Azed 2120/more than one slut
Posted by ilancaron on January 27th, 2013
Harder than usual even for an Azed. I had to check the BRB for well over half of the answers. OK I’m lying. Closer to 80%. A couple of unsolved wordplays await within.
Across
1 SASTRUGI – (gt, russia)*. At first I resisted gt as an abbreviated but of course it’s quite common.
11 PE(WE)E – Pee and we in a single clue. Makes you want to go. N. American flycatcher.
12 PA,TRI(C)O – hedge-priest thus low churchman presumably. I suppose pa=father=pastor since I couldn’t find any evidence in the BRB that pa=abbrev(pastor).
13 SPRU([h]IKE)R – Australian haranguer thus barker. And if hike=hitch then ‘ike=’itch.
14 CON,DO – US apartment (owned not rented)
15 S(TAT)E[a] – public welfare. The main is the sea.
16 EN TOUT CAS – (a net cou[r]t’s)*. In any event, you can play on this surface.
18 LIKELY – promising. I was sure I had worked the wordplay out when I solved this clue but I can’t find any notes and I can’t remember. “Promising flower? Reckon without ma cutting it”
20 TRULLS – prostitutes. (slut, l, r)* so anagram &lit. Plural is required since there’s a slut both to the left and the right of you.
22 ADI(PI)C – PI=[private] eye in acid*
24 PAR(AD)E
25 PE(NEPLAI)N – almost a plain. nepali* in PEN=W. Indian plantation.
27 UREIC – related to urine. Wordplay is i,cure=eliminate with ic and ure switching places. So not an indirect anagram which is what I thought at first. Lesson learned: always trust Azed.
29 RISHI – Wise man found in an ashram presumably. Comp. anag. (man’s a RISHI)*=(is in ashram)
30 DICROTIC – double-time pulse. (c[h]i[l]d [n]o[t] i[n] c[a]r[e], t)*
31 S(TR)IDES – TR=abbrev(Turkey). Sides=directions.
32 BREDE – hidden. Old spelling of braid.
33 ASTHORES – (a[u[thoress)*. Darlings=sweeties. Incidentally, anagram fodder also yields harosets (sweet foods served at Passover) which is what I had at first.
Down
1 SP(ECUL)A - rev(luce=pike) in spa. And it’s a mirror (those circular ones an inch in diameter on the end of a metal rod that dentists like putting in your mouth.
2 AEROSID,ERI(T)E - iron meteorite. Roadies* with Erie=lake.
3 SWANSKIN - replace i=one with wan=pale in siskin=Eurasian finch for fine, soft fabric.
4 TEADE - a torch so a hidden &lit.
5 [p]UPP(IT)Y
6 GAR[field],ROT – kind of duck. Ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_Sobers. Didn’t realize that was his real name, I had always heard him referred to as Gary.
7 C(RITT)UR – critter=creature=animal. Cur=animal. Ritt=scratch (Scots). “Just below head” is a cryptic instruction to insert RITT right after the C of cur.
8 PIK,A – rev(kip=lodging-house) and it’s a tailless hare thus “scut-free”.
9 ACETALDEHYDE – (Deadly Hecate)*
10 M,O,RES
17 C(LASSIE)R – cr=carriage return (who can forget crlf?)
19 EP,E,IRID – spider. Irid=plant of iris family (with ”showy” flowers).
21 SEM(IT)E,S – phoenicians. Seme=scattered, S=sons and IT=Italian.
23 CLOTES – hidden. Burrs.
24 PAPIST – Latin I suppose. And T=tense. But don’t see how this works: “Latin tense brought printer’s muddle”.
25 PUD,S[all]Y – pudgy. Pud=pudding=sweet.
26 NIT,RO – rev(or=gold, tin)
28 ECRU – (ruc[h]e)*. Unbleached linen.
January 27th, 2013 at 12:34 am
Thanks for the blog, Ilan. 18a is MAKE less MA in LILY, and 24d PI in PAST (tense), with definition “Latin”. Also 12a is P + C in A TRIO: Chambers gives P = Pastor.
January 27th, 2013 at 12:56 am
Very much at the harder end of the Azed spectrum but that’s not a complaint. Failed to see TEADE which is possibly the best hidden I’ve seen. Also SEMITES as I always think of Libya when Phoenicians are mentioned, thank you Mr Kemp. I’d put money on Azed having a quiet giggle at the two anagram possibilities for 33.
January 27th, 2013 at 7:57 am
Thanks Azed for the puzzle and ilancaron for the blog. I filled the gaps the same way as Andrew @1.
Since I started reading comments about puzzle difficulty on this site, I have been noting my solving times, and for me this was at the lower end of the range. Maybe I was just lucky.
1dn: Of course, SPECULA is a plural word, hence the definition “we reflect”.
January 27th, 2013 at 10:46 am
Thanks all
Just to complete the difficulty spectrum, I jotted ‘average difficulty’ on my copy when I finished.
I did have a major quick entry through ‘acetaldehyde’ and last in was ‘strides’.
Although I did sort them out I had some problems parsing 1ac and 27ac.
Does anyone else share a problem which I often have with Azed?
The spaces between words (and possibly letters rn/m) is very small and sometimes confuses me.
January 27th, 2013 at 11:57 am
RCW@4: I too occasionally have problems with the rn/m thing.
January 27th, 2013 at 1:29 pm
RCW and Pelham
It happens to rne too.
January 27th, 2013 at 7:16 pm
Let us hope the typesetters are reading this!
January 27th, 2013 at 11:03 pm
Thanks for the blog. Found this fairly hard.
1a I thought this was a comp. anag.: You’ll find such icy ridges [=SASTRUGI] are [+ARE] all over the place in [are an anagram of] GREAT RUSSIA. So no need to worry about abbreviating “great”.
13a I agree on the parsing and quite like this clue, but I can’t remember Azed doing this before with itch standing for hitch etc. Normally he’d have something in the clue to indicate that hs were being dropped (e.g. an apostrophe). I’d have thought the approach here counted as “libertarian”. At first I assumed “ike” was an obscure synonym for “itch” or that Eisenhowere had two nicknames.
January 28th, 2013 at 11:52 am
Thomas,I wasn’t aware of the alternative but I used your version too.
January 28th, 2013 at 1:29 pm
Thomas99 @8 re 13ac: There is an apostrophe in the pdf but not the Java version online (or it least that was the case when I looked just now). I agree the apostrophe is needed by Azed’s normal rules.
January 28th, 2013 at 1:30 pm
Correction to 10: “at least” not “it least”.
January 28th, 2013 at 2:29 pm
@Pelham Barton -
You’re right about the two versions of 13a – they’re still different. It’s rather odd. I must say the java version, without the apostrophe, makes a better surface (“Aussie barker purrs weirdly about itch” – I imagined a dog with a skin complaint). With the apostrophe I’m not sure what’s going on in the surface – a ‘spruiker’ (oddly) happy that something’s gone wrong, maybe?
January 28th, 2013 at 2:37 pm
PS. My parsing of 1a @8 has a small error in it – SASTRUGI ARE is (not are) an anagram of GREAT RUSSIA. Sorry about that; hope it was still clear what I meant – presumably it was because I’d just written “are”. I thought it was a very smooth comp. anag. – &lit. too, perhaps?