24914

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Time taken to solve: Off the scale yet again.

I got off to a great start with the gift of a long answer at 5dn and made very good progress to complete the NW and put in quite a few in the lower half but gradually I began to realise it was going to be a struggle to finish as I had to deduce a number of words I didn’t know from the wordplay alone.

Eventually I found myself with only the NE to complete with only 5dn, 6dn and 17ac in place and I thought I was never going to find a way into the remainder. The carriage at 8dn proved to be the key to this and I finally struggled home with around 90 minutes on the clock although I had stopped counting by then.

Parsing some of the clues presented additional problems so I feel I have been really tested today and anyone who had a stroll in the park, would you kindly think twice before you admit it?

I’m anxious to get this posted before the LJ goes down so I may do some minor edits over the next half hour as I read it all through again.

Across
1 S,TIN,KO – KO = Knock Out. Another of the multitude of slang words meaning ‘drunk’
5 S(PARE R)IB – My last in and last but one to parse. If I’ve worked it out correctly the definition is ‘cut’, then ‘cut, one may’ = PARER and ‘relative’ = SIB, short for ‘sibling’. I needed the wordplay here to rule out SHORT RIB which is also a cut of meat. On edit, SIB is not short for sibling, it’s a word in its own right.
9 T(IRAM)ISU – The popular Italian dessert. This was my very last to parse, in fact I only just found the reference that explains it. It’s an anagram of SUIT around MARI reversed. MARI is a Welsh winter festival that appears to have died out almost completely except in certain parts of Glamorgan and Gwent. It’s so obscure that it’s not in any of the usual sources nor, I think, in Wikipedia. On edit; Thanks to ulaca for pointing out the MAR 1 is St David’s Day. But I didn’t make the other one up. Honest. I’ve posted a link in the thread below.
10 CAESAR – Another very late entry. Sounds like “seizer”.
11 ALT(E R EG)O – I considered the correct ‘Kent’ reference on first reading and with no checkers in place I wondered if it might be ‘Super man’ but quickly discarded that idea as it wouldn’t be two words anyway. E registration plates were issued in the first half of 1967 but then the E was a suffix. The dates here reference E’s second tour of duty, this time as a prefix.
12 pAPERCUp Clever stuff. So hard to see but so simple when one has seen it.
13 S,CRU,TINY
15 Hard to know what to leave out today but this is an easy word with simple wordplay so I guess it will do for starters.
17 vAGUE
19 oNE,PEN,THE – I’ve never heard of this drug mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey which banishes grief or trouble of the mind.
20 M(O,I)ETY – I know this word as at I used to deal with legal documents in which it often cropped up. I’m not sure of the exact wordplay but here goes: ‘Either of two divisions’ is the definition. ‘Of the Yard repeatedly’ I take to be MET,Y – MET(ropolitan Police i.e. Scotland Yard) + Y(ard). Then ‘one’ and ‘ring’ clue the ‘I’ and ‘O’ respectively with ‘nailing’ and ‘smuggling’ as inclusion indicators. Y=’yard’ is in Chambers but is not supported in the usual sources.
21 ONCE-OVER
22 TALk,MUD – A book of Jewish law.
23 E,GOT,RIPS – ‘Suffered” = GOT as one gets an illness.
24 LAST POST – Double definition, one career-wise the other military.
25 D(0,MIN)O – MIN being half minute = 30 seconds.
 
Down
2 T(RIAL) RUN – Anagram of TURN encloses LAIR reversed.
3 NE(AR EA)ST
4 I’ll leave this one out for seconds as it’s a simple anagram.
5 SPUR-OF-THE-MOMENT – My first in. If one knows which team plays at White Hart Lane then this clue is a gift.
6 REA(P)PLY – Another easy one. Anagram of PLAYER enclosing P.
7 RESTRUNG – Another very late entry. It’s REST on RUNG so presumably on a ladder and therefore ‘climbing’. The definition in the first part of the clue refers to tennis rackets or musical instruments with strings made of gut.
8 BAR(OUCH)E – Add this to your list of carriages if it’s not already there.
14 NO,TO,CHORD – Another unknown word. It’s a sort of spinal chord.
15 G(UNMET)AL – Took ages to see this one despite the word being in my mind because I bought some new glasses with gunmetal frames only this week.
16 AC(HILL)ES
17 A,EROG,RAM – Yet another unknown word. The second bit is GORE reversed.
18 UNDER,PI,N – Pi being 3.14159 approximately.
19 NO TRUMP – Double definition. I always thought the bridge call was ‘no trumps’ but the singular is valid too, apparently.

