Times 25972 – 2014 Grand Final, Puzzle No. 1

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
You’d expect the first puzzle of the Grand Final to be elegant and fair; I thought this was both, and amusing in parts. A couple of slightly obscure words (well, obscure to me anyway) but gettable from clear word play; and an alternative (more often used in USA) spelling for a currency. It took me the allotted 20 minutes in relaxed mode although under exam conditions I might have hit the wall.

Across
1 COLD SNAPS – amusing cryptic definition.
6 THROW – HR (hour) after T (end of argument) OW (I’m in pain); def. upset, as in bewilder, discompose, discomfit.
9 OFFAL – OFFALY (Irish county) with the Y removed (tail banned); def. lights. Generally ‘lights’ refers to the lungs of a butchered animal, offal is a wider term for all the internal organs. I am now told haggis includes lights, which is a pity because I thought I quite liked haggis.
10 EXTROVERT – Three ‘unlimited’ words i.e. without their outside letters; (t)EXT(s) (p)ROV(e) (w)E’R(e) then (indiscree)T; def. outgoing.
11 NEW SCOTLAND YARD – (TEN COWS)*, LAND (country) YARD = DRAY (cart) reversed; def. Met, as in Metropolitan Police, Greater London’s police force.
13 TINCTURE – TIN (can), CURE with T inserted; def. medicine.
14 ENIGMA – E (close to bedtime), NIG (GIN knocked back), MA (old lady); def. closed book.
16 PLEASE – PL (hollow pill) EASE (provide relief); def. will. I can’t find will as a synonym for please in Roget, but someone will please explain it.
18 CAST-IRON – ASTIR (on the move) eaten by CON, C ASTIR ON; def. firm.
21 RUSSIAN ROULETTE – A cryptic definition to make you smile and move on. Nothing to do with the chaps at the golf club with short arms and deep pockets (every golf club has a few).
23 WOMANLIKE – (I KNOW MALE)*, indicated by ‘jockeys’; def. of effeminate appearance.
25 EMMER – Hidden word in Ecosyst(EM MER)cifully; def. old kind of wheat. Worth reading about it in Wiki, especially how the awns seed themselves into the soil, if you have nothing better to do.
26 RUBLE – RUB (cause friction), LE (the French); def. Moscow ready. More often spelled ROUBLE in Europe but both are in use; the version here looks closer to the original Russian рубль.
27 SPECTACLE – Easy one, SPECTACLES (eyewear) finishing early (drop the S); def. exhibition.

Down
1 CROWN – CROW (Express satisfaction over) N (new); def. dental work.
2 LEFT WINGERS – (F SWELTERING)*; Def. they’re pink, as in politically not blue but not dyed in the wool reds.
3 SOLICIT – LICIT (legal), after SO (as has been stated); def. what hookers do.
4 ALEATORY – ALE (beer) A TORY (Conservative); def. random. I could say it was a word I knew the meaning of, but it would be a fib; I got it from the checkers and wordplay.
5 SATRAP – A despot, once a governor of Persia. SAP (fool) and RAT (traitor) have their ‘tips’ swapped.
6 TRODDEN – (RED DON’T)*; Def. put foot down. Ought it to be ‘having put foot down’?
7 ROE – Fish eggs so future swimmers.
8 WITHDRAWN – W (ife) IT (vermouth) H (usband) DRAWN (pictured); def. shy.
12 ALGORITHMIC – (A MICROLIGHT)*; def. following step-by-step instructions.
13 TOP DRAWER – REWARD POT (bonus pool) all reversed; def. the elite.
15 GABONESE – EG reversed, with A BONES (a doctor) inserted, G A BONES E; def. from West Africa.
17 SOIGNEE – O (old) going inside (‘boring’) SIGNEE (person who’s bound on paper); def. smart. French adjective soigné, feminine soignée, well-groomed.
19 TALLEST – TALES (stories) going around L(arge), then T (CAT with the CA (about), removed); def. most improbable, as tall stories often are.
20 UNDIES – UN (limitless JUNK, i.e. without the J and K), DIES (languishes); def. drawers, perhaps, short for underwear.
22 EERIE – (P)EER = guillotined nobleman, I, E, (first letters of intimidate everyone); def. ghostly.
24 MOB – Def. rowdy lot; I presume this is MOBILE (cell, abbr. for cellphone, as Americans call them) reduced in half.

40 comments on “Times 25972 – 2014 Grand Final, Puzzle No. 1”

  1. Very much not in any of ‘les zones’ today, plodding my weary homeward way in 75 minutes. I consider myself a bit of a map buff but have never heard of Offaly, seem to have forgotten all about Gabon, couldn’t put two and two together (‘alea iacta est’ and all that) and put the little learning I have to good use, wouldn’t trust the wordplay at 17d, totally failed to spot that 2d was an anagram, and identified ‘met’ as the probable definition, spotted the likelihood of Scotland and still couldn’t get that one.

