Times Cryptic No 27816 – Saturday, 7 November 2020. Nice and easy.

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This was a smooth solve. I printed it after 11am, and finished before noon (while watching reporting on the US Election, moving along about as fast as grass grows). There were only a few vocabulary testers; the standout was 7dn, where I wasn’t certain of either the answer or the building block  in the wordplay. I particularly liked 20ac. 14ac was a very unusual clue: I think it has two separate definitions, as well as wordplay! Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle. Let’s take a look.

Notes for newcomers: The Times offers prizes for Saturday Cryptic Crosswords. This blog is posted a week later, after the competition closes. So, please don’t comment here on the current Saturday Cryptic.

Clues are blue, with definitions underlined. Deletions are in {curly brackets}.

Across
1 Service mechanic makes a terrific mess (9)
ARTIFICER – anagram (mess) of A TERRIFIC.
6 Stole small vehicle from missing traveller (5)
SCARF – S for small, CAR, F is ‘from’ missing ‘rom’ = gypsy/traveller.
9 Deny advance, for example (7)
GAINSAY – GAIN for advance, SAY meaning for example.
10 Face palace attendant wasting time (7)
COURIER – take T out of COURTIER. The answer is a type face.
11 It happens the day before with books (5)
EVENT – EVE, N.T.
12 Prototype flyer I found in Hampshire river bed (4,5)
TEST PILOT – TEST is the river, PLOT is the (garden) bed. Insert an I. The answer is the tester, not the craft being tested.
14 She is leaving children to take action (3)
SUE – I think this clue has two definitions: a woman’s name, and an action at law. In between, the wordplay says to take IS off ISSUE. I’ve never seen that structure before!
15 Versatile players left twice during a game (3-8)
ALL-ROUNDERS – A, L twice, ROUNDERS.
17 Astute fleet moved wide, circling heart of battle (5-6)
QUICK-WITTED – QUICK is fleet, then anagram (moved) of WIDE, circling TT from the heart of ‘baTTle’.
19 Get into the red circle, joining our side (3)
OWE – O is the circle, WE is our side.
20 Relation interrupting child’s birthday, then grandma’s? (9)
EIGHTIETH – the child has its EIGHTH birthday interrupted by TIE=relation to give grannie her EIGHTIETH.
22 Irish boy embraces becoming landowner (5)
LAIRD – LAD embraces IR for Irish.
24 Rose may clamber over this river in Brief Lives (7)
TRELLIS – R for river in TELL for brief (brief the staff, for example), then IS for lives.
26 Salt, the basis of shift worker’s pay, might one say? (7)
NITRATE – one might say it sounds like NIGHT RATE.
27 Check round spruce initially to find this? (5)
RESIN – REIN or check, around S from spruce.
28 Tedious job to study origin of meteors in Plough (9)
TREADMILL – READ and M{eteor} in TILL.

Down
1 Fever limits entry to Rotten Row (5)
ARGUE – R is the ‘entry’ to Rotten. Put it in AGUE.
2 Reported experiment with paper boat long ago (7)
TRIREME – sounds like (‘reported’) TRY REAM.
3 Urgently promote secure number (4-5)
FAST-TRACK – FAST is secure, as in ‘make fast’. TRACK is a number on a music album, for example. ‘Urgently’ seems a bit strong in the definition, but the concept is right.
4 After a rewrite, stale lyrics become clear (11)
CRYSTALLISE – anagram (‘after a rewrite’) of STALE LYRICS.
5 Give a lift to my fabulous bird (3)
ROC – lifting/reversing COR = ‘my’
6 Significant fall sees son with swelling (5)
SLUMP – S for son with LUMP.
7 Lead character in Jaws missing: they can sweat! (7)
AXILLAE – MAXILLAE are jawbones. AXILLAE are armpits.
8 What’s in store for English society in gallery (9)
FORETASTE – FOR from the clue, E for English, S for society in TATE, the gallery.
13 Do brief alteration (5-6)
SHORT-CHANGE – DO as in ‘cheat’. Otherwise, explanation hardly required.
14 Appropriate goal secured by Sybil, say (9)
SEQUESTER – QUEST for goal, in SEER.
16 Due to land being cultivated it’s bumpy in places (9)
NODULATED – anagram (‘being cultivated’) of DUE TO LAND.
18 French artist originally snubbed opening (7)
INGRESS – INGRES is the artist. The final S is Snubbed, ‘originally’.
19 Paper folding in old Baltic city? This writer’s upset (7)
ORIGAMI – O for old, RIGA is the city, I’M upset.
21 Section of foot — a long claw (5)
TALON – hidden answer.
23 Live and thrive, lacking nothing (5)
DWELL – DO WELL, without the O.
25 Establish series of games (3)
SET – double definition.

