26026 In which I restored Mlle Nina to her rightful place

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Stopped the clock at 19.36, and only time will tell whether that’s a decent time for a slightly tricky puzzle or a stumbling dawdle through a piece of standard fare. There were some decent chuckles along the way, and a reminder of one of the all-time great put downs (puts down?). There’s still one I haven’t worked out the wordplay on, and I can only hope the penny drops during the writing of my report. Since it’s 1 across, the penny dropping machinery will have to work in the background (it didn’t) while I tentatively disclose my workings on all the others in this wise.

Across

1 TOSS UP  It’s as likely as not
I (and Chambers) only know mog as a cat (or a Mummerset cow). So here we have one obvious cat, the PUSS, which goes back to back with the TOS. One of the two words loses an S, since a Manx cat is one without a tail. You may have already spotted the flaw in my analysis, and if I remedy the flaw before concluding, I’ll put in a note to that effect, unless of course it makes me look really stupid. On edit: well, it sure does Thanks Vinyl for the other cat, which of course is just a TO(m). I couldn’t break away from the clue’s intimation that either mog could lose its tail, so they must end with the same letter. All setters is barstids.
5 MUSHROOM  Balloon
As in get bigger. Also “may be edible” the setter hedging his bets in case you are encouraged to try one that isn’t. Probably on legal advice.
9 STRAINED  (so) awkward
For dirty read STAINED, and dress the (floo)R withal.
10 DAMPER  piano piece
In this case, a piece of piano, the felty bit that stops the strings vibrating when you press the soft pedal. More soppy is not so much kitsch, more just a bit wet.
11 HARLOT  Call girl
Often is A LOT, wrap that around R(estaurant), place both after H(ospital)
The story goes that Margot Grahame, the Great British Actress in the heyday of Hollywood, was asked by Jean Harlow whether she pronounced her name Margot or Margo. “Margo” she replies. “The T is silent, as in Harlow”. One of those stories that, if it isn’t true, should be.
12 INEXPERT  not good enough
XP within a “broadcast” anagram of ENTIRE
13 WELL AND TRULLY completely
My LOI, because I was persuaded that “source of water” was just W and not WELL, and tried every possible combination on the rest of the wordplay. It’s just a “wrung” out anagram of T(rickle) and IN LAUNDRY placed after WELL, after all.
17 DESIRABILTY appeal
Another anagram plus, in this case the anagram is of ALIBIS and R(ight) contained within the heart of God, translated as DEITY
20 SILENCED  cut off
Just a simple anagram of DECLINES
22 BUNYAN  author
A soundalike, in this case of “bunion”, something “painful afoot”. Bunyan, the “Bedfordshire Tinker” was responsible for “Pilgrims Progress”, one of the most published books in the English language.
23 JETSAM  bits discarded
Material deliberately thrown off a ship. good &lit clue in which you need all the words for the wordplay. Stuff produces JAM, and if you discard the odd letters of wEtTeSt you get the inclusion you need.
23 CHIPMUNK  North American native
Of the animal variety. The partner of the fish friar (note spelling) might well be the CHIP MONK. Geddit?
26 WINDLASS  lifting apparatus
Girl is LASS, and (air) current is WIND. Assemble.
27 GALLEY Vessel
Or indeed the onboard cooking facility.