    I may have to stick to setting…as well as critiquing, of course.

    I think ‘if you will’ is close enough to ‘if you please’, Pip.

  2. All but 17dn completed in 18 minutes. Was in the process of resorting to aids when it suddenly dawned on me that SOIGNEE might be a word. In fact, I’m sure it’s a word. And whaddya know, it IS a word!

    Makes you wonder why it took so long to spot it.

    Thanks setter and blogger. These championship puzzles have all been outstanding, in my humble opinion.

    1. Actually they can’t all be outstanding can they? Otherwise they wouldn’t stand out. They’ve all been, um, real good.
  3. I thought I was heading for sub-30 but got held up at the end by the first part of 18ac (couldn’t think past FLAT)and 15dn, and eventually came home in 37 minutes.

    Unknowns or forgottens were OFFALY, ALEATORY, EMMER and RUBLE. I also worried about “please / will” and thought long and hard about the workings of 24dn before concluding it probably referred to handys (as the Germans would say).

  4. Well, they could all stand out from the other cryptics, although they don’t, really, do they? I’d go for real good. I realize now that I didn’t bother to parse a bunch of these–then again, I wouldn’t have taken the time in the competition. But I did wonder about Gabon; it took me a good deal of time, because I was thinking of Western African nations, and Gabon doesn’t count as one in my book (north of the Gulf of Guinea is my criterion, not that anyone, leastways any geographer, asked me). And Pip forces me to fess up and acknowledge that I couldn’t have told you what ALEATORY meant to save my life. Fun, which it wouldn’t have been for me on site.
  5. No real time (the gasman cometh) but probably would have been around my average for round two, so in the region of 17 minutes. Neither of the long ones wrote themselve in, which might have made things quicker. Lost time counting letters in “getting a round in” and trying to make an anagram of them.
    ALEATORY from my student days discussing the music of John Cage et al for no good reason.
    I don’t believe OFFALY exists without comedians making hay. I can genuinely say I have remained ignorant of it until today. I see the Irish used to call it Uí Failghe, but I bet even they couldn’t pronounce it.

    Edited at 2014-12-17 08:37 am (UTC)

    1. Having lived not far from there for ten years, I can advise that Offaly is not offaly interesting, although the golf course in Tullamore is fine.
    2. Most people in Ireland can pronounce Irish, even if they’re not fluent speakers. Uí Failghe would present no problem. (It’s something like ‘wee fall-ya’ if you’re interested).

      Edited at 2014-12-17 02:54 pm (UTC)

      1. Thanks both. I got the RAT half but not the SAP, and I’ve certainly never heard of SATRAP!
  7. Hmm, this took me about 15 mins, somewhat more than it should have given that it is the second time I’ve solved it.. but not much was retained. I did remember 21ac which I thought was a neat cd. You would think 11ac would have stuck as well but it didn’t. No problem with emmer, which I buy from time to time.
    Pip, at 5dn your html is showing..
  8. Pip, I had 1A as callous=COLD; photos=SNAPS; rather than a CD

    I found this very easy and was surprised that it appeared as a puzzle in the final. I usually enjoy tackling these puzzles because they’re difficult and elegant. This just didn’t meet the mark as far as I was concerned.

  9. On the day this took me about 7 minutes … of watching Mark Goodliffe. I sat in on the final and was one of the spectators who didn’t initially get a copy of the puzzles so I just watched other people solving instead. Mostly I watched one competitor (my apologies, Magoo, if you had that feeling you were being stared at — you were, but not just by me). It turns out that solving at sub-plausible speeds does not involve frowning, squinting, looking to the heavens, hunching your shoulders, chewing your nails, screwing up your face into a mask of concentration or, in fact, doing much of anything. It seems to involve sitting still, but not rigidly, picking up your pen and starting to write and not stopping until it’s done. Simple. I knew that keeping your head still was important in golf and cricket and tennis. I hadn’t realised it was a key to solving crosswords. I tip my hat to the Jack Nicklaus, Don Bradman, Roger Federer of crossword solving.

    Strangely, since that day my own times have improved and I’m making far fewer mistakes. Maybe something rubbed off.

  10. 16:05. I agree that this was mostly surprisingly easy for a Grand Final puzzle. The exception for me was 17dn, which took me over five minutes on its own. I came perilously close to bunging in SCIENCE, which was the only word I could see that fitted.
  11. I actually fell asleep for a quarter of an hour doing this at lunch time, so not the most gripping of crosswords but then the nanna naps are becoming more frequent. LOI was 24 because I dislike printing off two pages and try to guess the answer for any clues not on page one. This time it was easy.
    1. If you use “print preview” and shrink the page size to 90%, you can get the whole thing on one page.
  12. Easier than I expected, but it still took me 40 minutes to complete. The only unknown was Offaly. Some excellent clues, especially 11, 17(LOI) and 18, made for a thoroughly enjoyable solving experience.
  13. 20 minutes apart from 5dn and 17dn which i had to cheat on. i could’ve looked at 17dn for a hundred years and still not have got it
  14. 11:02 but then I got a copy and had a bash at it while the final was in full swing.

