Across
1 POTAGE Defined only by its significant attribute – it’s thick – the soup is created by dropping name – TAG – into the
crossword setter’s favourite author, (Edgar Allan) POE
4 ASPHODEL. The grid (and the clue) defied my efforts to write in ASPIDISTRA. The right plant emerges from helpful
wordplay: D(ied) is inserted into an anagram of HOLE and follows the ASP, which certainly qualifies as something poisonous.
Just ask Cleopatra.
10 ARAUCARIA The monkey puzzle tree which does indeed have cones around it. ARIA, something sung at the Royal Opera
House, Covent Garden (anyone not know that?) contains AU (gold) and a CAR. Araucaria was also the assumed name of
Rev John Galbraith Graham, celebrated creator of Guardian (and other) crosswords for 55 years until his death in
November last year, and one of the small band of our craft heroes to have a crossword setting style named after him,
characterised by themes and a less precise, but no less entertaining format.
11 ALLOT To divide amongst several recipients, or as in this case, “a lot”. A very generous indication of a sound-alike clue.
12 COS Double definition, first COSine, trigonometric function, then a bit of salad, the crisper version of lettuce.
13 ORANGE PEKOE First decide that, out of the possibilities presented, you’re looking for tea, then reverse engineer to O(ld)
APE OK and GREEN as your anagram fodder
14 CORNEA Two types of ear, the first wheaten, the second a shortened lughole, combine for the front part of the eye.
16 DEEP SEA The Ocean, where the River DEE joins P(ost) S(cript) and the first letter of E(bb) A(way) I tried but failed to
imagine it happening as described
19 HELIPAD LIP is “nerve” (you’ve got a../none of your..) in HEAD=main (sort of) for the landing place presumably digitised by
Apple
20 GEE-GEE The centre of drugging gives you the necessary two Gs, which are then spelt out. My son as toddler disdainfully
told us that “the lovely gee-gees” were in fact horses.
22 DAISY-CUTTER Again a double definition. A daisy-cutter, today’s cricket, is a ball that keeps low and is likely to get under
the batsman’s guard. I’m not sure whether the “rare” refers to its fine quality as a delivery, or just that, on a normal pitch,
it doesn’t happen very often. You know what a mower does.
25 RYE in Sussex is one of the Cinque Ports, though now about 2 miles from the sea. Rye whiskey is an American concoction,
impossible to confuse with Scotch. Canadian Rye apparently often contains no rye.
26 VOILA which directly translates as “See that!”reverse hidden in totAL I OVerpaid.
27 TERRORIST TT (dry/teetotal) harbours (verb here) ERROR=failing and IS 1: “likely to cause mayhem” “one likely to
cause mayhem” is a rather jolly definition of a terrorist. Thanks McT
28 LEATHERY “Tough”. I initially played with LETHE, the drug of forgetfulness, but settled on THE (article) inside LEARY.
Timothy Leary was a psychologist famous for his experiments with and advocacy of psychadelic drugs in the 60s and 70s.
Richard Nixon called him “the most dangerous man in America”, which from Tricky Dicky sounds like a recommendation.
29 STATUE Permanent fixture? A rather loose definition, as both Lenin and Saddam have discovered. U(niversity) in
STATE=Country
Down
1 PLAICE Nicely disguised, for here fare=food, of which our fish is indeed a flat example. Sounds like place (duh!), which is
equivalent to station as in “I know my place”.
2 TOADSTOOL Breakfast, in abstemious households, might well be TOAST, but see also 9 for a better idea. The last of (lar)D
is included, and the assembly followed by LOO, a “Ladies” up. Are toadstools necessarily inedible? Discuss.
3 GECKO Definition lizard, skin in CasK in GEO(rge). Christmas cracker of the week: How do you shoot lizards? With a gecko
blaster!
5 SHAGGY DOG STORY Something of a cryptic definition, a SDS being a determinedly long winded and often rather
pathetic joke
6 HEADPIECE, which I would have associated more with books rather than hats, but it’s HE (Man) with an old penny (D) in
APIECE for “each”. Younger readers might want to know that, when attending to Mr Leary, we were careful to distinguish
our LSD from his LSD
7 DALEK Correctly identified as alien, from the planet Skaro. K(ing) foots DALE, a valley.
8 LUTHERAN, named for the protesting Martin Luther, he of the 95 theses. NEUTRAL converted and (patriarc)H included.
Luther tended not to be tolerant of protesters who didn’t protest like he did, drowning Anabaptists and laying the
foundations for rabid anti-Semitism. But at least he wasn’t a Catholic.
