Guardian 24,003/Auracaria (sic) (Sat Feb 10) – G whizz
Posted by rightback on February 24th, 2007
Solving time: about 14 mins + a bit of guesswork on 1dn, which I got wrong.
The three starred clues, of which two were fairly straightforward despite being clued without definition, led to words or phrases that can be represented by the letter G; 15dn also contained a thematic reference.
A few clues have strange surface readings but many are very good, though a lot of clues contain superfluous words which are there purely to assist the surfaces. This is normal Guardian (and especially Araucarian) practice, but I particularly dislike ‘for’ stuck in the middle of the wordplay in 14ac and 25ac and the link phrase ‘having to do’ in 6dn.
* = anagram, ” ” = ‘sounds like’.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| *1/10 | ACCELERATION DUE TO GRAVITY; (LACE RE-)* in ACTION (suit) + DUET + O + GRAV(IT)Y – quite a good surface but a very complex wordplay; hats off to anyone who ‘cold solved’ this, especially given the liberal treatment of the hyphen in ‘re-worked’. |
| 8 | A + N(TON)OV – I saw ‘Russian plane’ and ‘speed’ and almost wrote in ‘migrate’ immediately. The Antonov An-225 is the world’s largest aircraft. |
| 9 | WORSTED (double definition) |
| *11/26 | GENERAL + INTELLIGENCE |
| *13 | GRAND[ad] |
| 14 | CIGARILLO; CI (Channel Islands) + GORILLA with A and O swapped |
| 16 | TENNESSEE; ‘inversion’ of “SE 10″, Greenwich’s post code – nearly fell for ‘Minnesota’ here, and took me a while after solving to fathom the wordplay. |
| 19 | COVER; C (100) + OVER (6 balls) – to make this wordplay work you have to split ’106′ into ‘a hundred and six’. |
| 23 | TO + PAL + OV[a]; “TOPPLE OFF” – a double wordplay clue. Veselin Topalov is currently rated world number one by FIDE, the World Chess Federation, just ahead of Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik. |
| 24 | NORWICH; rev. of WRON[g] + ICH (German for ‘I’) – the definition bemused me but Google came to my rescue: The man in the moon Came tumbling down And asked his way to Norwich; He went by the South And burned his mouth With supping cold pease porridge. |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | ACTINIA; AC + “TINEA” – one of these. I failed on this, guessing ‘actenia’ because of the possible connection to ‘ctene’, another sea creature; I knew ‘tinea’ could mean a moth but not a skin disease (of the ‘athlete’s foot’ variety). |
| 2 | CENTRED; inversion of RED CENT |
| 3 | LOVELOCKS; VELOC[ity] inside rev. of SKOL – I could make nothing of this clue until I had all the crossing letters. It turns out that ‘Mud in your eye’ is a toast, as is ‘Skol’. |
| 4 | ROWAN (double definition) – refers to Rowan Williams. |
| 5 | THROWER; ROW inside THE R[ight] |
| 7 | BAGGAGE TRAIN; (GAGA)* + GET inside BRAIN |
| 15 | GEE-STRING – ‘might be partly starred’ is a thematic reference because of the ‘gee’ (see introduction above). Took me a while to twig to this one. |
| 18 | ER + RHINE – ‘to do with sneezing’. |
| 19 | CAP STAN – a somewhat clichéd wordplay which I would happily forgive if the surface made any sense. |
| 20 | VULTURE; rev. of LUV + (TRUE)* |
| 22 | E(THY)L |
February 24th, 2007 at 11:51 am
14 minutes… wow. Took me about 45′ I think. Anyway, on Saturday he had 106 as (C, OVER) and Thursday 101 as (C, ONE) — I’m sure now that we’ve understood this he’ll switch to something else equally inventive.
February 25th, 2007 at 2:16 am
It’s Araucaria rather than Auracaria, chaps.
However, you are not the first to have made the error: a fairly recent Guardian crossword carried the header, ‘Set by Auracaria’.
‘Blimey! New setter?’, we all shouted.
February 25th, 2007 at 5:37 am
That’s why rightback added (sic).
February 25th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Interestingly this error has been corrected since I downloaded the puzzle little more than 24 hours ago. I wonder if someone at the Guardian website reads this blog?
February 25th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Bet they do – sorry I missed your ‘sic’.