Alia’s second appearance in the cryptic slot
A fine puzzle to start the week – a pleasing mix of clue types, with some good anagrams, neat charades and smooth, meaningful surfaces throughout.
I had ticks for 1ac SUMMITS, 11ac POIGNANTLY, 25ac AUTOMATON, 26ac DREAM, 3dn INCENDIARY, 16dn SLAPDASH, 19dn CINEMA and 20dn FLAMBÉ.
Thanks to Alia for the puzzle.
Definitions are underlined in the clues.
Across
1 Two males wearing formal outfits for important meetings (7)
SUMMITS
M M (two males) in SUITS (formal outfits)
5 Operations bringing in nothing after April by the way (7)
APROPOS
APR[ril] + OPS (operations) round O (nothing)
9 Ace medical worker going round hospital when needed (2,3)
AD HOC
A (ace) + DOC (medical worker) round H (hospital)
10 Flexible item ruptured with holes (9)
LITHESOME
An anagram (ruptured) of ITEM and HOLES
11 Not playing around, sadly (10)
POIGNANTLY
An anagram (around) of NOT PLAYING
12 Somewhat wide-ranging segment of a recent Taylor Swift concert? (3)
ERA
Hidden in widE-RAnging – I had to do some research here and found this
14 Frustrated senior cops assigned to a job (12)
DISAPPOINTED
DIS (Detective Inspectors – senior cops) + APPOINTED (assigned to a job)
18 Fresh larvae, I guess, is a type of rich food (5,7)
LIVER SAUSAGE
An anagram (fresh) of LARVAE I GUESS
21 Standard role in film getting cut (3)
PAR
PAR[t] (role in film)
22 Animal rage freely flowing from execs (10)
MANAGERIAL
An anagram (freely) of ANIMAL RAGE
`
25 Area up front usually needs to house fruit machine (9)
AUTOMATON
A (area) + U[sually] N[eeds] round TOMATO (fruit)
26 ‘Ideal’ days ultimately never materialise before noon (5)
DREAM
D (days) + [neve]R [materialis[E] + AM (before noon)
27 Trendy person extremely precocious in their performing (7)
HIPSTER
P[recociou]S in an anagram (performing) of THEIR
28 It’s a typical measurement, of course (7)
YARDAGE
Reference to a golf course: ‘the distance between the player’s ball and the target he is aiming for’.
Down
1 American politician enthralled by science? This smells somewhat fishy … (6)
SCAMPI
SCI (science) round A (American) MP (politician)
2 Second broadcast includes hot material (6)
MOHAIR
MO (second) + AIR (broadcast) round H (hot)
3 Provocative conclusion to column in popular church journal (10)
INCENDIARY
[colum]N in IN (popular) + CE (church) + DIARY (journal) – great surface
4 Hairdressing business regularly seen in small towns? (5)
SALON
Alternate letters of SmAlL tOwNs
5 Wild animals run off, covered in little insects (9)
ANTELOPES
ELOPE (run off) in ANTS (little insects)
6 Short Instagram video is genuine, we’re told (4)
REEL
Sounds like (we’re told) real (genuine)
7 Quality land (8)
PROPERTY
Double definition
8 Officials set to transform administrative districts (8)
STEWARDS
An anagram (to transform) of SET + WARDS (administrative districts)
13 Chief component of phone containing metal (10)
RINGLEADER
RINGER (component of phone) round LEAD (metal)
15 Stone coming from blast area, possibly (9)
ALABASTER
An anagram (possibly coming from) of BLAST AREA
16 Careless hit-and-run? (8)
SLAPDASH
A neat charade of SLAP (hit) and RUN (dash)
17 Go too far on the subject of rearing dogs, perhaps (8)
OVERSTEP
OVER (on the subject of) + a reversal (rearing) of PETS (dogs, perhaps)
19 Pictures of clubs in Eastern Massachusetts (6)
CINEMA
A neat charade of C (clubs) + IN + E (Eastern) + MA (Massachusetts)
20 Method of cooking meat in edges of fire? (6)
FLAMBÉ
F[ir]E round LAMB
23 Endlessly uses a loudspeaker to give someone grief (5)
ANNOY
[t]ANNOY[s] (uses a loudspeaker)
24 Piece in revolutionary multimedia issue (4)
EMIT
Hidden reversal in mulTIMEdia
I’m never quite sure what to expect on a Monday these days. This was firmly back in the gentle tradition – which is no criticism. Some very nice surfaces in here and plenty of crisp, clean constructions. AD HOC, LIVER SAUSAGE, AUTOMATON, INCENDIARY, SLAPDASH and OVERSTEP are my picks today.
Thanks Alia and Eileen
Didn’t parse SCAMPI, but clues which use a series of abbreviations tend to have that effect. I did find this very enjoyable though and ANNOY raised a smile. Felt it was a bit more challenging than most Mondays of late (which may be about adjusting to a relatively new setter’s style) but no less enjoyable for that.
