No time recorded – my laptop decided to crash and I had to get it wiped, so I’m solving and writing this up on an unfamiliar laptop.
As soon as I start solving, my phone goes off. Thinking it might be news about my computer, or about my broken heater, I pick it up and have a lovely argument with someone who insists he’s not trying to sell me insurance.
Since I don’t have my usual stuff, I also don’t have the automatic blog creator, so this will be a cut and paste Frankenblog.
On top of that, I think this is a pretty difficult crossword. The current times out there for it seem to bear that out. How did you get along?
| Across | |
| 1 | US city mail misplaced singer’s gift? (10) |
| MUSICALITY – anagram of US, CITY, MAIL | |
| 6 | Messing up turn, foxtrot’s destroyed (4) |
| GOOF – GO OFF (turn) minus F (foxtrot) | |
| 10 | Clean, like Em is? (5) |
| PREEN – In the alphabet, Em is PRE EN | |
| 11 | Bird’s not drinking in Waikiki, shortly flying East (9) |
| KITTIWAKE – TT (teetotal, not drinking) inside an anagram of WAIKIKi minus the final letter, then E (East) | |
| 12 | Arranging area for party, butcher’s in Hamburg’s terminal embraces joyful circulating (14) |
| GERRYMANDERING – GANDER (bitchers), IN and the last letter of HamburG surrounding MERRY (joyful) cycling – split it at the E | |
| 14 | Honours for teacher checking cheat’s kept nose clean (7) |
| BEHAVED – B.ED (honours for teacher) containing HAVE (cheat, have on) | |
| 15 | What’s possessed rabbit to change direction? (7) |
| CHATTEL – CHATTER (rabbit on) with the R changed to L | |
| 17 | Chinese stuff for poser there (7) |
| TANGRAM – TANG (Chinese) and RAM (stuff) | |
| 19 | Water source in Germany is screened by research facility (7) |
| CISTERN – IST (is, in German) inside CERN (research facility) | |
| 20 | Groom never quite nigh for Elizabeth (3,6,5) |
| THE VIRGIN QUEEN – anagram of NEVER, QUITE, NIGH | |
| 23 | Civil engineer after pub bites bottom lip (9) |
| INSOLENCE – CE (Civil Engineer) after INN (pub) containing SOLE (bottom) | |
| 24 | Cream and gold plant pots (5) |
| IVORY – OR (gold) inside IVY (plant) | |
| 25 | Wise guy spending weekday alone (4) |
| SOLO – SOLOMON (wise guy) minus MON (weekday) | |
| 26 | Assume you shouldn’t have asked new nurses about blood group (4,2,4) |
| TAKE AS READ – TA (you shouldn’t have) then an anagram of ASKED NEW surrounding RE (about) and A (blood group) | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Big shock! Entertainers primarily manifest blue humour (4) |
| MOPE – MOP (a big shock of hair) then the first letter of Entertainers. Think of humour as in mood | |
| 2 | Ogre eating European and Chinese character in Disney film (5,4) |
| SHERE KHAN – SHREK (the movie ogre) containing E (European), then HAN (Chinese). Character in The Jungle Book, voiced by the awesome George Sanders | |
| 3 | Snazzy car’s collecting Republican that’s gone inside to moot (14) |
| CONTROVERTIBLE – CONVERTIBLE (snazzy car) containing R (Republican) inside TO | |
| 4 | Tips for mishandling archaeological disinterments? First, dig furiously (4,3) |
| LIKE MAD – first letters of Mishandling Archaeological Disinterments after LIKE (dig) | |
| 5 | Wreck extract of capsaicin at Italian’s counter (7) |
| TITANIC – hidden reversed in capsaiCIN AT ITalian’s | |
| 7 | 1000 senior bears and one other animal (5) |
| OKAPI – K (1000) inside OAP (senior), then I (one) | |
| 8 | Tenderfoot left creep during brief amour (10) |
| FLEDGELING – L (left), and EDGE (creep) inside FLING (brief amour) | |
| 9 | Initially disorganised as butler, I failed to cut pork pie before second course (7,7) |
| LIBERAL STUDIES – anagram of the first letter of Disorganised, AS, BUTLER, I inside LIE (pork pie), then S (second) | |
| 13 | Support for those expecting unholy tribes to start to celebrate saint (10) |
| OBSTETRICS – anagram TRIBES TO, then the first letter of Celebrate, then S (saint) | |
| 16 | Earth under rear of fattest cow contracted accordingly (9) |
| THEREFORE – E (earth) after the last letter of fattesT, and HEREFORd (cow) minus the last letter | |
| 18 | Hue and cry of Trump supporters guards shut up, not quietly (7) |
| MAGENTA – MAGA (cry of Trump supporters) containing PENT (shut up) minus P (quietly). Little bit of PTSD in this clue, being an immigrant living in the USA. | |
| 19 | Give up immediately after opening three letters in a row (7) |
| CONCEDE – ONCE (immediately after) inside C,D,E (three letters in a row) | |
| 21 | Rest and relaxation on lake (5) |
| EASEL – EASE (relaxation) above L (lake) | |
| 22 | Fish caught and studied (4) |
| EYED – homophone of IDE (fish) | |
For me this was a rather similar experience to yesterday in that I retired injured part way through and needed a second session to return to it refreshed.