Down

2 OUTLAY  Cost
A hen that produces more eggs than another hen will do this. Another chestnut flavoured teehee moment
3 SWALLOW DIVE  Elegant plunge
Down (verb) gives SWALLOW, and a sleazy establishment produces the DIVE (as does [insert name of cheating footballer – reader’s choice])
4 PANATELLA  smoke
” A good cigar is a…” Panatellas are long and thin. TAN brown rises in PAELLA, Spanish food (unless I cook it, of course)
5 MADEIRA  cake
Reversed hidden (“gobbled up”) in weARIED AMerican
6 SIDLE  Inch
Had me going thorugh my litany of Scottish islands, and almost being scuppered by the notion that “plane, perhaps” is always code for a tree. Turns out it’s L(eft) inside SIDE, borrowed from basic geometry, producing inch the verb.
7 RAM  Strike
Or male, of course. A double definition complcated by the fact that there are so many possiblities for either word.
8 OVERRULE  reject
Draw a line provides the RULE, which is placed under some 6 balls of cricket. Eight if you’re old school Aussie.
13 PARTY ANIMAL socialite
The enduring symbol of the US Democratic PARTY is the donkey, indubitably an ANIMAL.
15 DRIBBLING  talent of an infant
… and also of a footballer. You probably need to put “talent” in imaginary inverted commas. Anyway, another teehee sort of clue.
16 BERIBERI disease
I and Chambers would put a hyphen in the enumeration. A BERBER is a North African, the two I’s are produced by the one and the island and are suitably placed
18 INDICES  Files
I thought in terms of the old and rather wonderful collection of index cards that libraries used to have. Items spotted are DICE, place within topless (b)INS
19 SARNIE  Familiar form of snack
An anagram (nuts) of IS NEAR for the contraction of the Early invention
21 COMMA  Butterfly
In musical notation, a comma represents a place where the desperate chorister is allowed to take a breath.
24 SAD  low
Produced by the first letters of Sheep Always Down

46 comments on “26026 In which I restored Mlle Nina to her rightful place”

  1. Enjoyed this quite a lot. The CHIPMUNK pun takes me back to a joke from The Beano c1958. Couldn’t believe it was used in the Times.

    At 11ac (nice joke Z8!) is the ARLOT really behind the H? Looking left to right, it seems to be in front of it. But such things always confuse me.

    Best of the lot was the &lit at 23ac … had me crying “double duty” for a while until I saw the point.

    And, of ninas: there’s an instruction on how to cook Japanese noodles in the last two rows.

    Edited at 2015-02-19 03:56 am (UTC)

  2. Oh dear, I’m going through a rough patch this week, possibly as a result of blogging two puzzles on Monday. I took an hour to get all but one – 16dn – and then lacked the willpower to persevere without resorting to aids so I looked it up. TBH I don’t think I’d ever have cracked it because I was nowhere near coming up with the necessary North African and I thought the disease was two words or hyphenated.

    I fell into the bear-trap at 25 by writing in CHIPMONK and my explanation at 2dn was along the lines that eggs laid by birds that are out (as opposed to in batteries or cages) are better. They probably are, but that’s not the point.

    On a pedantic technical matter, the dampers on a piano stop strings vibrating when you release the sustaining (often wrongly called ‘loud’) pedal. Or when you release a key (provided the sustaining pedal isn’t down at the time).

    Edited at 2015-02-19 03:47 am (UTC)

    1. I think by the time I got to the piano piece, virtually all my little grey cells (at least the background ones) were working on the cat problem like Eddie the shipboard computer in H2G2 contemplating tea, and couldn’t be focussed on anything as complicated as a piano. You are of course quite right. The wise move would have been to stop after “the felty bit that stops the strings vibrating”.
  3. 18:17 … went through the same mental gymnastics as our blogger in trying to make sense of TOSS-UP, but did eventually arrive at the parsing. The CHIPMUNK gag was new to me and pleased me greatly.
      1. That’s an outrageous piece of stereotyping! Somebody call the gender sensitivity officer …

        To be honest, I thought they were all a bit silly and my only longstanding subscription was to BBC Wildlife magazine. I was a very serious child.

  4. A satisfying 40 minutes with 1a being the LOI, finally working out the parsing. Yes, the joke at 25a was a friend of long acquaintance for me too.
    Nice entertaining blog z8 – though I think you’re off your trully at 13a.
    1. See comment on Jack’s piano point. Though I’ll add in the bit about being really smug and knowing (this is true) as I wrote it into the grid that it wasn’t two Ls. Pretty well guaranteed that, once I got into the freeform mode of the blog, I would duplicate the L.
  5. 27:21. Bit of a disaster this. I got completely stuck with three to go. Eventually I considered that PAT might not be right at 7dn, which helped me get MUSHROOM. Then I put SLIDE at 6dn, which made 10ac challenging until I reconsidered.
    I liked the terrible pun 25ac but I thought it would have been better with ‘frier’. Can’t homophonicity apply to both clue and answer?

