It’s Boatman providing the challenge today, with a theme that must surely be unmissable.
Today, it was not so much a case of spotting the theme as chasing down some knotty parsing but I think I just about got there in the end. The theme did get rather tedious towards the end but, overall, I enjoyed this more than is often the case with this setter and I learned one or two new terms.
Thanks to Boatman.
Definitions are underlined in the clues.
Across
7 One taking charge of CIA, crudely infiltrating abductor (9)
CAPACITOR
An anagram [crudely] of CIA in CAPTOR [abductor]
8 Sally in fight to get round in (5)
FORAY
FRAY [fight] round O [round]
9 Engine opening, inertia beaten with a kick-starter (9)
AIRINTAKE
An anagram [beaten] of INERTIA + A K[ick] – there must be a mistake in the clue: it needs a hyphen
10 Fast way to get drunk (5)
TIGHT
Double definition, the first as in ‘the door was shut tight / fast’
12 Superior ale to drink time after time (6)
BETTER
BEER [ale] round T T [time after time]
13 Excited, drunk and available online (8)
UPLOADED
UP [excited] + LOADED [drunk]
16 Rum ration left as a test (2,5)
ON TRIAL
An anagram [rum] of RATION + L [left] – I hope the definition is correct: I can’t quite make the grammar work
19 Dry? Knock back spirits, raised before going out (7)
PARCHED
A reversal [back] of RAP + CHE[ere]D [spirits raised, minus ere – before]
22 Spooner’s underage drinker, a failure with poor attitude (3,5)
BAD LOSER
Lad boozer [underage drinker]
25 Types of bar in which to get drunk fast on empty stomach (6)
SHAFTS
An anagram [drunk] of FAST after S[tomac]H
27 Stale, thus getting a beer (5)
STOUT
If we take ST OUT of stale, we get ale [beer]
28 Extreme complication lately affecting more pregnancies — seek immediate aid at the beginning (9)
ECLAMPSIA
Initial letters [at the beginning] of Extreme Complication Lately Affecting More Pregnancies Seek Immediate Aid – a great surface
29 Caught duck, say, in the drink (5)
CIDER
C [caught] + IDER [sounds like eider – duck]
30 On sides of bottle, a drop formed of high alcoholic content (4-5)
BEAD-PROOF
B[ottl]E + an anagram [formed] of A DROP + OF – ‘of such proof or strength as to carry beads or bubbles, after shaking, in alcoholic liquor’ [Chambers]
Down
1 Pass case of Rioja onto wine producer … (6)
RAVINE
R[ioj]A + VINE [wine producer]
2 … case of cold wine brought up (8)
CANISTER
A reversal [brought up] of C [cold] + RETSINA [nasty, in my opinion, wine]
3 British ale or German equivalent overwhelms non-drinker (6)
BITTER
BIER [German ale] round TT [non-drinker]
4 Takes in drunk on drink (5,2)
SOAKS UP
SOAK [drunk] + SUP [drink]
5 Bareback rider avoiding flips in exiting (6)
GODIVA
An anagram [flips] of AVOID[in]G minus [exiting] in
6 Old club whiskey’s source, that is (6)
MASHIE
MASH [whiskey’s source] + IE [that is]
MASH: ‘in brewing or distilling, a mixture of crushed malt and hot water’ [Chambers]
MASHIE: ‘an old-fashioned golf club used for shots of medium length and loft, corresponding to a number five iron’ [Chambers] – and once quite a regular in crosswords, as I remember
11 Tip of foliage creeping up jumper (4)
FLEA
LEAF [foliage] with the F [tip] creeping up
14 Note on hospital discharge (3)
DOH
DO [note] + H [hospital] – I don’t understand the definition here
15 Prepared ingredients in Bacardi daiquiri (3)
DID
Contained in bacarDI Daiquiri – as in ‘Shall I do the potatoes?’, perhaps?
