Another Wednesday puzzle where most of the answers flew in but a few took most of the time. I haven’t managed to explain 6a yet, but I’m sure the penny will drop for you. For once, I have no gripe with any of the definitions, and I give CoD to the long anagram at 4d about the ramshackle yurt.
Definitions underlined in bold, (ABC)* indicating anagram of ABC, anagrinds in italics, [deleted letters in square brackets].
| Across | |
| 1 | Don’t declare uranium advances in rogue state capital (5,5) |
| BATON ROUGE – if you BAT ON in cricket, you’re not declaring; move the U to make rogue become ROUGE. Capital of Louisiana. | |
| 6 | Hard cheese — poor lad lost $1 (4) |
| BUCK – it seems there is now one clue most weeks that I can’t quite explain. I’m looking for a word which means “hard cheese” or “tough luck”, from which you remove “poor lad” or the letters LAD to leave buck. I’ve looked at a list of every word in English (226) with buck in it, from 20 letters to five, but I can’t see it. And I can’t find a sort of cheese with buck in it either. EDIT jackkt was the first to explain this one, see below comment. I’m not keen on the idea of having to remove an anagram of a word in the clue. | |
| 8 | Sit back to eat cold, whole shellfish (8) |
| ESCALLOP – POSE (sit) reversed, has C, ALL inserted. Escallop is one of several old spellings as SCALLOP has become the usual one in English. | |
| 9 | Aristocrats replacing key framework (6) |
| GANTRY – GENTRY changes E to A, both musical keys. | |
| 10 | Isaac’s son second to visit Arab lands to the west (4) |
| ESAU -UAE (United Arab Emirates) reversed with S inserted. | |
| 11 | Guy initially mad keen to keep Florida condo with outside space (6,4) |
| GARDEN FLAT – G[uy], ARDENT (keen), FLA (Florida) inserted. | |
| 12 | Exercise, regularly painful hard work requisite for cook? (6,3) |
| PEANUT OIL – PE (exercise), pAiNfUl, TOIL = hard work. | |
| 14 | Yet more weird food — starter binned (5) |
| ODDER – [F]ODDER. | |
| 17 | Storm passing over northern mountains (5) |
| RANGE – N inside RAGE = storm. | |
| 19 | Old-fashioned adhesive manufactured from camel spit (9) |
| EMPLASTIC – (CAMEL SPIT)*. An old word meaning adhesive as an adjective. I’d never seen it but worked it out from the anagrist. | |
| 22 | Craft movie hit I can’t rent around (3,7) |
| THE TITANIC – (HIT I CANT)* with ET (the movie) inserted. It took me a while to see exactly how to parse this, but the answer was obvious. And the THE is not really correct. | |
| 23 | Shampoo and cut for receding husband (4) |
| WASH – SAW (cut) reversed, H[usband]. | |
| 24 | Express sorrow about European wife’s security (6) |
| BEWAIL – E W (European wife) inside BAIL = security. | |
| 25 | With leader absent, badinage beginning to inspire soldiers at the front (8) |
| ANTERIOR – [B]ANTER, I[nspire], OR = men. | |
| 26 | Reported grain yield (4) |
| CEDE – sounds like SEED. | |
| 27 | Barrow boys backed English horse (10) |
| CLYDESDALE – Clyde BARROW, the real life American robber featured in the movie Bonnie and Clyde (which even I have seen); LADS reversed; E for English. | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Pager — sound of alarm’s piercing; one’s used to working with buzzers (9) |
| BEEKEEPER – BEEPER (pager) with EEK! inserted. | |
| 2 | Organ piece for Charlie, jazz fan, No 1 in America (7) |
| TOCCATA – TO C (for Charlie), CAT (jazz fan), A[merica]. | |
| 3 | Downgrade envoy after the Holy See becomes discontented? (8) |
| RELEGATE – R[om]E, LEGATE. | |
| 4 | Ramshackle Armenian yurt? Pal, that won’t do for our House! (15) |
| UNPARLIAMENTARY – (ARMENIAN YURT PAL)*. | |
| 5 | Young winger last to tie end of bootlace (6) |
