Financial Times 17,035 by Buccaneer

17 comments on “Financial Times 17,035 by Buccaneer”

1. A very enjoyable and quite challenging puzzle. Same favourites as our blogger + the def and wordplay for DIURETIC and the HEADS OR TAILS def. I didn’t know that tête-à-tête could mean SOFA either and so 24d went in with a “can’t think of anything else”.

   I may be mistaken but I parsed 5d as The ‘Blues’ being the name by which CHELSEA FC is commonly known. It seems more likely to me than the def being the second name of a singer.

   Thanks to Buccaneer and Pete

2. I do not have any real standouts for this one, as it was generally enjoyable. I do find Buccaneer puzzles on the difficult side, and this was certainly one that took a few sittings to get through.

   I, too, had no idea that there is a sofa called tete-a-tete, so thank-you Buccaneer for the lesson. OBSCENEST was clearly the last one in the grid for Buccaneer, given it is only marginally a word

   I needed help from friends to parse FINISH – “picked up” is new to me as a homophone indicator and I will try to keep that in mind for future. LLANO is another word known only by the select few, and I did manage to remember it from a previous puzzle. I needed help to parse SKI also, and rather admire the clue now I understand it.

   Rather than “&lit” I wonder whether CHARISMA is an editing error. Each of the pieces is doing double duty, and it seems as though something is missing. Does it seem an awkward clue to anyone else? As a relative newcomer to crosswords, this is more a question than a criticism

   I am afraid I have a slightly different parsing for CHELSEA. Yours is great, Pete, but the Chelsea football team is know as the blues – well at least according to the internet. I suspect that is what Buccaneer was after

   Thanks, as always, to Pete for the great blog and to Buccaneer

3. Thanks WordPlodder – I was writing as you were posting and we wrote many of the same things

4. Thanks Pete and Buccaneer. I enjoyed this crossword, but 9a MODERATE was a biff-and-shrug; I still don’t understand why MOD = “not a rocker.” Halp?

   Among others, I found 18a HEADS OR TAILS rather amusing.

5. Verbose @4 – I’m no expert on the culture of the time, but the “mods” and the “rockers” were two opposing youth groups in the UK in the 60’s and 70’s. I’m just old enough to remember the “shock-horror” headlines when they clashed a few times in the mid-60’s.

6. Thanks Buccaneer. I found this on the difficult end of the spectrum and it took several sittings to complete. I needed a word finder to get TEMPI, INTRUDER, and OBSCENEST, the latter being a strange word to my ears. There were many favourites including COCKTAIL, INDIANA JONES, CHARISMA, EXODUS, and MECHANIC. Thanks Pete for the blog.

7. Thanks for the blog , interesting puzzle , all my favourites have been mentioned already.
   Martyn @2 CHARISMA – I took it as the whole clue gives the word play, no explicit definition but read the clue as a whole and it describes someone with charisma.
   TETE-A-TETE very Victorian really , a bit like two chairs facing opposite ways with a common arm in the middle, For young lovers who could only meet socially under supervision and might want to talk privately.
   MODS and rockers , very 60s really, MODS smartly dressed, ride scooters and like The Who , Small Faces , Kinks etc. Rockers wore leather, ride motorbikes and like 50s rock and roll. Famous battles in Brighton etc on Bank Holidays. See the film Quadrophenia.

8. Buccaneer keeps up a steady supply of absorbing entertainment with this weekend grid.
   Lots of creative wordplay like the ‘mod/rocker’ dichotomy in 9 and the slyly deceptive definitions for SPURIOUS and DIURETIC (where ‘blushing/flushing’ first sprang to mind).
   18 made me laugh, 24 was neat but what I liked best was the pleasing intersection of those two London clubs at 5d/12a. For this reason, I’m sure Blues for Chelsea’s nickname is what was meant.
   There was much more to like besides in this (for me) slow-burner. TEMPI was my LOI, a lucky guess that checked out. Only now do I understand it! Doh!
   Thanks to Buccaneer and Pete.

9. One last thought on CHELSEA; I thought the singer might be SEAL?

10. Sorry, having checked my notes, I parsed CHELSEA as you did, Pete, after all. No more from me on this subject.

11. Another fine but challenging crossword from Picaroon. I thought he had some very well hidden definitions in the mix – quite often not the first word that came to mind

    Thanks to Picaroon and to Pete

12. Thank you WordPlodder, Martyn and others for enlightening me about Chelsea FC.

13. Roz @7 thanks for the lead on CHARISMA and &lit.

    I am afraid the clue still does not work for me. The problem is “primarily”.

    “One’s cracking appeal and allure” says CHARISMA to me, but not “One’s cracking appeal and allure, primarily”

14. What crypticsue said (except that you’ve been bamboozled by today’s Guardian puzzle, Sue. 😉 )

15. Thanks Roz@7

16. To Martyn @13, I think the ‘primarily’ give us the ‘a’ as the first letter of appeal.

    Thanks to all. Good puzzle and helpful comments.

17. Thanks Buccaneer and Pete
    Agree that this one was a bit tougher than the normal for this puzzle after WEASEL jumped straight off the page at first. There are always innovative and interesting clues sprinkled in his offerings – amusing definitions such as ‘comment of tosser’ and ‘part of Ford’, the clever device for EXODUS and the simple but cleverly disguised clues such as SKI.
    That definition of ‘tete-a-tete’ casa also new to me and the ‘not a rocker’ = MOD took a while to drop.
    Finished in the SE corner where a hastily bunged in TATTOO slowed things up, but when FINISH finally popped into my head was able to see the error and was able to finish off with TETCHY.

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