24758 – A real toughie (or just me?)

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I took over 90 minutes to finish this, solving it late into the night but it was after a very long and tiring day at work and I’m not sure whether that was a major factor. I wonder how I would have done coming to it fresh this morning but I wanted to be free by 8:30 to watch tennis. I shall be interested how others fared. Some of the clues are a bit tricky to explain so maybe it really is a beast. It’s certainly a pangram.Off to watch the boy wonder now.

Across
1 HIMALAYAN – Anagram of H for ‘hard’, AA ‘couple of answers’ and MAINLY.
6 F(ACE)T – The Financial Times is the paper in question and ACE for ‘crack’ meaning ‘expert’. FACET can be the side of a cut gem which is clued by ‘rock’ here.
9 PAL,AVER – Cockney rhyming slang gives us PAL for ‘China’ as usual and ‘state’ for AVER is simple enough but some may not know PALAVER meaning to talk i.e. yak, unnecessarily and at length. I didn’t.
10 WOLF,RAM – ‘Bolt’ gives us WOLF as in rushing one’s food and ‘stuff’ gives us RAM. Together they make an alternative name for tungsten.
11 OEDIPUS REX – Anagram of PEROXIDE around US.
12 Deliberately omitted. Please ask if baffled.
14 AS,COT – ‘Early crash site’ supplies the COT element, with ‘crash’ meaning to fall asleep.
15 Man,IS,QUOTED
16 JEALOUSLY – Anagram of SUE A JOLLY
18 POM,MY – Reversal of MOP meaning ‘shock’ (of hair) then MY as in ‘Goodness gracious me!’. ‘Victorian’ supplies the Australian context for the definition.
20 Z,ERO – The ultimate character is Z followed by ‘hero’ as spoken Cockney style.
21 JUST THE JOB
25 EX,PLO(1)T- The definition is ‘milk’.
26 RE,GORGE- ‘Sight’ here is a tourist sight, one of which in Cheddar is Cheddar Gorge. I can’t say I am familiar with this word for ‘vomit’.
27 A(BY)SS – Another gorge perhaps? BY for ‘times’ is familiar territory.
28 SKINNY,DIP – To swim naked.
 
Down
1 HIPPOcrates – With reference to the lover of mud, mud, glorious mud and the Ancient Greek physician.
2 MELODIC – Anagram of LEMOn aCID with NA for ‘not available’ removed.
3 LOVE PO(r)TION – LOVE has its tennis meaning here i.e. zero, not a thing.
4 YORKS – Our daily cricket term. There were or are three areas called Ridings in Yorks(hire). I believe they no longer exist as administrative divisions (hence ‘once’ in the clue) but they survive as social and cultural entities.
5 NEW JERSEY – Sounds like ‘knew’ followed by the breed of cattle.
6 Deliberately omitted. Please ask if baffled.
7 CUR,RENT – Our old friends the RUC reversed and followed by what’s paid to a landlord..
8 TIME OF DAY – It’s rude not to give someone this. ‘Even’ is an archaic word for ‘evening’.
13 JUMP THE GUN – A cryptic with reference to races and starting guns.
14 A,L (JA(ZEE)R)A – The Arabic news channel. If I’ve parsed this correctly the ‘letter from America’ is ZEE inside JER short for the bottle called a Jeroboam all inside A LA. I can’t find the JER abbreviation in any of the usual sources but I assume it’s valid in the wine trade or some such circles. JAR all inside A  LA. Thanks to those who pointed out my error. I wasn’t sure how to spell it and it’s not in the dictionaries so I went to Wikipedia and put in what I thought i.e. AL JEZ, and it was on the predictive search list so I selected it and failed to notice that it had redirected me to a page with the correct spelling. It’s not the first time I have fallen for this trap that awaits those daft enough to use Wiki for looking up spelling.
15 MO,S(QUIT)OS – The definition seems a bit loose to me but I have no fight left in me at this moment!
17 A,TROPHY
19 MAJORED – Anagram of OR MADE around J for Judge.
22 TAR,SI – Reversal of IS RATher. Bones of the foot.
23 BLEEP – Double definition. Bleep to page someone or bleep out swearing.
24 TOSS – Another double, not give a toss or toss a coin.

71 comments on “24758 – A real toughie (or just me?)”