| EAGLET – E (end of tie), AGLET (the little plastic bit on the end of a shoelace). | |
| 6 | Bits of skeleton a tailless dog buried in good faith (4,5) |
| BONA FIDES – BONES with A FID[o] inserted. I like a bit of Latin. | |
| 7 | Business fury involving one thousand fee added to drinks bill (7) |
| CORKAGE – CO (business) RAGE (fury), insert K = one thousand. | |
| 13 | Horrible experience in which mounted champion gets beheaded? (9) |
| NIGHTMARE – KNIGHT MARE loses its K. Is there more to this clue than that? | |
| 15 | Well-bred individual coming from Timor, Aceh or Serang? (9) |
| RACEHORSE – nicely hidden word in these far eastern places. | |
| 16 | DJ’s companion gave somebody a shiner, we’re told (5,3) |
| BLACK TIE – sounds like someone received a BLACKED EYE. | |
| 18 | Perhaps blue permit featured in articles (7) |
| ATHLETE – A, THE (articles) with LET = permit inserted. As in Oxford or Cambridge sports-people. I was hoping to get one for playing bridge, in my time, but I see it’s not in the list these days even though you can get a half-blue for “ultimate frisbee” among other things. | |
| 20 | First Lady: “I’m obliged to ingest nerve gas” (7) |
| TSARINA – TA (thank you, I’m obliged), with SARIN an organophosphate nerve gas inserted. | |
| 21 | Right-leaning type? (6) |
| ITALIC – cryptic definition, as you can see. | |
39 minutes.
The parsing of BUCK came to me post-completion. It’s B{ad l}UCK (hard cheese) [anagram [poor] of LAD lost]. ‘Hard cheese’ is very British slang from a certain era meaning ‘bad luck’.
EMPLASTIC was unknown. It was helpful that both ANTERIOR and EEK had come up very recently
I lost time trying to make THE TITANIC a straight anagram but always had letters over and never managed to figure it out. I also missed the parsing of GENTRY. [Later edit: Failed because it was wrong. I evidently biffed GENTRY and moved on.]
CLYDESDALE suddenly came to me after a long struggle and I forgot to parse the first part. I knew Clyde Barrow from seeing the film decades ago but I’m not sure I would ever have thought of him.
I’m wasn’t altogether happy with 23ac so WASH went in with a query against it. Shampoo / WASH is in DBE territory and ‘for’ placed between ‘cut’ and ‘receding’ in my view interferes with the wordplay.
I wasn’t sure about ‘for / TO’ in TOCCATA but seeing TO C (for Charlie) in the blog not lifted and separated I get it now as something that might be written on a gift label.
a receding cut is saw, as in to use a saw
As an aside, I completed this online as usual, went to another site to check emails and google something and came back to find my completed grid was blank. This happens quite often, though usually a few words remain. It is seriously annoying.
Anyway, the puzzle. A lot of fun I thought, all done in 28.19. Well done Jack for explaining BUCK and I thank piquet for several, including the Clyde Barrow reference and the presence of ET the movie in THE TITANIC. In NIGHTMARE I thought the knight was ‘mounted’ by being physically above the mare.
From Rainy Day Women #12 & 35:
They’ll stone you when you’re at the breakfast table
They’ll stone you when you are young and able
They’ll stone you when you’re tryin’ to make a BUCK
They’ll stone you and then they’ll say good luck
But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned
I had the same parsing of NIGHTMARE making use of the Down clue.
Moi aussi.
So did I and, I suspect, so did the setter.
I didn’t really parse “THE TITANIC” – I put it in because it was obviously the answer and assumed there must be a film called “The Titanic”, even if I couldn’t think of one; I’ve checked, and there isn’t.
I sometimes get the impression that, where the Times crossword is concerned, ET is the only film ever made.
