Financial Times 17819 Gozo

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Thank you to Gozo.  Definitions are underlined in the clues.  Please excuse the unusual formatting.  I’ve had to make do since my usual posting method is not working.

Across

  1. Rodent, second seen in store (6)

MARMOT :  MO(short for “moment”/a short moment in time/a second) contained in(seen in) MART(a store/shop).

  1. Ace pilot crashed — of lyrical bent (8)

POETICAL :  Anagram of(… crashed) ACE PILOT.

  1. Develop a link with old clay (6)

KAOLIN :  Anagram of(Develop) [A LINK plus(with) O(abbrev. for “old”) ].

  1. For starters, casserole of quality, as usual, valued in Nantes (3,2,3)

COQ AU VIN :  1st letters, respectively, of(For starters) “casserole of quality, as usual, valued in Nantes”.

Defn:  A casserole/stew that may be much appreciated/valued in Nantes, France.

  1. Woman gets cross outside wide forest (8)

SHERWOOD :  [ SHE(third person pronoun for a woman) plus(gets) ROOD(a cross/crucifix) ] containing(outside) W(abbrev. for “wide”, in cricket).

  1. Nice evening for a party (6)

SOIRÉE :  “Evening” in the native language of Nice, France.

Defn:  …/social gathering held in the evening.

  1. State circles round Hawaii (4)

OHIO :  OO(2 x letter representing a circle) containing(round) HI(international code for the state of Hawaii, USA).

Defn:  … in the USA.

  1. Do big trees flourish here? Hardly (4,6)

GOBI DESERT :  Anagram of(… flourish) DO BIG TREES.

  1. Eastern Cape city is location of Walford, it seems (4,6)

EAST LONDON :  Last letter of(Eastern, in an across clue) “Cape” + LONDON(English city).

Defn:  Where it seems, ie. in fiction, that Walford, the borough that is the setting for the soap opera, EastEnders, is located.

  1. Rude word in boat-house (4)

OATH : Hidden in(in) “boat-house”.

  1. Leaving diamonds at workplace (6)

OFFICE :  OFF(leaving/going) + ICE(slang for “diamonds”, the precious stones).

  1. Full of spite, silly moo lands in planet (8)

VENOMOUS :  Anagram of(silly) MOO contained in(lands in) VENUS(a planet in our solar system).

  1. Who’s out with car, returning with back end of boot missing, here? (8)

SHOWROOM :  Anagram of(… out) WHO’S plus(with) reversal of(…, returning) “motor”(informal term for “car”) minus last letter of(with back end of … missing) “boot”.

Defn:  Comically or tragically, where a car out for a test drive returns with part of its rear missing.

  1. Trip to Venice on yacht, initially, taking a time (6)

VOYAGE : 1st letters, respectively, of(…, initially) “Venice on yacht” plus(taking) AGE(a long period of time).

  1. Highway patroller giving amphetamine and cocaine to works (5-3)

SPEED-COP :  SPEED(informal term for an amphetamine drug) plus(and) C(slang abbrev. for the drug, cocaine) plus(to) OP(abbrev. for “opera”, plural form of “opus”, a musical piece/work).

  1. Delivery service’s songs (6)

YODELS :  YODEL(a delivery service company in the UK)’S.

Defn:  … sung with sudden changes from a natural voice to a falsetto.

Down

  1. Arranges party — with what’s available? (5,2)

MAKES DO : MAKES(arranges/organises) DO(a party/social function).

Defn:  Works ….

  1. Castles bordering lake where birds gather (9)

ROOKERIES :  ROOKS(chess pieces also called castles) containing(bordering) ERIE(one of the Great Lakes in North America).

  1. North American people from Iowa playing blackjack (6)

OJIBWA :  Anagram of(… playing …) [IOWA + B(abbrev. for “black”) + J(abbrev. for “jack”, the playing card) ].

  1. Small shire and bullock working (4)

OXON :  OX(bullock) ON(working/functioning).

Defn: Abbrev.(small) for Oxfordshire.

  1. Easter — so cultivated blooms! (3,5)

TEA ROSES :  Anagram of(… cultivated) EASTER — SO.

  1. Woods providing shelter or a bait for wild animals (5)

COVER :  Double defn:  1st:  Trees under which wild animals may obtain shelter; and 2nd:  Can’t find a satisfactory explanation for this – trees under which wild animals may find prey?

  1. Most extensive logs — ten chopped (7)

LONGEST :  Anagram of(… chopped) LOGS — TEN.

  1. Saucy city’s spicy sausage (7)

BOLOGNA :  BOLOGNA(city associated with Bolognese sauce for pasta).

  1. Understatement from TS Eliot play (7)

LITOTES :  Anagram of(… play) TS ELIOT.

  1. Give more facts that are complicated (9)

ELABORATE :  Double defn:  1st:  To present further details about.

