Times Quick Cryptic No 1079 by Izetti

Author   JohninterredPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic
Another lovely puzzle from Izetti today. This one took a bit of work to crack with one or two clues rather more devious than the usual QC affair, but there are enough relatively easy ones to gives us some checkers to help. For example, 17a has a very good deceptive surface and 22a has a neat and unusual indication of a hidden word. 4a is also tricky and my LOI as I fell into the trap of thinking the definition was ‘planned performance’. About 1 1/2 minutes over average. Thanks Izetti for the good mental workout and delightful PDMs (which, if you’ve not seen it before, stands for Penny Drop Moment.. and leaping out of the bath and shouting Eureka like Archimedes is not obligatory). How did you all get on?

Addendum: Jackkt (see comments below) has calculated that this is Izetti’s 100th QC. So let me add my congratulations and appreciation to those expressed by the commenters. I always enjoy an Izetti crossword, and look forward to the next 100!

Definitions underlined in italics, (ABC)* indicating anagram of ABC, {} deletions and [] other indicators.

Across
1 Maybe Queen’s printed greeting (4)
CARD – Double definition, first mildly cryptic. Anybody here got a birthday today?
4 Planned performance involving Leo maybe (8)
DESIGNED – DEED (performance) including the star SIGN Leo. My LOI, taking a while to spot the performance. With all the checkers in, I saw that DISAGREE fitted them… but not the clue! I have to confess that DEED for performance seemed a bit forced. But maybe I’m being too picky.
8 Shoes are awkward where there could be sand (8)
SEASHORE – (Shoes are)* [awkward]. I like to take mine off when I walk along a sandy beach, like Christopher Robin. Do you? …and get sand between the toes.
9 Ordinary Seaman crosses a river — boat may need these (4)
OARS – OS (Ordinary Seaman) outside [crosses] A + R. Also needed by our 3 men referred to in 16a.
10 Position of a new church at back of street (6)
STANCE – ST and, at the back of it, A +  N + CE.
11 Gym group wanting a bit of money, as before (6)
PESETA – The Gym group is a PE SET. Add A to get the former currency known in our family, thanks to my Great Aunt Jennie, as “potatoes”. She was of the era that pensioners could go and live in Spain for the winter cheaper than staying at home with all the fuel bills.
12 Ohio commences new subject for students (4,9)
HOME ECONOMICS – (Ohio commences)* [new]. I never got taught this at school… but it was a boy’s school then and, in those days, the housewife was supposed to do the cooking and have the man’s dinner on the table for him when he got home from work. The reverse seems to be the norm in our house! Back in time for dinner, anyone?
16 One of three men in a boat somewhere in the Outer Hebrides (6)
HARRIS – Double Definition. A character from the book by Jerome K Jerome and the island famous for its tweed. My aforementioned school had Harris tweed jackets as an alternative to blazers in the stipulated uniform.
17 Passenger finally entering smart train (6)
STRING – Neatly deceptive… this has nothing to do with travelling! We take the end of {Passenge}R and put it on board a STING (smart). Did you know there is a board game called String Railway?
19 Opening of pub in time for a beer? (4)
PINT – P{ub} + IN + T. I enjoyed a lot of halves of these at the Beer Festival last week. The Green Jack Mahseer IPA was my favourite.
20 When disturbed, I can’t — I have to be doing nothing (8)
INACTIVE – This was a bit baffling at first sight, but it’s quite clever. We take (I can’t)* [disturbed] and add I’VE (I have). Nope. Can’t be this. I’ve a blog to finish.
21 Yours truly when terribly rude must be restrained (8)
MEASURED – ME + AS + (rude)*. I can’t imagine our setter being terribly rude. Well at least not in his crosswords.
22 River essential for Egyptian, I learn (4)
NILE – A nice semi &lit clue featuring a hidden word in {Egyptia}N I LE{arn}. Nice, as in “Nice to get a pound for a cent and find a flower, perhaps?” Hmm. Maybe best stick to the blogging, John.