My thoughts too. ‘THE’ is superflous, but it was one of quite a few issues i had with this grid.
A few years ago SHE was the movie of choice with letters useful to a setter. All in all, I prefer ET, I think.
About 70 minutes. Slower going but not too difficult. FOI ITALIC LOI GANTRY. Liked Baton Rouge, BLACK TIE, BONA FIDES, CLYDESDALE , BUCK and EAGLET. The NE corner slowed me down. Had several where I had difficulty parsing.
Thanks Piquet for the blog.
First completed this week and thought it was pretty good fun. I was left with the parsing of BUCK at the end but it came to me soon after, but I did think it would cause grief for non-UK solvers. Bit surprised to see TITANIC described as a craft but it’s in the dictionaries as ship. Fooled again by DJ before I remembered dinner jacket.
Thanks piquet and setter
This was fun. I started out with the 15-letter anagram and then tried to get as many as I could without crossers—so obviously I wasn’t in a hurry, and didn’t mind that much when I got slowed down at the end, finishing with BUCK, which I didn’t explain well (did you know, though, that KEBBUCK is a hard cheese—though apparently only semi-hard… and Keb an African name for a male?)…
The ship was the RMS Titanic and the movie title—for both of them—simply Titanic.
I had the same thought about the ship. Actually my first thought was ‘there’s no such movie as The Titanic’, but even after seeing the parsing I thought it a bit odd. It’s commonly referred to as ‘the Titanic’ of course but that’s not really its official name, which is what you’d expect here. None of which prevented me solving the clue.
I had no problem with the Titanic, it’s almost universally referred to as that. Nobody ever made a film called Mutiny on Bounty. At the risk of over-egging the Dylan pudding, I will offer the following from D. Row:
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting, Which Side Are You On?
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are fighting in the captain’s tower…etc
You also don’t ‘pass buck’, but THE BUCK as an answer would be odd.
For a proper noun like this I would argue that the definite article should only be included where it’s an intrinsic part of the noun and hence capitalised, but I don’t feel desperately strongly about it tbh.
I think the point is that if you’re going to put something in front of Titanic, it is R.M.S, not The.
20:00
Couldn’t parse BATON ROUGE but assumed there was something crickety going on. Parsed BUCK as Jackkt did.Didn’t get CLYDESDALE–would never have got Clyde from Barrow–but biffed it from the C. I knew 16d couldn’t be BLACK EYE, but it took me forever to see what it could be; only after submitting did I see–or guess–what DJ meant. LOI.
DNF – Gave up after 31 minutes on CLYDESDALE and came here. Actually now I see the answer, I *have* heard of this horse. Also, I just noticed I carelessly put GENTRY instead of GANTRY. Not my day!!!
Thanks setter and blogger
My experience exactly!
What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean Wash this blood
Clean from my hand?
(Macbeth)
25 mins pre-brekker. Still not keen on for=to, but I think it’s just me.
Ta setter and Pip.
28 minutes with LOI BUCK. COD to BATON ROUGE among many stimulating clues. But I didn’t fully parse NIGHTMARE. Otherwise, I really liked this.Thank you Jack and setter.
34:04
I didn’t manage to parse BUCK (thank you, jackkt). I enjoyed constructing PEANUT OIL and ANTERIOR (although held up thinking (n)atter might be involved at first).
Thank you to piquet and the setter.
Started off crisply then came to a grinding halt with half a dozen clues left. This seems to be a common occurrence for me these days! I persevered, got them all, but came a cropper on CLYDESDALE which, in frustration, I looked up. Just couldn’t see what the « Barrow » bit was doing. BUCK bunged in with no idea why. Oh well.
MER at corkage as it is not a « fee added to drinks bill » it IS the drinks bill if you’ve bought your own wine, say, to a restaurant, cafe etc that doesn’t have an alcohol licence or allows BYO. Rare here in France but common in Aus and other countries.
Thanks pip and setter.
Perhaps they had coffee afterwards? 🙂
I had a similar thought. It’s a fee added to a restaurant bill. There aren’t many places that will let you bring your own booze if you’re not eating!