  1. Hossanas to The Times for a run of exceptional puzzles of which today’s might just be the best yet.
    COD to POMMY or perhaps SKINNY DIP or perhaps BLEEP…
    Sublime.
    Can’t figure the AS bit in ASCOT.
  2. I think you’ll find it’s AL JAZEERA which is
    A(L(JA(ZEE)R)A)
    i.e bottle gives JAR.

    I didn’t enjoy this one and gave up way short of a solution. The northwest corner went in quickly and I though I was on for a respectable time and then it all went downhill after fast.

    Mike O
    Skiathos

  5. Right up my street, this puzzle: idiosyncratic and kaleidoscopic, apart from a couple of quibbles. And a pangram, to boot. Left hand went in first and fast, with my problems coming in the top right. Putting ‘flint’ at 6ac and ‘misguided’ at 15ac stymied me for quite a while, leaving me floundering at 7dn for far too long. 73 minutes in total. COD to JUMP THE GUN for the smooth and misleading surface, and also because multiword clues never get the recognition they deserve.

    Thanks to Jack for his late night vigil and explanations of cryptics for 14ac and 1, 22 and 23dn. Also felt MOSQUITOS was clued a bit loosely. As for 4ac, can Yorks on its own be a riding, rather than any of E Yorks, W Yorks and N Yorks?

    18ac amused me after HRH’s recent speech.

  6. Great crossword, great blog. Time irrelevant (maybe approaching two hours in three stints). Always had problems distinguishing east from west so managed to parse 9ac as ‘PA’ (Pennsylvania = ‘state’) east of ‘LAVER’ (washbasin = ‘China’)! Many potential CODs but my vote goes to ‘TOSS’ (my last in after painstakingly working through, and rejecting, LOTS of options).
  7. 50 minutes, with a good proportion of the time trying to choose between MOSQUITOS and MESQUITES. The wordplay seemed to indicate the former (which I opted for) and the definition the latter; I should be grateful for any enlightenment. Excellent puzzle, though.
  8. MOSQUITO according to COED is an alternative spelling for MISKITO, apparently a member of an American Indian people of the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua and Honduras. (Alternative spellings not my favourite type of answer).
  9. That was a hard one! Didn’t like MOSQUITOS. Only now can I see how it was arrived at but American Native? I got that one wrong because my entry, MESQUITES are an American Native shrub. Bah humbug! Also don’t like the AS as in ASCOT. I accept what other bloggers have said about both, but “loose” is being kind in describing those clues. COD? Any one from SKINNY DIP, HIPPOCRATES, MAJORED and BLEEP.
    Oh, while I’m at it, POMMY is how all Aussies describe Brits, not just the Victorians. I know about these things, I’m a Pom from Sydney.
  10. Not just you Jack, I found this difficult and in particular AL JAZEERA and MOSQUITOS.

    I’m not convinced by jar=bottle and think channel a bit loose. I got it from checking letters and reverse engineered the cryptic – the path most will take I suspect

    For the other I thought like John that mesquites had to be the answer because of the definition. I looked up mesquitos in the dictionary to see if there was an alternative plural. In the end I went with the crytic but without understanding the definition. My thanks to Barry for solving that and I have to say that I think the clue is unfair in a daily cryptic.

    1. Thought we were going into a Tommy Cooper routine there, Jim! “Jar, bottle – bottle, jar”.

      They are not the same in any sense that I can think of. I’ve always understood the ‘jar’ in ‘going for a jar’ refers to the beer glass rather than a bottle.

      1. In the days before freezers we used to bottle fruit by putting it in jars, and to jar can mean to bottle. Indeed, to can can mean to put in a can … as can tin .. to put in a tin can … (I don’t know about Tommy Cooper, but this is beginning to sound like the Marx Brothers.)
        1. You’re right of course now I think about it. My grandmother used to bottle pears and Chambers gives it under “bottle”. But a bit obscure surely – folk younger than us are going to really struggle with it. Did you solve it from checkers and reverse engineer or did you derive the answer from wordplay?
          1. I thought the letter from America must be zee and then noticed I already had the A and the Z, so the answer came to mind; then I worked backwards.