Confidently entered FURLONG at 28a. Wrong!
That was my first thought, too, Shirl!
Another who found this a struggle to get going but with a few across clues in the down ones seemed to go much more readily – either the “getting on the wavelength” effect or the help of a few crossers. Some lovely anagrams and I like that the setter avoided over-complex cryptic parsing and also gave us some very readable surfaces. Some modern references too, which is good to see, though I am pretty sure the Swifties in the forum will be aware that the tour was called “Eras” not “Era” so I don’t think that quite works.
The Instagram reference was new to me but perfectly guessable as a standard film term, which is the kind of trivia/GK I like – I learned something and was not frustrated that it was outside my spheres of knowledge.
Thanks Alia and Eileen.
Had fun doing this last night. Not a write-in but didn’t require any search engine for once. Pretty much agree with Eileen’s picks with SLAPDASH and FLAMBÉ my favourites.
Ta Alia & Eileen.
A pleasure to start the week with this very good Monday puzzle, which was elevated by numerous fine surfaces. Favourites were SALON, SLAPDASH and FLAMBÉ.
I thought PROPERTY was the COD in an enjoyable Monday puzzle.
And I must say I like Eileen’s clear, straightforward explanations, without recourse to lots of colours or tabulation.
So thanks to her and to Alia.
Couldn’t quite see why days, (plural) was a single D in DREAM, but other than that a good Monday offering.
Thanks, Eileen, for digging out the Taylor Swift reference, I doubt if I could have bothered.
Very enjoyable.
Thanks to Alia and Eileen especially for help with Taylor Swift. I guess the definition should include ‘segment of’ so that ERA = one concert from ‘The Eras Tour’?
JOFT@ 5: I know next to nothing about Taylor Swift but the tour name came up recently in another puzzle. Given that ‘Somewhat’ in the clue is indicating the hidden, I took ‘segment of a recent Taylor Swift concert’ to be the definition and a segment of ERAS would be ERA. I have no idea whether the concert is, in fact, segmented but it explained the presence of those otherwise superfluous words.
I just checked and, according to Google: Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is divided into distinct segments, or “acts,” each representing one of her studio albums
Jack @5 I saw the defn in 12A as “segment of a recent Taylor Swift concert”, hence ERA as a segment of Eras
PostMark GMTA!
Another furlonger here. Very enjoyable start to the week. Thank you, Alia. Nice to meet a new setter- I must have missed their first one. Fave clue was ANTELOPES! Picturing it made me smile.
For me this was perfect for a Monday. Not overly taxing but required some thinking and plenty of humour.
Liked SUMMITS, HIPSTER, AUTOMATON and quite a few others.
Luckily already had some checking letters so I didn’t experience the FURLONG dilemma.
Thanks Aria and Eileen
Good fun. Enjoyed ANTELOPE, HIPSTER & SLAPDASH to name but a few
Also needed the crossers to eliminate furlong
Parsed ERA(S) as others have commented
Cheers E&A
I’m not a follower of Taylor Swift — a swiftie? — so ERA was a guess. Neither am I a golfer, so YARDAGE was a head scratch. All else was OK and enjoyable.
I’ve never heard of Taylor Swift.
Thanks to all re “segment of…” – I knew there’d be a few die-hard Swifties to sort it out! I wasn’t aware that the individual concerts were themselves divided into eras, which makes sense.
William @9: My only stab at justification is that, when a letter is used as an abbreviation for an amount then it is not pluralised. So we happily write 1cm or 10cm and read the latter as “ten centimetres”. In a similar fashion “10d” could read as “ten days”. I’m not wholly convinced by this explanation however!
I enjoyed that, very pleasant start to the week. As someone who usually does quiptics it’s nice when a Monday puzzle is on the easier end. This one went in more smoothly than some recent quiptics. I have little to no knowledge of golf so needed all the crossers for 28. Favourites were POIGNANTLY, SLAPDASH and ANTELOPES for the surface.
I agree that “segment of” is part of the definition for 12A
Thanks Eileen and Alia
I’ve never seen ‘tannoy’ used as a verb (though it’s in Chambers) so 23d made me hesitate. Otherwise a good puzzle and well suited to a Monday.
Taylor Swift…. ‘tintin Chambers. A’ll ave t’ ava word wi t’editor.
Good Monday puzzle with a few thought-provoking entries. I liked HIPSTER, INCENDIARY, RINGLEADER, and FLAMBÉ.
Thanks inter ALIA and Eileen.
Thanks Alia and Eileen
In contrast to others, I found this hard – harder than Saturday’s Prize, in fact. The SE took longest.
I had never heard of REEL as something on Instagram, though, to be fair, I’ve never used Instagram.