The concept is also very common in London. I like to drink nice wine without paying horrendous restaurant mark-ups so I rarely go to places that don’t allow it these days.
There was a discussion about corkage on Radio 4’s ‘You and Yours’ today. I was shocked to hear a restaurateur or sommelier from a London eatery the name of which I missed say that his establishment allows diners to bring their own wine on condition that they pay £100 per bottle corkage AND enter into what he described as a gentleman’s agreement that they will buy a wine of similar quality at his establishment’s listed price. I can’t knock the idea completely; if it works in his business and at the market level he wishes to serve, good for him and for those who choose to eat and drink with him. But it’s a long way above my market sector, to say the least.
I used to own two restaurants in London and my premise was, whatever the gross profit was on a bottle of house wine, roughly £5.00 at the time, that would be the corkage charge. That was based on the fact that they would probably buy a bottle of wine anyway, at least the house wine so I was not out of pocket and the customers were always happy with that.
That’s still broadly the principle that’s applied, I believe, but in a moderately smart central London restaurant these days the house wine will be at least £30 and the corkage is typically £20-25.
I can only assume that the place Norm0 refers to must be one of the very swanky Michelin-star places.
(PS our local place in not-central London charges £10, but we are such regulars that they don’t charge us at all any more, happy days!)
Sounds like a great deal, long may it continue. I have to say it’s a great way to keep your customers « regular » !
That’s more a question of what you feed them 😉
There are two restaurants near us, one that allows me to take my wine and one that doesn’t. The former gets 100% of our custom.
I hesitated to write the word in as I was sure you’d pick up on it. ; – )
Well I enjoyed this one, some witty clues. I liked the Armenian yurt, the barrow boys, and others. Nho emplastic.
Sympathy to those not getting the horse, it took a bit of dredging up and (like buck), I couldn’t parse it until I’d already thought of it, if you see what I mean.
About 25 minutes.
– Didn’t parse BUCK, so thanks Jack
– NHO EMPLASTIC but it sounded reasonable and was the only thing that fitted the checkers
– MER over *THE* TITANIC, as Guy has mentioned above
– Forgot Clyde Barrow but dredged up CLYDESDALE from somewhere
– Had no idea how EAGLET worked – I need to remember ‘aglet’
– Didn’t fully get how NIGHTMARE worked, but LindsayO’s explanation makes a lot of sense
Thanks piquet and setter.
FOI Esau
LOI + COD Buck
12.52. I enjoyed this one – BUCK took a few moments to parse at the end.
A lot of errors on the Snitch, which I assume is GANTRY/GENTRY. I don’t think it’s *quite* ambiguous (‘replacing key framework’ would need a comma after key to give the proper cryptic reading), but very biffable. Would’ve been better to have avoided having both possible defs at either end.
Thanks both.
21:21. I rather stuttered through this wasting a lot of time trying to fit an answer to 16D into 18D (A?H? TIE, which made BEWAIL impossible). I started writing SCALLOPE in 8A before I realised it didn’t parse. I vaguely remembered AGLET but EMPLASTIC was unknown and constructed from the checkers and the anagram. I failed to parse my LOI BUCK, so thanks for that jackkt. I liked BEEKEEPER and the hidden RACEHORSE. Interesting to see breeds of horses in both this and the QC today. Thanks Pip and setter.
10:32 but with a very stupid error. I misremembered the thing at the end of your laces as an agret, and that was enough to prevent my dozy brain from registering that an egret is 1) not a ‘young’ bird and 2) not spelled like that.
I had no idea about Barrow, and couldn’t parse BUCK, so thanks to PK and jackkt for those.
20:22
Straightforward solve. Matt McGinn wrote a song about a Clydesdale horse.
Thanks, p.
About 12′, but with GENTRY. If I’d thought about it more I’d have come up with the same answer. BUCK unparsed and CLYDESDALE LOI.
Thanks pip and setter.