            I still have a boxful of Kilner bottling jars in my pantry: keep thinking they’ll come in useful one day. Stewed fruit, however, doesn’t seem as popular as it was in the immediate post-war years; and these days, I don’t think I could eat the salted beans we used to jar. Revolting! Like cardboard soaked in sea-water.

        2. Of course! I hadn’t considered that context. I’m just trying to find an excuse for my earlier spelling error.

          Note to self: If an abbreviation is not in any of the usual dictionaries then something has gone wrong and I need to examine the clue more closely.

  11. Fairly tough this, but my kind of puzzle and I enjoyed it immensely. c40 mins or a little less altogether.
    I cannot see that 15dn is a fair clue. It is defensible, I suppose, because the Mosquito Coast that many will have heard of is named after the Miskitos. But Wikipedia correctly says: “The name “Miskito” derives from the Miskito language ethnonym Mískitu, and is not related to the Spanish word “mosquito,” which derives from the word mosca, meaning “fly.”” It would have been easy to have used a more accurate definition than “American natives.”
    Jar didn’t bother me at the time but I agree it is loose.
  12. Like others I thought this was almost a very good puzzle spoiled by looseness and liberties. MOSQUITOS is beyond the pale.

    Didn’t anyone else raise an eyebrow at a JERSEY cow as a source of beef?

    1. Yes, at first. Then I remembered that Jersey is the name of the breed of cattle so there are Jersey oxen as well as the more familiar cows. No idea what cattle breeders do with them but I guess they qualify as beef.
      1. A little research suggests that Jersey bulls are either kept for breeding or sold young for veal. But the point is that a Jersey is known as a dairy cow and clueing it as a source of beef is just deliberate perverseness which I find annoying. Rather like MOSQUITOS.
  13. 27:48 … This puzzle seems to crystallize one of our ongoing themes: either you enjoy the slightly freewheeling wit and variety on show here, or the odd bit of looseness bugs you.

    I loved it – most enjoyable of the week for me by some distance. Always happy to grant a bit of “setter’s license”.

    Loved the ‘early crash site’, so COD to ASCOT. Last in VETO.

  14. 21:02 on paper whilst eating an M&S microwave risotto so no real problems here although it was full of the sort of things that would have had me totally flummoxed 2 or 3 years ago but which now seem to come as second nature:

    At 7d on seeing “old coppers” the first thing I looked for was RUC;
    At 19d seeing “cases” I immediately spotted it as a containicator (luckily Himalayan was my first in otherwise I might have done the same at 1d and wasted time trying to find an animal like pombo or podro) 🙂 ;
    18a – gracious/my came to me quickly. Some time back I remember asking 7dPenguin why “my” led to “cor”;
    extended definitions like “of range” and “with green eyes” jumped out at me;
    At 15d seeing natives I got thinking about creatures – that led me to the right answer but seemingly for the wrong reasons!

    Anyway, I’m with Sotira on this one – fun and original for which I can happily forgive the odd quibblette.

    1. Could be a schism in the making and a breakaway by the Clue Liberation Front (not to be mistaken for the Liberation Front for Clues – splitters).
    2. I had the pomoo as a possible lower primate until the Himalayas appeared over the horizon. The Pomo, on the other hand, are Native Americans.
  15. I loved this one. Best for a while, I’d say. Found it hard to gain access to start with, then it all went pretty well. Some superb clues.
    What I would like to ask about is pangrams. Can someone enlighten me, and how they relate to the grid? I have never quite twigged what is going on and would really like to know.
    1. At least one of every letter in the alphabet appears in the grid. That’s all there is to it.
  16. 18:55 here, so above average difficulty but not all THAT hard. I noticed the large number of J’s in the grid before checking for the pangram. I raised an eyebrow at MOSQUITOS, but only because I thought they were African. In crossword-speak (especially the Times dialect thereof), a native of somewhere nearly always refers to a plant or animal, and it was fairly easy to construct it from the wordplay.

    I wasn’t 100% sure of the spelling of AL-JAZEERA either, but figured it out from the wordplay – I didn’t see any problem with JAR=bottle.

  17. Once again I had one blank before finally giving up and checking the answer here: 4dn (but, seeing as it’s a sporting ref, I won’t beat myself up too much…never my strong point). Took time getting going, and spent a long time at the end with the SE corner, finally seeing JTJ which was the beginning of the end. Oh, and I got one wrong: put in LOTS for 24d.

