This was a classic puzzle of two halves for me. The bottom half and the two long Down answers went in smoothly and tidily but then I ground to a halt and had real problems making progress in the top half. In the end I took well over an hour to polish it off. I’m always pleased to see shorter clues but the absence of 3- and even 4-letter words today weighed badly in the balance.
I noted that at 2 AM there was only one entry on the Club leader board, Neil R at 22 minutes (a long time for him) and with 2 errors. Revisiting at 3:30 there are only two entries, the latest timed at 59 minutes with 1 error. I’m now getting nervous that I may have something wrong!
Across |
|
---|---|
1 | STEEPLECHASE – STEEP (difficult) + anagram of CHELSEA |
8 | AGA SAGA – There’s not much to go on here other than a straight definition and an indication we’re looking for a palindrome. I didn’t know that a country setting necessarily applied to this but Wikipedia says so. The usual sources only have ‘semi-rural’, whatever that means. |
9 | ERASMUS – ERAS (times), SUM (chief) reversed. I’m not entirely convinced the second part works. |
11 | EMOTION – E (online – as in email), MOTION (movement) |
12 | TIEPOLO – TIE (obligation), LOP (cut) reversed, O (over). My last one in and I needed PB’s dunce’s cap and the self-kicking boot when the penny eventually dropped because this artist has caught me out so many times over the years, yet I still can never remember his name. |
13 | ENSUE – U (university) in a jumble of random points of the compass (directions). My most hated type of clue. |
14 |
EXTROVERT – EXTR |
16 | LITERATIM – Anagram of REMITTAL I. Not a word I’m over familiar with but easily gettable from the anagram fodder. |
19 | TURIN – “One after the other” is I in TURN – geddit? |
21 | ANTONIO – ON (leg – cricket again) inside ANTI (opposed to), O (over – again). He’s the Merchant of Venice. |
23 | PEANUTS – NUT (fruit) inside PEAS (vegetables) |
24 | TINFOIL – IN (trendy) + F (following) inside TOIL (work) |
25 | ECHIDNA – Anagram of CHAINED |
26 | CARNEGIE HALL – Anagram of A CHALLENGER I (one). The premier concert venue in New York. |
Down |
|
1 | SHADOWS – Double definition. “60s band” seems rather a narrow definition for The Shadows who were active continuously for some 30 years from the late 50s onwards and I believe they have reformed more recently. |
2 | EXAMINE – EXA (mega-mega-mega), MINE (explosive). No doubt the scientists among us will pick over the finer details but I think the idea is that ‘mega’ represents a million or 10 to the power 6, so three of those is 10 to the power 18 which is represented by ‘exa’. Whether this holds up in practice I have no idea and care even less. |
3 | PLAIN TEXT – I (current) inside PLAN (proposal), TEXT (theme). It means not encrypted, apparently. |
4 |
EJECT – |
5 | HEAVE-HO – Double definition. “Call to work” as in “heave-ho, me hearties” in old-fashioned nautical speak, and “notice” as in being given the old heave-ho when one is given notice to quit or sacked. |
6 |
SOMEONE – SO (extremely), M |
7 | BAKEWELL TART – BAKE (cook), WELL (clearly) TART. I was going to argue that a tart is not a flan but the dictionaries disagree with me. |
10 | SHOOTING STAR – SHOO (get out), TING (ring) STAR (brilliant). The song “When you wish upon a star” from Pinocchio illustrates the idea behind the definition here. |
15 | TIMEPIECE – ME (setter) + PIE (prize) + C (caught) inside TIE (ribbon) |
17 | TITANIA – TITAN (moon – of Saturn) + I, A gives us another moon (of Uranus) |
18 |
RANGOON – NAR |
19 | TRACHEA – Hidden |
20 |
ROUNDEL – ROUND (encircling) + |
22 | OFLAG – O (old), F (fine), LAG (convict). The Nazi prison camp for enemy officers. It sounds as if it ought to be responsible for regulating prisons in present-day UK! |
I thought the cluing was rather high-quality, no complaints here. I also remembered that any 7-letter artist ending in ‘o’ is bound to be ‘Tiepolo’. I did have to reach deep to remember the ‘Aga Saga’, though.
Liked the “in TURN” device at 19ac; not easy to spot at first bush. Especially when you’ve missed the hidden at 19dn and punted at URETHRA!