Unlike yesterday however I didn’t have the satisfaction of completing the grid without using aids for the intersecting answers PREEN and MOPE. Because of the tiresome font business I wasn’t sure whether the penultimate word in 10ac was ‘E-m’ or ‘E-r-n’, the latter perhaps being a reference to Ernie Wise who sometimes appears here and was often addressed as ‘Ern’ by Eric Morecambe in their TV shows. I also used aids for the SHERE in SHERE KHAN. I knew the character being referred to but not the spelling, and I was never going to think SHREK for ‘ogre’.
Assuming it has appeared before, I didn’t remember TANGRAM. CHATTEL appeared in yesterday’s Guardian puzzle.
Tough, slow. Long and wordy clues don’t make it any easier – e.g. gerrymander took a while to parse after guessing the answer. Normally try anagrams in my head, but had to write down both Liberal Studies and Obstetrics. Couldn’t account for “Honours” in behaved – hereabouts a Bachelor’s degree is a bachelor’s, and Honours is a superior degree. Otherwise all parsed, one guessable unknown Controvertible, one semi-unknown Shere Khan. Tangram known, could even tell you the shapes. Possibly.
A good challenge, lots of good clues, no MERs.
I muttered to myself after a few clues that this was a verbose setter — I agree! On 7d I thought ‘bears’ in a down clue would mean ‘goes under’ not ‘goes into’, and spent ages trying to think of an animal ending in OAPI.
Liked this despite not finishing. Some very convoluted clues, specially the long anagrams. Haven’t seen the Lion King so SHERE KHAN was never going to come but knew it had to contain ‘Shrek’ in there somewhere. I also bunged in KITTYWAKE and then couldn’t figure out where the ‘Y’ could be from. THE VIRGIN QUEEN was my FOI and wrote it in before finishing reading the clue. Bottom lip in the clue for INSOLENCE threw me for a while and then I wondered how ‘sole’ was bottom before thinking of a shoe. Liked CISTERN. Also thought EYED very good and thought about how often ‘Ide’ comes up in these crosswords. CHATTEL was very good too. A photo finish for COD from me with GOOF and LIKE MAD both deserving I thought. I saw GOOF pretty quickly but was convinced that ‘Go’ was ‘turn’ and couldn’t figure out where the missing ‘O’ came from before the penny dropped. Clever.
Thanks G and setter. By the way, you don’t need the ‘ew’ in ‘new’ in Take As Read.
SHERE KHAN is in The Jungle Book
Ha! Thanks. Got my animal movies mixed up. Haven’t seen that either.
Not sure how Kipling would feel about the reference to Disney in the clue rather than to him. Shere Khan was voiced by George Sanders and it was lovely to hear his elegant English tones amongst a sea of American accents.
Interesting how, as ever in Hollywood, “English tones” signifies evil!
Some good clues but some surfaces were clunky and meaningless. What does ‘Arranging area for party, butcher’s in Hamburg’s terminal embraces joyful circulating (14)’ mean?
…a reasonable point!
Very fair!
Thanks for persevering. I’ve never read The Jungle Book.
30.52
Happy enough with a successful solve as it was tricky and I am much earlier than normal, only one coffee in. But not a massive fan of long convoluted clues where you kinda give up and just try to solve from the definition. But as Sawbill says some good stuff as well. Finally twigging SHREK helped me finish.
Commiserations George but thanks for the blog and to the Setter as well.
I found this a bit too much and gave up with several missing. On coming here, I felt I should have done better, but I no longer seem to have the eye for convoluted clues such as GERRYMANDERING and LIBERAL STUDIES. COD to THE VIRGIN QUEEN. Thank you George and setter.
30.23. An enjoyably teasing puzzle; I was held up at the end by LIBERAL STUDIES, and in the middle by CISTERN, where “research facility” initially made me think of MIT or LAB, until I remembered CERN (which I have visited several times….)
FOI LIKE MAD
COD GERRYMANDERING
Thanks G and setter
55 minutes. Slow, but there were some pretty tough clues and I was just happy to finish. Glad that I took the trouble to look at the wordplay and avoid an A in CONTROVERTIBLE. Only knew SHERE KHAN as a Kipling character so had to rely on wordplay and hope that he’d been Disneyfied.