  1. Chess player by bar is House of Lords official (5,3)

BLACK ROD :  BLACK(chess player with the black pieces) plus(by) ROD(a thin straight bar).

  1. Self-centred folk say it’s so peculiar (7)

EGOISTS :  EG(abbrev. for “exempli gratia”/for example/say) + anagram of(… peculiar) IT’S SO.

  1. Airline employee as TV presenter (7)

HOSTESS :  Double defn:  1st:  …/stewardess.

  1. Style of architecture dismissed by two companies (6)

ROCOCO :  RO(abbrev. for “run out”/how a batsman in cricket may be dismissed) plus(by) CO,CO(2 x abbrev. for “company”).

  1. Became ice-cold round about 0 Fahrenheit (5)

FROZE :  Anagram of(round about) [ ZERO(0/nought) F(abbrev. for Fahrenheit, a temperature scale) ].

  1. I travel, unknown, round Mediterranean island (4)

GOZO :  GO(to travel/tour) + Z(symbol for an unknown quantity in mathematics) + O(a round-shaped letter).

Double defn:  1st:  The setter using the self-referential pronoun; and 2nd:  … in the Maltese archipelago.

 

27 comments on “Financial Times 17819 Gozo”

  1. Thanks Gozo and Scchua.

    Not sure if this comment will appear as the ones I posted on the Guardian puzzle haven’t .

    Really liked this puzzle. Is Yodel still extant – I thought they changed name.

  3. Thanks Gozo (except for 3dn) and Scchua. I had 19ac the same way as JS@2.

    3dn: In my view, this really needs to say something like “playing with black jack”.

  4. In the spirit of 14d, this wasn’t a bad way to spend my coffee break. My first few in contained Q, X, Z and K so I was on the alert for the pangram which duly emerged.
    I liked SHOWROOM and GOBI DESSERT best and it would have been great if the wordplay for the aforementioned 14d had been an example of that figure of speech.
    There were a few answers that didn’t seem so cryptic, for instance, SOIREE and HOSTESS. I wasn’t sure, like our blogger, how to classify COVER, or for that matter, EAST LONDON for the reason JS mentions.
    However, it was breezy entertainment so thanks, Gozo and Scchua who still thankully managed to provide the visuals!

  5. I took nearly as long puzzling out YODELS as the rest of the crossword. Because I checked, in the UK, Yodel the delivery company are currently restructuring after splitting from their parent company in June, apparently, but score much higher than Evri/Hermes in reliability studies.

    Thank you to scchua (isn’t the utility more or less useable?) and Gozo.

  6. 19ac: Further to JS@2 et al, I take this as a simple double definition, the first relating to a real city in South Africa, and the second to a fictional part of a real city in England.

    7dn: SOED 2007 p 544 has, among its definitions for cover, “Woodland, undergrowth, etc., that serves to shelter or conceal wild animals or game.” Chambers 2016 p 358 has “undergrowth or thicket concealing game, etc”. I think we can match “game” in these definitions to “bait” in the clue.

  7. I am truly surprised to see the clue for OJIBWA: how can an anagrind between two elements embrace both of them without a ‘with’ or an ‘and’ or similar? Sorry, but that’s just poor. I am not at all convinced by ‘are’ in ELABORATE – I don’t see how it can be part of the def and suspect it is a link word – in which case, surely it should be ‘is’. I agree with Diane that SOIREE is barely cryptic. And GOZO seems a tad unfair, giving us two definitions with WP in the middle; I’ve no problem with setters being creative but wonder how many other solvers tried to incorporate either ‘I’ or ‘Mediterranean island’ into their WP.

    Also like Diane, my two favourites were GOBI DESERT and SHOWROOM.

    Thanks Gozo and scchua

  8. I really got into this! I wasn’t keen on EASTern/EAST in in 19A but I liked ‘flourish’ as the anagram indicator at 16A. Thanks Gozo and scchua. Have a good day, all.

  9. Straightforward enough with not so many quibbles as others, or at least, different ones… yodel is a form of singing not a song per se, used as a means of communication between mountain tops, if Heidi is to be believed, certainly the delivery service wasn’t the first to spring to mind.. I was thinking along deliveries=overs for COVERS despite that being a solution for another clue entirely .. on a completely different tack, my Uncle Peter lived on Gozo..
    Thanks Gozo n scchua

  10. Parsed 24d FROZE with an anagram of ZERO (“about 0”) plus F[ahrenheit] all reversed “round” – ((ZERO*)+F)<
    Saw no wordplay in 19a – It's just telling us that there's another EAST LONDON, apparently, in SA
    "I", for one, liked 26d GOZO with a definition at either end, and wordplay in between.
    I thought 13a SOIRÉE was nice, too, with the lower-case "n" hiding at the front of the clue, instead of what usually happens — Nice.
    And I thought 14d LITOTES was "not bad", either.

