Times Cryptic No 27270 – Saturday, 09 February 2019. Good for the digestion.

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This seemed fairly straightforward for a Saturday. I finished comfortably over lunch. There was a good helping of clever wordplay, and lots of gravy. I liked 12, 17 and 27ac, and 16, 19 and 24 dn. Does anyone want to nominate their clue of the day?

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 Tot’s initial reprimand for crying (7)
TEARFUL: T[ot], EARFUL.

5 Blimps regularly track aircraft (7)
BIPLANE: Odd letters of “blimps” are B-I-P-, then LANE.

9 Brief all guards in Washington, first line of defence (7,4)
CURTAIN WALL: CURT (brief), then ALL “guarding” IN WA. Chambers gives “curtain wall” as a non-loadbearing one. Not sure why that’s the first line of defence. Perhaps the Wikipedia version is clearer: A curtain wall system is an outer covering of a building in which the outer walls are non-structural, utilized to keep the weather out and the occupants in.

10 Stop someone telling joke (3)
GAG: double definition.

11 Ran out of drink and cursed, half-cut (6)
LAPSED: LAP (drink), [cur]SED.

12 Officer pulling wings off lady beetle and termite (8)
ADJUTANT: AD (lady, minus “wings”), JUT (beetle, as in “beetle-browed”), ANT.

14 Volatile vet is fearless and forceful (4-9)
SELF-ASSERTIVE: anagram (“volatile”) of (VET IS FEARLESS*).

17 Anxiety about millions leaving huge country (13)
CONSTERNATION: C (about), [m]ONSTER (huge, minus M for millions), NATION.

21 Oddly neglected fiances kiss saucy amateur (8)
INEXPERT: even letters of “fiancés” are -I-N-E, then X (kiss), PERT.

23 Quiet old man hiding in an under-fire vessel (3-3)
ASH-PAN: SH (quiet please, this is a library) and PA, all “hiding in” AN. Clever definition.

25 Badly want to lose weight (3)
ILL: [w]ILL (want), losing W (weight). The definition is “badly”, as in “ill/badly treated”.

26 Father got us bananas, much in demand (6-5)
SOUGHT-AFTER: anagram (“bananas”) of (FATHER GOT US*).

27 Man perhaps stops crazy fool (7)
MISLEAD: ISLE (… of Man, perhaps), inside MAD.

28 Sanctimonious, before experiencing pain (7)
PREACHY: PRE, ACHY.

Down
1 Grab food and beer, heading off (6)
TACKLE: TACK, [a]LE.

2 Poor sap treated suitably (7)
APROPOS: anagram (“treated”) of (POOR SAP*).

3 Order gal to feel pulse (9)
FLAGEOLET: anagram (“order”) of (GAL TO FEEL*). Not a pulse I knew, I confess.

4 Feline couplings can be heard (4)
LYNX: sounds like LINKS.

5 Make revolting violet-coloured biscuit (6,4)
BRANDY SNAP: BRAND (make, of car for example), reversal (“revolting”) of PANSY (violet-coloured).

6 Maud sheds clothes after endless lager and spicy rice (5)
PILAU: PIL[s] (“endless” lager), then [m]AU[d] (“without her clothes”).

7 Answer four consecutive letters about a new currency (7)
AFGHANI: A (answer), then FGHI (consecutive letters) around the letter A and N (new).

8 Without leaders we might see an age of maturity (8)
EIGHTEEN: drop the first letter of each word, giving [w]E, [m]IGHT, [s]EE, [a]N.

13 Pretty good routine that holds attractions (10)
FAIRGROUND: FAIR (pretty), G (good), ROUND (routine).

15 Restore control over country (9)
REINSTATE: REIN, STATE.

16 Mostly working with university, in one’s element (8)
ACTINIUM: ACTIN[g] (working, “mostly”), then U (university) in I’M (one is).

18 Winds up unnecessary contracts (7)
NEEDLES: NEEDLES[s].

19 Advancing relatives turn up gaping and twitching (7)
NEPOTIC: NEPO (OPEN=gaping, “turned up”), then TIC (twitching).

20 Greener gym conserves power (6)
ENERGY: hidden answer.

22 Dads ultimately get some stick (5)
PASTE: PAS (dads), [ge]T, [som]E.

24 Tea party excluding Bohemian fellow
CHAP: CHA (tea), then P[arty].

30 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27270 – Saturday, 09 February 2019. Good for the digestion.”