COD to the innocuous looking GOOF for which I had the same experience as Quadrophenia.
About an hour for me. I made a set of TANGRAM pieces in CDT class at school, otherwise that one might’ve gone over my head. Enjoyed PREEN and CHATTEL for the penny-drop moments.
WOE after 46 mins but unlike yesterday I enjoyed every minute of it and the leaderboard be damned.
CONTRaVERTIBLE was my downfall, failed to parse the middle bit and can’t spell.
It did lack elegance as Sawbill says and I normally prefer concise to verbose but it was very satisfying to parse, esp GERRYMANDERING.
Thanks to setter and George.
Dnf. An ingenious puzzle but too many tortuous clues for me. I would humbly suggest that once a clue reaches ten words, it might be time for a rethink.
Thanks to George and the setter
Even longer than yesterday, with GOOF having to be looked up once OKAPI was in. Put in SHERE KHAN from Jungle book without knowing more than HAN, have vaguely heard of SHREK as a kids’ movie but no idea he / it was an ogre. Best part of an hour between FOI MOPE and LOI GOOF. I liked GERRYMANDERING for “arranging area for party”. Sadly they all do it. Sorry for your IT troubles, George, I remember the pain of trying to blog without the usual templates.
38.20, so a bit of a long session for me. I don’t usually give puzzles more than half an hour. Either way, I enjoyed it. Sawbill has a point about the clunkiness of 12 across, but I thought that was a one off. In contrast, I thought the clue for liberal studies was very well crafted.
I was slowed up with one down thinking it must be mane, but couldn’t justify it, but at the same time couldn’t quite forget it. Always annoying when that happens.
A number of you liked goof, but I am unsure of the rules on a word like that. I feel that if the clue means messing up, then the answer must be goofing. I’ve no doubt someone will be able to give me an example where goof nicely substitutes for messing up in a sentence.
I agree about goof being the wrong part of speech. Sloppy grammar.
I agree.
If MESSING UP had been hyphenated, one might have just about got away with both being nouns (a messing-up). But it’s still not convincing.
42:25 on this toughie but got so excited to finally see my LOI GERRYMANDERING that I spelt it with an I.
Two tough ones in a row, I am not looking forward to tomorrow.
COD SHERE KHAN
Thanks blogger and setter
Hard work. From LIKE MAD to MOPE in 40:36. Too browbeaten to comment further. Thanks setter and George. Commiserations on the laptop and heater.
44:30 mins – bit of a joyless slog for me. I thought the reference to The Jungle Book’s Shere Khan as a Disney character was a bit off for these parts – rather like referring to Mr Darcy as a character in a TV series.
My thanks to glh and setter.
DNF big time. Too hard for Tricky Thursday IMHO, but OK. One finds things in the course of cheating.
FOI 20a The Virgin Queen.
POI At 1d I found this def for mope noun in Wiktionary: “3 (pornography industry) A bottom feeder who “mopes” around a pornography studio hoping for his big break and often does bit parts in exchange for room and board and meager pay.” but I don’t think it is relevant. I should have lifted & separated blue and humour.
Not green paint 9d Liberal Studies not in Wikipedia as such but in Wiki there is a redirect to “Liberal arts education” and later we have “Liberal studies refers to degrees with a broad curriculum, across multiple liberal arts disciplines and/or sciences and technologies”, so OK then.
16d Therefore biffed, never saw the Hereford lurking in the meadow.
19d Concede biffed; I saw CDE but in the wrong order. Thanks glh for the parsing.
27:34. Like others, I balked a little at the long clues and convoluted wordplay, but got there in the end. COD to LIKE MAD, but I liked CISTERN too. Thanks George and setter.
I also don’t like the way characters tend to be referred to by the film that has been made of the book rather than the original book. The top left bit (SHERE KHAN and MOPE) held me back for ages: I can’t quite understand about Disney and Shere Khan: Wikipedia tells me that Shere Khan was to appear in cancelled Jungle Book 3, so I rejected that answer and spent ages looking for other Disney movies that fit. In the GERRYMANDERING clue (yes a very clunky surface) is circulating = cycling? Not in my opinion: cycling has a very specific meaning, but circulating is either an anagram indicator or (perhaps) a reversal indicator. 86 minutes after expecting rather lower. I think the setter was trying to avoid offending people who dislike ‘cycling’.
I liked it. Variety and all that, and it had a slightly different feel to it. Sadly, two too many biffs did for me, as I flung in a nonsense WOLF for GOOF to sneak in under the half hour, only to see I’d made another mistake with SOLE for SOLO. I’d stuck that in with a shrug shortly after spending quite some effort to fail to parse CONCEDE: I simply couldn’t get past NCE (AT ONCE = immediately, “after opening three letters”) going in an unparsable CODE. Thanks setter and tech-beleaguered George.
