An unthemed puzzle by Brendan provided this week’s prize challenge.
I can’t remember an unthemed puzzle from Brendan before, so am worried that there is in fact a theme that we have missed! It was certainly tougher than his usual level, with a couple of pretty obscure words (CICERONE and AOUDAD) and some devious parsing. The grid added to the difficulty, with first letters for several across and down clues being unchecked. It’s a grid that lends itself to a Nina, but again we couldn’t see one. Thanks to Brendan.
Well, I was right to be worried! There was indeed a theme – snakes and ladders – so thanks to Richard Heald and others. I have amended the grid to include those identified so far, but there may be others!
| ACROSS | ||
| 8 | WIND DOWN |
Move like snake towards bottom, slow and stop (4,4)
|
| A straightforward charade. | ||
| 9 | RUN UP |
Quickly put together ladder to place above (3,2)
|
| And another charade; here “run” equates to a ladder in a pair of stockings. | ||
| 10 | TEES |
They replaced little piles of sand in river (4)
|
| Double definition. I think that, historically, golfers used little piles of sand to support the ball before wooden or plastic tees were available. | ||
| 11 | MAINSPRING |
Motivation seen in mother after winter (10)
|
| MA IN SPRING. A clever clue, exploiting the definition of spring (“after winter”) to mislead (we were expecting the synonym for mother to come at the end, not at the beginning). | ||
| 12 | SOURCE |
How to get an anagram, of course (6)
|
| What it says on the tin. | ||
| 14 | EPICURES |
Connoisseurs who consume timeless movies online? (8)
|
| E-PIC(t)URES. We spent some time considering STREAMERS. | ||
| 15 | RESCUED |
Delivered letter indicating possession — sign in colour (7)
|
| S (letter indicating possession – as in ‘s) CUE (sign) in RED. | ||
| 17 | SAILORS |
Stereotypical heavy drinkers creating trouble or breaking vessel (7)
|
| AIL (trouble) OR inside SS (vessel). | ||
| 20 | NAGASAKI |
Pester with an Asian drink, Japanese port (8)
|
| NAG A SAKI. Saké is the more usual spelling. | ||
| 22 | ARDENT |
Missing female, shed a tear outside, showing passion (6)
|
| (she)D inside A RENT (a tear). | ||
| 23 | HUMIDISTAT |
It controls amount of moisture I mixed with mud, that is (10)
|
| *(I MUD THAT IS). We were misled into looking for a word ending …ie. | ||
| 24 | PILL |
One of the two letters one should mind by bad and nasty person (4)
|
| P (mind your p’s and q’s) ILL (bad). Chambers gives this as a subsidiary meaning of pill (“a tiresome person”); it doesn’t seem to be connected to pillock. | ||
| 25 | ASLAN |
Literary lion using a non-standard lexicon, mostly (5)
|
| A SLAN(g) (non-standard lexicon). Aslan is the titular figure in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis and appears in all the Narnia books. | ||
| 26 | CRESTING |
Getting over the hill? It’s about taking it easy (8)
|
| C (about) RESTING. | ||
| DOWN | ||
| 1 | CICERONE |
Guide old lady around hazard on road (8)
|
| ICE (hazard) in CRONE (old lady). Chambers doesn’t explain the derivation of this term, which presumably is related to the Roman orator Cicero. | ||
| 2 | ADDS |
First part of African capital one’s withdrawn, notes as well (4)
|
| ADD(i)S (ABABA). | ||
| 3 | COMMIE |
O’ Mice and Men, initially composed as left-wing (6)
|
| *(O MICE M(en)). | ||
| 4 | ENLIVEN |
Stimulate new learner I put in uniform (7)
|
| N(ew) L(earner) I inside EVEN (uniform). | ||
| 5 | CRESSIDA |
Leading part and another taken from actress — I’d a female title role (8)
|
| (a)C(t)RESS I’D A. Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare is the title role in question. | ||
| 6 | UNTROUBLED |
Sorted out blunder without anxiety (10)
|
| *(OUT BLUNDER). | ||
| 7 | SPONGE |
Soak or wash, in a way (6)
|
| Double definition. | ||
| 13 | ROCKABILLY |
With solid support, a kid’s father makes music (10)
|
| A charade of ROCK (solid support) A BILLY (kid’s father). I was initially misled into thinking that it would be a word ending …TABLE, but Timon was not fooled. | ||
| 16 | EVASIONS |
Don’t blow up things with charges — they could help one get away (8)
|
| SAVE (don’t blow, rev) IONS (things with charges). I am indebted to Timon for the correct parsing. | ||
| 18 | RANKLING |
Vexatious order crossing line (8)
|
| L(ine) in RANKING (order). | ||
| 19 | PIN-TUCK |
Use special scissors covering slit up in piece of decorative needlework (3-4)
|
| CUT (slit, rev) in PINK (special scissors). Chambers gives this as a two word phrase. | ||
| 21 | AOUDAD |
Desert animal a couple raised in modern times (6)
|
| A DUO (rev) in AD (modern times). Apparently it’s a North African wild sheep; do they live in deserts? We had to use a word-finder for this one. | ||
| 22 | ATTLEE |
Post-war leader emerging from battle energised (6)
|
| Hidden in “battle energised”. | ||
| 24 | PETS |
Boxers, for example, swap some neat jabs — just the finalists (4)
|
| Final letters. |
With a snake and a ladder in the first two clues, I thought we were in for some fun and games; as it happens, not as much fun as I had hoped, meaning just that I found it quite hard. But there were some great clues, to compensate.
