Independent 10,273 by Tees

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Tees very much has a style of his own which is much more general knowledge orientated than some other compilers.  This can occasionally get a little frustrating when it turns out every other clue has a cultural reference in it.  Having said that, most of the stuff here I’d come across at some point – the only exceptions being 9a and 20d.  It’s not the sort of puzzle you’d want to do on a train with a newspaper and no internet access but fun if you have Google on hand to check all the suppositions.

Across
1 SCHEME Nietzsche meticulously hatching plot (6)
  Hidden in nietzSCH MEticulously.
4 PETARD Old gate-crasher died after exercise with sailor (6)
  D(ied) after (PE + tar).  A petard, which now only exists in the phrase “hoisted by one’s own petard” was orginally a bomb designed to blow open a door.
9 STRETCH ONES LEGS Take stroll as Procrustes sometimes would? (7,4,4)
  CD.  Procrustes was a bandit who kidnapped people and stretched their legs to fit the size of an iron bed.
10 BEDAUB Smear pallet perhaps with gold and black (6)
  Bed + AU + b(lack)
11 BAR STOOL Contemptible man in pub finding seat there? (3-5)
  DD.  I’m familiar with stool from stool pigeon, which is a sort of contemptible person, although it may also have a direct association (possibly derived from stool’s other meaning as faecal matter).
12 DEADHEAD Emotionless boss to remove spent flowers (8)
  Dead(=emotionless) + head(=boss)
14 WINNER Weight concealed in shot at Wimbledon (6)
  W(eight) + inner
15 NAUSEA Greek character boxing a marine shows revulsion (6)
  Nu around a + sea(=marine)
18 ON THE JOB Busy hospital in Eton treated one patient (2,3,3)
  H(ospital) in eton* + Job, a Biblical figure who is proverbially patient in the face of great adversity visited on him.
21 WATER SKI Write and ask when disposed to do sport (5-3)
  (Write ask)*
22 TICKET Credit given with French party policies (6)
  Tick + et (=French for and).  Politicians often talk about running on a particular ticket.
24 PERSONA NON GRATA No! Paragons aren’t cast as undesirable! (7,3,5)
  (No paragons aren’t)*
25 MARBLE Brother driven back in Tom’s roller? (6)
  Br< in male (as in Tom cat).  Obviously a ref to the marbles which roll along the ground.
26 BARIUM Element of NHS meal provision? (6)
  CD referring to Barium meal, a technique used to examine the stomach.
Down
1 SO THERE Drunken person around — that’ll teach you (2,5)
  Sot + here
2 HYENA Scavenger had endless desire to feed (5)
  Ha[d] with yen in it.
3 MACABRE Carriage cuts horse in two — it’s gruesome (7)
  Cab bisecting mare.
5 EYEBROW Feature Cockney intellectual overheard (7)
  Hom of ‘ighbrow.
6 ALL AT ONCE Suddenly everyone agreed to go round clubs (3,2,4)
  All at one around c(lubs), abbrev in playing cards.
7 DOG ROSE Wild flower in shadow shot up (3,4)
  Dog(=shadow, as in follow) + rose(=shot up).
8 FORBID Female replaces male in gloomy bar (6)
  Morbid with F replacing M
13 DISPENSER Chemist is pounds in red, needing turnover (9)
  (Is pens) in red<
16 ANAHEIM An aspiration to keep ambassador in Californian city (7)
  An aim around HE(=His Excellency)
17 ARSENAL Stadium beside lake accommodates second team (7)
  Arena + l(ake) around s(econd)
18 ONIONS Cricketer gets one between legs, beginning to scream (6)
  I in on + on (on and leg side are synonymous in cricket) + s[cream].  Referring to bowler Graham Onions, although it was Joe Root who suffered a similar blow in the test match on Saturday.
19 TITANIA Bottom fancier busy — that’s written up in a novel (7)
  (At it)< + (in a)*.  It’s a ref to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” where Titania is made to fall in love with Bottom.
20 OMENTUM Leaderless Corbynites in the fold (7)
  [M]omentum, a left wing labour group.  The omentum is a fold in the peritoneum.
23 CORGI Crumbs soldier gives dog (5)
  Cor! + GI

*anagram

8 comments on “Independent 10,273 by Tees”

  2. Thanks Tees and NealH

    I saw 11 somewhat differently: definition = “seat there” (referring back to ‘in pub’), wordplay being BAR’S (in pub) TOOL (contemptible man).

  3. I obviously have much the same ‘knowledge’ as Tees as I didn’t have problems with any of this enjoyable crossword.   Slightly less Monday-ish than many of his previous appearances in this spot, but that wasn’t a problem for me

    Thanks to Tees and NealH

  4. I didn’t know the ‘Old gate crasher’ at 4a or ‘Procrustes’ and his proclivities at 9a, though they weren’t hard to get from wordplay and def. respectively. I did have trouble spotting the very good ‘Bottom fancier’ def. for 19d for which the wordplay wasn’t obvious either. The ‘NHS meal provision’ was my favourite bit, although maybe it could have been introduced by ‘old’ as BARIUM meals aren’t often done these days.

    I agree with Simon S @2 about the parsing and def. for BAR-STOOL.

    I found this to be a bit tougher than the usual Monday Tees, so was satisfied to eventually nut it all out.

    Thanks to Tees and NealH

  5. Although I had no problem to find the solution to 22ac (TICKET), it feels like the ET bit is somewhat impure.
    The clue says ‘with French’ and not ‘and French’. I know in English ‘with’ and ‘and’ are often interchangeable but here you’ll have to do two things.
    Equate ‘with’ to ‘and’, then translate it into French. If one doesn’t like to do that – something I do understand – it leads to avec (the French word for ‘with’).

    But a good crossword with, indeed, a fair amount of general knowledge.
    I hadn’t heard of the cricketer in 18d [I haven’t heard of many cricketers anyway] but it was very nice clue.
    No problem with OMENTUM either (it was recently in another crossword), however I failed on BARIUM, being not familiar with ‘Barium meal’.

    Many thanks to NealH & Tees.

  6. We got through this without any real problems, though we had to look up Procrustes in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and in 8dn we took a while to find a suitable synonym of ‘gloomy’ but it was easy enough once we got it – doh!

    Favourite was DISPENSER, although to be pedantic a chemist (i.e. a pharmacist – the preferred name) is rather more than a dispenser.

    Thanks, Tees and NealH.

  7. Like crypticsue@3, I didn’t think there was much that was too obscure, general knowledge-wise.  Procrustes turned up in my early days in computing to describe the fitting of a string of characters into a fixed size variable.  I’ve actually been to Anaheim.  It’s where Disneyland is, and the Los Angeles Angels play there.  It was DOG ROSE that gave me the most trouble.

    The last production of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream I saw, it was Oberon who ended up in bed with Bottom, not Titania.

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