  1. Indeed, reasonably easy for a Saturday, but entertaining none the less. Thanks for the parsing of BRANDY SNAP and FAIRGROUND (fair = pretty good?) which eluded me.
    Oops, edited out stupidity…

    Edited at 2019-02-16 12:51 am (UTC)

  2. I had no holdups with this one, taking 25:04 to finish. Liked ACTINIUM and ASH PAN. I do these puzzles online so I don’t have any notes and usually can’t remember where I started or finished after a week(or 2 for the Jumbos!). I did like 1a now that I’m reminded of it though. Thanks setter and Bruce.
  3. Not really a memorable puzzle, but pleasant. DNK the vegetable FLAGEOLET, only the musical instrument (which for some reason I picture being played with hautboys), but as Vinyl said. 5d BIFD, solved post-submission. I just now noticed that 17ac (NATION) and 15d (STATE) both have ‘country’ as a clue. So? You may ask, and indeed I may, too. COD perhaps to NEEDLES.
  4. 29 minutes but with one error as having thought of CURTAIN CALL for 9ac I couldn’t see past it even though it didn’t parse or fit with what I assumed was the definition. I suppose I should have trusted the wordplay and got the WA from Washington but I’d run out of energy by that stage and I wouldn’t have recognised CURTAIN WALL as an expression anyway, let alone know what it was.

    Remembered ACTINIUM from the Tom Lehrer song (my regular source of knowledge on matters elemental) because it’s placed prominently in the lyric – or at least it always catches my ear – unlike yesterday’s ‘astatine’ which tends to get glossed over a bit in the avalanche of names.

    Edited at 2019-02-16 05:57 am (UTC)

  5. I meant to say that I had thought a curtain wall was a non-load-bearing wall, and it is. But it was also the external wall of a castle, outside the building itself and thus constituting the first line of defense (at least if you didn’t have a moat, I suppose).
  6. I’ve just finished emptying the dish washer, the modern day equivalent of riddling the ashes into the waiting pan. 31 minutes including a couple deciding between LAPSED and lopped. I picked the right one, but LAP for ‘ran out’ isn’t that obvious to me. The JUT of ADJUTANT was the only other unknown, but the answer was clear. I liked CURTAIN WALL and ACTINIUM, but COD TO NEPOTIC. (The family that slays together stays together. I think that was Phil Ochs about Diemocracy in South Vietnam.) Nice puzzle. Thank you Bruce and setter.
      1. Thank you, Kevin. I had just realised that on my morning constitutional, and was hoping to get back and edit before anyone had spotted. You now all know that my my membership of the halfway-competent club has lapsed!
        1. 🙂 Commiserations!
          See first comment – I was lucky enough to get back & edit before a reply, after: struggling to parse while solving but eventually getting it, then forgetting I’d parsed it and going back to my original stupid guess when writing the comment some time later.
    2. I was also puzzled by beetle/JUT and I still don’t really see it in the example quoted. I get that ‘beetle-browed’ can refer to eyebrows that jut out but it seems a bit of a stretch from that to say that ‘jut = beetle’.
      1. ODE sv beetle: (usu. as adj. beetling) (of a rock of a person’s eyebrows) project or overhang Most of the examples it gives are of eyebrows, but for instance ‘beetling hilltop towns …’ ‘the beetling houses and gothic towers of the Old Town…’ It seemed fine to me at the time.
        1. Thanks. I just found ‘beetle = jut’ buried in the depths of Collins on-line. Must read to the bottom of the page in future!
    3. As Kevin says, LAP is “drink”. I’ll try to be clearer, rather than assume everyone is on my wavelength! I’ll update the blog now.
  7. 35 minutes, so all quite simple. Only had a question-mark over the beetle/jut correspondence. I’ll be forever grateful for a friend’s desperation for FLAGEOLET beans for a recipe once that had us driving all over Bristol to find them; the word’s come up in a few crosswords since then.

    FOI 1a TEARFUL, LOI 25 ILL. COD 5a BIPLANE. Really must try a BRANDY SNAP at some point. So far, for me, they are sadly a crossword-only word.

