24416

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 11:17, one mistake

Quite a tricky puzzle, which I made a hash of through carelessness which could have been anticipated, at 20D.

Answers written without full wordplay understood: 10, 11, 18, 2, 19, 20.

A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all our readers, bloggers, setters and editors.

Across
1 DOORPOSTS – 2 defs, though with enough words to look as if it could be a charade – the first line I tried.
6 ARGU(e)S – Argus is a mythical watchman (“Guardian” in the clue), who lives on in the title of a few local newspapers in the UK.
9 SHELL – 2 defs, one “the outer covering of a fruit or seed”
10 A (R) MAD, ILL.,O – an armadillo being shelled = “9ed”, and Ill. being Illinois
11 ON ACTIVE SER = (Vertern CO is)*, VICE = fault
13 PRISTINE – 1’S in PINTER* – my last answer
14 TANTRA – hidden – my first answer. Tantra = a set of texts, or adherence to their principles
16 (b)EAGLE,T
18 MANACLES – MALES around rev. of CAN = jail
21 EARLY ONE MORNING – 2 defs or a CD, depending on whether you buy “early one morning” as a def. of “dawn”
23 THE MIKADO = (Kid at home)*
25 PAEAN = “peon” – but the Concise Oxford gives the same pronunciation for both – a surprise if like me you thought paean sounded like “pie on”
26 YUK = expr. of disgust, ON = about
27 DON = teacher, CASTE = class, R = resistance
 
Down
1 D(IS,C)O – C here is the speed of light, a sample constant, not an abbrev. for “constant”. (I may get things wrong, but not the same thing two days running!)
2 OPERA SINGER = diva – O = Old, then ERASING = getting rid of, in rev. of REP = theatre co.
3 PALE = sickly-looking,TOT – after a quick look in the dictionaries (Collins, not in COD) and Google images, “coat” seems a fair def of “paletot”
4 ST(ARV(o))ING – arvo is Aussie “afternoon” = PM, and a sting is a scam
5 SAMOSA – MO = instant, in two instances of old favourite S.A. = sex appeal = “it”
6 ANDORRA – N in ROAD*, then R,A
7 GEL = “shock treatment”, rev. of “leg”. “Shock” for hair is a very old Times trick
8 STONE=rock, BASS=singer – “rock singer” is great stuff, though “in the main” is as old as “shock” so the deception didn’t last long. I’d seen the fish name somewhere before, so not too hard for me.
12 IN = popular, TELLI = “telly” = TV broadcast = spoken, GENT = chap
13 P(RESENT)LY – {work = ply} is another Times trick
15 CALM DOWN = (mad clown)*
17 ELY = see, SIAN = “Welsh woman” – such as Sian the weather
19 A (GRIP) PA – pa = governor = father – if you thought of the Turkish aga as a governor, explaining the rest could have been tricky
20 IN=home, HAND=help – my crass error was to choose “ON HAND” as the right kind of “available”, having already rejected TO HAND and AT HAND. If I kept a little black book of confusable answers, this would be going straight into it
24 ER = queen, K = king – “erk” is slang for the lowest rank in the RAF – roughly equivalent to “rating” in the Navy. In Collins (and OED) it’s a naval rating too. It’s possible that it comes from AC = aircraftsman, though OED has some other origin stories, and their oldest citation is naval.

40 comments on “24416”

  1. Didn’t post yesterday as the blog came up a bit late for me. Sorry.
    Made rather heavy weather of this one I’m afraid and took nearly an hour. Couldn’t get into the thing for ages until I saw the anagrams at 13ac and 23ac. I was convinced that 4d had something to do with (K)eating until I remembered that he’s still alive. And I was looking for Lorelei/Siren connections at 8dn which, on solution, brought Bill Wyman to mind!
    No doubt there will be discussion of “telli” vs “telly”, “paean” vs “peon” and “Early One Morning” as a putative chorus — an assumption from which the setter should have … um … refrained?
    Koro must have brought the cooler weather up from the SW: it’s only 27C today! Though I see the London max is hovering around 8C which is apparently the temperature at which the human brain functions best.
    1. I too failed to post ystdy for the same reason as mctext. A retrospective comment: like most others, I arrived at FLEECED at 17dn via Jacob sheep, but I like Peter B’s suggestion (even if it was probably not the setter’s intention) that the reference was to Jacob’s brother Esau, if only because it brought to mind Alan Bennett’s peerless send-up of a CofE vicar’s sermon in Beyond the Fringe, in which, you may recall, he took as his text: “My brother Esau was an hairy man, but I am a smooth man”. For full effect this needs to be read out with weirdly elongated and strangulated vowels.
  2. A bit laborious rather like yesterday’s. Guesses for STONE BASS, ERK, PALETOT & ARGUS. The ARV(O) part of STARVING got courtesy of a recent MCTEXT posting. Never got round seeing REP immediately following the O in OPERA SINGER and then trying to figure what ASINGER was all about. First in a wild guess at EARLY ONE MORNING which, while perhaps not very precise, at least made me smile, which hasn’t happened much in the last couple of puzzles.
  3. 45 minutes for all but 8dn then another 30 minutes on and off to spot an error at 6ac which then allowed meto solve my remaining Down clue.

