Hard-but-fair for a Tuesday.
First blog under the new grid-less regime and I found it hard going though I could just be suffering from 21. A new abbreviation for the old quiver and a couple of parses I’m not absolutely sure of; all comments welcome. Thanks to Jason for the test, enjoyed it (eventually).
| Across | ||
| 1 | DECISION | Judgment finds CO inside in error (8) |
| Anagram (‘in error’) of CO INSIDE. | ||
| 5 | SWATCH | Small survey sample (6) |
| S[mall] + WATCH (‘survey’). | ||
| 10 | DIOCESE | See one cracking obscure codes with eccentricity (7) |
| 1 in anagram (‘obscure’) of CODES then E (in maths, ‘the eccentricity of a conic section’: new one on me). | ||
| 11 | HUNGARY | Country commonly said to be empty (7) |
| Homophone: ‘Ungery’ might be an illiterate or ‘common’ pronunciation of ‘hungry’ = ’empty’. | ||
| 12 | CHARD | Grill German veggie (5) |
| CHAR (to ‘grill’) + D[eutsch], German. | ||
| 13 | MISBEHAVE | Carry On Monsieur is live experience (9) |
| M[onsieur] + BE (to ‘live’) + HAVE (to ‘experience’ as in ‘have a good time’). | ||
| 14 | PRIDE OF PLACE | Force applied differently in pole position, say (5,2,5) |
| Anagram (‘differently’) of FORCE APPLIED. | ||
| 18 | POSTPRANDIAL | Like something after dinner? Port’s laid out and nap (12) |
| Anagram (‘out’) of PORTS LAID + DIAL (‘nap’, 2 old-fashioned words for ‘face’). | ||
| 21 | NEOPHOBIA | Fancy iPhone old boy kept boxed having a fear of novelty (9) |
| Anagram (‘fancy’) of IPHONE ‘boxes’ O[ld] B[oy] + A. | ||
| 23 | ODOUR | Old dreary bouquet (5) |
| O[ld]+ DOUR. | ||
| 24 | OUTSOLD | Publicly reveals antique fetched a better price (7) |
| OUTS (‘publicly reveals’) + OLD (‘antique’). | ||
| 25 | EXPLAIN | Clarify former intention about island (7) |
| EX (‘former’) + PLAN (‘intention’) around I[sland]. | ||
| 26 | RADISH | Salad ingredient is hot and impressive at first (6) |
| IS + H[ot] preceded by RAD[ical] (‘impressive’ in U.S. dude-speak). | ||
| 27 | ESPRESSO | Petrol station wrapping present of drink (8) |
| ESSO (‘petrol station’: other brands are available) surrounds PRES[ent]. | ||
| Down | ||
| 1 | DEDUCE | Draw two picking up diamonds (6) |
| DEUCE (‘two’) surrounds D[iamonds]. | ||
| 2 | CHORAL | Church or a lovely cover of a group song (6) |
| Inclusion in ‘churCH OR A Lovely’. | ||
| 3 | SPEED TRAP | Jaguars might be caught in this (5,4) |
| Cryptic def re fast cars. | ||
| 4 | OVER MY DEAD BODY | Not until I’m beyond caring about marks on unknown stiff (4,2,4,4) |
| OVER (‘about’) + M[arks] + Y (‘unknown’) + DEAD BODY (‘stiff’). | ||
| 6 | WINCE | Get chancellor of the exchequer to pull a face (5) |
| WIN (‘get’) + CE (‘chancellor of the exchequer’). | ||
| 7 | TEARAWAY | Ne’er-do-well to leg it, hell for leather (8) |
| ‘Tear away’ = ‘leg it hell for leather’. | ||
| 8 | HAY FEVER | Henry, indeed, fellow always getting the sneezes? (3,5) |
| H[enry] + AY (‘indeed’) + F[ellow] + EVER (‘always’). | ||
| 9 | CHEST OF DRAWERS | Bureau concerned with bloomers: briefs collected here (5,2,7) |
| CHEST (‘bureau’) + OF (‘concerned with’) + DRAWERS (ladies’ ‘bloomers’) + cryptic def. | ||
| 15 | PEA SOUPER | Summit mostly cool about old thick fog (3-6) |
| PEAk (most of ‘summit’) + SUPER (‘cool’) around O[ld]. | ||
| 16 | OPEN DOOR | Trade and immigration policy might make one poor daughter (4,4) |