34 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27816 – Saturday, 7 November 2020. Nice and easy.”

  1. No problems, although I didn’t think of the type face until after submitting. I liked SCARF.
    1. COURIER, as a fixed-width font, used to be useful to me when The Nation ran crosswords. That said, I think this was my LOI, ironic for someone who was a typographer for so many years.
  2. I didn’t know the specific definition of ARTICIFER and I looked twice at TIE as ‘relation’ but the only thing that stumped me completely was {m}AXILLAE and I used aids to get that as my LOI. I would have known ‘axilla’ and ‘maxilla’ in the singular and possibly even have thought of the answer, but the E at the end supplied by the checker threw me off the trail and I simply couldn’t come up with anything as a likely fit.
  3. “Fast-track” is a term of art in American politics, meaning to expedite a piece of legislation with as much assumed urgency as possible. Sometimes protesters place themselves athwart those fast tracks.
    1. I know it in the sense of someone, not necessarily the owner’s offspring, who’s being promoted rapidly and headed for the top.
  4. No problem with that but I spent half the time on the NE corner.
    I liked TRELLIS but COD to AXILLAE.
    You’re right, Bruce; 14ac is an unusually constructed clue.
    1. One of our setters has a “signature” which involves a triple definition clue for one of the shortest words in the grid. I’d suggest 14A is one of these. She could be a girls’s name; is removed from issue is the second cryptic; with take action, as in a court of law, providing the third route to the solution.
  5. Was just over 10 minutes with AXILLAE. missing and wondering why the COURIER had a face. Was 7d lifted from The Lancet crossword? I needed aids for both body parts. I think it highly likely that if somebody doesn’t know one term then they won’t know the other, and if so then there is no way in. And as a physicist I knew neither! Otherwise, an easy offering. Thank you Bruce and setter.
  6. ….who was christened “The Armpit” by one of my colleagues (think of Uriah Heep, only less ‘umble). I encountered “axilla” soon afterwards in a GK crossword, and he was referred to thus ever afterwards. Another artistically inclined colleague drew a cartoon of “Axilla the Hun” and it caused considerable amusement throughout the building. If the victim saw it, he never let on.

    A straightforward puzzle, other than having to look up COURIER afterwards.

    FOI ARTIFICER
    LOI COURIER
    COD ROC
    TIME 6:48

  7. All done and dusted in 30mins, which is good for me. I think we had AXILLA in a crossword fairly recently and for once I remembered it! Not such a leap therefore to AXILLAE being the plural. Didn’t know MAXILLAE of course, so thanks b for the explanation there.

    Today’s question: if you had a German friend with smelly armpits, would the be known as AXILLA THE HUM? Sorry.

    FOI SLUMP
    LOI AXILLAE
    COD EIGHTIETH.

    Thank you b as ever and setter.

    1. I suppose he would be related to the former Alpine skier Fanny Chmelar whose name left Bradley Walsh disabled by laughter on “The Chase” a few years ago.
  8. Dear White Rose,

    I have a German friend, Maximilian von Schmelling who might just be knocking on your door, one of these dark nights!