Why “typical” in 28a?
Favourite POIGNANTLY.
I just happened to be discussing George Orwell’s ideal pub a few days ago, and that features a “snack counter where you can get LIVER SAUSAGE sandwiches, mussels (a speciality of the house), cheese, pickles and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses”. So 18a sprang readily to mind. Mm, I could just fancy one of those sandwiches with a pint of wallop 🙂
I agree that this was an excellent puzzle with a great range of clues. Many thanks Alia and Eileen.
Enjoyed it; not difficult, although I couldn’t parse my last two – ANNOY and YARDAGE – and only put them in because nothing else seemed to fit. Liked ANTELOPES, INCENDIARY, AD HOC, APROPOS. Thanks Alia and Eileen!
Good puzzle, no major quibbles, though I wouldn’t personally use ‘Tannoy’ as a verb, and the YARDAGE clue was a bit weak. Also not sure that HIPSTER is a trendy word these days, as distinct from a decade or so ago. Favourites include AD HOC, INCENDIARY, CINEMA.
Anna@18 – back in July you said you’d never heard of Bart Simpson … I assume you live ‘off-grid’ in a cave somewhere and your only connection to the outside world is doing the Grauniad crossword (without reading the paper, or hearing/seeing any news)! 🙂
Thanks Alia and Eileen.
JoFT@19: well, you may not have convinced yourself, but I thought it an excellent defence! Thanks for trying!
Pleasant puzzle, Alia is welcomed.
I know nothing of golfspeak, but got YARDAGE anyway — it’s a measurement. Similarly Instagram — something that sounds like “real” and is some kind of video is probably a REEL.
Some really good anagrams, especially “not playing.”
Why is the page dropping my name again? I clicked “remember me” yesterday.
Thanks, Alia and Eileen.
This struck me as more robust than Alia’s last weekday offering, which I think was on a Tuesday and which I thought was barely Quiptic. This was sufficiently al dente to be worth its spot.
Valentine@29. A number of participants have had the problem with the site refusing to remember their names. This is documented on Site Feedback. I was one of the afflicted, and it took about three frustrating days before the problem just rectified itself.
On first, rapid read through, only two came to me quickly. But slower thoughts revealed all the answers to me in the end. Perfect for Monday! Readily do-able, but not too easy. Like others, I very much appreciated the smooth surfaces.
An enjoyable new setter.
I parsed 23D as (T)annoy, “a loudspeaker” with one end missing.
Wonderful Monday puzzle — doable, but no pushover. I love a good surface, and this one had many great ones — 1a SUMMITS, 18a LIVER SAUSAGE (“fresh larvae”? Ewww!), 25a AUTOMATON (“fruite machine”), 1d SCAMPI (with some current political overtones), 5d ANTELOPES (poor creatures!), 6d REEL (so many are not real these days), 7d PROPERTY (beautifully succinct), 15d ALABASTER, 20d FLAMBÉ, and others
Liked the current reference at 12a ERA (and didn’t have to do any research — the ERAs tour was huge!) 🙂
Nho 23d “TANNOY”
TANNOY appears to be a British thing; it’s come up in these puzzles before, I think, but it didn’t stick in my brain. Maybe this time; anyway, that one went in unparsed. Other than that, this all went very smoothly.
[Anna @18: if you haven’t heard of Taylor Swift, have you been living under a rock for the last decade or so? I’m no Swiftie, and I don’t even see the appeal really, but she’s been impossible to avoid in recent years. The Eras Tour broke all kinds of records for ticket revenue, and she is likely the richest woman in the world now.]
Nice puzzle. I’m another who hadn’t heard of TANNOY as a verb (but it wasn’t a stretch to believe), and who was confidently wrong wth furlong.
Liked PROPERTY, POIGNANTLY, SALON and SLAPDASH.
mrpenney @34 – Tannoy is a British brand name , which entered the OED in 1946 – see here:
https://www.tannoy.com/our-story.html
beaulieu@27 and mrpenney@34 I like to think of fifteensquared as a sneer-free zone, but sometimes it’s hard. I myself have certainly heard of Taylor Swift and her tour but didn’t know till today that it was about Eras. Nobody is responsible for not having heard of something.
Pleasant puzzle and always a good blog from Eileen.
Often I find clues to be a bit aged and obscure on cryptic – pop culture references from the 60s and whatnot… and here we have references to Instagram and Taylor Swift. Has my generation has been skipped (having only taken up cryptics in the past 2-3 years) or did I just never have my finger on the 90s pulse? I suspect the latter…
Thanks Alia and Eileen
Well, maybe to your last sentence, Valentine @38, and I too was not comfortable with the tone of the earlier comments which you cite. I myself was the subject of a sneer a few weeks ago and I did not take it kindly, regarding it as wholly contrary to the spirit of this forum. Anna certainly doesn’t live under a rock; she lives in Helsinki – which, as it happens, the Eras tour did not play. On the other hand, Anna’s detestation of everything American or Americanised has been well documented here over the last few years, and I think there may be some wilful avoidance going on.