    Back then I think it probably too less than 15 minutes but with soignee missing and I had to ask someone to tell me the answer. Odd, then, that it was my LOI today.

    For anyone who is still of the view that CDs have no place in the Times Cryptic I give you Russian roulette as the case for the defence (and ask for roe to be struck from the record).

  15. 33 min: almost done about 10 min sooner, but then spent a while trying to fit M.O. into 15dn. Finally, after several minutes working on SCIENCE, eventually resorted to aid to see if anything would fit at 17dn
  16. DNF. Got all of this in around half an hour. but undone by 17dn, where I was another who could only see ‘science’. I would never have got ‘soignée’ (or the masculine ‘soigné’ for that matter) without recourse to aids.
  17. Got all but 4 or 5 before I fell asleep last night, with the intent of tidying up quickly this morning. Wrong. Those last ones were the last ones because they were tricky. I think we’ve seen Top Drawer / reward pot before, but I smile every time I see that long of a reversal. Now for the Turkey. I’m optimistic because I already kmow one of the answers.
  19. 42m but another in the science camp for 17d which is annoyingly precise now I have the right answer – thank you blogger! This was a pleasant challenge and I liked the CD (and its question mark) at 21a. Couldn’t understand where NEW came from in 11a as I had missed the anagram, seeing SCOTLAND for country so again thanks to blogger and setter.

    Edited at 2014-12-17 03:49 pm (UTC)

  20. I have not been involved in the Championship for the last 15 years or so (under the late MCC Rich) but this did strike me as a surprisingly easy one for a Grand Final, and for me at least, by far the easiest of the previous 5 or 6 Wednesdays. Perhaps I ought to start gearing up for next year.
  21. A little less than an hour after toying with, but correcting, SCIENCE because I couldn’t make it parse.

    I got a great deal of pleasure (and a couple of real chuckles) out of a couple of the comments above, notably the “outstanding” debate and Sotira’s excellent commentary on being a spectator at the live event, and drawing lessons from that experience. All of the behaviours described are very familiar to me (with the exception of the “picking up your pen and starting to write” bit. Very amusing Sotira.

  22. Between 15 and 20 minutes, ending with SOIGNEE. I had more trouble with the earlier competition puzzles. Wordplay needed for ALEATORY and the LOI. Somewhat mild for a championship, methinks, though a nice puzzle. Regards.
  23. SOIGNEE definitely deserved to be in a Final puzzle but otherwise I thought a couple of the heat puzzles were harder, though I was helped with this one by having seen several of the answers in Alan Connor’s piece about Goodliffe-watching in the Guardian a couple of months ago. Didn’t know the Irish county and I put in MOB thinking it was something to do with amoeba.
  24. Forgive me if I’m being pedantic, but when did the suffix “-ee” change meaning?
    I was always of the view that it denoted a person to whom something was done, rather than the doer.
    For example, a payee is paid by the payer, a legatee is the beneficiary of the will of the legator, etc. What’s wrong with the word signer, or even signatory?
    Has the world turned ipside down?
    1. >Forgive me if I’m being pedantic, but when did the suffix “-ee” change meaning?

      No later than 1866, according to the first citation for “signee” in the OED. (When was English ever a logical language?)

  25. 18 mins. After an extremely busy day I tackled this at 10.15 in the evening so I was very surprised with my time, especially as it was a Grand Final puzzle. I remember that I struggled mightily with all three of last year’s GF puzzles when they appeared in print shortly after the finals, and this one was definitely not in the same league from a difficulty perspective. I had all but SOIGNEE cracked in 16 mins and I’m another who was mulling an unparsed “science” before the penny dropped. I needed the wordplay for ALEATORY and I didn’t parse MOB, although that’s a little annoying because I know our transatlantic cousins call a mobile a cell. I agree that the clue for RUSSIAN ROULETTE was an excellent CD.
  26. A very fine puzzle, but a bit too easy for a Championship final IMO. I was held up briefly by SOIGNEE, but fortunately twigged the significance of “old boring” fairly quickly, and the answer came straight away once I tried including an O in it.
    1. With all the checkers and knowing it had an O in it SOIGNEE wrote itself in immediately, and parsed itself even quicker. Pretty sure it was a word, though if asked I would have defined it as a social event (confusing it with soiree, no doubt).
      GABONESE held me up – bones for doctor always gets me.
      22 min – so a very easy GF puzzle.
      Rob

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