There were some very clever and maybe novel devices: “missing female shed” in ARDENT (required dropping a fixation on ardour to see this), “letter indicating possession” in RESCUED. Great misdirections!
CICERONE was the target in the clue-writing competition on &lit. a few months ago. Wiktionary gives its etymology as from a word for pea/chick-pea: “Possibly humorous reference to loquaciousness of guides.” Do peas talk a lot?
Faves were SAILORS, UNTROUBLED and TEES. The last of these referred to a practice I didn’t know, but working backwards from the river it made so much sense it had to be right.
I missed 15A REACHED fit the crossers and just about the definition. Of course it did not parse, but that is nothing new.
The grid certainly does contain a Nina – quite a number of them, in fact – heavily hinted at by the first two clues and their solutions.
Thanks bridgesong. Another pleasant hour or two of steady but not spectacular progress for me. I’m ashamed to say the simple 12a was my LOI, partly because CICERONE was new to me but mostly because of lack of imagination. You are right about the golfers’ piles of sand except perhaps in those days that it was a task for the caddie! Held myself up in the SE corner by pencilling in PRAT for 24a, not entirely confidently. CRESSIDA was obviously the answer to 5d but it took a bit of figuring why. I tried to complicate it by using the first letters of ‘and’ and ‘taken’ but it is simpler than that of course.
I can’t see Nina even with RH hint @3!
Didn’t help myself by throwing HUMIDIFIER in without checking. CICERONE I’ve seen before I’m sure.
Thanks both
All solved and parsed, but over a couple of sittings. CICERONE and TEES were my last two in, with some odd ones, like AOUDAD, going in early, because for some reason I knew it.
Thanks to Brendan and bridgesong.
Further to RH hint @3 look diagonally!
Ice on the road not being a thing here, needed help with cicerone, and only then got tees instead of thinking about aits or keys, d’oh. And I remember taking an age to twig wind for move like snake, d’oh again. Only bits of stuff in the oddlights, like cus(?), let non pea wad up. Someone will say if there’s more. Ta both, now for today’s.
Just realised that at 26 I’d bunged in coasting, then later had overtyped the a with Attlee coming down, finishing up with, and failing to wake up and correct, coesting … silly!
For How to get an anagram, of course (6), I had RESORT. Re-sort being how to get an anagram. And a course of action being a resort. Clever me I thought. Turns out it wasn’t so clever after all.
Comments @3 & @7: I see only SOCIAL and SALMON and maybe BOAT for Ninas,, but do not see any significance or relationship to 8A or 9A???
Thanks Brendan for a very pleasant, expertly clued crossword. I was expecting a difficult, themed prize but I found this quite easy with many favourites including SOURCE, SAILORS, ARDENT, ROCKABILLY, EVASIONS, and PETS. I cannot spot a nina despite being a devoted fan of Serpent. Thanks bridgesong for the blog.
