Tees has produced a very good crossword today. Not always particularly easy, but utterly sound so far as I can see, sometimes very clever, and with few points that will elicit controversy. At least that’s what it seems to me.
Two of the long answers have less than 50% checking, which will offend some. But the answers are very long so the percentage is close to 50. And if there’s a Nina here, which as usual escapes me, then it is arguably forgivable.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | DEPOSIT SLIP — (Spode)* its lip — telling as in bank teller |
| 9 | O.B. S(C)URE |
| 10 | DIVERGE — diver (eg)rev. |
| 11 | DARWINIAN — (RA d)rev. w in Ian — but why ‘daughters’ not ‘daughter’? |
| 12 | TIE-IN — twice with WC [Fields] separately removed, in [= cool] — although ‘on two occasions’ led me to think that this was a rather dodgy way of saying that the letters WC are split up and each treated on its own — Tees, as he doesn’t need to, hasn’t bothered to tell us to separate W from C because the letters occur in the right order in ‘twice’ |
| 13 | REED — an ancient word for an arrow presumably, but my take on the wordplay, which may well be wrong, is that it’s E [point] in ‘red’ [Maybe bloodied point for an ancient arrow] |
| 14 | CENSORSHIP — h in (conspires)* |
| 16 | CHA(1)RWOMAN — a charwoman has improved her lot significantly if she becomes a chairwoman |
| 20 | S(TO R)M — r = right, one side |
| 21 | ELISABETH — Eli (beast)* h |
| 23 | OT HELLO — Old Testament, Hello magazine, Othello was a Shakespearean general |
| 24 | GREMLIN — g R.E.M. (nil)rev. — Michael Stipe disbanded R.E.M. (you didn’t think I knew that, did you. Actually I didn’t, and had to Google it, also to find out whether it was R.E.M. or REM) |
| 25 | REINDEER AGE — quite simply, as Chambers says, ‘the Magdalenian’ — (Greener idea)* — I was quite wrong on this and clicked Reveal, saying to myself ‘leading man’, which has many faults, the most important of which is that Tees has put the clue in the order [wordplay] for [def], ie he has used ‘for’ correctly, not the wrong way round as I initially thought |
| Down | |
| 2 | PAUL I — referring to Paul Dirac and also to Wolfgang Pauli |
| 3 | STERILE — e in (Lister)* |
| 4 | TIDINGS — things with h [= henry, the SI unit] replaced by id |
| 5 | L(A VAT)ORY — according to Chambers a lory flies in ‘New Guinea, Australia, etc’, so I’m not quite clear about the American reference — my choice of nom-de-plume was unfortunate because whenever the word John appears in a crossword it has lavatorial connections |
| 6 | PORTERHOUSE BLUE — porter [= stout] house [of Parliament] blue [= defending Cameron] — a novel by Tom Sharpe |
| 7 | FOOD PROCESSOR — ‘meatballs’ and ‘stale lamb’ are anagrams of one another, so if you process either food you get the other one — very nice spot here from Tees |
| 8 | PENNY-PINCHING — 2 defs |
| 15 | GRIM ALDI |
| 17/19/1D | ONE GOOD TURN DESERVES ANOTHER — on (rogues that never do endorse)* — anagram indicator ‘transforming’ not ‘Working with’ |
| 18 | ATINGLE — at = by, the ingle is the Scots fire[/place] |
| 22 | ShakespeARE NAthaniel’s |
Marvelous stuff from the Teeser, managed to complete on the train, quite liked the Woolgang Pauli/Paul Dirac link.
Thanks John too.
Thanks Tees and John.
Re 5D, Chambers indicates john as being especially American slang for toilet, hence the American reference.
A good puzzle indeed, but definitely not easy.
Thank you John for a very nice blog. I agree with you and Flashling that this is top-drawer stuff, with very many good spots, and at least one really brilliant one at food=processor. I suppose the ability to think like that is what makes someone an Indy compiler. I am a jealous drudge!
Thanks Indy for a lovely solve, and the idea that Aldi really IS grim!
Cheers
Rowly.
Thanks, Tees. Good to see a puzzle with some scientific references as in 2dn. My first guess, having got 11ac but not 1ac, was ‘Fermi’ since Fermi and Dirac both developed the statistics now known by their joint names. Then I remembered Dirac’s first name. Incidentally, both Pauli and Dirac (and Fermi, for that matter) could be described as quantum experts.
But like, John, I wondered about ‘daughters’, plural, in 11ac. It does rather lead one to expect a word with two D’s. I can’t see that the surface reading needs the plural rather than the singular.
And thanks, John, for the blog, particularly the parsing of GREMLIN which I only got from the crossing letters.
Oops, a misplaced comma. That second paragraph should read “But, like John, I wondered… “
I don’t know the Indy rules, but from doing The Times I think they have daughter or daughters for D, and son or sons for S.
I thought this was very good – not as difficult as Tuesday, but quite absorbing. As everyone as said, the food processor clue was very well worked out.
“has said”, that is.
Many thanks to John for his excellent blog, and to commenters.
This thing about daughter(s) and son(s) is correct AFAIK, in which case it would stop you having a double-letter indication for either via the plural. ‘Daughterses’ though … I’ll ponder.
Apologies to all those Aldi customers among you. I’m sure it’s not grim, and if you think I am a snob who shops at Waitrose, I promise you are overestimating the amounts editors pay.
See you at the soup kitchen,
Luv Tees.
I was doing so well and then I got stuck on three at the end – 13ac, 16ac and 7dn. 16ac fell to a word search. 13dn could have been too many things and I don’t think I’d heard “reed” for arrow. 7dn had two possibilities, and it seemed to me it could just as easily have been “word processor”.
Today’s i puzzle.
Is it Food or Word processor in 7D? I thought of both, and opted for Word, because a food processor cannot, despite John’s blog, turn meatballs into stale lamb. But Tees only suggests the reverse, and “literally” actually means “actually” in such contexts, rather than “as written”.