, no clue why, since they had this service disruption about 1 week ago ~ but i’ve been able to modify entries and css without any problems. ^^
Edited at 2014-03-12 12:41 pm (UTC)
Unfortunately there’s very little activity here on old puzzles as we tend to discuss what’s current and then move on usually within 24 hours except for competition puzzles where there is an embargo on discussion until solutions have been published a week later.
The Times is available by subscription on-line but unfortunately these days it’s quite an expensive business to sign up for it, however access to it would enable you to tackle the puzzle regularly, join in the latest discussions here and hopefully improve your solving skills. There is also now a Quick Cryptic puzzle each day Monday – Friday which is also blogged and discussed on this site. It’s less demanding than the main cryptic but very enjoyable in its own right and can serve as a useful stepping-stone for less practised solvers.
Best regards
Edited at 2014-04-13 04:24 am (UTC)
Sincerely, Scott.