We enjoyed this offering from Crosophile today.
As we said on Thursday, for a crossword to be enjoyable it has to raise some smiles, have some smooth surfaces and is even better when there is some ingenious clueing. Our only niggle with this puzzle is that in certain cases, redundant additional word(s) have been included in the wordplay to improve the surface reading – e.g. ‘stacked’ in 4ac, and (we first thought) the reference to ‘X-Factor’ in 26ac. We were very unsure of our initial parsing of 26ac, but a ‘little bird’ thankfully gave us some help before the blog was posted – the parsing is corrected below.
There was a (rather obscure – at least to us) theme to the last Crosophile puzzle we blogged – if there’s a theme today, we’ve missed it again! The only thing we did notice was that the phonetic alphabet was used six times in wordplay to identify single letters, but could that count as a theme?
Once again, we will have no internet access for the rest of the day. We hope that between you all, any errors or omissions can be sorted out.
| Across | ||
| 1 | Full-length uniform gets caught in fan (5) | |
| UNCUT | U (uniform, in the phonetic alphabet) + C (caught) in NUT (fan) | |
| 4 | Salesman has top drawer stacked by piece of furniture that’s upright (9) | |
| REPUTABLE | REP (salesman) U (‘top drawer’) TABLE (piece of furniture) | |
| 9 | Issues Don’s seen with flipping Poles making insinuations (9) | |
| INNUENDOS | Interesting one – in ‘issues don’ the ‘s’s are changed to ‘N’s and the ‘n’ is changed to ‘S’ (‘flipping’ north and south ‘poles’) to create INNUENDOS | |
| 10 | Echo after blowback of gassy hot air (5) | |
| BILGE | E (echo, in the phonetic alphabet) after GLIB (gassy) reversed or ‘blown back’ | |
| 11 | Go and make a speech about training (7) | |
| OPERATE | ORATE (make a speech) around PE (‘training’) | |
| 12 | Secretary to inform adult it provides joint protection (7) | |
| PATELLA | PA (personal assistant – secretary) TELL (inform) A (adult) | |
| 13 | A monster‘s head that is attached to rear (6) | |
| NESSIE | NESS (head, as in headland) IE (that is) | |
| 15 | Constant unmarried mother right to go for Virginia (8) | |
| UNVARIED | UN |
|
| 18 | Only men have this Republican stance? (8) | |
| PROSTATE | A Republican stance could be said to be PRO STATE | |
| 19 | Whiffs of fried garlic left out before start of supper (6) | |
| CIGARS | An anagram of GAR |
|
| 22 | A medium‘s sob, in grip of endless malice (7) | |
| ACRYLIC | CRY (sob) ‘in the grip of’ |
|
| 24 | Unsafe plant when avoiding whisky prohibition, ending in violence (7) | |
| HENBANE | ||
| 26 | Top celebs, one doing well in ‘X Factor’ if given a hand? (1-4) | |
| A-LIST | ||
| 27 | Chaps engaged in a welcome understanding (9) | |
| AGREEMENT | MEN (chaps) in A GREET (welcome) | |
| 28 | Acne on forehead? Exciting times! (4,5) | |
| HIGH SPOTS | Acne (SPOTS) on the forehead could be described as being HIGH, as they presumably could be no higher on the body | |
| 29 | Time to run fast or dash (5) | |
| TRACE | T (time) RACE (run fast) | |
| Down | ||
| 1 | It’s fantastic Charlie and Romeo entered into marriage (7) | |
| UNICORN | C and R (Charlie and Romeo in the phonetic alphabet) ‘entered’ separately into UNION (marriage) | |
| 2 | Nothing’s caught by rod in boat (5) | |
| CANOE | O (nothing) in or ‘caught by’ CANE (rod) | |
| 3 | Boss of train robbery takes the blame – one offers treatment (9) | |
| THERAPIST | T (first letter or ‘boss’ (as in ‘leader?’) of ‘train’) HEIST (robbery) round or ‘taking’ RAP (blame) | |
| 4 | Some believe it parted and dried up preposterously (3,3) | |
| RED SEA | SEARED (dried up) with the first three letters moved to the rear (‘preposterously’) – we were puzzled by this until we checked in Chambers to find that a rare meaning of ‘preposterous’ is ‘literally inverted, having or putting the last first’ | |
| 5 | Put off by letters Gothic author’s written about chief of night-gaunts (8) | |
| POSTPONE | POST (letters) POE (Edgar Allan Poe – ‘Gothic author’) round N (first letter or ‘chief’ of ‘night-gaunts’) | |
| 6 | Contemptible person has to remain inside autonomous region (5) | |
| TIBET | TIT (contemptible person) with BE (remain) inside | |
| 7 | On the way up a dog enthusiast overheard musical instrument (9) | |
| BALALAIKA | A LAB (Labrador – dog) reversed or ‘on the way up’ + a homophone (‘overheard’) of LIKER (enthusiast) | |
| 8 | Stone me! Gerald’s floating around with no gravity (7) | |
| EMERALD | An anagram of ME |
|
| 14 | Ascot’s not limited to spurring and whipping (9) | |
| SCOURGING | ||
| 16 | Golf (new) parked amongst scrap metal in siding (9) | |
| ALIGNMENT | G (golf in the phonetic alphabet) N (new) in or ‘parked amongst’ an anagram of METAL IN – anagrind is ‘scrap’ | |
| 17 | Notes not making the connection, as a moggy seeing its reflection in well (8) | |
| STACCATO | CAT (moggy) written backwards and forwards or ‘reflected’ in SO (well) | |
| 18 | A cheer goes up – dance around and around for the old king … (7) | |
| PHARAOH | A RAH (cheer) reversed or ‘going up’ with HOP (dance) around and reversed (around) | |
| 20 | … A new order of respect for royal authority (7) | |
| SPECTRE | An anagram of RESPECT – anagrind is ‘a new order’ | |
| 21 | Sun listens to financial swindlers (6) | |
| SHARKS | S (sun) HARKS (listens to) | |
| 23 | Flower head of umbels seen in profusion (5) | |
| LOTUS | U (first letter or ‘head’ of ‘umbels’) in LOTS (profusion) | |
| 25 | The Gunners short of seconds and losing the final in the stadium (5) | |
| ARENA | AR |
|
Thanks Bert and Joyce, and to Crosophile for an enjoyable solve.
Did you mean to put SPECTRE for 20d? We had SCEPTRE!
I wonder if there’s a comic book theme here…
Hi Petresy @1
B&J are away at the moment but I can confirm that they must have had a senior moment when writing up the solution to 20dn, the entry is indeed SCEPTRE, an anagram of ‘respect’.
Re your comment @2. I cannot see a comic book theme, but then again I was not allowed to read comics as a child (other than more serious ones, which were more periodicals than comics). If you would like to expand on your suggestion perhaps all will become clear.
Very good Petresy. Some of us learned to read with the Tintin books.
Thanks, BertandJoyce. And well spotted, Petresy and Cornick.
Those Tintin books in full:
CIGARS of the PHARAOH
the secret of the UNICORN
the RED SEA SHARKS
tintin in TIBET
the castafiore EMERALD
king ottakar’s SCEPTRE
the blue LOTUS
[I used to regularly dream long made up Tintin stories when I was younger – that’s probably not normal, is it? 🙂 ]