| Anagram (‘might make’) of ONE POOR D[aughter]. | ||
| 17 | ASSORTED | Diverse, like Dorset possibly (8) |
| AS (‘like’) + anagram (‘possibly’) of DORSET. I tried to make the ‘SORTED’ bit into a kind of reverse anagram but I don’t think it quite works. | ||
| 19 | MORASS | Quagmire is again more or less behind (6) |
| MORe (=’again’, shortened, i.e. ‘more or less’) + ASS (‘behind’). My best shot. Other views welcome. | ||
| 20 | PRONTO | Pair aware of prompt (6) |
| P[ai]R + ONTO (‘aware of’). | ||
| 22 | HOOPS | Rings husband – damn, my mistake (5) |
| H[usband] + OOPS! | ||
*anagram
And having published, I can immediately see there’s a problem with 18a anagram which I can’t resolve. Race you to the answer.
anag of PORTS LAID & NAP?
To Goujeers:
That was my 2nd thought, but NAP seems to lie outwith the anagram catchment area, if you see what I mean. Still can’t quite make it go.
Also just noticed I missed out the IS in MISBEHAVE. Not this blogger’s finest hour.
I can’t do any better than your parsing for either 18a or 19d, though I wasn’t really convinced by the ‘again more or less’ either. Laziness was my excuse for missing some of the subtleties such as E for ‘eccentricity’ in 10a. I can’t remember having seen ESSO for ‘Petrol station’ or PRES for ‘present’ before, so 27a held out for a while and was my last in.
I’m not a great fan of the two salad ingredients but I did like ‘Carry On Monsieur’ and SPEED TRAP.
Thank you to Jason and to Grant.
A crossword that was initially staring me in the face but after I got ‘started’, the rest followed pretty smoothly.
Not that every single clue was a smoothie.
18ac can, as Goujeers @2 says, only be an anagram of PORT’S LAID NAP. And yes, Grant, that means that the anagram indicator is placed in a strange position. The only thing that perhaps might work is that Jason means ‘take anagram of SPORT’S LAID, and include one for NAP too’.
I also find ‘again more or less’ for MOR (19d) a bit inelegant, and wondered about the link between fodder and definition in 2d. Does Jason mean: FODDER (is a) cover of (i.e. for) DEFINITION? Or is it: FODDER cover (i.e. plural verb) DEFINITION, with the latter being ‘of a group song’ (i.e. an adjective)?
RADISH (26ac) was easy to find but I was puzzled by RAD = ‘impressive’. And while I can see RAD = ‘radical’, in what sense is ‘radical’ = ‘impressive’?
I’m afraid D = ‘German’ is not an abbreviation supported by dictionaries. D = ‘Germany’ or ‘Dutch’, which are different things. D can also be an abbreviation for ‘Deutsch’ but in the musical sense – Deutsch was the surname of an Austrian music historian who catalogued the works of Schubert. Perhaps, someone will come up with DM = ‘Deutschmark’ = ‘German Mark’ ….
So, generally pleasant but with some question marks.
Finally, two more things that have nothing to do with this particular puzzle.
Grant, you say: “First blog under the new grid-less regime”. Is there a thought behind this? Yesterdays’ Teacow blog lacked a grid too. Not that I am bothered, I personally won’t miss it.
Secondly, when I download the PDF of an FT crossword, it will open in Adobe on a full A4 (as it always was). At least on the last three occasions I noticed that in the grid the clue numbers are hardly visible, blurred. Do others have the same issue?