    Edited at 2015-02-19 08:48 am (UTC)

    1. I thought it should be frier or even fryer to complete the illusion, and I wouldn’t have complained to the Ximenean Purity Board. The joke’s all over the web in various forms, and I found this rather cute illustration. Wrong sort of chips, of course, but I suppose “freedom fryer” doesn’t work quite as well.
  6. feeling mucho under the weather at the moment after breaking arm in bad fall so i didn’t latch on to anything until bunyan. hence e.e. cummings writing style. then confidently entered chippewa – thinking fish-fryer, chip-chipper. after that things picked up a bit. 15.32
      1. I also hope you recover soon Olivia. I broke the ulna in my left arm playing cricket many years ago and it made for a miserable summer.
    2. Sorry to hear about your arm, Olivia. Wincing in sympathy. .
      I thought of chippewa too but failed to parse it so (unlike yesterday) didn’t write it in
  7. An average puzzle I thought – 25 minutes without workingh too hard

    The chip-monk is indeed an old joke and I’m amazed it managed to pass Sotira by but perhaps those old comics were rather more laddish than aimed at girls. The first comic I can recall girls reading was the sister to The Eagle – which was called Girl

    1. There were three of us in our brood, and following some extensive arguments we did have a short-lived communal subscription to The Beezer, which none of us wanted. Good parenting on my mother’s part. As a child, you don’t really mind feeling deprived just as long as you’re sure your siblings feel equally hard done by.
  8. 22 min – held up in NE as I kept thinking of TOM for the male (somehow from TOM-TOM and Great Tom)
    Some of us will be quite familiar with a cat being a mog, as the base of the MENSA CATSIG is the Mogranch – and others with “Meg and Mog”

    Edited at 2015-02-19 10:39 am (UTC)

    1. “Bacon and eggs jump over their legs” indeed. You may have to explain “the base of the MENSA CATSIG is the Mogranch” as it looks like something Lewis Carrol might have written had he not come up with Snark and Boojum instead. Checking two combinations of the keywords very nearly came up with Googlewhacks, though of course before long this site will generate another hit and one for the full set.
      1. Mensa has a lot of Special Interest Groups, of which the one devoted to cat owners and fanciers is known for short as CATSIG, run by Maureen Day from her home, known as the “mogranch”, though there’s only one cat in residence at present.
  9. I was surprised to stop the clock on 26:23 as it felt like it had taken longer, including not much going in at all in the first 5 minutes.

    I nearly went for a mistaken PERIPERI at 16D before remembering that was a sauce typically served on chicken. Does BERIBERI also leave you hot and sweaty? I also was tempted by SLIDE at 6D but a nagging doubt that that wasn’t really to inch caused me to see SIDLE.

    LOI was TOSS UP where I saw TOM and PUSS quite early but got hung up on curtailing the PUSS rather than the TOM and wondering if TOMS UP meant something. I must try harder to avoid such solving cul de sacs!

  11. 12 mins, so I must have been on the setter’s wavelength judging by the comments above. However, I confess that I didn’t bother to think too hard about where the “to” element of TOSS-UP came from. I took a chance and inked in RAM as soon as I read the clue, although I was glad when I finally got MUSHROOM and DAMPER to confirm it. COMMA was my LOI after SILENCED.
  12. I must have been very on the setter’s wavelength today – 7:17 mins which is the nearest I’ve ever got to a Magoo.
  13. That’s such a painful gag at 23 across, oh Ed how could you do that to us?

    I was a 20-minute lagger today. Thanks blog & set.

  14. That is such a painful gag. Oh Ed how could you do that to us?

    I was a 20-minute lagger today. Thanks all.

