Times 25190

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Time taken to solve: 37 minutes. A very enjoyable and lively puzzle where only one clue (9ac) presented any problems solving and I’m not sure that it was quite fair because the cryptic way into it relies on having precise knowledge of a scientific definition. There’s another clue (14dn) where I don’t fully understand one of the references but as it’s a biblical thing I’m opting out on it. Here we go …

Across
1 CARIBOU – Sounds like ‘carry boo’. I didn’t know this is a reindeer but I’m familiar with the name of the creature from the lyric “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” by Noel Coward where ‘caribous lie around and snooze’ in order to avoid the heat of the midday sun. In the light of this new knowledge I’d not have thought the midday sun would be a problem for such northerly creatures and Coward was writing about ‘tropical climes’ anyway. Odd.
5 ORIOLES – ORIOn (hunter cut) + LargE (wings from large) + Small.
9 ANAEROBES – The surface reading recalls the song ‘Molly Malone’ in which she sells cockles and mussels alive alive-o in the streets of Dublin’s fair city, so I was expecting the answer to be another word for bivalves, however after much deliberation I gave up on that idea. ANAEROBES are organisms that exist in the absence of oxygen, so ‘- O’ = minus oxygen.
10 Deliberately omitted. I won’t spoil it for you.
11 THENCEFORWARD – Anagram of WET FRENCH ROAD.
13 RIDICULE – gRID (grid no good) + 1 + anagram of CLUE.
15 HEAD-ON – Double definition, one humorous.
17 TALKER – Line inside TAKER (better, as in ‘no takers’).
19 TORTILLA – Hidden and reversed.
22 PARAPHERNALIA – Anagram of APPAREL ANd HAIR
25 ADEPT – hAD  kEPT
26 BARBARIAN – BAR+BAR (bars) + IAN (Scotsman)
27 MAYFAIR – MAY (is allowed) + FAIR (market). ‘Capital’ being London of course.
28 DYNASTY – DrearY + NASTY (unpleasant). ‘Song’ being the Chinese dynasty which I know better as ‘Sung’.
Down
1 CLAY – CLAYmore
2 ROASTED – OAST (drying area – for hops) inside RED (primary colour).
3 BORNE – BORon NEon. ‘On’ (about) is ‘stolen’ from each element.
4 UNBUCKLE – Cryptic
5 OSSIFY – SO (reversed) + StIfFlY
6 INSURGENT – Anagram of RUINS + GENT (male)
7 LEOPARD – POE (writer) reversed inside LARD (fat).
8 SELF-DENIAL – Anagram of FILLS A NEED
12 PROTOPLASM – Anagram of OR Small PALMTOP
14 CLEOPATRA – LEO (stars) + PAT (anagram of apt) all inside CRAm (crowd briefly). More arcane biblical stuff here. The Queen of the South was the Queen of Sheba who was not the same person as the famous Cleopatra as far as I’m aware. Maybe they both ruled Sheba at some time. Who knows (or cares)? Note on edit: following koro’s comment I have  removed the reference to anagram. I had wondered about PAT = ‘apt’ myself but couldn’t justify it at the time. Ta. 
16 CORNERED – Double definition.
18 LARCENY – Anagram of NEARLY Caught
20 LEAD-INS – LEADINg (shortened first) + Second. Wires from aerials to receivers.
21 BERBER – BR (British) reversed in BEER (bitter).
23 LEARN – R from ‘Bunter’ inside LEAN (bend over)
24 ENVY – ENV {iron menta(l)l}Y. A rare outing for double brackets to account for ‘about’.

54 comments on “Times 25190”

  1. 23:20, the last 4 minutes taken up with first remembering CARIBOU, then justifying BORNE to myself (incorrectly: I had the B & NE and thought maybe ‘each’=OR, and just overlooked the ‘stolen’ bit) and then playing with the alphabet to get ANAEROBES, which I also didn’t understand. Thanks Jackkt for enlightening me on them, and on CLEOPATRA. Googling, I came across a reference to Big Dave’s Telegraph blog, where a puzzle from September 2011 also used ‘Queen of the South’ intending to indicate Cleo. I wonder if the setter meant more than that from the Roman point of view, Egypt was a southern kingdom.

    Edited at 2012-06-15 03:37 am (UTC)

  2. 22:08 .. very crafty stuff, and a bit more my cup of tea than yesterday’s. A few mistakes (like a careless HERETOFORWARD) took some unscrambling.