    So much of this had already gone in unexplained that I recklessly bunged in ANGEL at 6ac. I had the other checking letters but had carelessly split the lights into 4,5 which didn’t help. Also I was convinced this was a straight cryptic clue and I was looking for the name of an obscure Siren.

    I think I knew ARVO but had forgotten it. I have definitely never met PEON meaning a farm hand and was not over pleased to be caught out by this having been stumped by HIND last week.

    Did anyone watch the IMAGINE programme about Scrabble last night? If you missed it I would urge you to catch it on i-player or look out for a repeat. It was all interesting but the part I found most fascinating was seeing the champion class players preparing for the World Championships and learning how their minds work. At Championship level nobody gives a damn about the meaning of words; the only thing that matters is whether they are allowable. Nor is it necessary to be able to speak English despite this being the international language in which the game is played. Others may have sussed this already but it was news to me.

    1. Here’s the link – I’d heard about it being on Sky the other night and hadn’t realised it would be on the Beeb too, so only caught the last 10 minutes or so.
  4. Hope you don’t mind this for a couple of weeks – of the seasonal offerings available, it seemed “nice but not too cheesy”. For a while, comments about links on the right of the page will be misleading – I couldn’t find anything seasonal with that layout. We’ll return to the London skyline by twelfth night.
  5. I found this much more satisfying than yesterday’s puzzle, having to work through the wordplay in almost all cases.

    For some reason I got held up in the NE corner. 8dn seemed to work as a double definition of just BASS and it took a while to work out where the first word came from. It then took me ages to work out whether 8ac should be ARGUS or AEGIS – a complete blind spot!

    I was also unsure about the homophone at 25ac, by thinking that PEON was pronounced PEE-ON, which it is, but apparently as an alternative the O can be a schwa so it all works as Peter says.

    K

  6. Thank goodness for technology. We are iced in this morning – very unusual for Dorset.

    In the main a lot of this is comprised of old familiar tricks as Peter has pointed out so it never really gave me any shocks (yuk). The “Aussie PM” trick has appeared in a recent puzzle and even DOORPOSTS has appeared clued like this before, me thinks. 25 leisurely minutes.

    I too thought PAEAN was pronounced “pie on”, not that I have call to say it very often. I don’t really understand EARLY…. It was my last in. I’d more or less guessed IN HAND based on home=IN so the checking letters left little alternative. How is it a definition of “chorus” in the 2 defs solution or of “dawn chorus” in the CD solution?

    1. I’m with you, Jimbo, on EARLY ONE MORNING, which I take to be an allusion to the well-known folk song (well, I remember singing it at school):

      Early one morning, just as the sun was rising
      I heard a maid sing in the valley below
      “Oh don’t deceive me, Oh never leave me,
      How could you use, a poor maiden so?”

      The dawn/EARLY MORNING bit is fair enough, but it’s difficult to see why EARLY ONE MORNING should be defined as a “chorus”, which is usually understood to be a lyric or words intended specifically to be sung by a group of people, often as a refrain, which is plainly not the case here. The clue only seems to work if “chorus” is taken as a very loose synonym for “song” or “singing” in general, which is rather weak.

      1. On second thoughts, it occurs to me that the last two lines of the first verse of “Early One Morning” – “Oh don’t deceive me. Oh never leave me,/How could you use a poor maiden so?” – are repeated at the end of the song as a kind of refrain/chorus. Still stretching things a bit, however.
    2. Thanks to both.

      I think this is a classic example, rather like “pontoon bridge” the other day, of a setter getting carried away by a phrase “dawn chorus” and not being able to resist it. For me it doesn’t really work.