9 BREAD AND BUTTER To bring home the bacon is to bring in the financial necessities for living, and in at least one sense,
B&B serves the same function. On the other hand, it could just be about that culinary masterpiece, the bacon sarnie. .
15 NAPPY RASH Quite a complex &lit construction built around a plausible description. Components are: Managed=RAN
(reversed); very soft=PP (music); baby’s bottom Y and and anagram of HAS. Follow the Ikea-ish assembly instructions
and you’ll have your answer.
17 SPEARMINT Looking for a flavour, take S(mall) PEAR=fruit and add it to perfect as in MINT condition
18 SHE-DEVIL One out of Rev John’s Anglican prayerbook (almost): the baptismal injunction to SHED EVIL with the gap closed
and a hyphen inserted where it can do most – um – good.
21 SETTEE One who has clues set for him/her. Bring on the comfy chair and the soft cushions! For me, a laugh out loud piece
of whimsy
23 IBIZA A holiday destination famous for its night-life and pioneering electronic music. Heading off (t)IBIA and include the
generic unknown whoreson and unnecessary Z (King Lear)
24 ROOST A Quickie level clue to finish: S(on) contained in ROOT=search.
On which, I suspect the “one” in 27ac is where the def begins. The solution doesn’t need an extra 1/I at that point.
Just a bit peeved by “that’s thick” in 1ac, but there’s so much to compensate for it. I’ll even forgive the CD at 5dn. (Yet another repeat from a still-under-wraps puzzle; as I see now our blogger notes.)
Lastly, pleased to see the Quick Cryptic was up and available at 11pm GMT. Hope this continues because it gives me a chance to warm up for the main event at midnight GMT.
Edited at 2014-03-20 09:59 am (UTC)
With DEODAR yesterday and more plants today, I am expanding my plant vocabulary. I had heard of ASPHODEL but if asked would have ventured that it was a Babylonian deity.
ARAUCARIA was first in. LOI by a long way was POTAGE, mainly because I spent at least 10 minutes puzzling over P_O_G_. I can’t type, and I’m sure I would never have written 2d as OOADSTOOL.
Never heard of, or had forgotten, Timothy LEARY so I lost time considering the alternative LEATHERN at 28ac.
Not for the first time this week I was helped a little by having solved the Quickie first. Incidentally, although that has been up promptly at midnight the past few days, the e-paper has been late appearing and indeed I still can’t access it to find out the name of today’s setter.
BTW, there’s also an element of dubious truth about a 5dn that accounts for ‘tall’ in the clue. Just thought I’d mention it.
A very nice puzzle but I am really not very happy about the definition at 1ac. By the same token would it be acceptable to use ‘that’s clear’ to define the answer ‘consomme’?
Edited at 2014-03-20 07:03 am (UTC)
I had similar reservations about POTAGE. Clueing this as ‘it’s thick’ seems a step away from clueing soup as ‘it’s stuff’.
I was helped getting ARAUCARIA by recongnising the late setter from my occasional dabblings into the Guardian crossword. Didn’t he reveal his terminal illness via his crossword?
1A is a Pavlov clue! Name=TAG, Author=POE. The definition is awful but it doesn’t matter if solving from the very obvious cryptic. I think “breakfast” for TOAST is just as bad – TOAST can be eaten at every meal and on its own as a snack! Another weak cryptic definition at 5D – they’re becoming a Times hallmark.
I liked NAPPYRASH and SPEARMINT
Nice blog Z!
Edited at 2014-03-20 10:17 am (UTC)
Settee brought a smile to my face too, not only because of the conceit, but also because of the signs in the Auckland buses which refer to standees not being permitted past certain points. Isn’t a standee someone who is stood rather than standing? Or are you stood if you are standing? In which case a stander and a standee are one and the same. Or do they mean stood a drink, say, so the signs are discouraging people who don’t pay their fair share of rounds from travelling on buses?
My error was at 21dn where I had “settle” on the basis that it is a seat and a solver can settle things. The whimsical SETTEE is obviously the correct answer and mine isn’t really an acceptable alternative because a settle couldn’t exactly be described as comfy, and there is the question mark at the end of the clue. I really must concentrate more.
The 1’s were also my last entries.
Love the wit and sheer panache, and it explained neatly the things I’d slapped in but been unable to parse – VOILA (missed the reverse hidden), POTAGE (didn’t see the TAG / POE – just put it in on a wing and a prayer ‘cos it was thick and it fitted…)and GECKO.
