25090 – Yes, a walk in the park

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 27 minutes

Music: Vaughn Williams, Antarctica Symphony, Boult/LSO

I had all but one in 18 minutes, or so I thought. But the reason I couldn’t get the final answer was that I had a wrong word, put in through hasty solving that cost me dearly at the end.

Other than one clue, this is a rather simple and straightforward puzzle where many of the answers can be put in without either the literal or the cryptic – there’s only one English word that fits! The temptation for experienced solvers to go for it is strong, but there are a few chances to come a nasty cropper.

In order to have a reasonable sort of blog, I will not omit too many obvious ones, although really only a few can be called non-obvious.

Across
1 DISABUSE, DIS(AB)USE.
5 TEMPER, T(E MP)ER[m], my first in.
9 Omitted!
10 UNDER A CLOUD, UNDER A, incorrect anagrist of AROUND + CLOUD, the anagrind.McText has pointed out that cryptic the setter probably intended is an anagram of AROUND CLUED. I like mine much better, but it probably is too clever for this sort of puzzle.
12 PICARESQUE, PI(CARES)QUE, when ‘involving likeable rogues’ is the definition. Whether you’ll still like them after reading a few Smollett novels is a question I leave up to the group.
13 WEAR, W(E)AR, so the final R is not from ‘river’ as you might suppose
15 TRIBAL, TRI(B[lackadders])AL
16 DELIBES, DELIBE[rate]S. The only composer who fits.
18 AGAINST, AGA + INST. My last in owing to having ‘blue ribbon’ down, only seen after erasing some crossing letters.
20 Omitted!
23 Omitted!
24 WINCHESTER, WINCH + ESTER. A rifle, a cathedral, or a songwriter.
26 HAND IN GLOVE, HANDING + LOVE.
27 Omitted!
28 AGENDA, A(GEN) DA,
29 SKITTLES, SKIT + T[ime] + LES.
 
Down
1 DROOPY, reversed hidden word in ‘saY POOR Dear’.
2 SIDECAR, IS backwards + DE(C[ointreau])AR.
3 BLUE RIBBAND, BLUE + RIB + AND. My hasty error, putting in the modern ‘blue ribbon’, only corrected much later.
4 SIDE SPLITTING, SIDE + SPLITTING. There is probably some UK-centric thing about TV here, but the answer is obvious enough.
6 ETCH, ETC + H[ard].
7 PROVERB, P(ROVER)B. The only English word starting in ‘p’ and ending in ‘b’, so why read the clue?
8 Omitted!
11 ROUND THE CLOCK, double definition. I nearly put ’round and round’, but held off.
14 ALL THE BEST, anagram of THAT BELLS + E[aster].
17 Omitted!
19 ANDANTE, anagram of AT AN END.
20 OPTIMAL, anagram of [d]IPLOMAT. If you were solving fast, you thought the first three letters were an anagram of TOP and didn’t worry about the rest.
22 BRUTUS, BRUT + US.
25 Omitted!

42 comments on “25090 – Yes, a walk in the park”

  1. Vinyl: a couple of comments/corrections.
    1ac: delete the final D (DISABUSE).
    10ac: the fodder is “around clued”; and the indicator is “incorrectly”.
    4dn: Yes a TV channel can be a “side”. When there were only two, you’d always hear “What’s on the other side?”

    Edited at 2012-02-20 02:47 am (UTC)

  2. 23 minutes and welcome light relief after the two corkers at the weekend. Still managed one wrong, though – the apparently easy 17dn, where I had ‘mamushka’. Obviously wasn’t paying attention in knitting class.

    Never bothered with Smollett. For picaresque, you can’t go far wrong with Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn. COD to OPTIMAL.

  3. 8 minutes, this was all pretty straightforward – last in WEAR though I think we’ve seen almost exactly the same clue recently. SIDE-SPLITTING from definition.
  4. Should have been quicker. As Vinyl says, this is about as simple as they get. I’d marked pretty much all of the omitteds as entry level. Except 17dn where I didn’t know the “scarf” meaning. Honest I didn’t. 20ac is such an obvious &lit that I didn’t put it in at first. “Can’t be that!” But it was. By the same token: I thought the clue for DELIBES was good. And I was genuinely misled by 19dn: with just a few crossers, I figured it was the name of a musical (show) ending in Y. So this for my COD.
  5. 13:18, a PB. I’d be prouder of that if it hadn’t been such an easy puzzle; I hardly had time to think of the solutions. Didn’t know ROUND THE CLOCK, but with the H and C in, I couldn’t go wrong. The Widow Winchester, some of you may not know, was rather an eccentric (well, loony). She built a mansion in San Jose, south of San Francisco, and continued building, since a fortune-teller had told her that as long as construction continued, she wouldn’t die. It turns out she was misinformed. The ‘Winchester Mystery House’ is still there; the only tourist attraction San Jose has.

    Edited at 2012-02-20 02:55 am (UTC)

  6. Re 7dn, I’m not sure you are being serious but there are some other words with the pattern P…..B, including (P)OTHER(B)! I found this one very easy indeed, just below five minutes according to the website which must be a personal best.
  7. 18 minutes, which came as something of a relief after the nightmare of my crosswording weekend.

    My only queries were BABUSHKA (DK the scarf and couldn’t think of the old woman immediately), also DK that SKIT = hoax (it does) and wondered about BRUTUS being a hero, but now assume this refers to Brutus of Troy, a descendant of Aeneas who was a Greek hero, and not the infamous one referred to in “Et tu, Brute”.

