It seems that Eccles is becoming an increasingly regular setter on Fifteensquared, filling in many of the Wednesday slots that used to be occupied by Dac. Which is appropriate, for he is a good setter, not the hardest, but always challenging enough and pleasant to solve.
Definitions underlined, in maroon. Anagram indicators in italics.
I’m becoming tired of saying that I can’t see a Nina but perhaps someone can. Maybe Eccles follows the Dac way of not having a Nina.
| Across | ||
| 1 | SUPPLER | More flexible service provider one is wanting (7) |
| suppl(1)er | ||
| 5 | TAOISM | Communist swapping sides for religious belief (6) |
| The communist is a Maoist and the first and last letters of that word are swapped | ||
| 8 | AFOOT | Happening to be 12 inches (5) |
| a foot — 12 inches = 1 foot | ||
| 9 | PINNACLE | Plan nice rambles to get to summit (8) |
| (Plan nice)* | ||
| 11 | IGUANODON | Dinosaur poo collected by international academic (9) |
| I (guano) don — guano is the poo of seabirds and bats | ||
| 12 | DWELL | With head of orchestra absent, successfully perform live (5) |
| d{o} well, the o being o{rchestra} | ||
| 13 | GREW | Some meagre wages increased (4) |
| Hidden in meaGRE Wages | ||
| 14 | CAFFEINE | Roughly forces a German to provide stimulant (8) |
| ca. F F eine — on I think the postings after a blog of a recent Azed there was a discussion about abbreviations; when did you ever come across anyone abbreviating force to F? (In maths, or at any rate the maths that I did once, it’s P). Yet it’s in Chambers and Collins. | ||
| 18 | ROSARIUM | Parks with strange island inside flower garden (8) |
| Rosa [Parks] r(i)um | ||
| 19 | ASIA | Warship oddly ignored a land mass (4) |
| {W}a{r}s{h}i{p} a | ||
| 22 | AWARD | One’s compensation from embarrassing week away (5) |
| a{wk}ward | ||
| 24 | SYMBOLISM | Extremely silly management buyout is getting between 50 and 1000 to form movement (9) |
| s{ill}y MBO l(is)M — I couldn’t see why symbolism = movement, but Collins reminds me (tells me?) that it’s a 19th-century movement in art. Sort of knew that as a result of Flanders and Swann: ‘Symboliste, almost Surrealiste, imagery’ when talking of a poem by Gerard de Nerval. | ||
| 25 | DOUGHNUT | Scotsman’s desperate hunt for fried confectionery (8) |
| Doug (hunt)* — I hadn’t realised that Douglas was a Scottish name but I suppose it is. That excellent list of first names in Chambers, which they have unaccountably dropped from their latest editiions, says that it is originally Scottish. Good surface here, putting one in mind of fried Mars Bars, an apparently Scottish delicacy. | ||
| 26 | SPEAR | Pointedly catch fish, as per usual? No (5) |
| (as per)* — pointedly catch: ie as with a spear | ||
| 27 | ATTLEE | Former Prime Minister perhaps steers European leader to expel Conservative (6) |
| {c}attle E{uropean} | ||
| 28 | CAREFUL | About 5 people in a Mini conserving energy to be prudent (7) |
| car(e)ful — about five people in a Mini is a carful | ||
| Down | ||
| 1 | SHAVING CREAM | Eating small paste sandwiches? It helps not to have whiskers (7,5) |
| s (having) cream — I have two slight doubts here: paste = cream seems a bit odd, but OK I suppose, and why does it help not to have whiskers? [As Simon S @1 points out, it’s to be read as ‘It helps you to have no whiskers’] | ||
| 2 | PROCURESS | Madam, are you back on the phone during operation? (9) |
| (R U)rev. in process | ||
| 3 | LATENT | Passed on religious books in secret (6) |
| late NT | ||
| 4 | RAPIDS | Breaks into houses quietly in rough area (6) |
| ra(p)ids — a rough area of water — raids = breaks into, and houses is a verb | ||
| 5 | TENON SAW | On reflection, why fishing expedition failed in cutter (5,3) |
| (was no net)rev. — the fishing expedition failed because there was no net | ||
| 6 | ON AND OFF | Oscar gets grandma to tip intermittently (2,3,3) |
| O Nan doff | ||
| 7 | SOLVE | Loves bum crack (5) |
| (Loves)* | ||
| 10 | FLEET ADMIRAL | Altered a film about American officer (5,7) |
| (Altered a film)* | ||
| 15 | IN SPITE OF | Notwithstanding opponent’s pieces of advice, National Insurance put up (2,5,2) |
| (foe tips NI)rev. | ||
| 16 | PRODIGAL | Wasteful professional, like Vice President Gore (8) |
| pro dig [= like] Al [as in Al Gore] | ||
| 17 | NUISANCE | Nun is ace criminal in drag (8) |
| (Nun is ace)* | ||
| 20 | EMETIC | Refer to my work being rejected, causing vomiting (6) |
| (cite me)rev. — I suppose me = my work as in “that’s me”/”that’s my work” when for example an anonymous newspaper article is pointed out to someone who happens to be the author — there’s probably a much more obvious equivalence | ||
| 21 | MOUSER | Cat, perhaps – one with a particular way of working? (6) |
| I don’t really understand this: MO = modus operandi, way of working, and user = one with a particular way of working, but how it hangs together I can’t see — perhaps an MO-user is one who uses a particular MO | ||
| 23 | ABORT | Arrest Republican being protected by a fake Twitter user? (5) |
| a bo(R)t — the bot here is a malicious one I think | ||
*anagram
Thanks Eccles and John
Force = F: how about the RAF?
