Times 25086: No Eye Deer

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 37:39

Five minutes of which was spent on look-ups for 23dn. A clue that looks simple but may have stumped a few solvers, including yours truly. Apart from that, a pretty steady solve.

Across
 1 BABY GRAND. This is BAG RAND (obtain South African money) around BY (using); as in ‘he went by/using rail’.
 6 Omitted. Just shriek ‘Basil!’ … backwards if possible.
 9 CAR(P)ING. An easy clue but with a neat surface I thought.
10 F(RAIL)T,Y. FT (Financial Times) and the last letter of ‘commentarY’; including RAIL.
11 HOBB{le}S. Where we remove the L (50) and the last letter of ‘lamE’, even though the clue looks like we should add the latter. A reference to the great Sir Jack Hobbs, ‘The Master’. A 5-letter batsman starting with H sealed this one for me.
13 LO(RD MAY)OR. See=LO; soldiers=OR; insert RD (road) and MAY (spring in the N. Hemisphere).
14 SIN-KIN-GIN. The latter goes with It — vermouth.
16 LAND. Two defs. One a verb (as in boats); the other a noun (as in ‘my home soil’).
18 {k}NELL.
19 SPECTACLE. Anagram: places etc.
22 SIDE,BURNS.
24 STROP. Rev of ‘ports’.
25 BUSS,TO,P. The ancient word for ‘kiss’ (BUSS).
26 RO(0)STER.
28 GRIN,D.
29 BALD EAGLE. BEAGLE including A L{ake} and {snatche}D.
Down
 1 BACCHUS. ‘Back us’.
 2 BAR. A shortening of ‘bar{b}’, a freshwater fish. S’pose a bar might have some if it’s a 15dn?? One in Fremantle comes to mind. Don’t go there.
On edit: see alternatives in the comments. I’ll put my money on Jack’s ‘drink like a fish’ version.
 3 GAINS,AID. The def is ‘denied’.
 4 AL(GO)L. GO is a board game.
 5 DEF(ER)ENCE.
 6 SM,ARMY. SM=sergeant major.
 7 BELLY DANCER. Sounds like ‘belle’ + an anagram of ‘ardency’. Doesn’t quite come off as an &lit.
 8 LA,YE,RED.
12 BANGLADESHI. An obvious anagram.
15 GASTROPUB. Anagram: Spot a burg{er}.
17 O(TO)S,COPE. OS for ‘ordinary seaman’. It’s an ‘instrument coming close to a canal’.
18 N(OS,EB)AG. Reverse of BE (live) and SO.
20 EX PARTE. Reverse of TRAP inside EXE (a river). Legal: “with respect to or in the interests of one side only or of an interested outside party”.
21 AB(A,T)ED.
23 SOREL. My downfall today. It’s an obscure word for a buck (deer) in its third year, usually spelled ‘sorrel’ (also ‘sorell’) and the reverse of LEROS, a Greek island which may or may not be in the sun right now.
On edit: Told you this was my Achilles heel: as Paul says, it’s much more likely RE (about) inside SOL (sun). But I’m half-sticking to my idea that a UK setter might sooner be on a Greek island right now! (S.O.L. — the acronym — for me today eh?)
27 Omitted. Pull yourself together!

58 comments on “Times 25086: No Eye Deer”

  1. 21:31 .. trusted the wordplay on SOREL,

    I spent several minutes wondering about BAR, partly because I knew ‘barbel’ but not ‘barb’. I think the idea is a ‘Fish Bar’, which used to be a pretty common appellation for a fish n’ chip shop (as in Harry’s Fish Bar). Now they’re called Yo! Sushi.

    Edited at 2012-02-15 03:06 am (UTC)

    1. We won’t mention:
      A Fish called Rhondda, Oh My Cod, The Codfather, A Salt N Battered, The Pawnbrokers, or The Frying Scotsman eh?
      1. Excellent! Sounds like chip shops have caught the hairdressers’ love of an excruciating pun, gawd love ’em. A Fish Called Rhondda is brilliant – put it up there with Jason’s Donna Van.
          1. My hairdresser niece drives around to clients. Calls herself “Donna’s Mobile”. (Not food, I know, but punny in the same way)
  3. Very irritating: I was done except for 2d and 16ac in 13 minutes, put in BAR because no other vowel looked right, and then came to a halt. Couldn’t for the life of me come up with anything I liked at 16. Fie on’t!
  4. I put in BAR because BAR is a fish and I didn’t understand the wordplay (I thought it might be a literary reference I didn’t know). I’m still unconvinced as to how it is really meant to work.
  5. Another fine puzzle, completed in 59 minutes after spending the last five on OTOSCOPE. My Greek certainly came in handy here, as I’d never given that thing they stick in your ear a name; its alternative appellation, ‘auriscope’, seems more accessible somehow.