  7. Strangely, I found this easier than the previous day’s puzzle. It all fell into place fairily steadily, around 35 mins or so. That said, I only fully worked out the wordplay in several clues after finishing, in the case of STARVING, only on coming here. I had no idea that “arvo” was Australian slang for afternoon and spent fruitless moments wracking my brains for names of Australian prime ministers (as no doubt the setter intended!) I’ve always prounounced PAEAN more or less the same as “peon”, so no problem there, but I can see that some won’t like it.
  8. I took 25ac as a double definition, the “chorus” referring to the song of that name. I don’t quite see it as a CD.

    K

  9. Early One Morning being a song, “chorus” just about defines it. For me the CD idea works better, as “Early One Morning” matches dawn in the old-style CD way rather than quite defining it. I can’t see why “early one morning” has to be a definition of “chorus” though – if it is, it’s def by example.

    Edited at 2009-12-23 11:58 am (UTC)

  10. New years resolution will be to post a little more – timetables inverted a few months back such that I rarely was in a position to do so much before midday, and by then it seemed that all was said and covered and no-one was “listening” anyway !

    On this one there were a few unknowns – PALETOT, TANTRA and ERK, the latter of which didnt even come up on a google search afterwards, which i guess just shows the necessity to use a proper dictionary. STONE BASS was the last in, since I was suckered in to thinking singer must equal a bird and completely ignoring an actual singer. I remember doing similar with flower a while back – you do get into a certain mindset which is very difficult to shake!

    Other than that, it was fairly smooth progress, about 25m in all.

  11. I found this the easiest of the week so far. I finished all but one in 30 minutes, but spent a further 5 considering various possibilities for 8 before committing myself to the unfamiliar STONE BASS. For a long time I thought it might be a cryptic definition referring to one of the sirens. I almost made the same error as Peter – ‘on hand’ seems more suitable as a synonym for ‘available’, but it didn’t fit the wordplay. To me, ‘in hand’ suggests ‘being attended to’, but I went with it.
    Several clues had me taking a second look to see the wordplay, especially 19, where for some time I assumed the governor was AGA. COD for me was 12
    1. Initially I also had some doubts about this but Collins offers “available for use, in reserve”. This made me think of card games thought I don’t know whether it’s a correct train of thought.

      But “Home” = “In” can’t be argued with so I never doubted for a moment what the setter intended.

    2. In sporting terms a game “in hand” is one you have still to play, compared to your competitors; it’s therefore in reserve, or available for use (in that you might gain points from it while your opponents don’t play).

      It probably does come originally from card games – having a trump still in hand means you haven’t played it yet.

  13. I also found it reasonably straightforward at 40 minutes; held up by the ANGEL at 6ac, which made 8d LOOSE BASS (an apt description of some singers, no doubt, but I reasoned it probably wasn’t the name of a fish). PALETOT was new to me but sounded like a vestment of some kind. As for ERK, the only reason I knew it was from a Times clue competition a while back where I used it in an early attempt at BERSERK, rejected because I thought it was too obscure for the daily. If I had only known!

    Speaking of early in the morning, I don’t think there is an arvo equivalent for AM in Australia. I’m wondering why that is. Maybe morning, at two syllables, is acceptable but afternoon is a bit of a mouthful at three.

  14. I expected to have two wrong today but I discovered that my neologisms, paletot and stone bass both existed. However I still had one spelling mistake, having entered Paeon. One problem with homophone clues is that they give you no help with the spelling.

    I got in hand from the wordplay but I don’t think it means available. It means under control or in preparation. On hand means available.

    I think a CD should aim for a unique answer regardless of clue length or enumeration. Dawn chorus could be “Morning has broken”, to name just one that comes to mind.

    Sorry Peter, I find the festive typeface fairly unreadable.

  15. A very late night solve for me, since the Crossword Club log-in gave me the 404 reply for 5 hours last evening. But it finally cooperated very late, and I got through the puzzle in about 25 minutes, despite sleepiness. First in: DISCO, last: TANTRA. Didn’t know: PALETOT, Aussie PM, PA as governor, ERK, nor did I see the wordplay for MANACLES til coming here. PB: I like the seasonal format, very apropos. Vinyl’s explanation of the pronunciation of ‘paean’ is so authoritative that I confess that I have been pronouncing that word incorrectly (though rarely, as PAY-ON) forever, and will henceforward use the right version. COD’s: ARMADILLO, OPERA SINGER. Best regards.
    1. Kevin, I often get that these days using my default browser (Firefox) but then find I can access it successfully using Internet Explorer. It might be worth having more than one browser and trying the alternative when you get the error. I’ve no idea what’s causing the problem but the Club log-in page seems to be exceptionally temperamental.