I am worried that my enjoyment of this Prize puzzle was compromised by having so much trouble in the SE, which I only got out with the kind encouragement of a friend when I went back to it several days after my first attempt. Yes Biggles A@4, I also tried PRAT for 24a, and I had ARDOUR intstead of ARDENT at 22a originally, so it’s my own darned fault really. I also had NIP-TUCK for a while for 19d as i thiough it was referring to the cosmetic surgery procerday; then I checked my work and finally thougth of PIN TUCK (maybe a vague memory from sewing classes aged 12?). Anyway it all came right in the end. I was still pleased to read the blog, whihc cleared up a few niggling parsses that I couldn’t see.
[Oh and I also thought PILL didn’t quite fit “nasty person”, bridgesong. I hae always thought a PILL was a bit of a boring pain in the neck rather than someone nasty.]
I am still no wiser about the Ninas. I am obviously as thick as two short planks when it comes to this puzzle, as I can’t see what Richard Heald@3 is referring to even if I look diagonally – and I’m not picking up on the suggestions made by Cineraria@11. Can someone please enlighten this remedial solver?
Oh, I have to say that I did like 13d ROCKABILLY a lot – and once I finally parsed it, I had a good smile at EPICURES at 14a.
Thanks to Brendan and bridgesong.
[Sorry Tony@12, my tiresomely long comment crossed with yours or I would have acknowledged some parallels in our solving experience]
[cosmetic surgery PROCEDURE – sorry!]
Cineraria @11, there is a SOCIAL ladder as well as a SALMON ladder, and I believe a BOA is a snake.
Like Richard Heald @3, I too was struck by WIND DOWN and RUN UP in the prominent position at 8A and 9A. Then MAINSPRING appeared at 11A and I thought it was something to do with a clock. Hickory Dickory Dock? There’s ONE in CICERONE which is an obscure word (ie one I didn’t know.) Was it there for a reason?
Dr Whatson@1 has also pointed the snakes and ladders.
Over the hill: Jack and Jill? O’Mice and Men:Three blind mice? Sailors: Tinker tailor soldier sailor?
Is it children’s games and nursery rhymes? There’s also rock, and scissors, but no paper. Not enough in themselves.
Am I grasping at straws? Come back Richard Heald, please.
paddymelon @17, see me @16. The two ladders climb through the grid and the snake descends.
I failed on TEES, and wasn’t sure about PILL and ADDS (and still don’t understand its definition).
There has to be a theme, and I was sure it is connected with SNAKES and LADDERS. All I can see is ADDERS (zigzagging down from the A of 2 down) and STEP (straight up like a ladder) from 2d.
Thanks Brendan and bridgesong.
There’s also a ROPE ladder heading NW from the R in EPICURES
OK, also RATTLER. I don’t know. This freeform find-a-word is making me crosseyed.
Oh, thanks TimC & all re the snakes and ladders. Will have to revisit when the scales have fallen from my eyes.
I had RATTLER, ADDER, ASP and BOA for the snakes that “wind down”
Toughest I’ve attempted in ages. Thought I’d nailed it but had RETCHED (delivered in the vomiting sense) in lieu of RESCUED. My sham justification was that one might ETCH a letter on an object to indicate possession. What a vandal!
Some really impressive clues … when cracked. Am old enough to recall tees built from sand from some nook & cranny crack of memory.
For once, enjoyed the puzzle more than (to date) the blog! There’s a climbing ROPE diagonally towards NE corner. And ADDERS certainly wind down near NW corner. My sympathies to bridgesong being expected to diagnose and illustrate all these and doubtless more! I’ll come back (a lot) later. But thanks to Brendan for all the clue crafting.
Thanks for the blog, really enjoyed this, being on the beach for a spring day in November helped, although it is very worrying.
I had so many clues circled i had to re-edit to get my favourites of the favourites, some already mentioned. EVASIONS was great for the don’t blow up, I liked PILL for the P’s and Q’s , and ROCKABILLY because the father of the kid finally gets a mention.
On the other hand, I am struggling to think of anything in the whole wide world that I care less about than Ninas.
I’ve now amended the grid to highlight some of the snakes and ladders (too late to include ASP, sorry Jay @23).
TEES and piles of sand reminded me that golf balls used to be perfectly smooth, the natural assumption being that they would travel further, golfers discovered that older, roughened surfaces were much better. The dimpled golf ball was born . Size, depth and distribution of dimples is still a big research area.