Down
2 Spy taking time, not losing heart (5)
AGENT – Take your time, AGE  and add N{o}T to get the likes of Bond, James Bond. Mine’s a gin martini stirred not shaken, please.
3 Garden site — it’s abandoned and decays (13)
DISINTEGRATES – (Garden site it’s)*. A solving tip from me… If it’s a long anagram and it doesn’t immediately spring to mind, I leave it and come back when I’ve got some checkers. It worked perfectly today as my second pass through the across clues put several letters in place.
4 Doctor, individual who is 20? (5)
DRONE – DR + ONE. The answer to 20 is INACTIVE. A DRONE is a lazy, idle person. A bit of a stretch, perhaps, in the definition, but the wordplay is clear enough.
5 Fancy new taps that you might want in kitchen (7)
STEWPAN – [Fancy] (new taps)*. I don’t want one in my kitchen, thanks. Not a specialist bit of culinary apparatus I am familiar with. I have pans and casserole dishes and a slow cooker, all of which I use to make a stew. What more would I want? But maybe it’s just another name for what I’ve got already.
6 I go to a sad man in distress? That could be about right (4,9)
GOOD SAMARITAN – (I go to a sad man + R)*. Good Samaritan blogger that I am, I wrote out all the letters and checked them off so you didn’t have to. Another semi &lit that made me smile.
7 Unusually rare twitching, lacking predictability (7)
ERRATIC – (rare)* + TIC (twitching). A bit like my crossword-solving skills.
10 Note some of those turning up (3)
SOH – …a needle pulling thread. Hidden reversed in tHOSe.
13 Work on a product with shimmery colouring (7)
OPALINE – OP + A LINE. I’m more familair with its synonym opalescent. It is also a term for milk-glass.
14 Dismiss bank employee (7)
CASHIER – Double definition, the former meaning “dismiss (someone) from the armed forces in disgrace because of a serious misdemeanour.“
15 Get depressed, given long account that reaches no conclusion (3)
SAG – The long account that doesn’t finish is a SAG{a}. Which reminds me – I’ve still got 9 more episodes of The Bridge to catch up on using BBC’s iPlayer. She’s a bit of a 1a, isn’t she?
17 Broken bit that’s solid under surface of soil (5)
SHARD – If you live in the Arctic, you might take the surface of S{oil} and find some HARD permafrost under it. Or a big building next to the HQ of The Times. Hoping to see lots of you there at the Championship Finals later this year!
18 New sort of book (5)
NOVEL – A very readable double definition to finish with.
And, thinking of another poem from the author referred to in 8a, that, said John, is that!

21 comments on “Times Quick Cryptic No 1079 by Izetti”

  1. I followed John’s advice on the long down anagrams; in fact, I never returned to 6d and just biffed from a couple of checkers, having forgotten what the clue was about. Not a good idea, but it worked this time. HARRIS took a while–I’d only read the book a year or so ago. SOH was my LOI; I’d forgotten about those other spellings. 6:31.

    Edited at 2018-04-27 07:56 am (UTC)

  2. Firstly, I think congratulations are in order as by my calculations this is Izetti’s 100th Quick Cryptic.

    I discovered this by chance as I was looking back through my records to see how many of his puzzles have taken me 8 minutes (my solving time for today) as I thought it was quite a rare occurrence, and whilst I was there I thought I’d work out my scores so far within my overall target of 10 minutes. Then I went to calculate the percentages and found I had a nice round total of 100 to work with, making the calculation unnecessary.

    Anyway, after all that, here are the figures Izetti vs Jackkt out of 100:

    1 x 6 minutes
    5 x 7
    12 x 8
    17 x 9
    6 x 10

    making a success rate for me of only 41%.

    Edited at 2018-04-27 04:38 am (UTC)

    1. Many thanks to alerting us to that. As shown by several of the comments below Izetti is rightly admired as a master of the QC by several solvers.. including me!

