Times Championship 2015: Grand Final, puzzle three (Times 26289)

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
After last week’s black run, this one I found more like a red, mostly straightforward with a few tricky moguls in the SW corner. The parsing of 22a was not clear to me until jerrywh kindly directed me to an archaic usage in Collins. I also look forward to our members ‘across the pond’ commenting on 15a.
That’s the end of my nine weeks of ‘blog when ready’ luxury; next week, we’re back to the normal Wednesday morning panic. And a Happy New Year to all our readers.

Across
1 ENDEMIC – ENC. = enclosed; insert DEMI = half; D native.
5 BAD TRIP – Double definition, one referring to taking LSD, one about football.
9 LIVERYMAN – LIVER = organ, (MANY)*; D guild member.
10 MUFTI – Double definition, one an Islamic scholar, one an army term used for ‘out of uniform’, the latter originally derived from the former because off-duty officers in the early 1800s used to wear a robe and tasselled hat which resembled Arab dress. Or so Wiki tells me.
11 LETTERS PATENT – LETTER = landlord, SENT = posted; around PAT = TAP (bathroom fixture) reversed; D official documents.
13 LAY WASTE – If lay people waste it, it’s not the clergy who are throwing it away; D wreck.
15 MISSAL – Allegedly it sounds like MISSILE as pronounced by Americans; D book.
17 PICKLE – Double definition.
19 DRAGOMAN – DRAGON = fierce woman, engages MA = master (of arts); D guide, a chap often found in crosswordland.
22 ORIENT EXPRESS – EXPRESS = state, as in ‘say’, and the Orient Express chugged across Europe. I struggled to see the other part, until jerrywh directed me to the archaic meaning of ‘orient’ as ‘rising’, presumably because the sun rises in the east.
25 RHEAS – My LOI and a great little clue. HEARS = tries, the R is ‘diverted’ to the front; D creatures trapped on land, flightless birds in South America.
26 HEY PRESTO – (THE OSPREY)*; D surprise!
27 TRAPPER – REP PART = theatre role; all reversed; D one seeking ermine, perhaps.
28 HOT SEAT – Whimsical cryptic definition.

Down
1 ELLE – (B)ELLE = topless beauty, D magazine.
2 DEVILRY – DRY = boring, insert EVIL = nastiness; D mischief.
3 MERIT – M = mark, TIRE = flag, raised = ERIT; D desert, as in get your just deserts. Not ‘just desserts’, which is often seen and more tasty.
4 COMMENTS – COTS = shelters, insert M MEN for a thousand people; D observes.
5 BANISH – NI = IN, reversed, i.e. ‘coming back home’; insert into (‘drunk’) BASH = party; D drive off.
6 DEMEANING – (IN ENDGAME)*; D infra dig.
7 RAFTERS – R = first portion of rice; AFTERS = puddings; D beams.
8 POINT-BLANK – POINT = end of pencil, BLANK = cut, as in cut someone dead; D very close.
12 KLEPTOCRAT – Cryptic definition, plenty of examples spring to mind.
14 ALL ENDS UP – ALLEND(E) = deposed president (of Chile), shortly; SUP = drink; D completely. Actually Allende was just about to be deposed by the CIA-backed junta, but shot himself with an AK47 first, so I suppose he deposed himself.
16 TRIPTYCH – TRIP for journey, and TYCH sounds like tick = second; D joined panels.
18 CHIMERA – Big Ben is a CHIMER, on a grand scale; A; D fantastic piece of imagination. Another regular visitor to XWL.
20 MUST-SEE – MUSE = inspiration, insert TSE = T S Eliot, poet initially; D not to be missed.
21 WETHER – WEATHER could be snow maybe, delete A, D sheep. A ram relieved of his wedding tackle.
23 EGRET – Today’s hidden word, reversed in FLUT(TER GE)NTLY, D flyer.
24 LOUT – L = school finally, OUT = dismissed, as in cricket of course; D hooligan.

22 comments on “Times Championship 2015: Grand Final, puzzle three (Times 26289)”

  1. This was supposed to be next week’s puzzle according to the Final sequence, but I’ve managed to switch blogs; hopefully the missing Final #2 puzzle will be published next week and then my blog will magically re-appear. Merry Christmas all.
  2. I was overtired when I tackled this at midnight and managed only about half (mostly in the lower part of the grid) before giving up the ghost. On resumption this morning it didn’t seem too bad. I didn’t know the legal meaning at 10.