  8. ….as FAIRGROUND Attraction put it it their sole chart-topper. It wasn’t exactly perfect, but it was a generally decent and enjoyable puzzle, despite MER at “”ran out = LAPSED”.

    FOI GAG
    LOI ACTINIUM
    COD PILAU (I hope to run into Maud some time, sounds like my kind of girl)
    TIME 11:40

  9. A bit boring for a Saturday I thought. Knew my flageolet bean. Clue of day was ADJUTANT as I didn’t see how it worked so biffed. Thanks for explaining, brnchn.
  10. Thanks, Bruce, particularly for BRANDY SNAP. I started in the NW corner, like most people I suppose, so I was grateful for anagrams in 2d,3d and 14ac.
    I liked EIGHTEEN, INEXPERT, REINSTATE and ‘under-fire vessel (ASH PAN).
    The use of ‘sanctimonious’ in 28ac reminded me of a letter in Private Eye some time ago from one of the Pythons who referred to someone as a ‘sanctimonious bint’. I liked that.
    I also like the idea of nominative determinism present in 27ac. I imagine a MISS LEAD as a tour guide!
  11. 12:03. No real problems with this.
    I didn’t know what a CURTAIN WALL was in any context, which may actually have helped. The second Collins definition includes the exact words ‘first line of defence’.
    SELF-ASSERTIVE is a strange term. It just means ‘assertive’.
    I have cooked FLAGEOLETs in the last week, so no problems there.
    This meaning of the word ‘beetle’ must have come up before because I knew it.
  12. Pleased with this after yesterday’s horror which completely floored me. I’m going to go back to it now and see if it reveals any of its secrets more readily.

    COD: BRANDY SNAP

  13. No problems with this one, stopping the clock at 14.23. Mrs Z likes to produce bean salad for those bring-a-dish-and-share do’s, so I’m familiar enough with the flageolet version. Curious that the bean and the flute should have quite different derivations.
    Also curious that there is a repeat in today’s crossword, differently clued. Shan’t of course, reveal which one.
  15. With lamb is a recipe in a new Provencal cookbook I got for Christmas and I was thinking of making it quite soon. I remembered CURTAIN WALL (and bailey) from a long-ago visit to Berkeley Castle. 21.57 which included a prolonged sneezing fit which was odd because we’re nowhere near pollen season yet.
  17. as my note on this puzzle.

    FOI 1ac TEARFUL

    LOI 25ac ILL – terrible clue IMHO

    COD 9ac CURTAIN WALL certainly

    WOD FAIRGROUND Nostalgia Harry Lime etc

    KGB busy

  18. 13:49, with the last minute checking my biffed LOPPED at 11A and correcting it to LAPSED. So very straightforward for a prize puzzle. CURTAIN WALL was only vaguely remembered, but everything else went in quite smoothly. I liked ACTINIUM. Like Phil I remember FAIRGROUND Attraction and enjoy hearing their lead singer Eddi Reader. Thanks Bruce and setter.

    Edited at 2019-02-16 05:07 pm (UTC)

  19. I’ve only heard of CURTAIN WALL in connection with castles. (We Welsh are quite well informed about castles – they occupy a large chunk of the school history syllabus). But I only vaguely remembered FLAGEOLET as a bean. I know the musical instrument rather better. A friend once bought a double-flageolet in a junk shop and we spent many happy hours trying to play something on it in two-part harmony. Not easy… I struggled a bit with this puzzle and still can’t quite see how “Badly want” = “will” at 25a. 37minutes. Ann
    1. Badly treated, for example, might be ill treated. “Want” is wordplay, “badly” is definition. Bog so clarified, sorry for omission.

      Edited at 2019-02-16 08:37 pm (UTC)

  21. Thanks setter and brnchn
    Found this one on the easier side as well and was able to fit it into a lunchtime of 42 min. Didn’t know the ‘bean’, the ‘jutting beetle’ or the ‘first line of defence’. Struggled with the parsing of the last bit of ACTINIUM – ‘in one’s’ = I’M.
    Liked the ASH-PAN clue as my best. Started of with the gimme LYNX and finished in the NE corner with TACKLE and TEARFUL as the last couple in.

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