Very enjoyable puzzle. Liked the beginner-friendly grid for a Monday.
As others have already said we also parsed ERA as ERAS minus the s (segment of a recent Taylor Swift concert).
Favourite was SLAPDASH.
Nice Monday puzzle with quite tight clueing. I wondered why EATER was synonymous with “run off” in 5d until the penny dropped.
muffin @24, I think typical in 28a is a reference to yardstick as a typical comparator. Clue did seem a little loose to me, the only one I can’t fully get my head around.
Thanks, Alia and Eileen.
phitonelly @41
Thanks. That would make sense if YARDSTICK were the solution, but it’s YARDAGE!
Valentine @37: personally I thought beaulieu’s and mrpenney’s comments were meant in a friendly way.
Balfour @39: I hope that the comment of a few weeks ago that you mention won’t put you off sharing literary references with us — I for one always find these interesting.
Trickier than the usual Monday offering but good fun. Thanks.
Unlike Anna I have unavoidably heard of Taylor Swift, but like Anna I have no interest in her music, her popularity, her wealth or her tours, so I had to resort to the internet to figure out 12a ERA. As for the missing “s”, I assumed that if the tour is called ERAS, then an individual concert (a segment of the tour) would be an ERA. And I thought it was a very well-constructed clue, in keeping with the overall quality of the puzzle.
Thanks, Alia and Eileen, for the excellent puzzle and blog.
I am often surprised by what people say they don’t know or have never heard of, and remind myself on those occasions that they will certainly know lots of things that are unknown to me.
[I think “typical” makes sense in that, beyond golf, YARDAGE as a measurement applies to a variety of contexts, e.g. fabrics, landscaping, and (pace Anna) American football.]
Very enjoyable puzzle. I’m still getting to grips with doing at least the Monday Guardian Cryptic stepping up from the Saturday Quick Cryptics and Sunday Quiptics so this week and the last few Mondays were good but now achievable challenges for me. My one issue was that like others in the comments I don’t think Tannoy is used as a verb, despite what Chambers may say – unless it’s archaic. I know we may say ‘hoovers’ for cleaning with a vaccum cleaner but ‘tannoys’ – no. Thanks Alia and Eileen.
“Tannoy” as a verb is in the OED with its first citation in 1966.
Thank you, Simon S – you beat me to it! I was going to cite this:
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/tannoy_v?tl=true
nice one today with some references for the kids for once
I see Taylor Swift’s name every day when I’m typing “fifteensquared” into Chrome. I get as far as “fifte” when up pops “Fifteen a song by Taylor Swift”. I may listen to it one day.
Valentine@29. The site, not surprisngly, fails to remember me when I’ve cleared my browsing history . I used to have the option of not clearing fifteesquared but it has gone and I don’t know how to get it back.
Thanks to Alia, especially for the surfaces, and to Eileen.
Nice puzzle, thanks Alia and Eileen. I took YARDAGE as just a Vulcan-ish CD, which isn’t my cup of tea, but seems to be part of the Monday puzzle regime. At least there was only the one and not 3 or 4.
SimonS @ 49, Eileen @ 50: Ok I stand corrected. That citation isn’t in my OED. Only as a noun. I only have the OED Concise edition, though it’s still as big as doorstop 😂
I didn’t even look at yesterday’s crossword until about five minutes before midnight! Like Veronica@31 I needed to slow down and really think about the clues before getting a foot in the door with this setter. Strangely, ERA was my first one in, helped by it being a clue that included the answer fairly well hidden. I know as little about Taylor Swift as is appropriate for my age – my grandparents at the same time in their lives were similarly ignorant of the Beatles.
FURLONG also struck me as a possible answer at 28a, so I’m glad to read that others thought the same. Given the looseness of the clue, though, I decided to wait for a couple of crossers. Without even solving the intersecting 20d it was clear that it would have to end with an E and not a G.
Thanks to Alia for a well-constructed puzzle, and I echo Auriga@8’s appreciation of Eileen’s “clear, straightforward explanations”.
Lord Jim @43: almost certainly too late to catch your or anyone’s attention, but if anyone wrote that I must live in a cave or under a rock, I would not regard the remarks as friendly and no addition of a smiley emoji or any other kind of emoji would persuade me otherwise. In the past it has been proven that Anna is sometimes quick to take umbrage, although she has not responded overtly in this case, but I think that if you direct ‘friendly’ comments like those at another participant, it is wise to consider who your addressee is.
Tempat main slot yang aman, nyaman dan terpercaya cuma INDOCAIR
Indocair@57 – Very nearly; beautifully said. Well done!