An enjoyable puzzle and just about the right degree of difficulty for a Friday, I felt.   A pretty eclectic spectrum of clues,
including everything from a couple of pre-historic chestnuts (e.g. the ETON/NOTE reversal) to a handful of relatively (for the FT, at least) arcane answers.  Of the latter, I happened to know one (21d) and managed to deduce another (15d), but the third (8d) was unknown to me and I resorted to looking it up.

Across
1 MADE SURE (measured)* - I don’t recall having encountered this “setter-friendly” anagram before.
9 BLUE FUNK (flue)* in bunk - I wonder whether Falcon considered using the same wordplay elements in a Spoonerism?
10 OFF,SET
14 D,URBAN(e)
20 DRY,DEN - A “Deja vu all over again” moment, following hard on the heels of Neo’s (more imaginative) offering that I blogged on  Tuesday.
22 ULAN BATOR la in (ban tour)* - Capital of Mongolia.
23 ULTRA - (hidden) “Drowned” being the indicator.
26 EARTH,(gull)Y

Down
1 MOBILE (double def)
2 DOUBTFUL STARTER (cryptic def) - This one amused me.
6 IN FULL CRY c in (filly run)* - My second favourite hunting phrase (after Tally Ho!, of course).
7 LOS ANGELES TIMES - Subtle use of “by”, in the sense of multiplication tables, to indicate Times.
8 DOTTEREL do + (letter)* - A “migratory bird”, but unknown to me. With hindsight, I was probably a little premature in throwing the towel in on this one as the wordplay is not that fierce.
15 BARA BRITH bar,a,brit(is)h - Apparently the Welsh name for “speckled bread“. I tentatively entered the answer only once I had fully-checked acrosses.
21 S(mall),A,TRAP - I’d seen Satrap before, but am pretty certain it was in a more rarefied Listener-type environment.  Generous checking mitigates the vocab test, though.
23 ULCER - “Sore about unfinished clue being shown up”. Has the editor (or Fifteensquared?) been giving our setter an unduly hard time of late?

When I swapped to Friday this week I expected a nice Phi puzzle, instead I got Nimrod! A little more difficult than Phi for me with some clues still a mystery. However, much of it was straightforward thanks to the long anagram and me seeing 1dn as soon as I had P-D… A couple of the clues are gems.

My blog day falling conveniently on a day off, I settled down at 8.30 to get the crossword out of the way,but it was not to be. Several hours of partner stranded by tube chaos, daughter’s forgotten homework etc ate up the morning. So you could say this one took me three hours, but I think it was more like 20-25 minutes. Quite hard, and with some good tight clueing, the linked clues all having to do with numbers, in the contexts of sports and time.

ACROSS:

1. AC RO BAT (tab or<). Two different bills.

5. S(CAR)A(a)B. I was looking for a less up-market model in the middle, but it’s just car - the Saab being more up-market than the Beetle in the clue.

9. MAJOR IT Y, ref 21 in the number clues. Fine, except that ‘it’ should be put out to grass.

10. R(AF)FIA. I didn’t think of ‘plastic’ as an anagrind, but adjectivally, why not?

12. MAXI MUM BREAK. Ref 147 in the number clues, being the maximum break in snooker. I can’t remember how you do it, but then it’s not something I’ve managed.

15. THINK TWICE. WITH KITC(h)EN*.

19,17. O(NE-TW)O. I tried for ages to work out how the wordplay could make this NIL-NIL, but of course that was just the casing (0-0) around WENT*.  very good.

20. L(ITTLE R)OCK. State capital of Arkansas and home town of yet another Bill.

27. A VIE MORE. Def is ‘here winter sports’.

28, 24, 23. TWENTY-FOUR-SEVEN. 20 being the top number in darts. I think of rowing crews as eights, but I guess you can have fours too.

29. NATURAL. Good misleading double definition, long enough to make you look for the wordplay. Chambers has ‘natural’ used of children to mean legitimate or illegitimate, but more usually the latter.

DOWN:

1. (g)AMMO(n). Not sure about the surface. Are they firing bacon guns?

3. BA(R RA)CKS. Good use of US comic writer and broadcaster with unusual name.

4. TUT SI.  A minority in Rwanda and Burundi.

6. C(RAB)BE. Bar< in CBE. Ref George Crabbe, 1754-1832.

7. REFLECTION (IT+FLORENCE*). Nice anagram. ‘Of’ is not the best link word.

8. BLACK(BOOK)S. Surface a little strained here, presumably the idea is that someone’s nicked Blind Date presenter Cilla Black’s script, putting them in her bad books.

13. AT LONG LAST. I like this one a lot. I don’t even think ‘oversized’ is necessary, you can get the idea from imagining a clown’s shoes.

14. NINE TO FIVE. At first I had  ’five to five’, as being the time that would really ‘make your day’ as a wage-slave - i.e. nearly home time. But those aren’t odds, they’re evens, so it must be nine-to-five, which literally makes up the traditional working day.  

16. W EIGHT. 8 being the product of 2×4.

21. B(EIR)UT. Ire (displeasure), bottom to top, becomes eir. Surely ‘divided capital’ doesn’t apply to Beirut in the way it does Jerusalem or (formerly) Berlin?

Apologies for this being a day late. I had to go to a customer site yesterday and didn’t get back till 8pm, when I found that my ADSL connection was still down. I had been promised that it would be fixed by yesterday afternoon, but this morning it’s still down. Anyway, I solved this on my knee in the back of my boss’s car on the way back yesterday evening, so hopefully I can now read my own writing!

Across
1 JU(BIL(l),AN(n))T - be proud = jut
11 DE-GAS - ha ha, nice one.
12 AL((e)LITE,RAT)IVE - only worked out the wordplay when typing this up. And of course the whole clue is an example of alliteration, very clever.
16 PLUPERFECT - not sure about the wordplay. Homophone of “plus” (French for more) + PERFECT=well done, perhaps?
19 ECRU (cure*) - unbleached linen, or its colour.
24 ALE,PH=public house
26 D(REAR)Y - conclusion would normally mean just the last letter of a word, but here it’s the last two letters. Typical Araucarian “rule”-breaking.
Down
3,1,5,21 LIT,T(a)LE,JACK,HO,RN,ER(SATIN,ACORN)ER - the next line of the nursery rhyme is “eating his Christmas pie”.
4 NONBIOLOGICAL - shouldn’t this be (3-10)? Adoptive parents are non-biological, as is washing powder without the enzymes.
6 O,LD,HARRY - I don’t see how LD can be justified as an abbreviation for “would”. Can’t see an alternative explanation though.
7 NEG=gen rev,LI(GEN)CE
8 RES(PEC)TFUL - PEC = some peculiarities.
10 EXEMPLI GRATIA (taxi a mile per g)* - definition is just “say”.
13 GRANDSTAND - but why is it a fine place for a watchman?
14 P,RIVA,TEE,YE - Riva must be this place.
17 CRUNCHER - Jerry Cruncher is a character in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.
20 ME,TRIC(k) - here 10 isn’t referring to another clue, but it took me a while to realise that!
23 HYMN - “him”, and peon=”paean”, so a double homophone here in the definition and the answer.

Solving time 11:40

Here’s the explanation for the gentle ribbing about “strange characters turning up on Saturday” in the comments on last week’s Virgilius puzzle. For those who don’t know, Eimi is Indie xwd ed Mike Hutchinson giving himself one of his four or so slots each year. I tend to find Eimi puzzles quite hard (possibly because they’re infrequent), so I was quite pleased with 11:40, though the right first guess at 17 might have made it a minute or two faster.