Stop Press: At the time I loaded this blog, one published answer, for 21ac, made no sense to me! I think it must have been a typo, but we’ll see!! Update: 24 hours later, it’s been corrected.
Anyhow, at first pass I struggled to get started, but then things flowed up and out from the SW fairly smoothly. Thanks, setter. How did all you solvers get on with this one?
Note for newcomers: The Times offers prizes for Saturday Cryptic Crosswords. This blog is for last week’s puzzle, posted after the competition closes. So, please don’t comment here on this week’s Saturday Cryptic.
Definitions are in bold and underlined.
| Across | |
| 1 | Plain fool having chart reversed (6) |
| PAMPAS – SAP + MAP reversed. I thought “pampas” was plural, but maybe not necessarily. |
|
| 5 | High water tide came twice but only going halfway (8) |
| TITICACA – TI TI (TIDE, halfway, twice!) + CA CA (CAME, ditto!!). The lake is high in the Andes. Not a reference to high tides. |
|
| 9 | Singular dislike, having hit parking light (6,4) |
| SODIUM LAMP – S + ODIUM + LAM + P. | |
| 10 | Places crossed by Agricola coming west (4) |
| LOCI – backwards, hidden (crossed by, going west) in agrICOLa. Nicely done – the setter has a Latin word inside a Roman name. Agricola was a Roman governor of Britannia in AD 77-85. |
|
| 11 | Courses involving home programmes (8) |
| ROUTINES – ROUTES involving IN (home). | |
| 12 | Instability and rage when females go for extravagant living (6) |
| LUXURY – remove the F’s from FLUX + FURY. | |
| 13 | Duck by English river (4) |
| NILE – NIL (a duck, at cricket), E (English). No, not an English river. Gentle applause for the neat misdirection. |
|
| 15 | Record of muscular output and therefore pulse (8) |
| ERGOGRAM – ERGO (therefore), GRAM (a pulse). I knew of ergometers, but not of this. |
|
| 18 | Speculators place bets regularly in rigged surges (8) |
| GUESSERS – ES (bEtS, regularly) in anagram of (rigged) SURGES. | |
| 19 | What’s round area outside of Honolulu? (4) |
| OAHU – O (round), A (area), HonolulU. Honolulu is on the island of Oahu, so the clue is an all-in-one. |
|
| 21 | Popular drink for prisoner? (6) |
| INMATE – IN (popular, as usual), MATÉ (a type of tea that I’ve only met in crosswords).
Whoops. The answer initially published for this clue was INSANE, but to coin a word, that was *INSANE*. Phew: it was later corrected. |
|
| 23 | Showing disapproval of fine poet when cancelling book (8) |
| FROWNING – F, BROWNING. | |
| 25 | One admired artificial language learner (4) |
| IDOL – IDO, L. Ido is a derivative of Esperanto. |
|
| 26 | UN’s ethical bombing for missile installation (6,4) |
| LAUNCH SITE – anagram of (bombing) UNS ETHICAL. | |
| 27 | Unfortunately none obey a single order? (3,2,3) |
| ONE BY ONE – anagram of (unfortunately) NONE OBEY. | |
| 28 | Irresponsibly filmed orca eating director’s head (6) |
| WILDLY – WILLY eating D. From the film Free Willy. |
|
| Down | |
| 2 | From the first over, not the last over (2,3) |
| AB OVO – ABOVE (not the last), O (over). I feel we’ve seen this before somewhere. |
|
| 3 | Stupid missing beer when carrying round? (9) |
| POINTLESS – PINT-LESS (missing beer), carrying O. | |
| 4 | Church trading is set up with wealth, but not European (6) |
| SIMONY – SI (IS, set up), MONEY (missing E=European). | |
| 5 | Tilting glass which needs to be blown (10,5) |
| TRANSVERSE FLUTE – tilting, champagne glass. The dictionaries include “oblique” as a definition for transverse, so I guess that’s close enough to “tilting”. |
|
| 6 | Branch of maths to one who explored surface elements in geometry (8) |
| TOPOLOGY – TO, [Marco] POLO, GeometrY. | |
| 7 | Unusual Times clue for mosquito (5) |
| CULEX – pretty much a guess where to put the U and the E, at least for me. An anagram of (unusual) X CLUE. | |
| 8 | Pest of fowl and fish (9) |
| COCKROACH – COCK, ROACH. | |
| 14 | Fossil I assume must keep dropping from sky (9) |
| IGUANODON – I DON must keep GUANO (dropping[s] from sky, as found on Nauru). | |
| 16 | Plant set to introduce delivery routes (9) |
| GROUNDSEL – GEL to introduce ROUNDS. | |
| 17 | Safe heads needed in massacre (8) |
| PETERLOO – PETER (safe), LOO (heads, in the naval sense). | |
| 20 | Moment before lighter brings about city burning during war (6) |
| MOSCOW – MO, SCOW (scows and lighters are both types of barge).
I assumed this event happened in WWII, but a quick search didn’t find a reference. That’s because it was in 1812, after the Battle of Borodino, apparently – a part of history celebrated by the 1812 overture. |
|
| 22 | Freely answer Democrat politician (2,3) |
| AD LIB – A (answer), D (Democrat), LIB (politician). | |
| 24 | See only a subset of men at a lot of births (5) |
| NATAL – hidden in “men at a lot“. | |
42m 44s
Some oddities here. Transverse Flute is OK but with CULEX, IGUANODON and ERGOGRAM, it would seem our setter has swallowed a dictionary.
CODs to TITICACA and LUXURY.
Thanks, Bruce!
We’ve had IGUANODON a couple of times; the spelling has come up for discussion.