29 comments on “24914”

  1. Blimey! Since I usually regard over 30 minutes as a failure (the eggs get rather rubbery) this was a failure and a half, and I struggled over the line. Being an occasional spectator in N17, 5d was a welcome gimme but it didn’t help that much. Kudos to Jakkt for solving the rest of it!
    Curiously, in such a tough one, there were’t that many clues that delighted: APERÇU is my CoD (complete with the cedilla, of course) but there were plenty of clues of the stab-in-the-dark-followed-by-desperate-deciphering variety, MOIETY being a prime example. I knew the word, but not its rather precise meaning, and was playing with inches and feet (how about forint, for example?) before checkers made it impossible – and GUNMETAL was no gimme either.
    CAESAR only works if you mispronounce it the way everyone does: Mr Jarry, my Latin teacher, would have had a fit.
    RESTRUNG was rather clever even among thus bunch, and I incline to the half way up the stairs (is the stair where I sit) interpretation of rest rung.
    Apart from the meaning of MOIETY, no actual unknowns for me (even NO TO CHORD struck one) but piercing the devious, murky mist thrown up by this setter recalled Holmes: “It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.”
  2. Well, hello again! This is the first time I’ve been able to get on this site since last Sunday!! What are these attacks all about – what is the objective?

    Thank you to everybody who wished me happy birthday – much appreciated.

    I thought this was difficult so well done Jack. Took me about 35 minutes with a lot of head scratching trying to parse answers guessed from the definition rather than working from wordplay to solution.

    1. Jim, Sotira’s informative reply on yesterdays blog sheds some light on the motives for these attacks.
      1. Thanks. Just read it – as you say very informative. I had no idea!

        I think Sotira’s suggestion should be followed up

  3. … that ‘Welshman’s time to celebrate [returning]’ is St. David’s Day, AKA 1 MAR [reversed]!
    1. Ooh, so it is! And we had something similar recently with reference to Michaelmas or some other saint’s day, I think. However I think I can justifiably claim my version is also valid even if it’s not the explanation the setter had in mind: http://www.folkwales.org.uk/mari.html
      1. All Saint’s Day (1 NOV), I believe. I can see that no one is going to take that one away from you!
      2. Mari Lwyd is indeed in Wikipedia, Jackkt. Well done for finding something which must qualify as obscure by any measure.
  4. Needed to revert to aids for five of these, so a definite win for the setter. STINKO unknown, which makes me feel rather virtuous. So too APERCU, which meant the hidden clue was rather wasted on me.

    Now I understand it, COD to RESTRUNG, where the force of the second half of the clue is, I think, is ‘[a place] to take a breather while climbing’, i.e. a rest-rung, by analogy with, say, rest-room.

    Inidentally, Jack, had you really never used an aerogram, or are you saying that you are only familiar with the form aerogramme? They were very common for those of us with family abroad.

  5. We used to use airmail letters which I think were also called air letters. I never heard of aerogram(me)until this morning.
  6. Found this exceptionally difficult and for the first time in ages abandoned ship, without managing caesar, moiety, restrung and gunmetal, but all perfectly fair.
  7. DNF for me as well after spending most of the day cogitating the missing ones – GUNMETAL & MOIETY. I didn’t have a clue what they might be. Also put NOTACHORD to complete the rout, even though I knew what one was. I concur it was an absolute stinker. Commiserations again, Jack. Well done the setter.
  9. I don’t think the “rest-rung = (place to) take a breather while climbing” analysis works.

    “Take a breather” is a verb, so “rest” must also be verbal. I think Jackkt hit the nail in his blog, that it is “rest on rung” which describes the answer perfectly.

  10. 25:11 .. a stroll in the park… while being attacked by ninjas leaping from trees (I used to work with a diminutive martial arts nut from Yorkshire who reportedly spent his weekends that way – a sort of multiple “Not now, Kato” exercise).