    Edited at 2012-02-20 04:15 am (UTC)

      1. Of course he was! Blame it on all of that stuff being filed under “Greek myths and legends” in my sieve of a brain.
  8. I’d say Brutus of JC fame is a hero of a sort in most people’s books. It’s often asked (of struggling schoolchildren) if the play should have been named after him. Panicked a bit with only 17 left but got there in under the quarter-hour. Too easy in places.
  9. Not that it matters much, but the ‘legendary’ seems to tip the balance in favour of Aeneas’s descendant-cum-founder of London.
  10. 11m, so yes it was easy but it took me a while to get going: HOT DOG was my first in.
    I’d never heard of DELIBES, and I didn’t know a skit could be a hoax, but other than that there was nothing too unfamiliar.
    The only query I have is with 11dn, where I thought the game was always “darts”. It had me looking for something involving a river (or a creek once I had a couple of checkers).
    1. This didn’t strike me as odd when solving, although on reflection it is interesting. With games ending –s, I’d say both the singular and the plural form of the noun can be used when premodifying another noun (cf ‘billiards player’ / ‘billiard player’). Isn’t it just an extension of a broader principle where you can have both ‘communications plan’ and ‘communication plan’ used interchangeably by most people?
      1. I’m not sure. “Billiard player” looks wrong to me too.
        A bit of Googling reveals the existence of the International Dart Players Association (slogan: “you cannot play darts without dart players”). I suppose they ought to know, although they claim to be “officially recognised by the World Darts Federation and all it’s National Governing Bodies” so I’m not entirely sure they can be trusted on matters of grammar.
        1. Indeed – isn’t there a painting called ‘The Skittle Players’? Mustn’t forget the tiddlywinkers either.
  11. 22.47 for me. Now in Perth WA for two weeks and thought the glorious warmth had helped the braincells to work after the freezing NE winter in Teesdale but now I realise it was just an easy puzzle! Thanks for blog and my vote goes for ‘the noblest Roman’ though can someone who existed be ‘legendary’? Still haveSaturday’s cryptic to complete after 75 minutes so far.
  12. Simple crossword, but nevertheless some very neat clues – 7dn and 16ac for example.
    The only hard thing today is trying to imagine how you can be both a real assassin and a legendary hero at the same time.. wouldn’t a true hero have persuaded him to take early retirement, or something?
    And don’t perturb me with wild claims about “proverb” 🙂
  13. 12 minutes today, so in gentle stroll territory, but with decent, well constructed clues.
    Legendary Brutus can’t be the conscientious assassin – he was so real Shakespeare knew about him. Must be the one whose foot landed here in 1170BCE. He’d be my first Brutus called to mind having been myself a temporary resident of the wonderfully eccentric Totnes many years ago (if not that long).
    UNDER A CLOUD I saw as a conventional anagram. “Drop of Cointreau” more of a Mephisto/Listener indicator for C, I thought, but easy enough in context. BABUSHKA I associated with the old woman, not the scarf, though one would always be wearing the other.
    CoD to the neat PROVERB.

    Edited at 2012-02-20 09:13 am (UTC)

    1. ‘Legendary’ can signify the stuff of legend. Babe Ruth, the legendary baseball player…
        1. We’re talking hero here. ‘The noblest Roman of them all.’ This was his life: why someone like him became an assassin is what makes the legend. (And ‘hero’ as in a vivid central character of a drama.)

          Edited at 2012-02-20 09:06 pm (UTC)

  14. No problem with this one, despite not knowing the composer, the scarf or the ‘this month’ bit.
  15. a lovely enjoyable 8 minutes for me and that is with the new boss looking over my shoulder to see if he could solve any. I am going to have to get him trained – nothing should interrupt a cryptic crosswor solver – and it is lunchtime!
  16. Apart from Potherb,Perturb and Pedicab I couldnt find any more words in the English language (7 letters) starting with P and ending in B
    1. There are quite a lot more (paystub? plumbob?) – the OED lists 23 – but most of them are obscure and hopefully won’t turn up in a daily cryptic.

      Edited at 2012-02-20 04:56 pm (UTC)

    2. Vinyl didn’t limit it to only 7-letter words; the pleb is just plumb wrong. I’m off to the prefab pub.
  18. 10 minutes even after golf so must be easy. Got a lot of it without really having to think.

    Winchester the city has a long history whilst the cathedral boasts Arthur’s Round Table hanging on a wall.

  19. A friendly 7 minutes. Nothing wrong with a puzzle like this occssionally, especially on a gloomy Monday. I wonder if Magoo’s sub-3 minute time is a record for the puzzle since it went online (even if it is rendered meaningless by the people who claim similar astonishing times every day, despite the fact that nobody ever believes them to be genuine, and there is no kudos to be gained by doing so…)
  20. 20-25 minutes for me being held up for some time by having BLUE RIBBON.
    Now have yet another river to add to the list. Got BABUSHKA right off due, in part, to knowledge gained through my Ukrainian heritage. Refreshing after Saturday’s monster in which I got two wrong. For the life of me I can’t figure out which two they are.
  22. A sluggish 6:12 here, not helped by carelessly bunging in BLUE RIBBON (I’m relieved to see I wasn’t the only one) and the odd senior moment (particularly with BABUSHKA). Magoo’s sub-3-minute time still sounds pretty nifty though.
  23. Your blog-heading came a day early, v1! In view of 15dn in 25091 I wonder if they saved it specially for Jimbo’s day on duty.

Comments are closed.