16 Boatman’s out of drink in a round (3)
ORB
[abs]ORB [drink in] minus ab’s [boatman’s]
17 Touch the heart of secret admirer (3)
TAD
Middle letters of secreT ADmirer
18 It’s further coming back from Yugoslavia (4)
ALSO
Hidden reversal in yugOSLAvia
20 Drink commonly produces gas and cramp inside (8)
CHAMPERS
HAMPER [cramp] in CS [gas]
21 Drunk and disorderly crew landed with doctor missing (7)
WRECKED
An anagram [disorderly] of CREW + [doc]KED [landed minus doc]
23 Part of regiment loses second line, with nothing to gain (6)
ATTAIN
[b]ATTA[l]I[o]N] [part of regiment] minus b [second], l [line] and O [nothing]
24 Strange allure of symbol of honour (6)
LAUREL
An anagram [strange] of ALLURE
25 Clue for shy drinker’s light refreshment (6)
SHANDY
SH AND Y could be a clue for SHY
26 Examination of drunk about rupture inside (6)
TRIPOS
A reversal [about] of SOT [drunk] round RIP [rupture]
Enjoyed this in spite of a few unparsable (IMO) answers.
Thank you Boatman for a fun crossword managing (at least) 75% themed clues. Cheers for that!
Thanks Eileen. I was unsure about 14a too but I think the definition is “note”, with DO = discharge, as in (perhaps a bit vaguely) discharge a duty, “on” H.
Got seriously held up by the SW corner, struggled to see the parsing of STOUT and ATTAIN. Though one should perhaps raise a glass to Boatman on this rather wet, miserable morning in East Anglia.
DOH is an exclamation so could be a discharge (no more vague than some defs)
Or as Andrew says ..
Thanks both. Rather a lot of “find a word that fits then try to hammer out a parsing” for my taste.
I think Andrew is right about 14a
Thanks for the useful blog Eileen. Missed the parsing of STOUT,ORB, DOH. Thought ATTAIN was convoluted although I got there eventually.
I think Andrew’s right, too [D’oh! 😉 ] – I wasn’t happy parsing DO as ‘note’ when DOH is an alternative spelling: I think DO = discharge pretty much equates with DID = prepared in the next clue!
Lots of fun – finished, but couldn’t parse a few. Favourites were BETTER, WRECKED and BAD LOSER. Many thanks to Boatman and Eileen.
I wasn’t on Boatman’s wavelength today. Personally I prefer Paul’s tortuous but precise instructional surfaces to Boatman’s polished surfaces with their redundancies. 10ac for example. 5d and 25d great, and many others, but also many I had to reveal without any subsequent feeling of missed satisfaction. In 13ac, if something is uploaded isn’t it also available offline?
Great blog, Eileen.giving credence to puzzle that certainly was not compiled in a bar-and probably not by a lover of drink. Not saying Hoskins would have done a better job but his heart would have been in it.
Not my favourite Boatie puzzle, sorry.( Although tackling it in the morning didnt really help. )
Thanks Boatman and Eileen.
Generally I agree with Eileen’s comments; I too found the theme a bit overdone. And I had to reveal several throgh a mixture of slow-wittedness, lack of time and (IMO) unsatifactory clues. But there were some good ones including ECLAMPSIA, GODIVA and CANISTER.
Xjpotter@9 – you upload data to a website, where it is then available to others who are online. To see data offline, you have to *down*load it first. As far as I can see this terminology is just convention, as far as the up/down distinction is concerned.
Thanks Boatman for a taxing puzzle.
Managed to finish but needed Eileen’s help in parsing STOUT, ORB and PARCHED, so thanks Eileen.
In 30a knew it had to be something PROOF and got BEAD-PROOF from the parsing, but it is a term I’d not heard before.
Thought ECLAMPSIA was very clever. Other favourites were CAPACITOR, CANISTER and CIDER
Thanks Boatman and Eileen.
Not sure about the parsing of 23d. Isn’t battalion losing B, L, and O?
Not an enjoyable theme when you’ve overindulged last night before as I did and have a bad hangover. The first few clues left me needing some paracetamol. 🙁
jvh @13 You’re right, of course – I’m not sure what happened there: I’ll fix it now.
Thanks Boatman and Eileen
A DNF as I revealed BEAD-PROOF. I found this like drawing teeth, and I nearly gave it up – more irritating than enjoyable (the enumeration for 9a, for example).
I don’t like Boatman’s style. I have question marks of one sort or another against 12 clues – most for the parsing, but some for the clue itself. I won’t list the lot, but as an example, look at RAVINE. To start with its not necessarily a “pass”, then “vine” is several steps away from “wine-producer”.
No drinks last night, which helped with the solve. Clever cluing, although I needed Eileen’s help to parse a few.
I liked PARCHED, BAD LOSER, BITTER, STOUT and WRECKED.
Thanks Boatman and Eileen.
I forgot to give my favourites – BETTER and BITTER!
me @16
it’s – smacked wrist!