    Quite a few required a post-solve check, not least the unknowns ALGOL (I resisted the temptation to bung in the known word ‘angel’ and stuck with the cryptic) and SOREL. Regarding the latter, I found this in a wildlife forum: ‘In the case of [a male] Fallow Deer the sequence is Fawn [in his 1st year], Pricket [2nd year], Sorel [3rd year], Sore and Buck’. It would be fun to see a fallow deer in his fourth year being clued as a ‘detailed’ fallow deer in his third!

    Many good clues – I particularly enjoyed the cheekiness of 15 – but my COD goes to the simplicity of LAND. Was anyone else looking for leaves on the track/the wrong type of snow at 10?

    1. I didn’t see LAND and put in LAID as in laid to rest and put. Managed the rest and understood the wordplay except I didn’t know GO was a game.(thanks mctext) I knew the star though once I’d got 9ac, I cast thoughts of ARULL aside. SOREL seemed familiar and I saw RE inside SOL. I didn’t time this one but probably somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours. Enjoyable solve. I knew OTOSCOPE as I once had to see an Otologist when I had an ear infection that robbed me of my balance. Nasty!
  6. It’s a reference to the expression ‘drink like a fish’, I think, and also accounts for “Fish” in quotation marks if I’ve understood it correctly.

    Edited at 2012-02-15 04:13 am (UTC)

  7. 35 minutes for all but LAND, OTOSCOPE and SOREL then another 9 minutes to crack these. The last two I got from wordplay eventually but with ?A?D I just had to slog through the alphabet and find something that fitted it. When I thought of LAND it was no great eureka moment because both required meanings seemed a bit vague to me (I hadn’t considered ‘put in’ for example at a port), but I see them clearly now.

    I also struggled a bit with ALGOL and didn’t finally settle for BAR until I had both checkers in place which was quite late in the proceedings because 1ac gave me problems too. I didn’t know ‘barb’ as a fish so until coming here I had taken 2dn as &lit.

        1. No worries. How’s the weather in Hong Kong? Better than Leros I hope!

          Edited at 2012-02-15 08:44 am (UTC)

  9. Great puzzle, wasn’t helped by having posted instead of abated for dropped off, but you dont have to lie down to pose, I suppose.
  10. 15 minutes for this. I was nervous about OTOSCOPE, because I didn’t know the word and didn’t understand the wordplay, and BAR, where I just put in what seemed like the most likely vowel. So I wasn’t surprised to see I had an error but it turned out it was just a silly typo: SINGING IN. Grr.
    Other unknowns today: buss, ALGOL, SOREL. I’m sure HOBBS has come up before but I didn’t remember him.
  11. Easy one except for 2dn which I can’t properly follow. I think Jack is on the right lines but I still don’t quite get it..
    Some v nice surfaces.
  12. Found this annoying, with bar a sloppy kind of place for “fish”, and an obscure and archaically spelt deer, more likely to be a horse (I missed it, guessing sirel, though I should have dredged it up anyway), going with a nutty def. for an out-of-the-way Greek island. Two poor clues, to my mind, in what was otherwise a good puzzle. In a right 24. (Also, May for ‘when there’s many a blooming’ (presumably ‘a-blooming’? – or does ‘local’ elbow in there?) is arch or otherwise graceless. Snarl.) (Have now seen ‘a blooming’ but still irked, as are others, by the others.)

    Edited at 2012-02-15 12:15 pm (UTC)

    1. I read “blooming” as a gerund and “many a” as in “many a slip twixt cup and lip” or “many a time and oft in the Rialto”.
  13. I just noticed the puzzle number is wrong in the Club on-line so not mct’s fault, but it should be 25086 today.
  14. ALGOL, LAND and BAR all put in with ?s.

    Completely flummoxed by SOREL, as I could see neither the literal nor cryptic, and couldn’t for the life of me think of a word that fitted!

