Financial Times 16,635 by MOO

13 comments on “Financial Times 16,635 by MOO”

1. Enjoyed this write-in from start to finish. Favourites included 5a,11a,4d and 14d.
   Wanted to make PROPENSITY fit for 10a initially and was briefly tempted to write in ‘naked’ at 24d but crossers stayed my hand.
   Finished with the homophone at 9a.
   Thanks, Moo, for a gentle Monday solve and Teacow for the blog with that link.

2. Pleasant way to kick off the week without too many difficulties along the way, although I was held up for a while at the end by IN CONCERT, my last in. Minor annoyance at 19a, with the homophone indicator in the middle meaning the def could plausibly have been either ‘Wrong’ or ‘a socialist’.

   Loved the surface for 29a. No further comment needed!

   Thanks to Moo and Teacow

3. Pleasant enough with many smooth surfaces — favourites were COMPETENT and MUSHY PEAS. Did not think “paint picture” and “draw” were really synonymous in 29a — “sketch picture” would be better in my mind but that’s a tiny quibble. Thanks to both.

4. Can somebody explain 15A please? I just don’t get the “barred puzzle” bit. I’ll probably kick myself after.

5. Alas I had Tort rather than Trot in 19a. Therefore missed Exonerate. I thought of Exonerate but then figured the answer must be something different as it didn’t fit. Doh! Lesson learned. Otherwise a pleasant to solve and thanks to all

6. MarkA @4: Teacow has a reference to The Listener crosswords. My guess is “barred puzzle” refers to the structure of the crossword — it’s not a typical grid but instead is characterised by heavy lines that indicate where a word ends. I haven’t done Listener crosswords but Harper’s Magazine (Richard E. Maltby, Jr.) often uses that format in his puzzles and often acknowledges The Listener.

7. Thanks Tony. I missed the link.

8. As WordPlodder says, a pleasant way to kick off the week without too many difficulties along the way,

   We had to wait till we got crossing letters to decide whether the ambiguous 19ac as TROT or ‘tort’.  Oddly enough we had a similar experience with one of the clues in today’s Indy, and in another similarity one of the Indy entries today was ‘prescribe’ and as with PROSCRIBE here, ‘scribe’ was clued as ‘writer.

   Among others we liked OUTSKIRTS and, for the ‘reverse engineered’ clue, MUSHY PEAS.

   Thanks, Moo and Teacow.

    

9. Thanks Moo and Teacow

   Found this a puzzle that I meandered all around the grid to fill in answers, with it only coming together at the end.  Didn’t know which way to swing with 19a and had to wait for EXONERATE to show the way – think that this is fair enough, as long as the word can be definitively proven one way or the other by crossing clues.

   Finished with the clever PARTY, MUSHY PEAS (which I liked as a clue but not sure that I’d like with fish ‘n’ chips) and had to use a word finder at the end to get TERRA.

10. 15ac is a classic example of a clue which a reasonably good solver would be embarrassed to have to explain to a keen novice solver.

11. Thanks Moo & Teacow.

    In 20 down, Ginger recalls one of the Spice Girls, Geri Halliwell, of course.

12. I do not agree that TROT (19ac) is ambiguous.

    Yes, I dislike these clues with the indicator in the middle but Moo using the word ‘for’ makes it, in my opinion, clear in which direction we should think.

13. FWIW, I’ve never heard the word TROT as short for Trotskyite in the US. Fortunately, I’ve now done enough FT puzzles to recognize it. I too had put TORT in19a first, but fixed once I realized 17d had to be EXONERATE.
    Like many, I didn’t under15a until I followed Teacow’s link, but it clearly had to be the answer.
    Thanks to Teacow for the explanations and to Moo for a fun puzzle I could solve without help for a change.

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