Found this one really tough and couldn’t parse a few including RESCUED and EVASIONS my LOIs
Strangely CICERONE, my favourite, was one of my first ones in.
Also liked ROCKABILLY PIN-TUCK and PILL
Thanks B &b
Thanks bridgesong, like HoustonTony@2 I failed on RESCUED with REACHED being an ACHE (sign – of pain) inside red with a vague definition of a letter reaching its destination being thus in the possession of its recipient. Never mind! I really enjoyed the challenge and nearly fell into a few other traps, eg the NIP/TUCK (like Julie in Aus@13) which would work well with the definition, but couldn’t see any justification for meddling with PINK and a dictionary gave me the true meaning. I only knew 1d thanks to the travel guides by that fine publisher, and for 10A thought of a place kicker in rugby moving from sand to a plastic tee in the professional era. Thanks also various for the Ninas, at a stretch could also have Hissing SID within 5d (from Captain Beaky) and thanks Brendan for a very enjoyable challenge even though you got the better of me!
If the etymology of CICERONE is as Dr WhatsOn@1 suggests, then that’s another rattler. I knew the word from the Cicerone walking guide books. I had the same favourites as Roz.
[Roz@27 thank you for that note, had no idea you were also a student of golf history! I once lost a pub quiz tie break to guess the number of dimples on a golf balls. I got all technical with est’d surface area of ball, area of dimple, ‘packing factor’ estimate etc, but was out by an order of magnitude when the answer was an improbable eighty, I still think that is nonsense (only ten per quarter hemisphere?) but maybe the quizmaster was using one of the experimental balls of which you speak.]
I know little about golf, but kickers in rugby league used to make a mound out of sand, but these days have a kicking tee.
Snakes and ladders were the obvious theme after solving 8a & 9a, but by the time I switched my attention to 10a I had forgotten all about it. Failed on half a dozen – Brendan can be almost impossible for me sometimes. After a while my brain turns to concrete and I even failed to see ‘couple’=DUO! Doh.
Thanks to setter and blogger.
I’m another one who found this difficult, and I didn’t see the theme.
Very clever setting to get in all the references and NINAs. I particularly liked ARDENT for the (she)d a tear and the surface of CICERONE with the old crone.
Thanks Brendan and bridgesong.
A satisfying puzzle in the end. It seemed unpromising at first, but I got through it eventually except (like others above) for 3 alternative fits for 15ac which all seemed unconvincing, although one was correct. Deliver us from evil, indeed! Sorry that I resorted to a word filler to complete 1d despite owning some old Cicerone guidebooks. Pleased to see my local river making an appearance at 10ac. Also pleased to verify that KNIP scissors (and electrical shears) exist. Didn’t spot the hidden theme until I looked at the official published solution and read this blog this morning. Impressively devious. Glad that I stuck with it.
Due to the grid, this felt like doing 4 mini-puzzles. I completed NE and SE corners first then moved to the LHS, solving the NW corner last but failed to solve 10ac TEES and 1d CICERONE.
Liked ROCKABILLY, ASLAN.
I could not parse:
2d I wrongly entered ADIS (for Adis Abeba); and 16d.
New: AOUDAD.
Thanks, both.
* I did not see the theme
John @34 I think 19D is “Use special scissors”= PINK , creating serrated edges.
[Gazzh@31 I have no interest in golf, ” a good walk spoilt” is one of my favourite quotes, However I do use this example for the students in Fluid Dynamics, a case where the obvious answer is wrong. Against my better judgement I also tell them about reverse-swing from cricket. ]
[ Gazzh @31 – very crude calculation , diameter of ball about 4cm ? surface area about 5000 mm squared. Dimple about 4mm wide ? Treat as a square for packing fraction, area 16 mm squared. So about 300 ? 80 does seem far too low. ]
Having struggled with this and having said in the past that I preferred Brendan without the themes I was going to say that I should be careful what I wished for as I couldn’t see one here!
Thanks to Brendan and bridgesong.
[Roz @37. Pretty good! “The average golf ball has 336 dimples.” 🙂 ]
Wow! So close and yet so far. As you can see from me@1 I sort of “got” the theme, but really didn’t! Never having tried, I don’t know if it is easier or harder to insert Ninas the way it was done here or in the more usual way in aligned non-crossers, but either way, congrats to Brendan on a great achievement.
