Times Cryptic No 27252 – Saturday, 19 January 2019. Happy Australia day

Author   branchPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
This blog appears on an Australian public holiday to mark the arrival of British settlers in Sydney Cove. A good or a bad thing depending which side of history you were on. Arguably not the ideal day to celebrate national unity, but summer festivities will undoubtedly proceed.

This was an enjoyable puzzle. Interesting obscurities at 17ac, 3dn and 5dn. All doable if you know or can guess the spelling at 5dn. I lucked out with that – no skill involved!

My word of the day was 3dn which sent me on a dictionary trawl to confirm the special status of four-letter words. Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle.

Clues are in blue, with definitions underlined. Answers are in BOLD CAPS, then wordplay. (ABC*) means ‘anagram of ABC’. Deletions are in [square brackets].

Across
1 Force member to rip off firm (9)
CONSTABLE: CON / STABLE.

6 Sommelier eschewing one non-alcoholic drink (5)
WATER: WA[i]TER.

9 Foolish master quits in a manner of speaking (7)
IDIOTIC: IDIO[ma]TIC.

10 Old lady and tiny kids perhaps mentioned underwear (1-6)
Y-FRONTS: sounds like (“mentioned”) WIFE RUNTS.

11 Big cat’s back so fluffy, but not the tail (5)
FOSSA: AS SOFT backwards, minus the last letter (“not the tail”). I didn’t know this Madagascan mammal.

12 Decorate without being clumsy (9)
GRACELESS: GRACE (decorate, as in “she graced the room with her presence” perhaps) / LESS (without).

13 I slipped over having run on track (5)
SPOOR: OOPS “over” / R (run).

14 Solid artefacts round cathedral mostly broken (9)
OCTAHEDRA: O (round) / anagram (“broken”) of (CATHEDRA*). Last letter of anagram fodder omitted (only “mostly”).

17 Girl with old male expert dispensing tips for global dating status? (4,5)
ANNO MUNDI: ANN (girl) / O (old) / M (male) / [p]UNDI]t (expert, “dispensing” tips). I didn’t know this expression, but the wordplay was clear enough to get it with the helpers.

18 John, wanting a single, is available (2,3)
TO LET: drop the “I” from TOILET.

19 Young, shallow, vacuous Arabian country reporter (9)
NEWSWOMAN: NEW (young) / S[hallo]W (shallow, “vacuous”) / OMAN.

22 Athlete, once in US, New Orleans sent back (5)
OWENS: reverse hidden answer (“in”, “sent back”).

24 Chris, compared to Saviour, is thus eternal (7)
ENDLESS: CHRIS compared with CHRIS[t].

25 About to come in on air, playing instrument (7)
OCARINA: CA (about) in an anagram (“playing”) of (ON AIR*).

26 Prepare for something unpleasant — heavy metal? (5)
STEEL: double definition. Is steel a heavy metal? I suspect not, but a steel band might well play heavy metal music!

27 Joint talk pompously put on my page (9)
CORPORATE: COR (my) / P (page) / ORATE (talk pompously).

Down
1 Head cook touring India (5)
CHIEF: I (India, in the phonetic alphabet) in CHEF.

2 Clearly defines island, now for development (5,4)
NAILS DOWN: a “development” of (ISLAND NOW*).

3 Berate beastly male following an offensive four-letter word (9)
TETRAGRAM: I didn’t know “rag” as meaning “berate”, but it’s in Chambers. So it’s TET (a Vietnam War offensive by the Viet Công) / RAG / RAM (beastly male). Strangely it appears that although TETRAGRAM can be a four letter word, that’s not so for pentagram or higher numbers!

4 Help air surrounding earth in atmospheric enhancement (10,5)
BACKGROUND MUSIC: BACK (help) / GROUND (earth) / MUSIC (air).

5 Labour baron sacked after powerless “Iran Empathy” broadcast (11,4)
ERYMANTHIAN BOAR: two anagrams: “powerless” (IRAN EM[p]ATHY*) “broadcast”, then (BARON*) “sacked”. Once I saw the second word was BOAR and twigged it might be one of the Labours of Hercules, I only had to guess where the consonants went! A nod to the setter for the word order of the clue, automatically giving “Labour” a capital L.

6 Inferior small bore going around (5)
WORSE: WORE (bore, in the sense of “carried”) around S (small).

7 Weight of news in digital form? (5)
TONNE: N (new) twice, inside TOE (a digit on one’s foot, of course). Took a while to see.