Shaving cream smoothes the process, so it assists you in removing your whiskers, after which you don’t have them.
One of the things talked about was the use of abbreviations like this. The F in RAF obviously stands here for ‘Force’, but for F to be a proper abbreviation of ‘force’ it should be able to stand alone, as does s for ‘small’; otherwise we would have to allow a whole lot of rather silly abbreviations: i for ‘id’ because of ‘id est’, or s for ‘service’ because of SAS.
As for the whiskers I failed to read it as the clue demanded: he was saying in effect ‘It helps you to not have whiskers’. Thanks. Blog about to be amended.
Don’t know what maths you did but, for example, Newton’s law was always F = ma (strictly speaking, it is the rate of change of momentum).
For 20d, I read it as simply saying “cite me” means “refer to my work”.
I parsed 21d as you did. Didn’t really bother me and agree with Simon on 1d.
Thanks to Eccles and John.
An interesting point about the F in RAF – it is as John says a recognised abbreviation for Force
A nice entertaining Wednesday puzzle – thank you to Eccles and John
Further to Hovis @2, both Collins online and Oxford online have ‘f’ for force under the sub-heading Physics.
John, re 25a, the current Chambers 13th edition does still have the list of first names.
They’re very different clues, but that’s two Independent bum cracks in one week! (The other was from Morph on Thursday.)
Thanks to Eccles and John.
I’m so cheap that I haven’t bought the latest edition of Chambers, which is on my phone; it costs far less and seems to do all that’s required; except give the list of names. And you can’t get anagrams from the paper version; or do things such as d?g — my phone gives 8 matches. The only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be an indication of what edition of Chambers it is.
Ah, I presumed you meant the trad red hard copy. I don’t have a basic mobile, let alone a smartphone! (I’m not entirely comfortable with colour television either. 😉 )
We had no problems with F = force as in Newtonian mechanics (incidentally in Collins it’s a lower case letter, in Chambers upper case italic).
We struggled a bit, though, with 18ac until we realised the significance of ‘Parks’, and we couldn’t parse AWARD as we only saw ‘week’ as ‘w’ instead of ‘wk’. And we were misled for a while in 11ac, failing to separate ‘dinosaur poo’ and trying to remember the technical term for it (it’s ‘coprolite’, btw)
A lot to like, such as CAFFEINE, ROSARIUM, DOUGHNUT and ATTLEE.
Thanks, Eccles and John.
John @ 2
I take your point re abbreviations being standalone, but would make a counter-offer of S = SOCIETY. It’s supported by Chambers, and possibly others, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it on its own, only in combination with other letters as the abbreviation for an organisation.
I’m not trying to be picky, I’m genuinely curious as to how some apparently anomalous abbreviations are accepted while others aren’t.
Great puzzle, thanks Eccles. what a great day for puzzles. This and Julius/Knut and Arachne. Only problem is I should really be working on mine.
25a is brilliant. A perfect, smooth, short and funny clue.
Many thanks Eccles and thanks John
Never thought of Mrs Parks so that made the parsing of 18a somewhat difficult. My other queries have already been dealt with by other commenters.
I’m afraid I don’t care for clues like 7d – just me, I suppose!
My favourite was MOUSER.
Thanks to Eccles, nice to see you being so prolific, and to John for the blog.
The Indy seems to be the most permissive of the national newspaper crosswords, but Jane, for what it’s worth, I think SOLVE does overstep the mark, while still being a very good clue, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. I know setters like to amuse themselves and each other by concocting clues much more explicit than that in private, which can be a lot of fun, but I wouldn’t want to see them in The Times.
Cheers John, and everyone who commented. Sorry if 7d crossed the line – i think in my head i was equating it with builder’s bum, so it was just meant to be just a bit erm, cheeky.
I agree that some abbreviations esp in Chambers are a bit difficult to understand the origins of (s=sun?), although as Hovis and Nila Palin say, I think F=force is standard in physics. It was only when i spoke to some casual solvers who said they didn’t understand how you could randomly just use the first letters of some words that i realised that a lot of people don’t know that the dictionary is the (main) arbiter of such things, and as such it must seem random for the more obscure abbreviations. I have been fairly carefree with unusual ‘direct’ abbreviations (s=stokes was discussed on my last puzzle) but try to limit indirect ones to the obvious. (I dislike men = OR, for example – how would someone work that out without being told?). Maybe i need to tweak my abbreviation tolerance.
Coming late to this as I’ve been out (and it turned out I was too tired to actually finish this), but when I was doing my A-levels in the late sixties, I was doing both maths and physics. In applied maths, P=mf for force equals mass times acceleration, but in physics it was F=ma. (And we were still using Imperial units in maths. To this day, I still remember that 60 mph is 88 feet per second.)
And ‘f’ in maths is also function, confirmed in dictionaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics)
Eccles @13, no apology necessary because the clue isn’t offensive, just a subjective matter of taste. Pretty sure I’m in a minority on this one, and will also rate other borderline clues that others find tasteless.
Thanks for dropping in Eccles. I think you’ve been given a hard time over the bum crack clue — there are a few setters on this site who often do this sort of thing and it always seems to raise merely an affectionate smile. And Azed, of all people, once had a clue involving a dildo, and nobody batted an eyelid.
I think most abbreviations can be justified somehow: Isn’t s a standard abbreviation for sun in those printed weather forecasts when you see something like s: 5 hours? But if you go down the route of allowing abbreviations because they stand for one word in a compound abbreviation, the sky’s the limit. Things like m = majesty (HM).