Thanks to the setter for the torture and to JAck for explaining TURIN. Don’t get chief/sum either.
It may just be that I have been tired this week (I have), but the crosswords seem to be taking a turn for the obscure. Is this a deliberate policy to separate the main crossword in difficulty from the Quick Cryptic?
I’ve certainly had a bad week solving the main cryptic but I hope this is purely random and there has been no decision to deliberately beef up the level of difficulty. I don’t want to struggle to finish every day.
Edited at 2014-05-02 06:39 am (UTC)
If it’s based on “take the pie”, PIE/prize seems to be another case where the substitution test may be misleading – I suppose you could justify BISCUIT and CAKE on the same basis
Edited at 2014-05-02 06:48 am (UTC)
There are some beautifully pithy surfaces in here, not least 1a (the editor must have been delighted when Chelsea went out of Europe this week — either that or he’s psychic).
And nice to see ‘en clair’ turning up in a clue. Tony Sever clued it as an answer for our Christmas Turkey. It’s a phrase that just belongs in a crossword.
I’m with Jack on many of his comments, particularly the SHADOWS who were not simply a “1960s band”. I’m not convinced that 2D works: mega-mega-mega did not suggest EXA to me and I only saw what the setter was up to after solving. At 14A we have a DBE of “extra” clued by “wide” (other extras include byes, no-balls etc) with no indication.
30 minutes during which I was pleased I didn’t have to write the blog
I would not have been able to state “pie=prize” in a court of law, but my Chambers gives it en clair. I missed the cleverness of TURIN, gave an ignorant (and staying that way – there’s nothing I need to count which requires 18 zeroes) shrug at EXA-, and derived LITERATIM solely from cod-latin and anagram fodder. PEANUTS I left unparsed, not getting away from nuts plural for fruit and assuming something was going on with a pea as a round vegetable, which it incontrovertibly is.
On the other hand, I did stay long enough with ERASMUS to deduce that “chief points” could be SUM the wrong way, so I’m with kororareka on that.
A huge round of applause to the heroic Jack for unravelling all that lot. While the leaderboard is better populated now, even Magoo took more that 6 minutes. My, that’s tough!
Cheers
Chris.
More generally and as you would expect, things feel different under a different editor.
Personally I don’t think that necessarily validates it though. In Mephisto everything is fair game but when the setters rely on these nooks and crannies of Chambers in the daily puzzle it feels to me a bit like someone picking up the ball in the middle of a game of football.
> I wouldn’t hold it against you if you didn’t know what an AGA SAGA is, and there’s no way into the clue if you don’t
> ‘Chief parts’ for SUM?
> ENSUE: one of those ‘some letters’ clues
> ‘Mega mega mega’. Really?
> ‘Theme’ for TEXT?
> A BAKEWELL TART is not a flan.
> ‘Prize’ for PIE?
It happens that all the obscure meanings are in Chambers, so I wonder if this is a Mephisto setter. Perhaps one who likes cricket…
I think it was Joanna Trollope who started the whole Aga Saga genre as her early novels always featured a heroine with an Aga in her kitchen.
I did not know what a Nina was but Googling brought me to the beautiful one in The Times in July 1967 on the occasion of Alfred Bately’s retirement from teaching Mathematics at Westcliffe College.
Edited at 2014-05-02 03:27 pm (UTC)
The science stream should be happy today, with exa = mega-mega-mega and the (largest) moons of Saturn and Uranus respectively. And hats off to the setter for combining two Times old faithfuls, the Shakespeare and the cricketing clues, in ANTONIO.
FOI ERASMUS – what would he make, I wonder, of the bunch of spittle-flecked loonies who (loudly) describe themselves as “humanists” nowadays? LOI, HEAVE HO, where the sacking meaning, again known to me, eluded me, so couldn’t nail the parsing.
COD has to be SOMEONE, which held me up for ages! Nice one. Hats off to the setter, who did the “complex clues to straightforward words” thing to perfection today!
I keep worrying that these occasional brainstorms are a sign of incipient dementia. What seems to happen is that panic overtakes me when I get stuck, and my brain somehow seizes up. All very depressing.
Having said all that, and looked back over it at my leisure, I rate this an extremely fine puzzle. My compliments to the setter.
Edited at 2014-05-02 10:33 pm (UTC)