    Mostly the right kind of cleverness – ingenious wordplay and witty surfaces (though I think I could do without the car registration codes).

    Last in MOIETY.

    COD – hard to see past RESTRUNG for the brilliant definition and that implied ‘on’ in the wordplay.

  11. Despite filling the top half reasonably quickly, I gave up after an hour with three unsolved in the SW corner (15, 20, 22). Only rarely do I consider a tough Times cryptic worth pursuing for more than an hour, and this certainly wasn’t one of them. I thought a some of the clues were awful. I understood the wordplay to RESTRUNG when I solved the clue, but I don’t think it works. It might have worked if the answer had been RESTONRUNG. “O-30 seconds” for OMIN(ute)is dire, and the second ‘to’ in 10 is cryptically otiose since it’s not part of the homophone indicator and is a poor link between wordplay and definition. The best that can be said is that here and there are some ingenious indirect definitions.
  12. Well, I got stuck on several that have been mentioned, mainly due to tricksy word play and unknown vocab (MOIETY, NOTOCHORD, NEPENTHE). However, I did think this was a good puzzle, even more so having read the blog and worked out the why for several of the ones I got (eg, E-REG, MAR 1). Thanks Jack for taking the time to unravel all those dastardly clues.

    Lots of good clues, COD to RESTRUNG (which I did, in fact, get!). I also quite liked ‘0-30 seconds’ = OMIN, not sure why you find it so dire, dyste.

    Have a lovely weekend everyone, let’s hope the sun’s shining wherever you are!

  14. I believe vinyl1 and myself, and the other non-UKers, should be more cranky than anyone else, what with UK car registration plates, knowing who plays at White Hart Lane, nicknames for Scotland Yard, Mar 1 and so forth. Yet, I thought this was an absolutely great puzzle, diabolically clever. I enjoyed it immensely, despite being stumped at the end and resorting to aids for, of all tings, CAESAR. Nothing obscure about that. And well over an hour to get there. Some new vocabulary (NEPENTHE, NOTOCHORD) but I clawed my way through the wordplay to guess those. I also had a Latin teacher in high school who made us pronounce CAESAR correctly, and a History teacher who told us ‘you’re not in Latin class right now, stop showing off’. Thanks to the setter, and to jack for the blog, and kudos to those who got through this correctly. Regards.
  15. DNF. I was held up by most of the difficulties mentioned in other comments: cracked some with the benefit of aids but totally stumped by most of SW corner. Nonetheless my failures shouldn’t detract from a great puzzle.

    POD (‘Prize of the Day’) to jack for a great solve and a great blog! Many thanks.

  16. Quite pleased to have given this one up six short. Too many obscure words for the ordinary solver, particularly when combined with an obscure clue like 20A. Still unavble to grasp SPARE RIB, where does the second R come from? Also surely sib for sibling must be considered weak. Brilliantly done Jackkt.
    Good to be back in contact againg.
    2. There was so much to check when writing the blog this morning that I didn’t bother to look this one up as I thought I remembered clearly from a previous puzzle that it is an abbreviation. Your querying it sent me to the dictionaries this evening where I found that SIB is a word in its own right. I have amended the blog entry. Thanks.
  17. I found this the toughest for (literally) years, stopping the clock at 30 minutes still two short. After about 15 minutes I had all in except RESTRUNG and CAESAR (which took me another 8 minutes), MOIETY (which took me a further 5 minutes and which I wasn’t at all happy about but bunged in in desperation), and TALMUD and GUNMETAL which I got eventually but only after my time limit had expired.

    GUNMETAL was my LOI – I’ve never really thought of it as “sheeny”, but of course it is (I too have bought some new specs with gunmetal frames in the last couple of months). I even wondered fleetingly whether the setter might be using the meaning of “sheeny” which Chambers marks as “obs sl; offensive“, but I assume this wouldn’t be tolerated in the Times crossword.

  18. Those of us who remembered that

    “Julius Caesar
    Was a funny old geezer
    Who had a face
    Like a lemon squeezer.”

    should not have had any trouble spotting the homophone in 10ac.

    Sadly, I failed the test.

    1. The Caesar clue is, IMHO, outrageously unfair. All the rest was imaginative and difficult, but fair.

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