Times 25983 – Grand Final, Puzzle No. 3

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I don’t have a solving time for this as I did it in several short sessions before the holidays. I thought it was a very fair, medium difficulty puzzle and not as tricky as the first Grand Final puzzle which I blogged for 17 December, or the second blogged by Jerry last week. Once I had the two long across clues, one an anagram and one a cryptic pun, it seemed to flow nicely. Happy New Year to all our fine setters, fellow bloggers and solvers!

Across
1 INFRINGE – Def. cross boundary; the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is allegedly the world’s largest Arts Festival and many would-be actors kick off their careers at it.
5 BONSAI – France’s fine = bon; I AS (like) reversed; def. culture. My last one in.
10 CARBON FOOTPRINT – Cryptic def, sole as in shoe, ha ha.
11 SACRAMENTO – SENT (dispatched) goes around A CRAM (a force), then O (round); capital city of California. I feel we’ve seen Sacramento before quite recently, someone will tell me when.
13 AGIN – A GIN (alcoholic drink); regional variation of ‘against’.
15 REMORSE – Def. regret. R (last letter of bolder); MORSE (inspector in TV series and books by Colin Dexter); insert the E, which was Morse’s initial (eventually revealed to be short for ‘Endeavour’). Superb clueing.
17 MAITRE D – MITRED (got up as bishop) with A ‘welcomed’ inside; def. a man to supervise dinner, abbr. for maître d’hôtel.
18 PICTURE – Def. imagine. I saw this as PICT (old tribesman); (S)URE; sure = bound, as in bound to happen, with the S guillotined. Better ideas welcome.
19 POTSDAM – All reversed, MAD (keen), STOP (finish); def. conference venue. Churchill (Attlee later), Stalin and Truman, met there in 1945, to decide the fate of defeated Germany.
21 GEEK – GREEK (language), remove the R, def. one obsessed by computer. I think geek usually has a wider meaning, one socially inept or obsessed with introverted hobbies, but I guess ‘computer geek’ would be tautological.
22 TUMBLEWEED – a TUM BLEED would be an internal haemorrhage, insert WE, def. plant.
25 SPIRIT OF ST LOUIS – (TOURISTS FLOP I IS)*, the I from ‘one’, the plane in which Charles Lindbergh first flew 3,600 miles non-stop from New York to Paris. Rather him than me.
27 SAFETY – F (female) ET (alien), inside SAY (state); def. security.
28 KEY MONEY – K (king), (YEOMEN)*, Y (close to sacristy); witty def. ready for opener?

Down
1 INCISOR – Sounds (a bit) like INN SIZER, def. one ready for a bite. Do I hear a groan?
2 FUR – Fur may fly, idiomatically, in a fight; FUR(Y) = temper with no end.
3 IDOLATROUS – (OUR SODALIT)*; (shortly = remove the Y); def. (considered to be) worshipping wrongly.
4 GAFFE – Def. a foolish error; hidden in REBUFFIN(G AFFE)CTION.
6 OOPS – SPOO(N) reversed; def. I was clumsy.
7 SWING BRIDGE – SWING (decisively influence); BRIDGE (game); def. one turns aside to admit craft. I tried to make this clue harder than it was, until I had almost all the checkers and the PDM.
8 INTONED – INTO (very keen on), N ED (new edition); def. started a psalm, maybe.
9 BOTTOM-UP – Bottoms up! is an idiom used like cheers! when toasting people (relating to the notion of showing the bottom of an empty glass); Remove the S (son); def. starting with the detail, as opposed to working from the top down.
12 COMIC RELIEF – COMIC (stand-up); RELIEF (stand-in); for those of us lucky enough to miss this by living elsewhere, Comic Relief is an annual UK TV-a-thon in which talented people do embarrassing and sometimes slightly amusing things and the public pledge cash for a Good Cause. Around 30 million pounds this time I believe, although I wonder if all the ‘pledges’ get paid over.
14 LITTLE SLAM – Allusion to the game of bridge, in which making all 13 tricks is a Grand Slam and making 12 constitutes a LITTLE SLAM or small slam. And, not much of a bang.
16 EXECUTOR – Double definition, ‘doing one’s will’ = acting as an executor.
18 PEGASUS – P (power), (USE)*, = PE US, insert GAS (fuel); def. flier, the winged horse, one of the more interesting Greek mythological characters.
20 MODESTY – MODE (way), then STY (disorderly house); def. restraint.
23 BASIE – I in BASE (headquarters); William James ‘Count’ Basie, pianist and bandleader.
24 WILT – Double def. to wilt = to lose energy; and I see this as wilt as in ‘wilt thou’, archaic or poetic for ‘are you’..
26 URN – Twist = TURN, with its top off, def. pot.

