Five-Clue Cryptic (#3360)
No real trouble today. The odd surface of 3/5 meant that it had to be an anagram; were we supposed to imagine that the town of Tonbridge in Kent perfected the art of ordering cricketers before passing it on to the rest of the world? The only one that gave me pause was 1d, with three vowels as the crossers; I went through the names of elements ending in -GEN before realizing that it wasn't a specific element, but a group of them (in the technical sense as well as the everyday one).
Concise (#3360)
A three-word top-line pun is usually particularly groanworthy, and today's was no exception! I didn't get it for a while; my first one in, rather unexpectedly, was TAG TEAM (9a), a term I hadn't heard for years. Most of the rest was OK but for some reason I missed SHAKY as the obvious answer to 18d (SHADY was the best I could come up with), and I didn't know POPLIN (2d), apparently "a ribbed fabric used in clothing and upholstery". Crossword Solver reliably gave me both.
Codeword (#3038)
The letters given were V, L and A; on filling them in I noticed that no fewer than four of the words ended in A. Had I not been given the A, I doubt whether I'd have guessed it correctly at first inspection; were they deliberately trying to be helpful? It didn't take long to deduce that 21 was E and thus to enter EFFACE near the SW corner. (One of those words you rarely come across in its root form, though the derivative "self-effacing" is common.) The rest fell into place with few problems.
Cryptic by Radian (#3296)
On idothei, jonofwales has given this a five-star rating, with which I can't agree; I thought it was easier than last Friday's four-star puzzle, when I effectively threw in the towel. It took me a little longer than average, but I'd still give it three (or possibly four) stars; there were no obscure words except 2d (for which I needed Crossword Solver) and no particularly abstruse wordplay devices.
First one in was 10a. Clues I particularly enjoyed included 19a, 23a, 28a, 8d and today's favourite, 7d; "line with a pole at each end" sounded like wordplay but turned out to be the definition! (It maybe says something that even then my first thought was the Earth's axis rather than a line on the Earth's surface. Maybe I'm inherently Euclidean.) The only clue I didn't really like was 26a, as it contained my least favourite device not once but twice, with both "woman" and "chap" standing for personal names UNA and ERIC - fortunately the hyphenation in the enumeration gave the game away.
I'm generally bad at spotting themes, and this puzzle was no exception. After getting stuck in the SW
corner I glanced at idothei for a hint, and saw that there was a theme of map-reading - which I hadn't twigged even after getting answers like GRID REFERENCE and LONGITUDE. I glanced down at the grid, and there was ORDNANCE SURVEY straight in front of me! I guess my brain must be in a completely different mode when I'm trying to crack the clues.
Knowing there was a theme did help me to get COMPASS at 28a (for which the clue was much better than yesterday's effort, I must say). Polishing off the rest wasn't too hard after that; I knew the second word of 15d had to be MAP, even though I hadn't heard of the MOVING variety. Unfortunately I made a tiny mistake on 14a, thinking it must be WAYMARKER (with French MER = "sea" instead of MED). The fact that the clue said "signposts" (plural) should have alerted me to the correct solution.
One minor quibble at 29a, which Fifteensquared parses as a double definition but which seems to have redundant words ("what's the" and "of"); I didn't think this was allowed in this type of clue, and it went in unparsed. The only other one that I couldn't parse was 20d, but that was due to my forgetting the phrase "conspicuous by one's absence".
The thing I feel most embarrassed about is that I had to use Google to check that Tomsk was in Siberia (21d). Must brush up on my geography!
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