Many thanks to Grant for the blog & Jason for the puzzle.
Thanks to Jason and Grant. Enjoyable. I was content with the parsing of Goujeers@2 but like Wordplodder had trouble with the pres=present in ESPRESSO (Esso, on the other hand, is still available in Canada though to my knowledge no longer in the US).
Sil @6
To answer your query, the FT has changed the way that it includes the grid in the pdf file and PeeDee’s blogging utility is no longer able to extract it. The new grid is a raster image (Jpeg or similar) and, if this has been saved at lower quality in order to reduce the file size, it would explain the blurred grid numbers (which I have also noticed).
I found this quite entertaining and not too difficult, but I overlooked the E for eccentricity in 10a. Thanks for explaining that, Grant. I wasn’t too impressed by RAD for impressive at 26a, but I see it is listed in Chambers. Held up only by my last 2 in – SWATCH and then WINCE. I liked the witty MISBEHAVE, but my favourite was NEOPHOBIA for the lovely surface. Thanks Jason and Grant.
Yes Sil, l commented on faint numbers in the new FT format. Found this harder than Nutmeg in the Graun. FOI 20d, LOI 9d. How is draw=deduce please?
To Sil @6
I think yr right about CHORAL. The noun wd be ‘chorale’ which isn’t there. But Johninterred@9 is right about RAD, which Chambers gives at #3. It’s a bit U.S. West Coast, but common enough; I didn’t even look it up until now.
You & I have had a conversation about grid inclusion before & agreed to disagree. There’s no denying that it was a useful solving tool on PD’s site & I’ll miss it.
@10 My edition of the OED at definition number 48 of “DRAW” has “to deduce, infer (a conclusion, etc from premises).”
I enjoyed this especially by finishing it. As an amateur I took the “and” in 18ac as to include “nap” in the anagram.
Thanks to Jason and Grant.
To Chadwick@10:
One can either ‘draw’ or ‘deduce’ a conclusion. That’s how I read it, anyway.
Thanks Grant.
Thanks Jason and GB
Sil @ 6: I take your point about dictionary support, but DDR was a recognised abbreviation for Deutsche Demokratische Republik / German Democratic Republic, so in that sense it works (for me, anyway).
Gaufrid @ 8: thanks for explaining whu the solution numbers have recently started to appear fuzzier than they were. Makes a lot of sense.
Simon @15, yes, that works – that is, if you accept abbreviations that are not stand-alone (and from this and previous posts I seem to remember that you do). My take on it is: fine but don’t ask me to do that myself in a clue (because I don’t want to do that).
Also belated thanks to Gaufrid @8 for explaining the changes that the FT went through. And, Simon, your final words (Makes a lot of sense) are quite ambiguous. What Gaufrid said makes, indeed, a lot of sense. However, the FT offering PDFs in which the numbers in the grid have become ‘fuzzier’ doesn’t. Why should you give away a crossword (for free, I know) that contains essential elements that really stand in the way for those solving it?
Sil (should you see this)
I’m uneasy about non-standalone abbreviations, but think that they’re a fact of life (eg I don’t think I’ve ever seen S = Society as a standalone).
And yes, it was the explanation that made a lot of sense, as I suspect you corectly inferred.
Thanks Jason and Grant
Must have been on his wavelength with this puzzle as I was able to plough through it at a constant rate. Having said that I needed dictionary confirmation that there was a word POSTPRANDIAL and that TEARAWAY really was synonymous with ‘ne’er-do-well’. Needed to check on a couple of the abbreviations too – E for ‘eccentricity’, PRES for ‘present’ and CE for ‘chancellor of the exchequer’.
Didn’t have any problems with the anagram of PORTS LAID NAP at 14a when I was doing it, but agree that it is not technically correct. Liked the construction of MISBEHAVE and OVER MY DEAD BODY.
Finished in the NE corner with HUNGARY, WINCE and that TEARAWAY.