Posted by linxit on 21st December 2006
Solving time approx 20 mins.
I seem to remember the last Taupi was seriously tricky, but this one was OK. A lot of very clever and succinct clues that required a bit of thought, but only one word I didn’t know (23d), and one clue where I couldn’t figure out the wordplay (9a).
ACROSS
1 CORUSCATE (court case)* - nice obvious anagram to start with. I always feel more confident if 1 across goes in straight away.
9 ANGEL - but what’s that about causing one’s suspension? Don’t understand this. [But got it later - AN=one + GEL=suspension]
11 FL(AMBO)Y,ANT - ambo=pulpit was something I already knew from somewhere…
15 TRO(O)PER - O in REPORT rev.
17 EXE,CUTE - I’m not keen on banker=river. Probably the most common and worst crossword cliché.
20 IN,CH(urch) - good clue. I didn’t see through this for a while, even after I had the answer.
22 CANDLEWICK - cryptic definition. My granny used to have a candlewick bedspread.
27 THE,S.E. - more than this=these. Nice one.
DOWN
2 RIG,MA,ROLE - pretty straightforward, but “to play” is only there for the surface reading.
3 S(ALUBRI=burial*)O,US
4 ANODYNE (done any)* - is a painkiller, nothing wrong with that!
8 AL(DEBAR)AN - Alan Ayckbourn is a well-known playwright (although I didn’t recognise the names of any of his plays). Aldebaran is a red giant in the constellation Taurus.
13 MONGRELISE (merge lions)* - one of the last ones I got (mainly because I had it in my head at first that it was a nine-letter word, so I tried to make an anagram of “lions,bats”. Conjured up a weird image in my brain, and proved that you can find absolutely anything on the internet!
16 PROM,1,SING
19 F(ED)ERAL
21 C,ACHE
23 K,EDGE - easy wordplay, which was just as well because I didn’t know that to kedge is to move a ship (with a small anchor also called a kedge).
24 FLEE(t)
Posted in Guardian | 3 Comments »
Posted by rightback on 21st December 2006
Solving time: 11:36.
Monk is one of my favourite Indie setters and today was another gem with clues as inventive and accurate as ever. Some difficult words - five I didn’t know (12, 24, 25ac; 8, 15dn) - but many of these were made much easier if you spotted the theme, clockwise in the perimeter squares. This was a particularly impressive construction as even without this feature, every answer had at least half its letters checked.
Beginners’ tips of the day: ‘low’ = MOO, ‘Geordie’ = NE, ‘butter’ = RAM
* = anagram.
| Across |
| 7 |
(LOW + rev. of TA) inside KIT - I can’t decide if I think ‘power’ is a fair definition of ‘kilowatt’. |
| 9 |
AD(A + GI)O - a couple of times in the Independent recently I’ve noticed elements of wordplay being clued by short sentence descriptions rather than nounal phrases, for example, ‘one serves’ for GI in this clue, rather than ‘one who serves’ or ‘one serving’. One other recent example was Nimrod’s “Will touring Derby top brass name three, really?” (2, 4, 2) for IS THAT SO in #6286, where ‘Derby top brass name three’ clued HATS; almost brilliant but for the cryptic reading to work I felt that ‘…to name three’ was required. |
| 11 |
(ONE VOMITED)* - carelessly I initially entered MONTIVIDEO here which held me up on 4dn. |
| 12 |
anag. of [m]USKRAT[s] - ‘kurta’ is an Urdu word meaning ‘a loose collarless shirt worn by people from the Indian subcontinent’. |
| 14 |
MO(SQUIT)O |
| 15 |
EX + C[onvict] + I(T)E |
| 16 |
(CAME [u]P[o]N)* - the question mark is necessary because ‘pitch’ needs an object, such as ‘tent’, whereas ‘encamp’ is intransitive. |
| 19 |
(LINKED OK)* - the Klondike Gold Rush took place in the late 1890s. |
| 21 |
G(HE+TT)O - when solving I thought TT was given by ‘Man races’ (as in Tourist Trophy) but in fact it was just ‘races’. Possibly ‘race’ = TT would be more accurate, though this wouldn’t fit the surface. |
| 23 |
KNOCK(AB)OUT - excellent clue which the theme helped to solve. |
| 24 |
rev. of NE (= north-east = Geordie) inside KO - keno is a kind of bingo game, apparently. |
| 25 |
KERALA (hidden backwards) - hats off to anyone who knew this state on the south-west Indian coast. This obscure name was probably necessitated by the theme and the clue was helpfully straightforward. |
| 26 |
TOO + D(LEO)O - in another moment of carelessness, I put in ‘toodle-do’ to start with and so struggled on 22dn. |
| Down |
| 1 |
MIL(I)E + U - a mile is a ‘middle distance’ in athletics. I like this but perhaps some wouldn’t. |
| 3 |
rev. of RAM + (SOME)* + T |
| 4 |
MATERS - double definition, the second of which perhaps needs a question mark? |
| 5 |
M(A + rev. of LUPIN)ATE |
| 6 |
MIX + (PRATE)* - ‘taper out’ was my third wrong initial entry. Another of those clues where the clue is part of the wordplay. |
| 8 |
TON + A + ME - which apparently means a nickname. |
| 15 |
(N + GENERAL)* - a city in Germany which is apparently twinned with Stoke-on-Trent. Another fairly obscure name but the anagram couldn’t really lead to anything else, as long as you’d seen the theme. |
| 20 |
I(BAD)AN - the largest city in Nigeria. |
| 22 |
TEN[ny]SON - I vaguely knew this word but couldn’t have told you that it means ‘a competition in verse between two troubadours before a court of love’ or (in this case) ‘a subdivision of the piece of verse so composed’. A kind of forerunner of today’s freestyle battles, I suppose. |
Posted in Independent | 3 Comments »