30 comments on “Times 25983 – Grand Final, Puzzle No. 3”

  1. A superb puzzle, but very difficult for me, so I was pleased to get through it ion just under an hour without the recourse to aids that I felt at one stage might be inevitable. I thought TUMBLEWEED and REMORSE were outstanding clues but if I have one query it’s whether WILT can legitimately be clued as ‘are you’ as I’m not familiar enough with archaic usages. I know ‘wilt’ usually, maybe always, goes with ‘thou’ but is that enough for ‘thou’ to be understood and therefore omitted?

    Edited at 2014-12-31 08:04 am (UTC)

        1. Can’t remember how to sign in, sorry (Swissfrank):

          Will is not merely a future (will it snow tonight?) but simultaneously, and particularly with second person use, as here, a modal verb indicating volition (Will you have a cup of tea?).

          ‘Wilt thou have …’ Is definitely an inquiry about what you want not about what will happen (same as the tea example).

          Technically, ‘will’ expresses the desire of the grammatical subject whereas ‘shall’ imposes on the grammatical subject of the sentence the desire of another (‘Congress shall make no law ….’ about religion … tells us that someone other than Congress, the framers of the constitution, here, impose this obligation on Congress.)

          Shall retains its grammatical clarity and is used in legal contracts where obligations are imposed. Will is a terrible potential mess with volition and futurity not always easy to separate and drafters are well advised to steer clear of it.

          1. Weddings would be unromantic indeed if the couple were asked ‘Shalt thou take…?’ Those ecclesiastics knew what they were about…
  2. “Wilt’ is the old second person singular present tense form of ‘will’, so the literal should be ‘are you going to’. Very nice clue, I thought.

    Held up a bit by the aeroplane and the unknown plant, where I had to run an alphabet search on *U*, but a very pleasant 36 minutes all told, and comfortably the easiest of the GF puzzles for me.

    Edited at 2014-12-31 08:31 am (UTC)

    1. “Are you going to?” made me smile. I don’t follow these things so I’m not sure when the new prayer book wording came in but in my era one was asked “Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband?”. I believe it now just says “Will you?” which is a bit stark. But if the Rev. were to say “Are you going to?” it might sound rather tentative and casual, to which one might reply – yeah looks like it.
  3. I did this on the day and also thought it the easiest of the three finals crosswords, greatly helped by being able to write the first three acrosses straight in… a very nice crossword nonetheless, to complete the Championship series.
    Happy New Year to all!
  4. 22.55, so probably my slowest of the three. Holdups were at 1 ac, where I just couldn’t see it, leaving 2 dn very tricky; the plane (not at all early if you’re Bleriot!), and my LOI WILT, where I had to run through the alphabet and wonder whether I could make BIST work – it fits half the clue. POTSDAM also added time, as I was looking for a generic conference venue (why, I’m not sure) and rechecking the crossing clues when nothing worked.
    Happy New Year everyone.
  5. I solved all 3 Final puzzles under test conditions last Saturday. All three solved in 44 mins but I found this one the hardest of the three.
  6. On the day I was unable to finish all three within the hour, and was only about half-way through this one. However in the last three weeks none of them held me up for more than 15 mins, and this one took me about 11:30 today. I’m normally hopeless at remembering clues even a week later, let alone two months, but SPIRIT OF ST LOUIS seemed familiar.
  7. 28.33 which confirms my spectator-level status finals-wise. Good year-end puzzle though I find the Morse clue a little idolatrous. But what a name for a plane.
  8. I enjoyed this one but didn’t find it particularly difficult – about 25 minutes with no real problems along the way.