  11. 30ac: ODE 2010 p 2059 gives us “yodel noun a song, melody, or call delivered by yodelling”. Similar definitions can be found in SOED 2007 p 3695 and Chambers 2016 p 1822.

  13. Thanks Gozo. This was a mixed bag for me. I revealed EAST LONDON (surprised to see ‘Eastern’ in the clue and ‘East’ in the answer), BLACK ROD, and YODELS. All of those were beyond my scope of knowledge. I thought HOSTESS for ‘airline employee’ seemed a bit dated; maybe ‘bygone’ or ‘one-time’ might have been added to the surface. However, there was much I liked including MARMOT, COQ AU VIN, OFFICE, and ELABORATE. Thanks scchua for the blog.

  14. I enjoyed this with a few frustrations

    My favourites were OHIO, MAKES DO, ROOKERIES and BOATHOUSE.

    My frustration was the number of times I had to go to the internet to answer clues. Tony@14 came up with a few examples, here are some more. Even with the crossers OBJIBWA is impossible to solve without knowing the word OBJIBWA (and I agree with PM@7 on the wording of the clue), the double definition of EAST LONDON (never been to Eastern Cape nor watched East Enders), and GOZO was clever but I agree again with PM@7. I was amused to learn that a YODEL is a song. I thought it just a series of unpleasant noises uttered by the occasional Swiss person. But to use the name of an insolvent UK delivery company in a double definition shows again how insular our setters’ view of the world can be.

    In the end, my frustration section was longer than the favourite section. I did enjoy the puzzle, it was just that the quibbles took longer to explain.

    Thanks Gozo and scchua

  15. I think there may be a mistake in the clue for 29a SPEED-COP, possibly based on a misinterpretation of Chambers:
    ‘Op or op op, abbrev: opera; operation; operator; opposite; optical (see op art below); opus.’
    I think the word “opera” here means an opera, e.g. Carmen, and not the Latin plural of opus.
    As far as oed.com is concerned, ‘op.‘ means a singular opus, and the citations pluralise it as ‘opp.’ or ‘ops’ (or even ‘opuses’)…

  17. Frankie@15. An interesting point. Would it be excessively generous to the setter to argue that a single opus can contain more than one musical piece and so OP can mean works?

  18. I failed on 30a YODELS. I had the crossers, thought, like Undrell@9, that yodel was the way of singing, not the song, and entered MOTET, assuming it was the name of a delivery company.

    I initially thought the same as FrankieG@15 re op=works at 29a SPEED-COP, but PB@17 set me straight. For example, Beethoven’s Op 18 is made up of six string quartets, each a separate work.

    I also didn’t understand the “bait” in the clue for 7d COVER, and I think the clue works as well or better without it.

    Favourites were the superb surfaces of 16a GOBI DESERT and 24d FROZE (an excellent indirect anagram).

    Thanks Gozo for the witty fun and scchua for the excellent blog.

  19. It is very rare that I join in discussion about my puzzles. I much prefer to allow them to stand alone as
    further Gozo conundrums to perplex my solvers. However I am wryly delighted to discover that today’s puzzle has bewildered and ultimately foxed every commentator. Every solution includes an O. The pangram which a very few commentators noted is such that the pangram is in fact OA to OZ inclusive. But that is not all — there are a further twenty examples with a letter preceding the O — AO to ZO, but not including EO, FO, JO, KO, QO and UO. Thus, for instance, GOZO can be broken down into GO, ZO and OZ.

  20. I thought it was a strange puzzle. Mostly very easy clues but a few, as noted above, with questionable wordplay. Also, more than the usual amount of UK specific knowledge was required for this one. All in all a fun solve though—-thanks Gozo (Island that you are) and Scchua.

  22. GOZO was great. I put Mini forest instead of GOBI DESERT! Which I understand to be some uk environmental movement. And I have to add that here in New York BOLOGNA is hardly a spicy sausage! Nduja, andouille, merguez, salami, pepperoni, even kielbasa maybe. But not bologna!

    Thanks all.

  23. Thanks again Gozo. You’re too brilliant for the lot of us! I, for one, often miss the forest for the trees.

  25. I spotted the O trick but I kept quiet to give other people a chance, ( my nose is not really growing now, it is just an optical illusion , honestly ) .

  26. Pelham Barton@17 – Yes, I think it would be excessively generous.
    Cellomaniac@18 – Catalogues of Beethoven compositions: ‘The traditional 19th-century method of identifying a composer’s works was for publishers to assign some sort of consecutive opus number to the works as they were published.’
    Op. 18 may contain “six string quartets, each a separate work”, but they were published together as a single work and have a singular opus number.
    Agree to disagree.

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