    CoD to SKINNY DIP.

    Have a lovely weekend, everyone, wherever you may be!

    PS Anyone else going to see Steven Berkoff’s OEDIPUS REX at the Nottingham Playhouse?

    1. Ooh, I wish! Once saw Stephen Berkoff in “Salome” on the West End stage.I believe he based it on a piece of slow-motion street mime that he had seen in Paris. Wonderful piece of theatre!
  18. Couldn’t finish it last night, had to come back in the morning. Seeing that it was a pangram missing a G got me REGORGE and I was off on the bottom right corner. Any hint the setter was going for a record number of Js in a crossword?
  19. 24 mins, I thought it was great fun and forgive any liberties. Very hard to choose a COD, perhaps 28A SKINNY DIP.

    Tom B.

  20. Was left puzzling over mainly the SE corner. Some lovely clues (even the ones I couldnt get). Loved SKINNY DIP.
  21. 27:20 for me, nearly double my usual time. I was very slow getting into this one, then it was a steady solve up to 15d when I took quite a while to go with the cryptic and not the definition. Yes it was enjoyable and count me in as a member of the CLF!
  23. This has been quite a week, but worth the struggle. This one took me 48 minutes, but halfway through I thought I’d never get any further.I’ll join Sotira in the CLF, although I’ve never heard of the Miskito referred to as Mosquito (although it is the Mosquito Coast). I have a London-born friend (Eastender, maybe) who speaks ‘raising a jar’ when inviting me to join him in a drink. Great blog, too. But what’s ‘love’ doing in the clue for 20ac? I thought it indicated O, ‘ultimate character’=Z, and wasted a lot of time trying to account for the ER.
    1. “But what’s ‘love’ doing in the clue for 20ac?”

      – it’s the definition! Z + ‘ero = …

      1. ‘Love’ = ‘zero’ as in tennis (6-0, 6-0, 6-0).

        The great thing about a crossword such as today’s is that it makes it so worthwile to come back to read the banter here! Very entertaining.

        1. Not to mention the abject apologies for making an ass of oneself by asking idiotic questions!
    2. Love=zero as in tennis – the definition, the wordplay being Z (ultimate letter) plus ‘ero being hero in the east end (dropped h’s).
  24. Very clever puzzle. SKINNY DIP was delicious and HIMALAYAN one of the most ingeniously disguised anagrams in a long while. Loved the “crash site” clue for the COT bit of ASCOT. Last in MAJORED and POMMY. Thanks to Barry for explaining the absurdly obscure definition of MOSQUITOS, perhaps the only bit of the puzzle inviting a quibble. Like others I had assumed it was simply an extraordinarily loose definition (i.e. mosquitos are “American natives” in the sense that the little critters are found there, as they are indeed in almost every other country of the world!)
  25. Great puzzle, strange after reading the blog and comments, to note that VETO was my first entry. Esp liked ZERO, JUST THE JOB, MELODIC, LOVE POTION, YORKS, JUMP THE GUN, ATROPHY, MAJORED, BLEEP (quite a few!)
  26. Comrades… we nearly have a quorum. Now all we need to do is have a series of meetings to determine the agenda for the inaugural meeting at which we can lay out the parameters for discussion with a view to the drafting of a provisional constitution. Nothing can stop us now (except perhaps ammendments and points of order – always a tricky area). Oh, and we’ll need someone to make the sandwiches. And it can’t be me because that would be sexist oppression.
    1. I’m quite happy to referee any arguments over points of order but I may need a referee’s assistant…

      Anyway, what did the setters ever do for us?

          1. Have we voted on a rallying cry? I propose
            Congeri ite domum

            Re sandwiches for the meeting, fully understand. I’m happy to procure sandwiches from my local Woolworths in Sydney. Is there enough in the petty cash? Has everyone paid their subs?

      2. Nothing, brother Penfold. Nothing at all.

        … except for the hours of entertainment..

        but still…

  27. I completed this before lunch but had to go play for my regular Friday afternoon pensioner singalong. So I’m only now getting back for a late comment. I really enjoyed this puzzle and had the same difficulties noted by others; the spelling of AL-JAZEERA, the cryptic of ASCOT and not knowing this definition of MOSQUITO. Nevertheless, a most enjoyable 46 minutes.

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