8 Rebel worker buried under refuse (9)
RESISTANT: RESIST (to refuse) / ANT (worker).

13 Squeaky-clean, thanks, committing no crimes when on the outside (9)
STAINLESS: SINLESS (committing no crimes) outside TA.

15 Stew over author regularly in a difficult situation (3,6)
HOT POTATO: HOTPOT (stew) /ATO (AuThOr, “regularly”).

16 Fool about with musical in hedonistic existence (5,4)
DOLCE VITA: CLOD “around” / EVITA.

20 Scandinavian, not the first to hold golf club (5)
WEDGE: [s]WEDE, “holding” G for golf (phonetic alphabet).

21 Turn and streak for an audience (5)
WHEEL: sounds like WEAL.

23 Time to enter gorge, say (5)
STATE: T in SATE.

29 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27252 – Saturday, 19 January 2019. Happy Australia day”

  1. Is there a bit of a Nina happening in the four corners? Chief Constable, Water-Resistant, Stainless Steel, and Corporate State?
    Found this tricky at 35 minutes, but well put-together. Not on the wavelength, and always thrown by non-English words & phrases.
    Happy Australia/Invasion Day.
  2. Nice blog, Brnchn, and a nice puzzle. An easy solve whilst watching the US football playoffs.

    I was thinking that we are OK with ‘offensive’ as cluing Tet, but I don’t think we’d be happy with ‘rising’ cluing Easter – though 1916 in Dublin and 1968 in Saigon are close enough to the same thing militarily and also in terms of a religious or quasi-religious celebration of the lunar / solar cycle.

    1. Fair point, but rightly or wrongly it was always referred to as the “Tet Offensive” as far as I remember.
      1. My point, exactly, brnchn. It’s also always know as the “Easter Rising”. There are other offensives, and there are other risings, but none come quickly to mind for either. In spite of that, ‘offensive’ works for Tet – we see it often, and we solve the clue; ‘rising’ would not work for Easter, and if we got it we’d whine.

        Edited at 2019-01-26 03:37 pm (UTC)

        1. Perhaps it’s just that i (we) are so much more familiar with all the other aspects of Easter. I for one barely know anything about Tet.
  3. Spent a lot of time with the alphabet on 5d, but got nowhere. NHO FOSSA, which isn’t a cat.
  4. Some obscurities for me in this one. I knew I was looking for a Labour of Hercules at 5d, but didn’t know it, so laboriously constructed it from anagrist and then checked it. I had to resort to aids for FOSSA as I didn’t know the animal and the wordplay meant nothing to me. Managed to dig out the rest of the clues but it took me 47:01. Hard going. Thanks setter and Bruce, and Happy Australia Day. I expect my sister-in-law and family, who emigrated to Gunnedah NSW in the 80s will be celebrating.
  5. I was 63 minutes on this, finding it tough. I didn’t know FOSSA and it was LOI. I struggled also with the WHEEL/ STEEL crosser. Surely STEEL as an alloy isn’t even a metal? Mind you, HEAVY METAL is far preferable to BACKGROUND MUSIC, which is rarely an enhancement., although I do like Christmas Music when on my annual shopping pilgrimage. I’m not sure if I loved or hated Y-FRONTS, so I’ll make it COD, as that’s how I felt about the puzzle. The four pairs in the corners were very clever, not that I spotted them until Isla pointed them out. I also liked ANNO MUNDI and SPOOR, parsed some time after the event in the latter case, so I guess that overall the puzzle was a good thing. And I did know the boar well enough to get it right with the help of crossers. Thank you B and setter.
  6. 17:14. I found this tricky but enjoyable. Ever the refined high-brow intellectual, I knew about FOSSA from the movie Madagascar. As Kevin says they aren’t cats.
    I know a couple of sommeliers and they would be pretty offended by the rather reductive definition at 6ac!
  7. I was 63 minutes on this, finding it tough. I didn’t know FOSSA and it was LOI. I struggled also with the WHEEL/ STEEL crosser. Surely STEEL as an alloy isn’t even a metal? Mind you, HEAVY METAL is far preferable to BACKGROUND MUSIC, which is rarely an enhancement., although I do like Christmas Music when on my annual shopping pilgrimage. I’m not sure if I loved or hated Y-FRONTS, so I’ll make it COD, as that’s how I felt about the puzzle. The four pairs in the corners were very clever, not that I spotted them until Isla pointed them out. I also liked ANNO MUNDI and SPOOR, parsed some time after the event in the latter case, so I guess that overall the puzzle was a good thing. And I did know the boar well enough to get it right with the help of crossers. Thank you B and setter.
  8. 24:03 I found this quite tricky but enjoyable. I had to look up the not-cat to check I’d got it right and cheated to get the right spelling of the Herculean labour. Boltonwanderer has beaten me to it, but with a degree in metallurgy I have to protest at “heavy metal” as a definition of steel too. COD to WEDGE. Thanks Isla for pointing out the Nina I had missed and Bruce and setter for the blog and puzzle.
  9. Got well and truly BOARed with this one so I looked up several answers. Some of it seemed wilfully obscure.
  10. ….HOT POTATO, and ended up with my R and M transposed in the unknown BOAR, and a careless “Anna Mundi” just to compound matters.