Normally I would toast (!) a Boatman puzzle when I solve it but this one was a DNF for me as I didn’t complete the SW – 30a BEAD-PROOF and 26d TRIPOS eluded me, as both were unfamiliar. Thanks, Eileen, for putting me out of my misery when I came here.
IMHO, the unfriendly grid where each quadrant was almost a separate puzzle in itself made it extra-difficult to gain traction, as many clues lacked more than one crosser when I cam to try to solve them.
Despite my epic fail in the SW, that was when I found my favourite clue, 20d CHAMPERS.
So you got the best of me on this occasion, Boatman, but thank you nevertheless, and thank you to Eileen for your very clear explanations of some of the clues that befuddled me.
With Boatman, it is usually a question of, if you manage to get on his wave length, it is plain sailing. However on most occasions, lke today, I quickly became becalmed, the wind taken out of my sails, up the creek without a paddle. I thought I would be steaming ahead at a rate of knots, but ran aground pretty fast, after doing the top half of the grid.
Too convoluted to be fun.
I think what might have made this one harder than usual was the number of clues where you have to think of a word, and then take bits away or otherwise modify it, those bits being themselves indirections. These types of clues tend to be only understandable by getting the definition first and working backwards, which I don’t find so much fun, and it seems from the comments here nor do a lot of folks.
muffin @16 speaks my mind
Late to the party today – did a few before an early meeting and left with the (wrong) impression I was doing well. I came back to earth pretty quickly on my return. As with others, this was just too convoluted in parts, too many steps removed with little chance of “aha”. I think the disappointment for me is there was little of “ooh, that’s clever” (apart from B[E/I]TTER) after solving. Another who found the grid unhelpful, though “bead-proof” was very well clued in that, with a crosser or two it had to be “proof” and the rest followed, with a quick google to check it. Exactly how an unfamiliar term should be set out.
Pedantically, Lady Godiva was surely a bare rider, not a bareback rider. I know there’s a bit of poetic licence, but the term “bareback” has a specific meaning, so surely cannot be appropriated to mean something entirely different just because it sounds a bit like it. And also the Spoonerism should have a homophone indicated as the answer is not “bad loozer”.
TheZed@25 aren’t all Spoonerisms homophones? As I understand it, Rev. Spooner made his flubs in speech, not writing.
Dr. WhatsOn @26 It’s a fair point (“hissed the mystery lectures” only works as a homophone) but I had understood the convention, given crossword answers are written, was that the spoonerism had to be exact (“the town drain”). I’m sure someone could trawl back through past examples to see.
@TheZed
Do I understand you correctly that you don’t believe “lad boozer” and “bad loser” sound the same when Spoonerized?
Couldn’t parse 23d without reading above, nor 14d though they were obviously the right answers. Finished quicker than usual for Boatman, as I often struggle a bit on this setter.
There was a regular on here who had the patience to trawl back to historical clues. Anyway, as far as I recall, the Spooner argument has come up a few times and I’m pretty sure the conclusion was that the sounds rather than the written words had to be correct.
Something Paul amusingly just about gets away with at times.
baerchen @28 No you do not understand me correctly. They *sound* the same. My point was that I had thought crossword Spoonerisms required the spelling to remain unchanged, once initial letters are swapped (like yesterday’s Chinese underground entrances), as an additional constraint. Pedro @30 says he believes an historical trawl shows otherwise, so perhaps it’s one of those things some setters adhere to and not others, just as some would use “second coming” to refer to “o” and others would shudder at the very thought.
@31
OK, now I understand your point. It seems that you don’t really understand Spoonerisms in crosswords. I could show you many, many examples but I’m sure you’ll be able to find them for yourself.
@TheZed (again)
FT 16,198 dd 20.06.2019, blogged on this site, contains two of them.
(I set the puzzle myself)
baerchen @33 thanks for the pointer – but I only do the Grauniad puzzle, so I guess it’s precedence from this paper I was working from. I was simply wondering if it was one of the very many unwritten rules from the Editor, that a homophonic Spoonerism required further indication. Pedro suggested it has been looked at before and the answer appeared to be no. That makes me wonder if there are examples where the pronunciation changes with the letter swap e.g. “lose” to “pose” such that it *only* works when written. I’ve a niggling feeling I’ve seen such examples, which would extend the definition of Spoonerism the other way!
Eileen
Many thanks for the blog but there is a small error it your parsing of 19 ac.. You have one too many Es in Cheered 🙂
Thank you, Atlanta Dave – fixed now. I’m amazed I got away with it for so long.
