Financial Times 17,568 by SLORMGORM

30 comments on “Financial Times 17,568 by SLORMGORM”

1. Enjoyed this very much. I liked the ‘drop-head spanner’ in 5A, BOTTLE and the surface of ENORMOUS.
   Finished with ACTUALLY/LEEWAY, both of which took me a while to figure out. SANATORY was fair in the parsing and close enough to ‘sanitarium’ to pose no problems.
   Thanks to Slormgorm and Cineraria who cleared up SHRUB for me.

2. Couldn’t parse BOTTLE, due primarily to the fact that when we Aussies speak of bluebottles we mean nasty aquatic creatures that can give us a painful sting in the surf. I’d no idea they were flies.

   I wondered (ever so briefly) whether Slormgorm had misspelt “sanitary” for 8d. I didn’t know SANATORY, which presumably is pronounced the same way.

   PASSENGER PIGEON was a discovery. But if they’re extinct, no point in trying to remember it!

   I tried hard to parse FISH, but there really was nothing to parse.

   I thought actually/surprisingly was a bit of a stretch.

   Thanks Slormgorm & Cineraria.

3. Held up a little by entering ‘crack’ for 3d. Thought there were some marvellous anagrams here, particularly GOLDEN DELICIOUS. The one for PASSENGER PIGEON was also excellent and LAY TO REST wasn’t too shabby either. Just realised looking at the blog that I missed EGRETS. Meant to go back to it and forgot.

4. Agree – enjoyable, especially the anagrams.

   I finished unable to parse SANITARY, then suddenly the real answer with parsing came to me in a quiet moment. Of course I put my original answer down to my poor spelling…..

   I could not parse LEEWAY- so thank you Cineraria. I cannot help but feel Gotham Zoo has some special meaning in 19d. I am sure someone else will have an opinion.

   My favorites were the sly otter in LAY TO REST and SHRUB.

   Thanks Slormgorm and Cineraria

5. GDU, I agree that “actually” and “surprisingly” don’t mean the same thing. I am not surprised by something that I actually know. Surprisingly, I did not know that!

   Like others, I had to use my trusted old OED to find that “sanatory” is a real word – but easy to guess from the clue.

   I’m not too sure what “Gotham Zoo” is doing in 19D.

6. On the easy side but with some excellent clues as others have said.Most enjoyable.

   Thank you Slormgorm and Cineraria

7. Gotham in 19d is surely only there to add to the Batman villain surface of the clue.

8. Everyone knows penguins eat fish in zoos. In the Batman comics the Penguin lived in Gotham Zoo. I think the whole thing was a red herring.

9. And an allusion to Fish Mooney getting trapped by Penguin in Gotham?*

   *Was there such a situation in the series? 🙂

10. Thought the blogger might be hinting at a bird theme that I’d missed, but think I’m safe.

    Don’t know why SANATORY was preferred to SANITARY in a daily puzzle, as nothing in the grid (apart from the obvious) needs to change to accommodate it.

11. It looks as if we are moving gently towards consensus – SANATORY/sanitary was a challenge and I had to discover that sanitory doesn’t exist before the right answer went in with a shrug, plus I spent time thinking there might be more to Gotham Zoo than meets the eye. Very cleanly clued puzzle any, yes, quite breezy.

    RIDGES, LAY TO REST, SLENDER, ENORMOUS and the two amusing long anagrams for PASSENGER PIGEON and GOLDEN DELICIOUS were my big ticks. Interesting snippet re the former: Chambers does occasionally go slightly left field with its definitions and I found it amusing on this occasion. An extinct N American pigeon that flew in vast numbers in search of food. I’m wondering what kind of pigeons don’t fly in search of food?

    Thanks Slormgorm and Cineraria

12. Ui Imair, “SANITARY” as an answer does not fit the clue. As Cinereria correctly parsed it – S (second) + AN (article) + A + TORY (conservative). There is no letter “I” to support an alternative answer, nor a suggestion that “conservative” could be anything other than “tory” and not “tary”

    Although I had not heard of the word before, I think that “sanatory” means “healing” whereas “sanitary” means something that relates to cleanliness.

