| Welcome to my very first Times for the Times blog! I’m a great fan of the quickie and I’m delighted to have been invited to join the blogging team. Today’s is a fine example of the art from Teazel – a good mixture of straightfoward clues to get you going and some trickier ones that need some working out and some nice surfaces. Oh, in case you don’t know that term, the “surface” is how the clue reads as a sentence. This one took me rather longer than usual, but maybe I wasn’t very awake. It does seem at the harder end of the spectrum. What do you think? A big thumbs up to our setter; I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did.
Definitions are underlined in bold italics, {deletions are in curly brackets} and [anagrinds, containment, reversal and other indicators in square ones]. |
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Across |
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| 1 | Bid went wrong for retirement place (4,3) |
| TWIN BED – Anagram of [wrong] BID WENT. I could have got up from one of these this morning, but I retired to a double bed last night. | |
| 5 | It hurts, removing penny from sporran (4) |
| OUCH – What you might say if you hit your thumb with a hammer. Made by removing P for penny from {P}OUCH. A sporran is what you wear in front of a kilt, which has no pockets, to hold your pennies. | |
| 7 | Start working with television (5) |
| ONSET – A straight-forward construction clue : ON (working) + (with) SET (television). | |
| 8 | Ravenous, but sending back cheap seafood (7) |
| WOLFISH – At first I thought seafood might be the definition, but it’s not. It is [sending back] LOW (cheap) + FISH (seafood), leaving you very hungry. | |
| 10 | Turning, confer name on rudimentary shoot (3) |
| BUD – When I am knighted, I will be dubbed Sir John by the queen. Hmm. Pigs might fly. You take DUB (confer name) and reverse it [Turning] to get BUD (rudimentary shoot). | |
| 11 | Advert for disastrous loan (9) |
| OVERDRAFT – Anagram [disasterous] of ADVERT FOR giving you a sort of loan. | |
| 13 | Cooked, the ray is gross (6) |
| EARTHY – Another anagram [Cooked] of THE RAY. Not ‘hearty’ which i initially put in. Earthy being “direct and uninhibited, especially about sexual subjects or bodily functions“, which is gross. | |
| 14 | Fisherman’s view beside river (6) |
| ANGLER – This is ANGLE (view) + R (river). Very simple, but very neat clue. | |
| 17 | Fanciful scheme for the Tube? (4,5) |
| PIPE DREAM – What your imagination might conjure up as you smoked your PIPE (tube). | |
| 19 | Weaken juice (3) |
| SAP – Double Definition. As short as you can get for a clue of this type! | |
| 20 | Feature of high peak, perhaps, into which one may vanish (4,3) |
| THIN AIR – Another double definition. As you go up a high mountain, the air becomes thin. And if you are a skilled at 24a you might wave your wand and, *puff*, vanish into THIN AIR. | |
| 22 | Wild animal beginning to growl in row (5) |
| TIGER – You take the [beginning to] G{rowl} and put it in TIER (row) to get a big stripy cat. | |
| 23 | Period without power, we hear (4) |
| WEEK – Sounds like [we hear] weak (without power). You’ll find me blogging the quickie every 2 of these. | |
| 24 | Repentant, involving church in witchcraft (7) |
| SORCERY – Another containment clue. SORRY (Repentant) including [involving] CE (church) to get the means of vanishing into thin air (q.v.). | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Pours bottle out in dangerous place (7,4) |
| TROUBLE SPOT – Anagram (out) of POURS BOTTLE gives somewhere dangerous to be. | |
| 2 | Illegal trader in alcoholic drink spoken of (7) |
| INSIDER – Someone who illegally uses information they should have to make money on a deal. IN + SIDER, sounds like [spoken of] cider. Not a favourite tipple of mine. | |
| 3 | Madly bothered about time, being engaged (9) |
| BETROTHED – Anagram of [Madly] BOTHERED including [about] T for time. A rather old-fashioned way of referring to one’s intended partner. | |
| 4 | Daughter had swallowed (6) |
| DOWNED – D (Daughter) + OWNED (had). What I did with my beer last night. | |
| 5 | Wise type, or headless chicken? (3) |
| OWL – Something wise is nearly always OWL in crosswordland. The [headless] chicken is {F}OWL. | |
| 6 | At home, passing tea round — in this? (5) |
| CHINA – At home, IN with CHA (tea) outside [passing around]. The sort of cup you might drink the aforementioned tea from. | |
| 9 | Very successful person’s overheated house (3,8) |
| HOT PROPERTY – If you are an agent you might have a successful client who is this. Built from HOT (overheated) + PROPERTY (house). | |
| 12 | Explosives expert tried somehow to hold a lot up (9) |
| DYNAMITER – A bit of a tricky one. You take an anagram [somehow] of TRIED and include [hold] MANY (a lot) going upwards [up], and *boom* you get someone who might blow the place up. | |
| 15 | Dip into narrow street for Italian food (7) |
| LASAGNE – Another word inside another clue. This is SAG (dip) inside [into] LANE (narrow street), to get one of my family’s favourite italian dishes. Yum. | |
| 16 | Porcelain is useful when it turns up (6) |
| SEVRES – My last one in. You need to know your 6d for this. SERVES (is useful) when reversed [it turns up]. “Porcelain ware manufactured at Sèvres, near Paris, from 1756, characterized by the use of clear colours and elaborate decorative detail“ | |
| 18 | Quiet journey gives deeply satisfying feeling (5) |
| PRIDE – P (quiet), from the musical marking, + RIDE (journey). You can justly have this satisfying feeling if you manage to complete this crossword. | |
| 21 | Bird from Milwaukee (3) |
| AUK – A hidden word to finish with {Milw}AUK{ee}. “An auk or alcid is a bird of the family Alcidae in the order Charadriiformes. The alcid family includes the murres, guillemots, auklets, puffins, and murrelets. Apart from the extinct great auk, all auks are notable for their ability to “fly” under water as well as in the air.” Well I never knew that. We do crosswords and learn! | |
Your blog was fine until the last entry AUK – which was rather over-done but as you say there is little we don’t now know about the AUK!