I stuck with this after being defeated yesterday and finally succeeded. I wasn’t happy with all of it though- Surely AIR INTAKE is two words?- and I can’t say I got all the parsing. I liked BEAD PROOF which was reasonably easy to get,although I’ve never heard of the term. ATTAIN was LOI and took me ages to- sort of -see. I quite enjoyed this in the end although it was a struggle.
Thanks Boatman.
Thanks to Eileen and Boatman
How does one infiltrate an abductor? Sounds vaguely disgusting.
Some very inventive stuff, but one or two things I can’t come to terms with:
What is “way to get” doing in 10a?
Wouldn’t “drunk fast” do as a DD?
I thought of “tight” on first sight but dismissed it. I spent a little time wondering if “wif” might be slang for “drunk”, and with “get” as the inclusion indicator and “way” being “st(reet)”, the answer might be SWIFT.
Crossers put paid to that but it was a little irritating.
I liked the spoonerism, “doh”, and others.
Thanks to Eileen and all – it seems that I was being a little tricky today, but I’m glad that most of you had fun.
Muffin @16 and Peter A @ 37 – I agree with you about the enumeration for AIR-INTAKE (hyphenated in Chambers). This appears to be a Guardian typo, as it was shown correctly in the original draft – I’ll let Hugh know, so that it can be corrected in the archive.
Also – Muffin – I’m not 100% happy with VINE = “wine producer” either. You may like to know that I originally had “wine producer’s plant”, but Hugh convinced me that the clue was better shorter, even though that created, as you rightly say, an extra logical step.
Thanks, Boatman, for dropping in and confirming the obvious error in AIR-INTAKE – not your fault – which doesn’t seem to have fazed too many commenters, anyway.
I’m disappointed that you didn’t address any of the other queries, apart from muffin’s ‘wine producer’ – I think that, on this occasion, Hugh was quite right.
I’m sorry but I can’t find more than two or three references to this having been ‘fun’ – but there are several to the contrary 😉 .
Thanks to both for the entertainment and elucidation – I certainly had trouble getting on the right wavelength here. And thanks to Boatman for dropping in. Eileen, 19a still has problems – “eer” rather than “ere” is removed.
Mystogre @41 – grhh! [again, how has no one else noticed this?] I can’t even claim to be dyslectic – just geriatric! [it’s near my bed-time]. But ‘e’er’ is poetic for ‘ever’, not ‘before’ – over to you, Boatman!
Sorry to butt in,
It’s “ere” that needs removal, but from one step further to the right. -)
CHEereD
I hope not to appear a 22, but too many borderline unfair clues I thought. In particular, ‘beer’ has to be doing double duty as wordplay and definition in 27. Thanks anyway to Boatman and Eileen.
‘Beer’s stale, thus getting another’?
With the majority – and Eileen – here. We completed correctly, but with many not properly parsed, and agree that the clue theme had become a bit laboured and tiresome by the end.
Dansor @43 – many thanks: that’s honestly what was in my original draft.
There were quite a few that I solved but could not parse at all, or fully parse.
21d WREC/KED
27a STOUT
23d ATTAIN
16 ORB
11d F/LEA
19 PAR/CHED
New for me were BEAD-PROOF, CAPACITOR, MASHIE.
My favourite was CANISTER.
Thanks Boatman and Eileen.
I agree that 9a needs a hyphen => AIR-INTAKE
typo for 19 PARCHED – should be CHE[ere]D not CH[ere]ED
I usually enjoy Boatman’s puzzles and this was no exception. I did have to cheat to get EERY though. I didn’t parse STOUT and still don’t like that clue much tbh. Otherwise fair and fun.
Thanks!
Alton @49: re EERY – wrong puzzle!
Missed a couple in NE. Couldn’t get passed TREAT in 8ac – get round in, and missed GODIVA.
thanks Eileen, there were several I didn’t parse; finished this a couple of days ago (by dint of copious use of the check button, sotechnically a DNF I guess) but have been offline since then.
Is there not a nina of CAB SAF – CAB in the NW corner (first letters of 7,9 12 and SAF in the diagonally opposite corner- or am I reading too much into this, given that it is usually cab sav.
thanks to Boatman for the workout
ATTAIN and STOUT had to be right but I couldn’t see why. Maybe I’m just grumpy as it took me so long to get it but I don’t think the former’s clue is very fair.