    DNK FOSSA either.

    FOI WATER
    LOI the incorrect BOAR
    COD TONNE
    TIME 17:44 but with two wrong answers.

  11. I got the unknown FOSSA, but for my last entry plumped for EMYRANTIHIAN BOAR. It didn’t seem too unlikely for this non-classicist. (And I do know a little Greek, but apparently not enough…)
  12. I felt stretched to the limit by some of this but in each case I was pretty sure I had the definition,so the question was could I follow the wordplay.
    For example,TETRAGRAM,: I remembered the Tet offensive and think it’s been in a puzzle fairly recently.The rest followed. It was a generally enjoyable challenge; I too liked WEDGE.
    It came down to resolving the obscurities. I was left looking for a labour of Hercules and a big cat. Once I’d got rid of the P in the anagrist, the boar emerged. The”cat” was my last one in and I entered FOSSA with no confidence at all. I have been to many zoos and never seen one. I think they must be penned next to the aoudads. We’ve had an orc of a time in the puzzles this week.
    David

  13. Thanks, brnchn and Happy Australia Day, marked by an innings victory over Sri Lanka. Just to think that had Viscomte de la Perouse arrived just a little earlier you would probably be a DOM – Departement Outre Mer- of La Belle France!

    Yes, thanks particularly for FOSSA and TONNE. I struggled with ERYMANTHIAN BOAR (my COD) and BACKGROUND MUSIC (an enhancement?)
    as my solving time indicates. Had to use aids for a few clues.

    Spent too long trying to make NEWSHOUND work.

  14. Took me a while, this one.. struggled with the boar and also nho fossa. It is not a cat, true, but Wiki describes it as a “catlike carnivorous mammal,” which seems close enough.
    I had always assumed Australia Day had something to do with becoming a nation, but apparently not. Have a good one, anyway!
  15. I find it hard to recapture how I felt about a puzzle even just a week later unless there’s a particular reason. At 28.13 I see I must have found this quite difficult and I certainly didn’t know FOSSA which to me conjures up a Latin ditch and the Fosse Way rather than a so-called cat. It looks as if Australia Day has rather similar origins to Thanksgiving in the US which is celebrated more in spite of rather than because of its rather dubious beginnings. In any case, Happy ADay Bruce, Martin et al.

    P.S. Speaking of Latin and dubious origins, I see there was an amusing exchange of letters in the Times earlier this week between Richard Browne (former crossword editor) and a Latin teacher having to do with the possible conjugation of the “verb” BREXIT. http://nuk-tnl-deck-email.s3.amazonaws.com/61/acec40d7cb2fc91f4fe388dd0fc29d03.html

  16. 37:47 I thought this was an excellent puzzle. Particularly pleasing to work out the labour at 5dn.
  17. A rare sub-half-hour here. When irritated in polite company, I will henceforth shout “Oh, TETRAGRAM!”.
  18. A DNF because of / due to 21 dn which I entered as SPELL -a spell of bowling being a turn, as is a lucky streak!

    But, it made 19ac impossible as I sadly fail quite often to spot woman – my deeply sexist upbringing, for which I hang my head in shame.

    FOI 1dn CHIEF

    COD 5dn ERYMANTHIAN BOAR

    WOD 16dn DOLCE VITA

    I always thought vitas gerilaitis was a skin disease!

    1. I treasure this memory:

      At Madison Square Garden in 1980 he ended a run of 16 consecutive defeats against Connors. Asked how he had finally managed to overcome his nemesis, Gerulaitis famously replied: “Because nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row.”

  19. Confidently entered CHAIR for 1d, so wasted ten mins on NW corner, trying to justify “asinine”, among other things. “Chair” I think is actually a better answer, since it requires both “head” and “cook” to be read as verbs, rather than adjective and noun.
    1. The setter might think consistency in parts of speech is a minus, not a plus. Inconsistency of that kind is one of their tools of trade.
      1. My comment intended to distinguish between the grammatical functions in the surface and deep meanings of the clue, which is what a clever setter will try to exploit.

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