    Closest I can get on Cleopatra is that The Queen of The South was a common appellation for the goddess Isis. Cleo was much taken with the Cult of Isis and, as you do, ended up proclaiming herself to be Isis incarnate. At which point, I pass the baton to anyone who actually knows something about it …

    1. At this stage I’m not sure if I’m flogging a dead horse or not, but coming back to the blog it does seem that people may have missed the point that Queen of the South is a football team. The whole thing has nothing whatsoever to do with the bible.

      Edited at 2012-06-15 10:46 pm (UTC)

      1. Well perhaps I’m being dim. I’m fully aware of name of the the soccer team and I can see that the surface reading as a whole might be taken to relate to the game, but what does CLEOPATRA – the word being defined by ‘Queen of the South’ – have to do with football? I can’t justify another explanation as I mentioned in the blog, but there is no getting away from ‘Queen of the South’ being a biblical reference (Matthew 12:42 and it’s in Luke too) whether or not that’s what the setter had in mind.

        Edited at 2012-06-15 11:15 pm (UTC)

        1. Apologies, clearly I was flogging a dead horse as I thought!
          It seems to me the only bone of contention is whether “queen of the south” is a reasonable definition for CLEOPATRA. It seems fine to me in the same way as “king of the north” might define “Olaf”.
          1. Yes, sorry we seem to have been at cross-purposes to some extent as I missed your earlier contribution in which you made it clear you meant that the football thing is in the surface reading. Anthony Douglas’s late contribution below adds further to the Cleo/biblical discussion.
  3. Top blog, Jack, helping me out on several, including LEAD-INS. Took my twice as long as you, with ‘only’ for ENVY – must have been nuts.

    The ‘Dumfries’ clue (14) came up in DT 26654, according to Big Dave, clued the other way as ‘Eleven represented by Cleopatra maybe (5,2,3,5)’. Caused confusion then too. Incidentally, is ‘mobbed’ doing double duty (as anagrind and surroundicator), or is ‘by’ sufficient as a surroundicator, or am I missing something?

    Took ages to get the NW, with CLAY and BORNE both flummoxing me, and both needed to get the unfamiliar ANAEROBES, where I had ‘seashells’ (more in hope than conviction) for a while.

    COD to BORNE.

    1. According to ODE pat = in exactly the right way = apt, so there’s no anagram there.
  4. Another day another DNF. I gave up with CLAY and ANAEROBES undone. I’d completely forgotten the claymore and thought the only word that could fit 9 was diatribes. I shan’t begin one, I’ll just admit total defeat by the clue. I also had question marks beside taker=better and Song=dynasty, so thanks for the elucidation, Jack. Well done to the setter, for some outstanding clueing and particularly fine surfaces. COD to the reverse hidden &lit TORTILLA.
  5. … for all but the ANAEROBES, BORNE & UNBUCKLE before I had to leave for work. The rest over morning coffee, mostly by sheer fluke. –O in the first of these has to be one of the best concealed defs I’ve seen in a very long time.
    1. I think the definition is the whole clue, isn’t it, with the first ‘alive’ superfluous to it but needed to add the familiar song reference to the surface reading? But you are right that the ‘alive-O’ ploy is very clever. If only there’d been an alternative means to get to the answer I’d have admired it more.

      Edited at 2012-06-15 06:33 am (UTC)

  6. Much more accessible than yesterday’s for which I had to turn to aids with ten to go and even then couldn’t finish. Too taxing by half.

    28/30 today with Roasted and Anaerobes missing. Should have got the former but would never have got the latter. Couldn’t make anything of that clue – thanks for explaining it Jack.

    Tickled to see Paraphernalia in the grid – a word I used in my blog comment a few days ago.

  7. 36 minutes after being held up by anaerobes. ‘Alive-O’ is brilliant. Queen of the South is dubious. Otherwise an acceptable head-wrench before writing a slew of school reports and inevitably succumbing to a dread tide of cliche.
  8. 30m. I held myself up by putting in HERETOFORWARD and CLLY, and then not spotting either mistake for ages.
    I’ve eaten CARIBOU on more than one occasion, which helped me today.

    Edited at 2012-06-15 11:52 am (UTC)

  9. 25 minutes for this with the same reservations as Jack.

    “Song” is rather unusual and a bit obscure with “Sung” very much better known. I’ve seen the Queen of the South nonsense before so actually solved from the definition but I don’t like it and it’s very obscure the first time you come across it.

    But my biggest reservation is 9A. I have long championed the cause of including scientists as well as authors and scientific ideas such as paradigm shift. But this for me is a step too far. It requires a knowledge of scientific jargon (of which there is bucket loads) that I think is unfair. So however clever “alive-O” is, overall I give the clue a thumbs down.