24:07
The first this week with no mistakes or tyops.
A steady solve until I was held up by the unknown AGLET and the crossing GANTRY.
Nothing more to add that hasn’t been covered but I found this a pleasant solve.
Thanks to both.
45′ struggled a little after a strong start quickly solving the longer clues to provide lots of crossers. I parsed Clyde Barrow after writing in the answer. Like others constructed EMPLASTIC from the fodder, and finally biffed BUCK after realising the definition was $1 rather than hard cheese. Enjoyable puzzle, thanks Piquet and setter.
I had GANTRY but thought the clue was ambiguous enough to lead to GENTRY, so sympathy. I struggled for ages on my last, CLYDESDALE, not least because Barrow is nowhere near Glasgow. Possibly one of the meanest references ever in a Times.
Otherwise this proved an entertaining solve over nearly 18 minutes, with the thrill ride of EMPLASTIC jangling the nerves a bit. I did (eventually) get B[LAD*]UCK.
Just for interest, I googled “THE TITANIC” with precious little success – it doesn’t seem to be the title of anything.
I biffed far too many to gain much enjoyment, and didn’t bother to parse afterwards. I thought I’d rather come here and consult Pip’s wisdom – and Jack’s as it turned out.
FOI BATON ROUGE
LOI BUCK
COD CLYDESDALE
TIME 11:13
Got about half of the answers at first pass, nearly all of them when I had a few checkers, until I was left with 6 across. I spent fruitless minutes thinking of various cheeses, and synonyms for “poor boy” from which I could remove the letter “D”, until the penny suddenly dropped and “buck” came into my head, after which it was easy enough to parse “B(AD L)UCK”, the “poor boy” being the letters of LAD in a different order.
As usual in these circumstances I consoled myself by cursing the clue.
Timor (the western part), Aceh and Serang are of course not just far eastern, but all in Indonesia . Very nice, and certainly distracted me for a minute or two, but fortunately I couldn’t think of a nine-letter demonym for an Indonesian person.
I assumed BUCK had something to do with ‘hard cheese’ as in ‘buck rarebit’, though I’ve no idea how that sort relates to a standard ‘Welsh rarebit’. As for 22 ac, not only was the film not called ‘The Titanic’; nor was the craft itself, though we rarely omit the article in everyday references to both. So a mini-MER, for that one.
Didn’t manage to parse BUCK, or THE TITANIC and also failed to correctly parse GENTRY, so a pink square in a tad over 25 minutes. Thanks setter and Pip.
For no good reason I’m always uncomfortable with ‘over’ as an inclusion indicator. It can be justified but to me it always seems a bit weak and smacks of inferior offerings. As does the straight replacement of one preposition by another, in this case to/for. Again justifiable, so I have no leg to stand on. I found much of this rather good and quite easy, and after 25 minutes only had the CLYDESDALE clue to do, and I gave up trying to see what Barrow boys had to do with it and used aids to get a horse that I knew, so could have biffed it. 27 minutes eventually.
I think the only clue with ‘over’ is 17ac, in which case it’s only part of the inclusion indicator which is actually ‘passing over’. Does that make it any more acceptable?
No I’m afraid not. It still conjures an image of an overcoat (say) being laid over something and this doesn’t to me quite indicate that it’s round this something.
Far too many American words, place names and references IMHO.
34:28
Excellent puzzle, well worth a few minutes over my usual cut off time for the final four. Once I stopped looking for a set of bones, the B gave me BUCK and left me with the horse and LOI BEWAIL. Some cleverly hidden definitions there, thanks setter, and blogger.
I joined the OWL club today with GENTRY.
Thanks for explaining the EAGLET clue (I must remember AGLET).
The long down clue was entertaining.
Many thanks to blogger and setter
BW
Andrew
22:24 – entertaining, with a few clues that had more indirect elements than we normally see (BUCK, RELEGATE) but none seemed particularly difficult to reverse engineer.