22:42, but another CONTRAVERTIBLE. As others have noted this was a puzzle where the convoluted wordplay led to a lot of ‘find a definition and biff’ solving, which is fertile ground for misspelling.
MER at ‘Disney’, but to be fair George Sanders’ voice in the role is very memorable.
Retired hurt.
I wasn’t too keen on this. No doubt I would have liked it better if I’d done better! The surface reading of a fair number of the clues was not pleasing.
Thanks anyway to glh and our setter.
Two goes needed.
– Was glad that KITTIWAKE involved an anagram, as otherwise I might well have put KITTYWAKE
– Nearly biffed CHEERMONGERING (‘joyful circulating’) for 12a, a sign of how far off I was with that clue until the checkers from SHERE KHAN (which went in based on wordplay alone) and CONTROVERTIBLE gave me enough to see that GERRYMANDERING would fit. Still didn’t parse it!
– NHO TANGRAM so again had to trust the wordplay
– Also not familiar with LIBERAL STUDIES, but it had to be once I’d seen ‘lies’ + the anagrist
– Didn’t parse THEREFORE as I thought ‘earth’ was giving ‘here’ (which kind of works?!), so I couldn’t account for the ‘fore’
Thanks glh and setter.
FOI The Virgin Queen
LOI Liberal Studies
COD Like mad
DNF
As others have noted, some of the surface readings were all over the place. I can’t get into puzzles that have this defect. Give me Dean every time.
Thanks, g.
I was relieved to see the SNITCH count for this one as it took me 51 mins but, unlike last Friday’s, it never got tedious to solve. My favourite three clues were to THE VIRGIN QUEEN (brilliant), LIBERAL STUDIES and EYED. Thank you to Setter and Blogger.
59:49 – squeaked in under the hour. Very hard for me – but glad I persevered. SHERE KHAN was my FOI having spotted the ogre. I think making it a Disney creature made it a bit more cryptic, a Kipling reference would have been quite a lot easier.
Took a long time to get the long ones, GERRYMANDERING and LIBERAL STUDIES especially. Fun etymology for the former if I recall correctly.
Another superb puzzle to follow yesterday’s. Defeated today by the NW corner of Mope ( oh, that kind of shock, how did I miss it? ) , Preen and the dreaded controvertible, the meaning of which I’ve never understood until today.
Sheer Khan a superb clue.
Thx G and setter
Given the snitch, I’m extremely pleased with getting everything but PREEN/MOPE in 80 minutes. Just some ridiculously inscrutable clues here, but I had a great time sitting in the jury duty waiting room staring blankly at the grid.
Given the SNITCH, I was beyond pleased to finish this, and in under the hour. The long clues needed some thought and teasing out, but nothing in here I thought unfair or overly recherché. Sometimes it’s just a wavelength thing, and apparently I was on it. Liked TAKE AS READ and LIKE MAD, which – mirabile dictu – I actually constructed from the wordplay. Don’t see any problem with SHERE KHAN, who is a pretty well known ‘character in Disney film’ – the ‘Jungle Book’ being one of Disney’s best known (if rather nauseating) movies.
DNF. My first thought about 3 down was that the answer was CONTROVERSIAL, which fitted a lot of the checking letters and at a stretch I thought could mean moot. When it didn’t fit I became hung up on the idea that I must be overlooking a variant of it that did. I’d seen the word CONTROVERTIBLE but was vague as to its meaning and would not have guessed it meant moot. I still think I’d probably have got there in the end if I’d focused on getting something to fit the checking letters, but instead I was focused on looking for the (non-existent) variation of controversial that did.
34:12 Not easy at all. KITTIWAKE was the one that took longest, as I was sure it was KITTIHAWK. Really liked PREEN and GOOF once the penny dropped. Thanks blogger and setter.
12 across- the most convoluted clue of all time ?
Took 3 sittings and 93 minutes to complete. The long words with long clues took a great deal of time, and their surfaces were pretty lumpy. One or two clues were rather clever, e.g. preen.
43’01”. I reckon I’d have been a bit quicker with pen and paper for the long anagrams. 6 across could also (kind of ) work without the DESTROYED, if you take GO O for GO ROUND = TURN. That was how I arrived at GOOF, before seeing the real method. I am not too bothered about MESSING UP. Gerund, right? So a noun, like GOOF. Guessed TANGRAM, because I did not know what it was. Some good stuff in there, though I share the common feeling about these very long clues where all you can do is locate the definition and then start guessing. Yes you , 12 across. Thanks.
34:09
Seem to have done ok with this puzzle. Several clues looked impenetrable, but some inspired guessing and reverse-engineering the wordplay worked well several times, particularly with the long answers.
Thanks G and setter
51mins. After yesterday’s mare, saw this as a minor triumph and finished almost bang on midnight. Really tough but well worth the effort.