    1. I missed the clever ‘alive-O’ reference but still got it, once I had the checkers, through ‘anaerobic’, which is quite well known in phrases such as anaerobic exercise. Since it’s a short jump from that to the answer, I think it’s pushing the envelope just about the right distance, while serving to teach new vocabulary, which is one of the benefits of doing cryptics. I think a clue is unfair only when it allows no reasonable way in, and my impression is that this happens more with literary clues than scientific ones.

      The spelling of the dynasty may be a generational thing(!), as it’s Song in pinyin, but Sung in its predecessor Wade-Giles.

      Edited at 2012-06-15 09:05 am (UTC)

          1. Well, we live and learn, what? I only knew the non-an version of the exercise, and then only through hearsay!
            1. Sorry, me on another computer, gasping for breath. Must go and get some bespoke oxygen out of my aerobe.
    2. If you don’t mind me saying so I think you’re being a bit soft on us arty-farty types. As Jerry says below the term “aerobic” and its meaning is perfectly common, so I don’t think you need to know “scientific jargon”. I thought it much fairer than much of the literary stuff that appears frequently. I got it by working out what words might fit the checkers (once I’d worked out that CLLY wasn’t the answer to 1dn) and then seeing the cryptic, which I thought was brilliant.
  10. A DNF for me, with ENVY inexplicably overlooked after getting really cross (and failing) with ANAEROBES. I agree the latter is very clever, but gives you no chance if a) you don’t spot the hyphen as a minus sign and b) the esoteric is unknown. I fully accept that a) is the point of the clue, but of course, since I didn’t get it, it’s unfair, cheating, and I’ll never do the crossword again. This in a crossword where the majority of the clues were cryptics-by-numbers: I really did enter ORIOLES, for example, by writing in each cryptic “bit”.
    CLEOPATRA is simply bizarre. Whatever else she is, she’s not Biblical – Solomon’s QotS is unnamed and certainly nothing to do with Cleo. I assumed it was defective knowledge (or just a queen from somewhere south of Wapping) and put it in with a sigh.
    HEAD ON was funny. My CoD. Harumph.

    Edited at 2012-06-15 09:17 am (UTC)

    1. I say this only because I don’t expect you’ll see my answer to sotira above otherwise, but QoS is a football team. The clue is quite good, I think.
  11. 21:41 here, of which about 25% was spent contemplating the last two, 1dn and 9ac. When I get that sort of imbalance, solving the final clue leads either to a) “Well that last one was so difficult it was tantamount to cheating” or b) “That was brilliantly confusing, well done, setter”. Today my feeling was definitely b).
  12. Super crossword, this. I enjoyed it a great deal. I don’t see 9ac as any more of a stretch than, say, some of the shakespearian references we are expected to cope with. Aerobic exercise, and it’s purpose, are well enough known, or at any rate should be.

    Edited at 2012-06-17 09:42 am (UTC)


  13. …yep, I too was stymied by the NW, with gaps at 1 and 3dn, and 9ac.

    No way would I ever have got 9ac, and 1dn could just as well have been ‘clod’ for all my knowledge of Highland weaponry.

    At 3dn I had the wrong end of the stick, assuming ‘stolen’ to be the definition. That was a bit irritating, should’ve got that one.

    Best wishes to all for the weekend!

    1. Perhaps the reference at 2:55 will act as an aide-mémoire. Mind you, it’s not clear that Messrs Curtis and Elton knew exactly what a claymore was, as they have the Duke of Wellington saying, ‘It would take a homicidal maniac in a claymore and a kilt to get the better of me!’

      They would of course say that that is exactly how Nosey would have said it.

  14. What a brilliant cryptic! Thoroughly enjoyable.

    In defence of QotS – there is this little thing called a surface and here it was a beautiful – fair cluing and, for all that, Cleopatra was a queen of Egypt which is in the South. You want your cryptics to be less cryptic?

    Anaerobes might be one the best clue I’ve ever seen in the Times? As a frequent lurker, and seeing this cryptic taking some bashing for two clues, I couldn’t but come out of the shadows to defend the puzzle.

    I thought it was brilliant!

    1. For some of our contributors, Egypt is not in the south. But then I suppose, for many, Mayfair is not part of their capital either.
    2. If that really is all there is to it then this is an even worse clue than I gave it credit for.
      1. I really can’t see the problem. Cleopatra was a queen and Egypt is in the south (if you’re in London, which for these purposes we are). The capitalisation misdirects and makes the surface work by reference to the football team.
  15. Enjoyed this puzzle very much. I’ve seen the definition of “Queen of the South” before http://bigdave44.com/2011/09/15/toughie-633/.

