Guardian 24,481 (Sat 30 Aug)/Paul - How very dare you
Posted by rightback on 6th September 2008
Solving time: 8:30
The usual excellent stuff from Paul. There was some discussion in last week’s blog about rule-bending and so forth, with Paul being mentioned, but the difference between Paul and Araucaria is that I would struggle to find a clue in this puzzle where the grammar of the cryptic reading isn’t absolutely sound, even if a couple of the surface readings are a bit dubious.
There were a couple of mini-themes in this, ‘whiter than white’/'beyond the pale’ and ‘Catherine Tate’/'Are you disrespecting me?’. Not having a telly these days I can’t really offer an opinion on Catherine Tate’s sketch show (I would use YouTube to catch up but my computer’s sound is still broken!), but I’m sure it isn’t half as funny as either Harry Enfield & Chums or The Fast Show.
Music of the day: Difficult with no sound, but I’ll try to provide a link anyway - thanks to 3/23 and 7/25 it has to be A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procul Harum.
* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 9/20 | CATHERINE TATE; (HER + IN + E.T. + ATE) after CAT (= ‘prowler’) |
| 10 | APHID; A, + I in Ph.D |
| 11 | FAD + E,O,U,T - wasted time here with ‘tone out’, which fit the wordplay but was clearly wrong. |
| 12 | IN + E.R. + TIA - ‘tia’ is Spanish for ‘aunt’, hence ‘relative overseas’, which might be considered obscure except for the drink ‘Tia Maria’. |
| 13 | O + VOID |
| 14 | CORK’S CREW - very elegant. |
| 19 | DIALECTAL; (ALL I ACTED)* |
| 21 | [m]ORRIS - I think the floral pattern designer is William Morris. Needless to say, I didn’t know this! This was my last entry. |
| 22 | TOENAIL; rev. of NEO in TAIL |
| 24 | T(R)OLL - a nice allusion to the Hobbit. |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | SCAFFOLDED; rev. of OFF in SCALDED - cleverly worded, with ‘gone’ = OFF difficult to pick out; it looked much more likely that the word being reversed was a synonym for ‘building’, with ‘With support for’ being the definition. |
| 2 | STUD + IO + US - another very good surface. Io is a moon of Jupiter. |
| 3/23 | BEYOND THE PALE - cf 7/25. |
| 4 | MINT (double defn) |
| 5 | REC + I + PRO + CAL |
| 6 | WATERSKI; W + A + TERS[e] + KI[p] - I liked the definition (’Skim the surface’) but was surprised this wasn’t given as (5-3), and I’m not sure what the surface is supposed to mean. |
| 7 | WHITER THAN WHITE; (WHAT WITH NEITHER)* - excellent anagram. |
| 8 | [h]IDE + A |
| 14 | C(A + PIT)U + LATE |
| 15 | WHENSOEVER; (NOW HE VEERS)* - another subtlety, requiring ‘now’ to be split from the apparent definition ‘Any time now’. |
| 17 | EYEBALLS; “I” + BALLS (= ‘pluck’) - a bit Private Eye! |
| 18 | G + ER(MAN)IC - my second-last entry, and it took a while to see: the initial capital trick (referring here to comedian Eric Idle) fooled me once again. |
| 20/16 | ARE YOU DISRESPECTING ME?; (RECOGNISES RUDE TYPE + AM I)* - fabulous anagram, but too well disguised for me - I solved this from the ‘bovvered?’ hint and the checking letters. |
| 21 | ONE-TWO (double defn) - ‘Passing’ is very subtle, and probably bemusing for non-sports fans. I think the other reference is to a microphone test. [Er, no - see comments.] |
| 23 | TRAP; rev. of PART |
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