      To those who find new typeface unreadable, so did I but found it can be improved by adjusting Zoom In/Out on the View menu or equivalent in your browser.

      1. Another alternative for LJ members really troubled by this view (or any other) is to use the “View in my Style” option in the bar at the top (I’m hoping this isn’t for paid accounts only). “My Style” means the style of your own LiveJournal blog – which you can set up however you wish, without necessarily having any postings in it.
    2. I had the same Kevin but using the “delete cookies” button on the site solved the problem. Which was lucky because I could not have left the house.

      After thick ice this morning and torrential rain this afternoon, we now have a massive thunderstorm. How are you faring?

      1. Raining on snow – lovely if that lot freezes! Stating to wonder about stocks of food for Christmas here, though we should be elsewhere!
      2. I often have gotten the 404 after logging in, which as no problem as I simply reload the log-in page and it then recognizes me and I land in the Crossword Club page. Last night however, I was getting the error before even reaching the log-in. It didn’t offer me a ‘delete cookies’ button; I remembered using that before, but couldn’t find it. Thanks for all the advice, everyone. Next time I’ll try with Firefox – I use IE typically.
  16. Rather enjoyed this even though I put ‘on call’ for ‘in hand’ which moved Donny over the Pennines to Lancaster, ho hum.

    Re 404s, it’s definitely the sites silly cookies. If your session times (!) out the cookie left behind can prevent logging on correctly. The not terribly satisfactory way I deal with it is to use Opera. The log in page is set to clear cookies on closing, the puzzle page is set to remember cookies in case I want to save the puzzle part finished for instance. The best bit though is that all the silly pop-up windows can be changed to tabs simply by maximising them.

    Sorry for the verbiage.

    sidey

    1. Another option is to delete only the Times Online cookies when you run into problems. In Firefox, you can do this with Tools > Options > Privacy > remove individual cookies
      1. Of course, but the reason I don’t use Firefox is the frankly ridiculous opening puzzles as new windows thing which ruins Session Manager, and Opera does it automatically when you close the tab. It’s a shame, ‘cos everything looks better in Firefox.

        It’s stuff that really should be sorted on a subscription site. Shame the Times don’t seem to care.

        Anyway, season’s greetings and all, and the snowy theme’e very apt for this year.

        sidey

  17. Sneaking in late at night like Father C to comment on this. Not a lot that wasn’t already said, got a lot of these from the definitions, only one where wordplay was essential was PALETOT. Got AGRIPPA from definition, couldn’t figure the wordplay. Chortled at the telly gent.
  18. Like the festive offering.
    In hand is clearly capable of meaning available.. eg “I gave away two and kept two in hand” or similar
    Didn’t find this crossword very difficult, though arvo and paletot both new to me
  19. Struggled a bit with this one. Didn’t get the shock = hair reference at 7dn and had guessed AUSTRIA for 6dn from “mountainous region”, so had no hope of getting ARMADILLO! Had also never heard of ELYSIAN so missed that one out even with all the checking letters. (PALETON and ERK were also new to me but get-able just from the wordplay.)

    Why is ELY = see in 17dn?

    1. Ely is both a catherdral city in Cambridgeshire, and the centre of the diocese (= see) of the same name. Probably the most (over?)used 3 letter combo in Times Cryptics.
  20. Probably the easiest of the week at 26 min. BUT payed the price for not doing a final check and got one wrong (AEGUS – neither fish now fowl). COD: GEL. Not often you get a really good clue for a 3 lettered word.

    I find the Christmassy comments font rather hard to read, and will be happy when we revert to the old style.

  21. I’ve always said, and heard,’paean’ as ‘pee’ not ‘pie’, but on the other hand I’ve always said, and heard, ‘peon’ as ‘pea, on’, i.e. with 2 full vowels, not a vowel + schwa. And I was surprised to discover that in the Indian context it’s also pronounced ‘pyoon’.
    I knew ‘erk’, which means it must have been used fairly recently in a Times cryptic.

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