13. I think you’re out of my depth there Peter. I’m not suggesting that SANITARY can be constructed from the clue!

14. Okay, Ui Imair, I am sorry if I misunderstood your post. My apologies.

15. 24a – LEEWAY – “Song written about drugs with Space (6)” must be yet another capitalisation misdirection to:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_(English_band) whose debut album https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_(album) (1996) appears in 27a – WEB-BASED.

16. The anagram for 7d – GOLDEN DELICIOUS – “Docile old genius” is nice because an Apple retail assistant is called a Genius, and is usually young and far from docile.

17. I could not help wondering whether I was missing a nina or theme, but I am still coming up empty-handed.

    FrankieG@15: Space would also have been a misdirection for me if I had ever heard of the band. They seem to have enjoyed some popularity, though.

    The passenger pigeon was a migratory bird of eastern North America whose population ranged into the billions. Seemingly endless passing flocks were reported to blacken the sky for days at a time. Whatever one thinks about conservation of nature, humanity’s extermination of this species in modern times (1914) is a cautionary tale.

18. Thanks for the blog , a lot of very good clues, like Diane @1 I thought RIDGE was very good along with the anagrams mentioned. Is there a “drop-head spanner” ? sounds like a tap spanner.
    Seemed to be a lot of fake capitals , even for definitions .

19. I enjoyed this a lot, but annoyingly failed on LEEWAY. Couldn’t get ‘lied’ for ‘song’ out of my head even after I had decided it must be wrong and I wasn’t helped by the capital ‘S’ for ‘space’. Can’t help feeling I should have got it; ah, well.
    Thanks Slormgorm and Cineraria.

20. don’t see the problem with it being SANITORY in 8D personally.

    “A Conservative” can be taken as one (aka 1) Tory can it not?

21. Enjoyed this one.

    Steady, if not spectacular progress. Some marvellous clues which have all been listed above. I particularly enjoyed Ridges and Golden Delicious.

    Like Diane @1, I finished with Leeway and Actually, which took a little while to find.

    Re postmark@11, birds can fly in huge flocks other than in search of food. For instance, a murmuration of starlings.

    Thanks for an excellent blog

22. Thanks Slormgorm for an enjoyable crossword with easy but clever anagrams at 2d and 7d as well as my other favourites, EGRETS, SLENDER, and EXONERATE. I used a word finder for my LOI, LEEWAY, forgetting that song = lay. I couldn’t parse INSECT or BOTTLE so thanks Cineraria for explaining.

23. Mark A @20. The problem would be that SANITORY isn’t a word. As others have said, SANITARY doesn’t parse.

24. ah yes.
    didn’t twig that … having vowel problems today 🙂

25. I took the day off today, but I think I can help with 17dn (ACTUALLY)

    ODE 2010 gives actually [sentence adverb] used to emphasize (sic) that something someone has said or done is surprising: he actually expected me to be pleased about it!

    Chambers 2016 gives “truly, however little one might expect it” among the definitions of actually adv.

    Collins 2023 is less clear on this, but gives an example of the use of actually as a sentence modifier “actually, I haven’t seen him”.

    Hopefully, there is enough in the above to support the definition used in the clue.

26. Sourdough@19, your experience with 20a LEEWAY (thought of “lied” for song and couldn’t get it out of your head) is an advertisement for putting the puzzle down, going away to do something else, and coming back later. It’s amazing how often that works.

    I agree with FrankieG @15 that the capitalization of the S in the clue for 24a LEEWAY was intended to misdirect us to the band, but like Cineraria @17 it didn’t have that effect on me, not knowing the band. Still, I thought it was an excellent clue.

    Thanks, Slormgorm and Cineraria for the cheeky web-based fun.

27. Mark A @24 – Maybe everyone today is suffering from Irritable Vowel Syndrome?

    But thanks as ever to Slormgorm and Cineraria for an excellent puzzle and blog.

28. [piratewitch @27: Are you saying we have a loose vowel movement underway?]

29. All rather nice and enjoyable apart from 19, which was rubbish. Gotham City???

30. Sanatorium seems to have been in common usage in the world or Dickens and later in old movies, if my memory serves me.

    Thanks to Cineraria and Slormgorm for a nice challenge.

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