  16. Synchronicity is a strange thing. Having spent the morning repairing a sustain pedal for my digital piano, there was DAMPER in the crossword. Spoiler alert: tomorrow I’m expecting delivery of a distributor for the car.
  17. Slow today with a DNF as I never got near the disease and abandoned the effort after 51m. Enjoyable if arduous struggle for me, as it has been all week. I blame the overheating of my brain as it was -3C when I left for Newcastle airport on Monday morning and 33C when Emirates delivered me to my brother in Perth WA some 24 hours later! Thanks to setter and blogger for their efforts!
    Grestyman (who cant remember his login details)
  18. 23 minutes, a medium difficulty pleasant puzzle, my LOI SIDLE, done late in the day after my first game of golf this year / post operation. Still too much mud but the exercise was welcome. The PUSS TO(M) thing was my FOI.
  19. All correct today but for misspelling Chipmonk (sic). Duh!
    NW corner last in because of dabbling with Odds On at 1A.
  20. 30 mins with SARNIE LOI after realising that it had to be an anagram so BUNYON could not be the correct spelling. I went online to check insurance for my cat today and was pleased to see that moggy was among the numerous breeds I could choose from.
  21. About 20 minutes, ending with COMMA. Everything else went in without too much trouble, after remembering what a mog is, and recalling SARNIE from earlier puzzles. The CHIPMUNK joke may be a chestnut, but was news to me so I enjoyed it. Regards.
  22. About 30min for me, though at some point I wandered off and left the timer running.

    Was I the only one who initially had HAMMER as the piano piece in 10ac? My justification was along the lines of “ham” acting… no, I know it doesn’t really work but I spent a long time looking for an S_H_E at 6d.

    I thought a few of the clues (15d, 22ac) were a bit feeble. I was also convinced for a long time that 18d was INSECTS, and that “files” was a typo (on the digital version) for “flies”. Luckily I realised that there was no justification for a sect being spotted, and in any case 20ac showed me my error.

    I wish [Olivia] a speedy recovery. (Old Tommy Cooper joke “I said ‘Doctor – I’ve broken my arm in three places!’ – he said ‘Well, don’t go back to those places.’)

  23. Pardon me, I should have included my best wishes to Olivia also. I hope you’re soon feeling better and on the mend. Regards.
  24. Best wishes for quick healing. I’m pretty sure that you were quicker than me, even with a broken wing.

    Edited at 2015-02-19 06:30 pm (UTC)

  25. I forgot to time myself today, but at least my solutions and parsings were all correct, which is an improvement for this week 😀
  26. thanks indeed for the kind messages. i wasn’t exactly on a pub crawl but we had been at a local bistro for husband’s birthday. set into and below the sidewalk in front of many restaurants and stores in nyc there’s a sort of underground storage vault with metal doors flush to the ground that open outwards. the bistro staff had seen fit to thread a rope through the doors’ metal loop handles at ankle level for easy opening. unfortunately it also provided the perfect trip wire, invisible in the dark. tableau as they say in the old punches. i thought of thud n blunder while in the e.r. – the doctors were a terrific bunch though i doubt they have his skill with cryptics.
      1. nah – i wouldn’t do that to them jerry. given the maze that still confounds u.s. health care we are however going to tell them to inform their liability insurance company that we are looking to recoup any deductibles, co-pays and out-of-pocket stuff i’m stuck with. but none of that ‘pain and suffering’ garbage that people use to claim the big bucks.
        1. Well up to a point I approve of that.. but if it really was their fault, and there has actually been ‘pain and suffering,’ then equity demands that balance should be restored. ‘000s perhaps, if not $m. Just having to emulate cummings for weeks must be worth something.. free food there for life, maybe? On second thoughts, they may prefer that their insurers pay instead..
    2. How awful for you, Olivia, particularly at the end of a celebratory evening. (It reminds me of when Janet broke her wrist on our way home from Sadler’s Wells, tripping over a barely visible lump of concrete that someone had left on the pavement.) Here’s wishing you all the best for a speedy recovery.
  27. So sorry to hear that, Olivia, join the club! The cast on my leg was finally removed today (after nine weeks) and I am now trying to learn to walk again in a ‘removable boot’. At first it seemed as if my brain was no longer able to send messages to my foot, which would not move at all, but I am now getting a bit of movement and it does not hurt too much. Hope you get better soon. Sue S.
  28. 17:36 for me. This is turning out to be an up and down week, as I simply couldn’t find the setter’s wavelength today, and (like keriothe) had particular difficulty with the NE corner.

    In fact this was one of those rare Times crosswords that I didn’t really enjoy all that much. (I wonder if it’s the same setter as when I’ve said that previously.) The clue I was least keen on was 18dn, as I’m not convinced that INDICES is the right plural of “index” when it means “file” (though I’m open to be persuaded otherwise).

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