      Edited at 2018-04-27 01:23 pm (UTC)

  3. I thought this was one of Izetti’s gentler offerings to celebrate his century. I got going at a cracking rate and it was only Peseta which held me up towards the end with a 14:30 time. Thanks, Izetti, for many enjoyable puzzles.
  4. Held up today by unknown 13dn OPALINE and over thinking 1ac CARD which was my LOI. Otherwise enjoyable but steady solve. 14:59
  5. I hope Izetti is lifting his bat to the applause of the crowd (assuming that jackkt, our scorer and very own Bearded Wonder, has totted it up correctly of course). Well done and thanks!

    Lovely puzzle today, though PESETA took me an age to puzzle out. Still got within my target time given that Kevin was over 6 minutes today!

    I know it’s “only an anagram” but I thought the surface for 8ac was quite brilliant.

    Templar

      1. Also not worth bothering with is jackkt’s enduring rudeness to posters he doesn’t agree with, anonymous or not.
  8. I found this slightly on the tricky side and it took me 1:21 over my 10 minute target. My first pass yielded nothing until I got to PINT at 19a. The bottom half gradually filled up and I worked my way back north, CARD being my LOI. I also didn’t spend any time on the long anagrams until I had some checkers. Nice puzzle. Thanks and congrats to Izetti, and thanks to John for the blog.
  9. Pretty tough I thought. Enjoyed GOOD SAMARITAN. Excellent &lit. PESETA and DESIGNED (LOI) took ages to spot, especially as I was convinced for a long time that the latter was an anagram.
    PlayUpPompey
  10. Thanks, John, for explaining why DRONE was correct! Finished this pretty quickly for my usual Izetti times…but cocked up by having COUNTER (as in counting money) for dismiss for a while, making HARRIS impossible.
    Says summat about my solving skills that a year ago I’d have run a mile from Izetti. Thanks to all setters and — especially — bloggers for helping me improve 🙂
  11. Off to a flying start with OHMS for 1ac, or not as the case may be ! If I tell you that I thought 20 was part of the clue for 4d, (it didn’t help that Score fitted the crossers at the time), you can perhaps see what sort of a day this has been. Suffice to say that this was my slowest Izetti time for ages, with 13d Opaline my loi and in danger of being lapped. However, setting all that aside, my congratulations to Izetti for reaching today’s milestone – onwards and upwards. Invariant
  12. There is no nicer way to spend a Friday afternoon than with an Izetti puzzle, especially after a morning’s golf when the rain came mainly after we’d finished.
    This took me 28 minutes and was a grown-up challenge. FOI was 22a -top row in the paper. I had a couple of quite big doubts -String and Opaline-but the parsing led me there.
    My last two were 2d and 1a. I’d got Agent early but could not see the parsing until after a proper consideration of Not losing heart.Then LOI was Card -again I had it well before I parsed it.
    Thanks Izetti for all the pleasure you have brought us, including the instructive defeats. David
  13. Struggling to see why string is train, vacillated between string and strung for a while since neither seemed to have any connection, and finally decided it would be trained if strung. I also thought deed for performance was a very big stretch, and it took me while to see Queen as a playing card, although the second definition was so clear I put it in anyway. I did like 13d as one of those where the wordplay is so good that you can get the answer even if you don’t know the word.
    Paulw
  14. Another Izetti fan here, although 13d nearly put me off him a bit today!! It was my LOI went in with all digits crossed. I also had to trust the wordplay in 16 and 17a. So a good combination of straightforward and testing clues, which I completed in 17.43
    Thanks for the blog
  15. Time off the scale, must be first day at work syndrome.

    Struggled with card, designed, harris, pint, drone, cashier, and LOI opaline.

    COD pint.

  16. Struggling to see why string is train, vacillated between string and strung for a while since neither seemed to have any connection, and finally decided it would be trained if strung. I also thought deed for performance was a very big stretch, and it took me while to see Queen as a playing card, although the second definition was so clear I put it in anyway. I did like 13d as one of those where the wordplay is so good that you can get the answer even if you don’t know the word.
    Paulw

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