    Some very nice clues today, and a fine end to a really good week of Times puzzles. I liked 9 across, and 12 and 19 too.

    Incidentally if I can be a little indulgent, today’s Telegraph Toughie by Notabilis is another superb challenge and worth digging out if you can.

  16. 18 minutes for me, held up the longest in the NW corner. Lots of very nice clues in there. I remembered the Cleo/QotS contraversy from BD’s blog so she just wrote herself in. Thanks to setter and blogger.

    Incidentally, is it just me or has Live Journal stopped remembering people? I have to remember my password every time I want to comment now.

  17. Am I the only one who put ‘teller’ not ‘talker’ at 17 ac? Seemed a reasonable and parsable answer to me. Otherwise all good in 45 mins or so, CoD anaerobes, ideal clue for an ex-biochemist. And our golden orioles are heard daily but seldom seen.
  18. In the course of my career as a copywriter, I worked extensively for water companies where treatment works often included ‘anaerobic digesters’, so I had no problem with this clue. I think the -O is masterful. But I can see that it’s a bit arcane for many people.
  19. 10:19, with the last 4 minutes spent on 9ac (ANAEROBES) and finally 1dn (CLAY), which involved the unknown but familiar-sounding claymore.  My only other unknown was LEAD-INS (20dn).

    Clue of the Day: 23ac (LEARN).

    1. I am a frequent lurker and I do find astonishing the words that people don’t know and, more often, the words that they do know that I don’t. To me clay (1dn) was a gimme – it was my first in and I thought ‘that was too easy for the Times’. I was very surprised to see how many distinguished solvers found it difficult.
      1. Hello, lurker!  Good to hear from you.  I think one reason for listing the unknown and the unfamiliar is precisely to show how much variation there is between solvers – one man’s “why would anyone know that?” is another man’s “how could anyone not know it?”
  20. And the name for Cleopatra was presumably coined in civilisations for which Egypt was about as south as it got.
    1. Furthermore, the phrase itself is initially a Biblical reference, and came about because Sheba was, well, south from their perspective.

      In addition, the book of Daniel in its latter portion uses ‘the South’ countless times to refer to the Ptolemaic dynasty, and I challenge you to name a better known queen from that mob!

  21. 13 minutes, no huge hang-ups, though ANAEROBE and CLEOPATRA went in with a shrug. Outstanding surface and anagram for THENCEFORWARD
  22. I’m a daily Guardian in the morning/Times at lunchtime solver. This puzzle was the best of the latter in some time – not too tricky and more than a couple of corkers – particular favourites 9ac, 19ac and 8d.
  23. How annoying. 9ac is exactly the type of clue I most admire, straying a little from the formula, but I completely missed the point. Eventually got it after resorting to aids.
    So it feels like I missed an opportunity to derive maximum enjoyment from what was a superb puzzle.
  24. At over 35 minutes this was a bit too challenging for me and I had to go to aids to get ANAEROBES. I knew I was looking for organisms exemplified by cockles and mussels but that’s as far as it went. It’s good to learn a new word now and then but I don’t like it happening too often. (Talking of new words: I attempted last Saturday’s Codeword this lunchtime and was left with some oddities that I had to assume were “Call My Bluff” type of words – including AFRE and BALS. I thought I’d learned some new vocab but it turned out that they’d not printed the last two columns of the grid. Should have been AFRESH and BALSAM!)
    1. But you weren’t! Cockles and mussels are not ANAEROBES.
      This does seem to have been what you might call the Marmite clue today. Although I for one think Marmite is perfectly fine but I can take it or leave it.
      1. I sort of assumed they were. Thanks for putting me right. Something else learned from crosswords.
  25. About 25 minutes, like many others ending with ANAEROBES (with aids) and CLAY. The ‘alive-O’ trick is clever, yes, very much so, but too clever for me, and, in my opinion, too clever by half. But if we’re supposed to realize that we’ll be bested every so often, and it’s the setter’s job to do so, well, today was my day. And, yes, to repeat, it is very, very clever. Regards to all.
  26. 17:05 for me – the slow time being down to exhaustion after an extremely trying day. Among other things, I was slowed by reading 17ac as “Line adopted by better conservationist”!

    That said, I found this a most enjoyable puzzle – far more to my taste than yesterday’s. 9ac (ANAEROBES) deserves to be recorded as a classic Times clue – ingenious without being convoluted – and I raise my hat to its setter.

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