GUANO solved the question about spelling here 😏
25:52
Fairly straightforward, although I didn’t parse TITICACA and GROUNDSEL until after submitting. It took me a while to complete SODIUM _, until I finally remembered LAM (not in my dialect). I wondered about the plural ‘heads’ in PETERLOO, but on looking at the corpora examples in ODE, I gather that in the UK and elsewhere it’s heads not head (head in the US). The adjectival form of Democrat is Democratic; both are abbreviated D, so there’s no reason for the setter to imitate the illiteracy of Republican politicians, who uniformly refer to the ‘Democrat party’. I liked TITICACA & AB OVO.
This was not terribly difficult, particularly if you can biff Peterloo – think Malcolm Arnold. I also just happened to know culex, very handy. I was a bit surprised to find both Free Willy and iguanodon in the same puzzle, but there you go.
Time: 35 minutes
You made me look up Malcolm Arnold.
In case you hadn’t noticed, today, The Times has launched ‘Sign of The Times Cryptic 1’ with the following message:
“A 21st century puzzle for those put off by crossword jargon and older references. Normal cryptic rules apply but expect modern slang, younger (living) people, brand names and conversational phrases”
I shall not be going there….
Yes, I noticed this and shall give it a try.
I’m not sure if TfTT had advance notice of this (I certainly didn’t know about it until this morning) so please don’t anyone reveal any answers here, and it might be best to save any discussion about the puzzle until the blogging arrangements have been sorted out. I imagine more info will follow in Mick H’s newsletter this morning. Meanwhile there’s an article about it here
Thanks, Jack!
There’s an article in today’s Times. I took a quick look at the puzzle and decided the hell with it. I’ve never understood, by the way, the objection to ‘older references’. Charles III is OK, but Charles I is out? I object to Tree not because he’s old–so is Nijinsky, so is Sara Bernhardt–but because he’s overused and trite. Ditto for e.g. ‘it’, which is way before my time and yet I knew it. I already expect modern slang, at least if it seems to have established itself (like ‘pants’). I wonder how many new solvers this is going to attract (currently 11 on the leaderboard, of which I recognize 3; cf. 53 for the QC). Is it going to be weekly?
👍
Since writing the above I have seen Mick H’s Newsletter and reading between the lines it would appear this is a one-off, for now at least. He describes it as a special accompaniment to the article by Tom Whipple linked in my posting above.
Thanks again, Jack. I’ve read the article which I found very interesting. It’ll be interesting to see if it is indeed a one-off.
I hope not. My kids would love to do more cryptics but they are put off by exactly what this new crossie is hoping to avoid. On the other hand I don’t want them starting to get quicker than me 🙂
Johninterred has posted the blog now.
77 minutes. Martin’s remark about the setter swallowing a dictionary found a degree of sympathy here.
After a run of relatively easy Saturdays, I found this very difficult unlike some of the above comments.
Must be me.
Branch your explanation for 7 down didn’t quite make sense, it wa an anagram of xclue. X being for Times. Sorry to be pernickity. All in all an enjoyable puzzle. I never time it but complete over several days. AB ovo was my last one in as I hadn’t heard of it before. Really like Titicaca
Thanks. Those “T”s and “X”s all look the same in the dark.
Oh my goodness! A DNF again, after an hour’s effort, and I see now why not. Just too many NHOs or clues that I just couldn’t untangle. No complaints, just beyond my GK and abilities. Thanks, all.
About an hour. OAHU, TRANSVERSE FLUTE and SIMONY were dimly known. POI PETERLOO took an age. NILE, inexpicably, LOI. Thanks branch.
24.32
Getting TITICACA was key. I looked at “ high water” and thought it would be clever if that was referring to a body of water at high elevation like that lake in South Ame….hang on! Clever clue as was LUXURY albeit rather more biffable.
Thanks Bruce and setter
DNF, with ‘celux’ rather than CULEX… my 50/50 punt didn’t pay off.
Forgot loo=heads but PETERLOO had to be; don’t know what a SODIUM LAMP is; had to trust there’s place called OAHU; and didn’t remember scow for MOSCOW.
Thanks setter and blogger.
COD Groundsel
Started of with PAMPAS. Steady progress until left with the rest of the NW, and the TRANSVERSE bit of 5d. The breakthrough came when I lifted and separated hit and parking and got SODIUM LAMP., which provided SIMONY. ROUTINES then allowed LOI, AB OVO to be constructed. Liked the IGUANODON clue. 21:57. Thanks setter and Bruce.
Thank you for flagging up about Agricola in 10ac.
On solving the clue I’d been thinking about the Latin word agricola = farmer (and trying to remember whether all first declension nouns were feminine), and therefore hadn’t noticed that the capital “A” meant this was an historical figure.
I see from Wikipedia he was “…responsible for much of the Roman conquest of Britain”: so a nicely apt surface!
I found this hard going. Finished it but with 3d incorrect, which is surprising because it wasn’t a particularly hard clue. For some reason, now forgotten, I convinced myself that PRINTLESS was the answer
Bit of a slog as I found out that some of the answers were NHOs (TOPOLOGY, CULEX – which I guessed correctly- SIMONY and AB OVO). Forgot about poor old Willy ( think the synonym here a bit vague) and also NHO SODIUM LAMP, even though got the lamp part early. Oh well: gave it my best shot. Started off well with PAMPAS straight in, then picked off the low-hanging fruit of LOCI, NILE and OAHU. Also NHO an ERGOGRAM, but made sense, but TRANSVERSE FLUTE methinks a bit unfair…surely all flutes are played ‘transversely’? Liked LUXURY and IGUANODON.