Independent on Sunday 1,682 by Tees

19 comments on “Independent on Sunday 1,682 by Tees”

1. I thought this was Tees at his best. My main holdup was entering “topline” for 5d, which made 16a impossible. I eventually sorted it out though.

2. Certainly needed back-up from the dictionary on a few occasions but great satisfaction on arriving at a completion.
   Particularly liked FINAGLE (very expressive word) and ELBOW which just made me smile.

   Thanks to Tees and to our favourite feline for the review. That 10a big cat might have its uses?!!

3. I think there are better and less controversial ways to describe Tibet than “Chinese.£

   And what’s a GEHENNA? Not finding any discussion here, I found this.

   Thanks to setter and blogger.

4. Absolutely loved this today and PIMENTO is one of my clues of the year. Like jane, I enjoyed FINAGLE and the definition for ELBOW is lovely. STRADDLE and ABOMINATION were other big favourites but I could almost have ticked anything. Perhaps apart from BEER BELLY which I got from def and crossers but couldn’t parse. Having taken advantage myself of the convention that acceptable abbreviations can be used in anagrams, I can hardly complain but I didn’t get close to spotting that wordplay when solving.

   Thanks Tees and Kitty

5. Oh dear. Tees has managed to produce a selection of my bêtes noires which I’m sorry to say took the edge off this otherwise enjoyable puzzle for me.

   There were three women, one of which was neatly clued as “little woman” but the other two were totally vague. We also had three Americanisms, one of which was clearly identified by “across the pond” but the other two were not indicated as such.

   Many thanks to Kitty for the review, particularly for the parsing of 27a which eluded me.

6. I forgot to mention that my top two were PIMENTO and FINAGLE.

7. I agree with Hovis @1 about the quality of the puzzle. Not as hard as Serpent yesterday but plenty to keep the mind engaged and amused.

   I didn’t really know the meaning of FINAGLE or INELUCTABLE and the senses for PAISANO and OCTOBER were both knew. Thanks to Ian SW3 @3 for the GEHENNA link. I thought I was being clever in picking up that ‘Miners perhaps’ at 18a was wordplay for a (verboten) indirect anagram, but of course the clue was much cleverer than that.

   Thanks to Kitty and Tees

8. I had fun with this. Some very clever cueing, but all gettable. I couldn’t parse 27a – could someone explain to me why it isn’t an indirect anagram?
   Thanks Tees and Kitty.

9. Sourdough #8 I see that point, but English and pound are (I hope) very well-known indicators for E and LB. The two papers I work for with the strictest style sheets, The Times and The Daily Telegraph, have different interpretations on this: The Thunderer allows the mix of word-fodder and single-letter indicators to make an anagram, whilst The DT does not (you can still have a partial anagram however, you just have to write it in a different way).

   My take is that RYE plus E LB twice is easy enough to get, and not really indirect. Where you have to deduce the fodder from a synonym, well I’d have to rule that out for sure.

10. Thanks Kitty et al btw. Perhaps I should have been kinder to Tibet, though it is, as Wiki tells me, an ‘autonomous region of China’. I’m not really a big fan of land-grabbing bullies wherever they may be (and that includes you, UK).

11. Tees @9: lovely when a setter drops in to engage on a specific; it’s much appreciated. I stared at that clue for ages without seeing what I needed to do. There were a lot of elements to play with – particularly as I’d equated the solution simply with ‘Pot’. So I had ‘ale’ = BEER and everything else to create BELLY!
    As I said earlier, it made sense when looked at in hindsight and your explanation is entirely fair. Funny how sometimes the clue does lead you step by step as the compiler wanted and other times leaves you floundering

12. Thank you so much for calling in to help Tees. I now understand, but still feel it is a bit of a fine line.

13. Thanks both. Much to educate me, although have to admit I have failed previously with ASTRAKHAN and still needed help with it today. Would not have got GEHENNA in a month of Sundays (including today) and my reading suggests Gan Eden is the known opposite

14. I suppose my problem is that I start with an assumption that indirect anagrams are frowned upon, so I don’t look for them. I agree that E and LB are very well-used abbreviations, but it still seems to me to require me to ‘solve’ that before then using the result in the anagram. My problem I think, though. I’ll have to adjust my internal algorithm.

15. Sourdough, of course it is an indirect anagram, because the fodder is not in the clue. Using English for E in the fodder is one thing, lb for pound is taking it a step further, as lb is not an abbreviation of pound, it is an abbreviation of the Latin word for pound. Then the doubling adds more indirectness. The only way to get it is to work backwards, which seems quite possible in this case.

16. Thanks Tees for a top notch crossword. Most of this fell nicely into place except for ASTRAKHAN which required a look-up. I particularly liked ABOMINATION, HAIRCUT, and TOPPING. I had a number of gaps in my parsing which Kitty thankfully addressed. Having Serpent on Saturday and Tees on Sunday makes for the perfect weekend.

17. Very enjoyable, with some lovely clues. Quite chewy, as they say, too, though none the worse for that, and for me this was markedly easier than the Everyman, which I gather used to be considered an entry-level puzzle. In a different universe I’m sure it was!

    To me the difference between an indirect anagram, that is where the fodder is made available through a synonym, as Tees explains, and an ‘okay’ one, where the needed fodder is either directly there or really obvious, is clear enough. For that clue we were also given a qm, which to me advertised a possible ‘something extra’.

    Thanks Kitty.

18. Some tricky clues here and I still don’t know what Gehenna and October are! I’m always grateful to our bloggers but please explain the obscure words even if they are obvious to you.
    I’m definitely with Ian @3 in being a bit shocked that anyone in the UK would think it’s OK to describe Tibet as a region of China.

19. The dictionaries assist you in all three cases. As they did me, frankly.

    As I said above, I’m not fond of referring to invaded and occupied places through the nomenclature imposed by their aggressors, but to do otherwise (where the new terminology is now in general use) would be to express an opinion. I think I might have expressed an opinion or two here and there, especially about the likes of Partygate :D, but much as I’d like to see Tibet, Northern Ireland, Palestine, and as of recently various parts of Ukraine returned to the people who some see as their rightful owners, I’m probably safer not doing that.

    Solvers will never know who I really am …

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