    Today’s answer:- A German joke is no laughing matter!

    Very few takers today on this rather hum-drum offering.

    FOI 1dn ARGUE

    LOI 20ac EIGHTIETH

    COD 1ac ARTIFICER

    WOD 18ac INGRESS

    Time – it passed slowly

    Edited at 2020-11-14 09:58 am (UTC)

    1. Eek, I hope he’s not a « heavy »! I’d be happy to give him a glass of chilled rose. (Still can’t find a way on this silly machine to put an accent on my e, except of course, when I don’t want it).
  9. 9:45 but… that includes a minute on 7D before I used aids to find the word I didn’t was know clued by another word I didn’t know. Hmmph! I liked the triple definition for SUE.
  10. A similar story from me. I had Courier but did not see the face element. And I needed my wife, a former nurse, to help me locate the jaw and the armpit.
    I had a germ of an idea, BACILLUS, but remembered enough Latin to know that a plural ending AE was unlikely.
    Otherwise good fun. David
  11. I was delayed a bit at the end by AXILLAE, but did eventually remember that I once had to see a Maxillo-Facial surgeon in A&E in the middle of the night, to have a couple of stitches put in my gum after a dental extraction left me bleeding copiously. All done in 23:03. Thanks setter and Bruce.
  12. I’m coming back to The Times Cryptic Crossword. I just want to download the crossword and don’t want to fill it in online or access any of the rest of The Times website.

    Can anyone tell me whether there is a reduced price subscription for just the crossword?

    Or have a username/password/script/text file they could PM me to do the same?

    Thank you.

    1. Not as far as I know – I send a friend a pdf occasionally.
      Sadly, there’s no free lunch these days!
    2. The man who tells presidents what to do, basically runs the USA: Rupert Murdoch. He now has your name and email address and has hacked all your personal details. If you think you can stay his inexorable demands for money, you are sorely mistaken.

      I.E. no, you must forfeit an arm and a leg. Or do what I used to do: take your morning coffee at a cafe that supplies random newspapers free, including the one with the crossword.

  13. 12:03. This was a fairly gentle offering. I had all the vocab though I seem to have glossed over the definition of courier while solving. I liked the anagram of stale lyrics.
  14. I couldn’t get 7D. I was going to use aids but I decided to sleep on it. I guess I never came back to it since it is still blank in my grid. The trouble with weekend crosswords is that I generally don’t remember much about the solving (on paper you can put little ticks and notes but online you can’t…well, I could open a word document I know, but life’s too short).
    1. I get round this problem by printing out the Saturday and Sunday cryptics a week late – on the day the solutions are posted. So when I come to this blog they are fresh in my mind. You have to wait patiently for the first week to kickstart the system but after that it’s plain sailing.
      1. Good idea falooker, but on my subscription it only allows me to to go back up to six days, so on Saturday I can only go back to last Sunday, eg. As Isla says….
  15. Printing them out on the day and putting them away for a week would seem to take care of this.

    Or am I missing something?

    1. You are of course right. That’s more or less what I do. I think we are crossing wires. I print them on the day, and complete them (hopefully!) that day and keep them for a week. I guess you print them and keep them unsolved for a week and then do them on the day? Anyway the important thing is that we do them and hopefully enjoy it! Francois.
  16. Rose, I don’t know what sort of subscription you have but surely it includes access to the Crossword Club from the main puzzles page? If you enter through that portal you can print puzzles going back years and year, so the previous Saturday wouldn’t be a problem!
  17. 42 minutes but a DNF because after spending 10 minutes convincing myself that 7dn was AXILLAE I forgot that I hadn’t yet sorted out the anagram in 16dn (which of course was easy). The problem is that the grid was full of letters, it was late and I didn’t have the energy to proofread as I usually do. Of course I did win if you only count the legal entries …
  18. I’d assumed from the comment that the subscription perhaps only gave access to six days’ puzzles – if not, no problem obviously. Also wondered if having a printer would be an issue.

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