BTW my clue for CICERONE in the andlit competition was:
Bamboozled concierge loses a thousand dollars to tourist guide.
Came in 23rd out of 64.
[ Thanks Sheffield Hatter @ 39 , I would be happy to be within 100 either way. There must be some variation, they are changing the number, size, depth , shape etc . I think golf balls must be a lucrative market. ]
Thanks bridgesong for posting the colour coded grid and thanks to Jay @23 for finding ASP. I knew that there had to be a 4th snake because there were four ladders. I don’t think a setter as precise as Brendan would tolerate an imbalance between the two.
[Roz@37 yes that’s pretty much where I landed, Sheffield hatter thanks for confirming I am right to be bitter about it years later! Impressed that cricket makes the syllabus Roz, all I remember is a jet of water hitting a plane at an angle and so many assumptions to make it analytically tractable that we had no faith in the results.]
Peter Guthrie Tait (see Chambers Biographical Dictionary) constructed a mathematical model that predicted that it is impossible to drive more than 190 yards on a calm day. (He also played golf at night with phosphorescent balls). Never mind Rory McIlroy, his son drove 250 yards at St. Andrews in 1893. When taught at school that the trajectory of a missile is a parabola I wish my teacher had emphasized that a model is an approximation based on simplifying assumptions.
As a dual brit and italian, I can say cicerone is a quite common word in italian and is also the italian name for Cicero , the root of the name is linked to chickpeas but the association with (museum, archeologic site, etc) guides is not.
Cicero is one of the fathers of oratory and therefore it’s not the chickpeas that talk a lot, it was Cicero who was a master of oratory and rhetoric and that is why the guides are called Ciceroni as they need to be able to engage their customers/listeners just like good old Cicero used to do in front of the Roman Senate and everyone listened.
Rhetoric was unfortunately not enough to spare him a violent death
I found this really tough. Finally managed to get, with parsing, all but CICERONE (nho) and TEES (I know very little about golf as played today, never mind in the distant past). I think I have heard of PILL from when, as a working-class kid in Stevenage I used to read the jolly japes of boys at public schools. Similarly, I will be ready if either of ADDLE-PATED or CLODPOLL comes up in the future.
AOUDAD only looks so weird because it’s an Arabic word transcribed by the French who, of course, lack the letter W to transcribe the Arabic ‘waw’. If those creatures had originally been reported by Brits, they’d be awdad. Looks like a plural form, but I cba to look into it properly.
[Gazzh and Roz, golf and cricket, poetry in motion, science in action 🙂 Vaguely remember bits, like Bernoulli, venturi effect, and fluid dynamics being, well, fluid; e.g. why the ball, which logically swings ‘towards’ its rough side, under certain conditions does the reverse. (And Roz, I still think the Pissant would’ve been on Bohr’s side at Solvay ’27)]
Brian@44, 250 yards seems a very long way for that time. How far do they hit it now ? The clubs and balls must make a big difference .
Grant @ 47 I do not know the cricket terms really but the thing called reverse swing is when the shiny side “stalls” due to separation of the laminar flow , there needs to be a large difference between the roughness of the two sides. . Same idea for a smooth golf ball.
[ And yes Bohr and Kant were both masters of using a huge number of words to say nothing. ]
[Roz, here’s probly not the place, but the essence is that after reading Hume, Kant, (leaving aside all his gothic waffle), said that space, time and cause are what we need in order to perceive. And entangled particles behave as though space, time and cause don’t exist. Marlan Scully’s eraser experiments were pretty cool re all this]
[Grant the trouble with Kant and Bohr is that they overestimate the importance of humans, the universe gets along fine without us. For the eraser experiments most people in the field would accept the interpretations are completely wrong, they failed to consider Born probability densities , hard to explain without diagrams. ]
[Ok, to be continued over a pint or five maybe if we ever meet up, e.g. at a S&B weekend … ]
Very clever by Brendan, this took me most of the week and I still had to cheat for CICERONE who I had never heard of, so technically a DNF. Failed to spot the snake and ladders too Oh well ! Thanks to Brendan and to Bridgesong.
Dr Whatson@1: ciceris Latin for chick-pea, and Cicero’s cognomen is said to derive from this (or was inherited from an ancestor who had it).