    Edited at 2015-12-23 09:21 am (UTC)

  3. Another mainly high quality puzzle that was a pleasure to solve at home but not so enjoyable under test conditions

    Little quibbles such as ALLENDE as mentioned by Pip and the train “swept across Europe” – “rattled and rolled around” more like

    No real stand out clues – a rather homogenious collection

  4. Undone by Cleptocrat.Ok for cleptomaniacs but not it seems for the political variety.Hoping someone out there can throw me a lifeline.
  5. Thanks for the parse pip. I was being too clever by half, thinking it might have something to do with Alfred de Musset (who called his cat Pusset). 25.10
  6. 27:31. Not as hard as last week’s, I thought, and I enjoyed this more. The bottom half went in first with the NW corner holding me up most, largely trying to use ‘organ many’ as the anagrist until 2d put paid to that idea. I liked RHEAS too, but there are quite a few neat clues. 3d my favourite. I also didn’t know the other meaning of MUFTI.
  7. I found this tough, and it took me almost an hour to solve, with the last ten minutes or so trying to complete the NE corner. Lots to admire in the clues.
  8. 24:49 so not as hard as last week. No particular standout clues though. I suppose that it has never occurred to me that it was other than ‘just desserts’ so as my old Headmaster used to say ‘I will go to bed wiser than when I woke up’, unless of course I forget a few things as well.

    Edited at 2015-12-23 01:08 pm (UTC)

  9. No time to offer as I did a bit of this on the day in the “audience”, a bit on the train home and a bit later in the week. I think I’d have failed on Kleptocrat and rheas.

    I enjoyed “poet initially” and the idea behind “lay waste”.

  11. Turned to this one on the day after coming to a halt on puzzle 2 with barely half completed, and it proceeded to be just the ticket, taking about 11m and thus making it (for me) the easiest of the 3. Wasn’t entirely sure I’d seen LETTERS PATENT before, and didn’t know that meaning of ORIENT, but the wordplay/checkers didn’t allow for any likelier alternatives. DRAGOMAN, TRIPTYCH, and CHIMERA had all helpfully popped up in old Jumbos that I’d been doing for practice beforehand so they were at the front of my brain already.
  13. This took me a while. Probably close to an hour, so congrats to those who came through in the competition. I thought the word was DEVILTRY with a ‘T’, didn’t know the first definition for ‘MUFTI’, although it had to be, and HEY PRESTO is not common over here. In fact, I don’t think it exists over here. Re 15A, as a former RC altar boy I will attest that MISSAL and missle are exact homophones, at least according to priests in the NY area. I hesitate to ask how anyone else pronounces it. My LOI was another unknown to me: WETHER. Animal husbandry not my forte. Regards to all.
    1. In UK English the weapon version is pronounced miss I’ll – if nuclear, it will contain fiss I’ll material. We would rhyme it with file and mile.
      1. Thank you Pip. I feared you all pronounced ‘missal’ with a long A sound, or something in that odd vein. Happy Holidays to you.
  14. DNF, and DNETF.

    My LOIN (“last one in (not)”) was ‘kleptocrat’.

    I ‘swept across’ the top half of the puzzle in about 20 minutes and then tried to get as much as I could, eventually needing to resort to aids for the SW corner.

    Definitely a lot to learn in this puzzle. Thanks, pip!

  15. Thankfully I was wide awake when I tackled this one and got home in 19 mins, with MISSAL my LOI after RAFTERS. I thought I was really going to struggle because I only had two answers after my first read-through of the clues. I confess that I misparsed LOUT, thinking it related to a lower tier public school in Louth, and I even thought it rang a distant bell. Eejit. I also biffed ORIENT.
  16. Beaten. DNF, thanks to KLEPTOCRAT (which was my NHO for this puzzle) and RHEAS, which I rheally ought to have got.

    I think that, even if I’d got RHEAS, and therefore had all the checkers for 12d, I wouldn’t have got it.

  17. Like mohn, I turned to this puzzle after coming to a stand with only about half the second puzzle completed. Unlike him, I was so exhausted by this time (attempts at moving house were still wrecking my normal sleep patterns) that I could only manage about a third of this one and was in despair that my day was going to end in disaster. Fortunately when I went back to the second puzzle again, I somehow managed to summon up just enough energy to allow me to coast home, completing that puzzle and then returning to this one and completing that too.

    I even had time to spend the last couple of minutes of the hour trying to work out why 15ac should be MISSAL (or come up with a better alternative) – all the more annoying since one of the first LPs I bought had Tom Lehrer singing “Mid the yuccas and the thistles / I’ll watch the guided missiles / …”.

    An interesting and enjoyable puzzle, which with hindsight looks a lot easier than I found it on the day.

    Unfortunately I’d already made an unforced error in the second puzzle – but more about that next week.

  18. In fact ‘rising’ is the earliest meaning of ‘orient’ given the etymology. In addition to missals, nucular and otherwise, N Am English also provides the delightful ‘fa-yootle’ for ‘futile’. Just thought I’d mention that. Oh, and ‘era’ and ‘route’ are indistinguishable from ‘airer’ and ‘rout’.

Comments are closed.