    I think BOTTOM’S-UP as a drinking idiom comes from the old practice of raising the beer mug in the air to look through the glass bottom to see if a shilling has been surreptitiously slipped into the drink. Naval recruiters used to do this so that an unsuspecting drinker would “take the king’s shilling” thereby inadvertently volunteering to join the navy.

    1. Thanks for this etymology of “bottoms-up”, Jimbo. Not one I’d come across before. But you raise a further intriguing question: should it be “bottom’s-up”, as you write, or “bottoms-up”, as I have always assumed it to to be. I guess both could be right depending on whether the invitation to raise mugs was being issued to one or more drinkers.

      Anyhow, nice puzzle.

  9. 15 mins, and a very similar experience to yesterday. If memory serves I struggled with the second of the three GF puzzles but that may have been because of the cold I was struggling with. It was only last night that I had my first decent sleep for about a week and a half so I’m hoping I’ll get back into the groove from here on.

    I parsed PICTURE the same way as Pip. SWING BRIDGE was my LOI after POTSDAM and I’m another who tried to overcomplicate it.

  10. 15m for this, and then a few more minutes to retype all the answers again because our dodgy Wifi. I found this reasonably gentle, and as a group I have found these final puzzles easier than in previous years, the exception being the one published last week. They’ve all been excellent though.
    Happy New Year to all.
  11. I finished in 31 minutes, but had a brain failure en route. For some inexplicable reason I entered NARROW FOOTPRINT for 10, then had little choice but to enter IONISER for 1d as the only word that fitted the grid.
    A very senior moment.
    17 seemed very familiar. I’m sure we had the same clue a few months back.
  12. This was the only competition puzzle that I completed in under twenty minutes, so for me the easiest of them. ‘Key money’ has a slightly different meaning in the UK, where it is (was?) a (legal) payment made on a rental property similar to a deposit. Elsewhere I believe it means an inducement or bribe to a landlord to secure a rental.
  13. Enjoyable and typically clear Finals puzzle. The only one where I was entirely dependent on word play was KEY MONEY, a thing which I’d never heard of, but which seemed a lot more likely than REY MONEY.

    Based purely on my solving times for the three puzzles, I might have done respectably if I’d got as far as the final, (13 minutes for this one), but a) I suspect that under pressure I wouldn’t have been anything like as quick as I am at my kitchen table – I certainly might have panicked more when presented with tricky tasks like filling in _I_T at 24dn, and b) obviously I still wouldn’t have been anywhere near the fastest finishers.

    Happy solving (and of course setting and blogging) to all in 2015.

  14. Very enjoyable. COD WILT. I like that sort of thing, with the old Araucaria benchmark clue of

    Art lecturer?

    for TEA CHEST coming to mind.

    HNY all, and have a good NYE!

    TTFN Chris.

  15. I thought this was quite hard and now I know why! No indication in iPad version of puzzle that it was from the Grand Final. Got there in the end but with one error – a wrong guess at Fir(e) for Fur.

    Happy New Year everyone!

  16. Just the level of difficulty I like. A bit of a challenge but not too much. 34 minutes. (Btw, in my local pub quiz the answer given to “the first to fly the Atlantic” was Linbergh. Massive outcry – especially since Sir Arthur Whitton Brown lived here in Swansea for about 30 years. The USA are better than us at creating heroes.) Ann
  17. Thanks for the blog. I, too, found this the easiest of the competition puzzles, though for me that meant a bit over the hour. Bonsai from wordplay, and made a lot of erroneous starts on swing bridge. I found the ‘from’ in The Spirit of St Louis distracting.
    Happy New Year to all, especially the blogging team
  18. Having read ALL the above again I’m more confused than ever and my original query stands again, at least in my own mind.
  19. Very fine puzzle, about 30 minutes for me, ending with WILT. But my time precludes me from aspiring to Championship levels (as I think I said before when commenting on one of the earlier finals puzzles). In any event, best regards for the New Year to all here.
  20. A very fine puzzle – but too easy for the third puzzle of a Championship final when the first two had been unusually easy as well.

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