A rare weekday appearance from Monk. Not sure I’ve ever blogged one of his puzzles before, but I have to say I found this pretty tricky. There were a lot of very well hidden definitions and a lot of lifting and separating of clues/wordplay required. I also found there was no real way to crack 1A and 27A until I had nearly all the combined checking letters to be able to piece together the anagram fodder. All very enjoyable stuff nevertheless, though I wouldn’t want one of these every day!
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | OPTIONAL EXTRA – (EXTRAPOLATION)* |
| 9 | EYELESS – [-dat]E + LES in YES |
| 10 | SUNDIAL – SUN + LAID back! |
| 11 | TRACT – R(epublican) in TACT |
| 13 | ELEVENSES – ELEVENS (sides) + ES (sides) |
| 14 | PARAMEDIC – (IDEA + CRAMP)* |
| 16 | IMSHI – 1 + M(inute) = SH (Mum) + I |
| 18 | TASTE – S(ingular) in TATE |
| 19 | MARDI GRAS – NOt sure on this. The definition is ‘Time for carnival’, and the wordplay (equipment to be dismantled in old indian city’) suggests RIG and MADRAS, but I can’t piece them together |
| 20 | TASMAN SEA – A S(mall) MAN in TEA |
| 23 | GONER – [-woma]N in GOER |
| 24 | MARVELL – L(iberal) in MARVEL |
| 25 | CHINESE – CH in ESE[-r(ight)] |
| 27 | EXTRAPOLATION – (OPTIONAL EXTRA)* |
| Down | |
| 1 | ONE STEP AT A TIME – (EASE TEMPTATION)* |
| 2 | THESAURUS – HE in TAURUS |
| 3 | OWE – Hidden reversal in thE WOods |
| 4 | AMSTERDAM – [-h]AMSTER + DAM |
| 5 | ENSUE – Anag. of fort[UNE-SE]eker |
| 6 | TENDERISING – TENDER + |
| 7 | ALIAS – A(rea) = SAIL rev. |
| 8 | PLASTIC SURGEON – (SPLIT CAS[-t])* + URGE + ON |
| 15 | CARPACCIO – CARP + C(aught) in [-sp]ACIO[-us] |
| 17 | SERENGETI – SERENE and GTI crossing |
| 21 | SPREE – PR(iest) in SEE |
| 22 | SALSA – Cryptic def |
| 26 | IDA – [-a]IDA |
I think in 13 ES are opponents in bridge, 19 is RIG* in MADRAS. Very tough and I had too lookup ishmi after I got in, cheers ALi and Monk.
Thanks Ali
In 19ac I assumed that the ‘equipment to be dismantled’ meant that RIG needed to be split into R and IG before the separate parts were inserted into MADRAS.
You appear to have omitted 12dn which is TEMPERAMENT – ERA MEN in TEMPT.
Hi flashling
19ac. If it was an anagram of RIG it would need to be inserted into MARDAS to get the answer! 😉
i liked a lot of this but some of it puzzled, no pun intended. “Paramedic” as one that helps bones seems a very loose definition and I would think that it should read ‘it IS assumed” in 7 down.Why ‘ising’ after ‘tender’ in 6 down? Is a ‘goner’ someone who’s asleep?
I found this fairly straightforward. 1a/27 came fairly quickly; getting the checking letters E T and A at the start of 27 was the lightbulb moment to think of ‘extrapolation’ and then with some checking letters in 1a the anagram was easily found. ‘Carpaccio’ held me up for a bit thinking ‘caught’ meant the name of a fish had to occur somewhere in the middle – no doubt a deliberate misdirection by Monk, but none the worse for that as that’s one of the attractions of cryptic crosswords.
I was actually doing the crossword today at time for 13a.
Indeed Gaufrid letter blindness this afternoon :-). @JP 6 is TEND + E(nlarged) + RISING
JP @4: In 6d the parsing is TEND (= mind) + E (head, first letter of ‘enlarged’) + RISING (= swelling).
Sorry, flashling, you beat me to it.
Hi JP @4
Bones, or sawbones, is a nickname for ‘doctor’ so the definition for PARAMEDIC becomes ‘[a person] that helps doctor’ which of course s/he does.
6dn is TEND (mind) E[nlarged] RISING (swelling)
I think it’s reasonably common to say “s/he’s gone” when someone falls asleep at a boring meeting, or whenever, and parents will say “s/he’s gone off” when a child falls asleep. In both cases the person would be a GONER.
Monk invariably has something extra in his puzzles and today’s FT is no exception. However I am struggling to find anything in this one other than that 27ac could be carried out 1dn and 8dn would be providing 1ac when carrying out a breast enhancement.
With 1ac and 27ac being anagrams the whole perimeter seems to be linked.
Thanks, Ali and Monk. I was rather lucky solving today as I found the linked answers at top and bottom almost straight away so it was a quicker solve of a Monk puzzle than usual. As always with Monk, there tend to be novel approaches eg CHINESE and it was all very entertaining and fair.
Thanks, Ali.
I got off to a flying start with this one, but soon came to a halt. I wasn’t too enamoured of the OPTIONAL EXTRA/EXTRAPOLATION clues, because you have no way of solving them independently except by guessing at the definitions. I liked the headless hamster in AMSTERDAM. Haven’t seen much of Monk in recent times, so it was good to grapple with one of his offerings today.
23A: alternatively, a GONER is one who is asleep. Permanently.
2D needs the ‘sign’ part included to make thesaurus!
Thought anagram at 1D was easy and that gave me a good start. Got extrapolation after spree – not that many 13 letter words beginning with e and meaning inference!
Took a while for the penny to drop with Chinese but enjoyed it when it did.
Thanks to Monk and Ali.
‘Asleep’ is a euphemism for ‘dead’ (popular on headstones).
In 2d of course you meant HE’S (not HE) in TAURUS.
Mr A W @15 “In 2d of course you meant HE’S (not HE) in TAURUS.” That’s what I meant but somehow failed to say correctly!
Thanks Monk for an enjoyable crossword and Ali for the blog.
I had 19ac the same way as Gaufrid @2. This seems a perfectly fair device to me.
10ac: We have to take “relaxed” = “laid back” and then turn the word “back” into a reversal indicator. I could only do this because we had recently had “Bored?” = “fed up” = DEF (in a down clue). I said at the time that I thought that was unfair, and here we do not even have the ? to help us. To my mind, crossword solving should be about deducing devices from the wording in the clue, not a series of conventions to be learned. End of moan.
We really enjoyed this one. Some original wordplay including ‘laid back” in 10ac. Brought a smile to our faces, just like “fed up” as mentioned @17. Similarly we thought 25ac was another good piece of clueing.
We look forward to a challenge on Thursdays. Mind you we also had Anax earlier this week which was a real but enjoyable struggle as well.
Thanks to Ali and Monk.
Thanks all for the pointers and apologies for the ommissons. I blogged this one in a hurry.
I’m not sure I like the RIG dismantled in MADRAS wordplay. For me, MADRAS has to be entirely contained for the word ‘in’ to make sense, and that initial R is sticking out like a sore thumb. Hey ho, horses for courses.
Thanks for the blog and comments. To Gaufrid @ #10, the Nina is merely the connected anagrams on the first and last row. i.e. nothing very inspired, I’m sorry to say!
Hi Monk
Thanks for dropping in and for confirming that I hadn’t missed something. I spent as long looking for the ‘extra’ as I did solving the puzzle but fortunately I have plenty of spare time.
12d doesn’t get a mention. I worked it out – temperament – as a synonym for character but had hoped to find an explanation here? Help please!