Fifteensquared

Never knowingly undersolved.

Archive for December 21st, 2007

Independent 6609/Phi

Posted by John on 21st December 2007

John.

As usual with Phi, everything very enjoyable. There doesn’t seem to be a Nina, but there probably is.

Across
1 RAM with ASH first. The letter combination ASH often appears and “remains” is a common way to clue it.
5 B(L)ANKS. I think a blank is a “coin to be”, in other words a piece of metal waiting to be made into a coin.
8 COMMERCIALISED - (mediocre claims)*. Excellent.
10 S(PART)A. SA is sex-appeal or “it”, something that seems to appear mainly in crosswords, although “it-girl” is perhaps one of its few appearances since probably the 1920s.
13 COR(P[erhap]S)E, but I don’t understand “Start to”. To corpse is to laugh inappropriately, not to start to do so, surely?
14 IMP AIR. The “’s” is short for “has”, or “has next to it”.
16 (PONYS)rev SE[[even[t]]S
18 CLIMA[c]TIC. But spurning which occurence of Celsius, you may ask.
20 U L(T[heatre])IMO, a word meaning “last month” in old business-speak, quite as dreadful as some of the worst modern excesses.
21 STORE DETECTIVE - ([s]ecret video test)*
22 S(KIM)PY. Before I got this, I was sure my lack of knowledge of Bond girls would let me down.
23 S UPPER
 
Down
2 S(HOPPING)MALLS
3 RE MORSE. R and E are the concluding elements of “warfare”; Morse code.
5 BUILDING SOCIETY. In the game “Civilisation” (although it seems to be “Civilization”) you build societies.
6 Probably ALL IN, but I can’t see why. It surely isn’t just a contraction of “all-inclusive”, which doesn’t I think have any out of bounds connotations.
7 KASHMIR - (his mark)*
9 DISASTER MOVIE - (smarties video)*. The second use of “video” in this crossword as anagram material. Either it’s very clever and its significance escapes me, or “Smarties” is a bit odd.
15 A R(M[olecular] L[ife])OCK
17 POTS TIP, all rev. Not sure whether “Pots” is a snooker or a gardening reference; it doesn’t much matter.
19 THE([labou]R)M. “Us” and “them”.

Posted in Independent | 4 Comments »

Independent 6604/Nestor

Posted by neildubya on 21st December 2007

neildubya.
Across
1 (SINFUL EFFECTS I)* - SELF-SUFFCIENT. SELF was obvious but the rest took a little time to make itself apparent.
9 RUSE,D,SKI
10 YUP,PIE - if I had to pick a word to sum up the 1980s it would probably be this.
11 DE CAMP - I liked this: “Go and butch up”.
12 NEG OR TIN< - quite a difficult one to parse.
16 C in (BRAVE ONES)* - OBSERVANCE. Not a tough word by any means and a fairly easy anagram to spot but this still took me a while to get. At any rate, it felt like it should have been obvious, but wasn’t.
18 C in PEER<, C in TALE - cleverly constructed clue which takes one abbreviation - C - and gets us to use it twice.
20 [-qu]EASY - one of the last couple I filled in and only because I could see what else could fit. Have just seen that “green” = queasy.
27 IPM in CHUNK - “thirteen hundred” really held me up here and even when I filled the answer in I still couldn’t explain it. Finally, the penny dropped: 1300 = 1PM = IPM.
28 PE,LET<,HONE,BOOT,H
 
Down
2 UM in [-g]ENERATE - the fact that UM and ER both appear made think that these were both indicated by “I’m hesitant” but that meant the rest of the clue didn’t work.
3 hidden reversed in “prAYERFul” - FREYA is the Norse goddess of love and beauty.
5 FRI[-day],ENDS
7 ESP,ION,AGE - “special intuition” for E[xtra] S[ensory] P[erception] and the definition was enough to get this.
8 T,WINE - “tent” is a deep red wine.
13 TURNER PRIZE - filled this in without understanding the clue but looking at it now, “lather” looks to be doing the deception work here as it means “some who operates a lathe”, which could also be a TURNER.
17 AS,HEWN in CUT - at first I couldn’t understand the wordplay here as I thought that “when chopped” was (WHEN)*, which left AS unaccounted for. Later spotted that “when chopped” is AS HEWN.
22 A,DEPT[-h]

Posted in Independent | No Comments »

Guardian 24266 Pasquale - “We need a common enemy to unite us.”

Posted by stan on 21st December 2007

stan.

Condoleeza Rice (15d.) once made the quote in the title. Not her finest hour. Struck me that Pasquale’s puzzle is uniting quite a few people this morning - hope you’re all finding it as challenging as I am.

The puzzle was a beast on the scale of the Boojum (a dangerous Snark). It would have beat me were it not for inspired contributions in the “Comments” section below.

Made me wonder if I’m up to this job actually … although we did get there in the end, and there may have been some entertainment value in watching me struggle.

Across

5 P-LACE-R - was badly stuck on the top half until took a leap of faith with this - turns out Placer Mining is a thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placer_mining

12 O-USE-L - A bird of some sort

18 PULL DOWN MENU - (DULLMENOWNUP)* Thanks David : makes the rest of the crossword much harder when you use DROP instead of PULL.

 21 ME-NO-MOSS-O : Kate Moss is the supermodel - it’s a musical instruction to slow down (obeyed rigorously if the musician is being paid by the hour rather than by the note)

23 IXTLE : Had to look it up, but it was fairly clear from the wordplay - anagram of (t)EXTIL(e) 

24 (S)IBERIA : related to sunny Spain. Why did this take me so long - this has come up a few times. (S) is for S(un)?

25 ASCENDER : a printing term you really should look up if you want to use it in a sentence.

27 HE-A-TRASH : H.E is crosswordese for High Explosive

Down

1 BECK-ON

6 LEASE -  think it’s EASEL with the L round the front - a “let” is a sort of lease

7 COM(e)-PLAIN - not convinced, but becoming increasingly less choosy as time goes on

11 After Araucaria’s 39 letter anagram at the weekend, this looks like a 24 letter one and so should be a breeze - haven’t nailed it yet

15 CONDI-MEN-T - “Condi” Rice is the US Secretary of State.  Chaps =Men. T = modicum of “taste”. Clue is a little unorthodox but I think totally fair. Let the whining commence !  

16 SPAM-MING - (MAPS)< with Ming Campbell (recently-ex LibDem leader - I wonders whether the new guy will linger long enough to make it into the crossword lexicon)

17 FLANDERS - As in the double-act “Flanders & Swan” and one of the old bits of Belgium that may be on the verge of becoming a new country. 

19 ST(AD)IA - “aits” are islands in a river (good Scrabble word)

20 HEA(R)TH - Edward Heath was a British Prime Minister and sailor. Responsible for one of my favourite quotations

“A diplomat is a man who thinks twice before he says nothing.”

22 MA(I)ZE

Posted in Guardian | 25 Comments »