John, I do hope there is a forthcoming exam on AUKS – we’ll all pass with flying colours!
9.49 for 919!
COD 16dn SEVRES my last one in too, as with most others I would guess.
WOD 21dn………….!
I found that at the easier end (done well before London Bridge) but very enjoyable. My COD was SORCERY, just for the ingenuity of Teazel in seeing the “sorry” in there.
Was not convinced by “ravenous” as a definition for WOLFISH (my LOI) but no doubt a dictionary will prove me wrong.
Templar
I needed 12 minutes (2 over my target 10) for this one because SEVRES did not spring readily to mind and I had a complete brain-freeze at 23ac, my LOI, where I needed an alphabet trawl to fill in the gaps in ?E?K. Because it turned out I was looking for a W as the first letter I had to think through many other posibilities before arriving at the correct answer.
DYNAMITER doesn’t sound like a real word to me but although it has never come up in a Times puzzle before (at least in my time), it’s in all the traditional sources.
Edited at 2017-09-15 08:19 am (UTC)
Didn’t get sevres.
Excuse noisy kids.
COD downed
This particular puzzle, my time of 11:18 is not going to win any prizes, as I found parts of it not immediately obvious. There was not any particular thing that gave difficulty, I just had to think a little more in general, so it was more like a 15 x 15 than a Quickie.
Many thanks to those who tipped off that the 15×15 was accesable on Wednesday, finished in 54 mins. More tip-offs please. Surprised to see several other QC bloggers there.
I had no cursor problems with paper and biro.
Fiendishly difficult Futoshiki this morning for those that also like to exercise their non-literary brain cells. 48 mins stands as my record for QC, Suko, easiest Sudoko and Brain Trainer, Cell Blocks, Set Square, KenKen and Futoshiki, give them a go, you only need to be able to count up to 9 and multiply single digit numbers.
Edited at 2017-09-15 06:17 pm (UTC)
The question I have is would I get any more pleasure in finishing it in 10 minutes.? The fun comes from working it out; to do it in ten minutes you must write in a lot of answers almost automatically and so are left with fewer to tease out.
It’s a bit like golf: where’s the fun in going round in 60 when you can have twice the experience in 120?
I thought today’s puzzle had some difficulties but the clueing was clear. Wolfish held me up a bit but I progressed steadily until three were left in the SW. I got Week and Thin Air with a second look which left me with 16d. I had previously inserted an unparsed Delphs because it had Helps in it. It did not feel right. Reading the clue very carefully led me to Serves and the answer. So LOI and COD to 16d. About 20 minutes. David
LOI SEVRES. Coming from Stoke-on-Trent, I was expeting to get this. However, I don’t think any outside types of porcelain are allowed into Stoke…and certainly not anything from France.
Nice blog indeed, and welcome to the team. I like the fact that you admit to a few misleads, good to know that even the experts take a wrong turn now and again…as I did with ‘detonator’ for DYNAMITER, at least mine was a real clue.
I’m glad I pulled the plug at 20 min with SERVES still open. I would never have go that one.
Poor show to end the week on a DNF, esp after my first ever 15×15 on wed.
It’d be nice if you added a name or nickname when you post so that we can differentiate between the various anons. Or you could open a free Live Journal account and have your own user ID complete with a picture.
Edited at 2017-09-15 11:03 pm (UTC)
12 minutes dead here, and it did feel quite tough to me. I think most of the last two minutes were spent on the unknown SEVRES, which was the reason I hit “submit” with crossed fingers. Mind you, I was slow on the anagrams, too, from FOI 1a onwards. I do the 15×15 on paper, but I’ve been trying to do the QC on the computer and without scrawling the anagrams out. It’s tough…
I got through this fairly quickly but ended up with a DNF as 16d was completely beyond me. Despite that I thought that this was an enjoyable puzzle to end the week.