Feeling chuffed as I managed to get this one out on a midweek night – unusual for me! Maybe the confidence instilled by nailing the Quickie each lunchtime is starting to pay dividends… early days, but cause for optimism. Maybe I’ll fix my golf swing this weekend too…(joke)
Edited at 2014-03-20 10:49 am (UTC)
COD to PLAICE, which made me think of British Rail sandwiches.
It will either be an unintentionally very short pitched ball which then essentially dribbles along the ground (e.g. when a spin bowler loses his grip on a wet ball and it accidentally pops out and lands in the first half of the pitch), or it may be a ball (of any pace) pitched on a reasonable length that then fails to bounce and instead shoots along the ground because the pitch is in poor condition.
The Trevor Chappell incident was a highly unusual (and rightly deprecated) instance of a deliberate daisy cutter delivered underarm. It has soured trans-Tasman relations for many a year now, and was close to causing a diplomatic incident at the time.
“The medium-pacer’s delivery to dismiss McCullum was arguably the ball of the match – a slower-ball yorker which turned into a daisy-cutter en route to the stumps.”
More fun, perhaps, from the Fanny Bush (sic) Devil’s Dictionary of Cricket, written especially for Americans:
Daisy-cutter- see shooter
Shooter- A ball which, after pitching, travels almost along the ground. Impossible for the bowler to bowl intentionally but, when straight and fast, almost always terminal for the batsman.
In baseball, it’s an (old fashioned?) term for a ball hit sharply along the ground at daisy-head height. Daisy-cutter pitches would presumably be illegal as they wouldn’t trouble the strike zone.
Law 24: 7 states (in essence) that any ball that either bounces more than twice or rolls along the ground before reaching the popping crease will be called No ball.
The importance of the law to the BBC report you cite is that either the “shooting” took place after the ball had landed *on or behind the popping crease*, or the ball had touched McCullum’s bat before “shooting”.
Edited at 2014-03-20 03:12 pm (UTC)
Leary and his following among the more unpleasant memories of the 60/70s, up there with rent-a-mob Tariq Ali, and Jack Straw as a particularly nasty student agitator.
FOI ORANGE PEKOE, LOI DALEK, COD ASPHODEL, for reviving memories of Tennyson –
” … others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil …”
I know how he feels!
Many thanks,
Chris.
I agree with McT that the def for deep-sea is “from the ocean” and I though the necessary lift-and-separate of away and from was rather clever.
I didn’t know Leary and whilst the word asphodel was familiar, if pushed to tell you what one was I’d probably have suggested an aasvogel-like vulture.
29 put me in mind of a TV programme I watched this week with Danny Baker taking a rather whimsical look at TV coverage of British statuary over the years. He showed John Noakes climbing to the top of Nelson’s column for Blue Peter. Staggeringly there were no hard hats or harnesses in sight, not even a rope. The only sop to H&S was the fact that the ladders had been tied to the column.
COD to voila for the neat definition.
Puzzle and blog enjoyable in equal measure so thanks all round.
Finished in ok time, with POTAGE (with a shrug), followed by LOI PLAICE, and that only once I’d corrected kos to COS. Getting my greens and my Greeks muddled.
Like Andy Borrows (not often can I write that, I can only dream of his times…) I too had settle for SETTEE. Bah humbug.
Thanks to Z for a fine blog.
Our internet connection isn’t fast enough for YouTube but somewhere on there you should find a clip of Richie Benaud giving his opinion of that under-arm delivery. If my memory serves me right you can practically see the steam coming out of his ears as he lays into Greg Chappel who was captain of the team, something of a pity as Chappel was one of the most elegant batsmen of his generation but rather blotted his copy book on that day.
Nairobi Wallah
I’m posting late because I didn’t get a chance to do the quickie this morning and was worried that someone might give one of the clues away again.
NTLOI was POTAGE, because I was determined to get an N in there. LOI was, inexplicably, HEADPIECE, wherein I was trying to fit a PER. SHAGGY DOG STORY was here recently, wasn’t it? Ah, I see that’s noted in the blog.
Too many cricket-related clues in this one for my liking, but at least it was Shakespeare-free and didn’t include any wilfully obscure trees this time. A bit thin on techie clues, however, apart from COS and CORNEA and, I guess, DALEK. Still, you can’t please everyone, as I often point out to the next of kin.