32½ minutes but with a pink square for GeNTRY. Maybe it could have gone either way, but I think GANTRY is a lot better. Too late now. I knew AGLET: in a recent purchase of new shoelaces I was offered a selection of aglets and chose the brass ones. I liked TSARINA
Quite enjoyed that, except, obviously, for a clueless guess that BUCK might be the answer because $1. That is head and shoulders the worst clue I’ve ever seen in The Times by the length of the straight, if I’m allowed to mix metaphors. Daylight second.
Emplastic guessed from the crossers, Clydesdale known as a horse, and after a few moments wondering realised I knew Clyde was Clyde Barrow. All else parsed, with no MER at “the” Titanic for the craft, whether it be right or wrong I didn’t know. Liked Baton Rouge, garden flat, and bona fides, always good to see Fido.
21.50 with LOI anterior and FOI Baton Rouge. The latter went in so quickly I got delusions of adequacy. NHO emplastic but seemed more likely than amplestic. COD Clydesdale.
ANTERIOR was my FOI oddly enough, though it was a DNF as I failed to get BUCK, CORKAGE or CEDE
I was quite tempted by AMPLESTIC for the old-fashioned adhesive – Ample Stic(k)
One error unfortunately. I had in mind that Racin was the nerve gas even if I’d never heard of a Tracina.
FOI GARDEN FLAT
LOI EAGLET
COD BUCK (so rather different views on this one. I guess I was pleased with myself to see the parsing reasonably quickly)
I liked the DJ’s unruly companion, and agree with Jeffrey that there were a lot of subtle and not so subtle Americanisms, but also a couple proper English terms. nice blog, pip
We had Suffolk Punch in the QC today and I got to thinking that there are a lot of working horses whose breeds are mostly only know locally. In the US there is a series of television beer adverts which have been running for 40 or more years and which feature a team of Clydesdales. All Americans know Clydesdales, and that was an easily parsed write-in; the Suffolk Punch, on the other hand, I had to work out from the cryptic.
Though they’re both British horse breeds originally apparently there are vastly more of both Clydesdales and Suffolk Punches in the US than there are in the UK (though US Suffolk Punches aren’t considered to be genetically pure enough to be actual Suffolk Punches by the official British body that registers them, according to Wikipedia).
Another possibility – a stong one – is that other than Clydesdales I personally don’t know much (including names) of many domesticated animal breeds.
I often wonder at the congruence of clues between the two daily cryptics, sometimes a day apart, sometimes the same day. Does that indicate the same setter, I wonder? Can’t be coincidence. Anyway, Suffolk Punch, Clydesdale… Got there in the end, working backwards from E LADS, though I didn’t make the Clyde Barrow connection. Nor did I parse BUCK. LOI BATON ROUGE, a great clue, as was BEEKEEPER, but I spoilt my success by not checking GENTRY carefully enough, assuming it was ‘G’ and ‘entry’ and only briefly wondering why entry was framework. I’m not sure, in any case, that I would have chosen GANTRY over GENTRY – it appears to work either way, as Z says.
Well, I’ll be the first to quote Jethro Tull: The Suffolk, the Clydesdale, the Percheron vie/ with the Shire on his feathers floating/ Hauling soft timber into the dusk/ to bed on a warm straw coating. Not a huge Jethro Tull fan, but Heavy Horses is a lovely song. 19’24”. Never parsed BUCK but I see it now. Narrowly avoided GARRET FLAT.
Didn’t think of GANTRY so biffed GENTRY without parsing. MER at CLYDESDALE, as surely Scots rather than English horse (NHO Clyde Barrow, so no chance of solving that clue).
19.48 WOE
Very late entry with a very careless GENTRY. V tired as doing post midnight and it was my POI but even so – poor.
Otherwise I rather liked BUCK when I saw it but the THE before TITANIC feels very wrong to me
Came to this excellent puzzle a day late. Thanks to setter, PK and other helpful bloggers. Joint COD to CLYDESDALE and RACEHORSE, incompatible competitors but both ending up in last place on the grid!