  15. A puzzle very similar to yesterday and another 20 minute stroll. I’m sure 2D BAR is a reference to a heavy drinker with the setter trying to justify the somewhat oblique reference by using the quotation marks. Helped a little by Mephisto solving for SOREL. A pity we don’t hear from Barry anymore, he would doubtless have had something to say about the great Jack Hobbs
  16. 30 minutes, but not as much fun as yesterday. I only knew Algol as a programming language and sorel as a horse with two R’s. COD to SINKING IN for tickling my fancy.

    1. The Times is a fascinating institution, is it not. The star is really quite obscure whereas the mathematical based computer language (Algo(rithmic) L(anguage)) was widely used in the 1960s and beyond.
      1. Was the language acronym named after the star, by any chance? Might have been a bit odd, I suppose, as Algol is regarded in historic terms as an unlucky star, possibly because it dims markedly every 3 days (strictly, a bit under that).
      2. Surely the star Algol isn’t all that obscure, Jim, and not just because its name was borrowed for the computer language – it’s probably the best-known eclipsing binary.

        I played around a bit with Algol 60 in the days before Algol 68 came along. However, I used to be pretty familiar with aspects of the latter since the syntax of SCL (the command language for the ICL 2900 series operating system VME/B) was based on it.

  17. around 25 minutes, running out of time with BAR and LAND just lucky guesses, though I now get “put in” as the boating reference. It’s going tobe difficult to persuade me that BAR is not an allusional step too far. Adding to the gaiety of nations, my favourite chippy was “Fryng Nemo”.
    BABY GRAND had to be, but until I wrote it in in desperation, its parsing didn’t click.
    CoD (and chips) to SINKING IN.
    1. Nice puzzle, had to check sorel and still don’t like BAR and LAND much. CoD for me 15d, not hard but the wordplay made me smile.
  18. 2dn & 6ac just couldn’t get and BAR still doesn’t make much sense to me at least!
    SOREL is a quizword answer to the first word in the clue for 23dn and whilst RE and SOL are there they are not in order. I didn’t get ALGOL for reasons stated by others above, its not in my little OED.
    Otherwise I did OK for my first time out in 20 years!

    Edited at 2012-02-15 12:06 pm (UTC)

  20. I normally content myself with lurking, but felt obliged to comment today. Can’t see anything wrong with either “bar” or “sorel”. Both parse perfectly well in my view.
    1. Good to hear from you. Why not join in on a regular basis? How long have you been solving?
  21. Didn’t get to this last night, so did it on two quick breaks (one being a computer crash break) this morning. BAR went in with a shrug, SOREL and ALGOL from wordplay (though both sounded familiar), NOSEBAG from definition.
  22. My first contact with computers was at Sunderland Poly during 3rd year at School. Our Chemistry teacher gave us some extra-curricular instruction in Algol 60. We punched the code by hand on to paper tape. The not very advanced Poly computer gave us the output on paper tape too. Happy days!
  23. About 30 minutes, ending with SOREL, and going with the wordplay only. BAR was a likely looking guess, and ALGOL from wordplay also. I thought HOBBS referred to the Roy Hobbs character in Malamud’s The Natural, and the Robert Redford role in the baseball movie, but that’s because I certainly have never heard of the cricket fellow. Since everyone seems happy with that, I assume he must have been quite the batsman. Regards to all.
    1. I’m no great shakes on baseball, Kevin, but Jack Hobbs is to English cricket what, perhaps, Babe Ruth is to your game. He played in the days of uncovered pitches (in simple terms, this means that the cricket ball bounced up in your face a lot more and went in odd directions generally after landing, i.e it was much harder to stay in) and scored 197 first-class hundreds – or 199, acording to some – a record that is unlikely ever to be broken, not least because so much instant cricket is played these days. Up there in the cricketing batting pantheon with Donald Bradman.
  24. Surely in 14ac it should be It? If it has no capital I can’t believe that it’s an abbreviation for Italian. Not exactly Ximenean, but nobody I think has mentioned it so perhaps it is in fact OK and I’m missing something.
    1. I must admit it occurred to me too but somebody raised a similar point here last week and the advice came back (from Jimbo, I think) that it’s usual to ignore such niceties these days. I’m sure there used to be a convention on these matters but I can’t remember what it was and if setters are ignoring it anyway it seems simpler not to worry about it.
      1. Well, I come from the don’t worry about It school, but from memory, the convention I remember is that you can remove a capital letter in a clue and get away with it, but you aren’t allowed to add one that shouldn’t be there. So quite often sentences would begin and end in unusual places just to add a “legitimate” capital letter..

    2. Chambers gives “it” as an entry on its own with the definition “Italian vermouth” (it also has “It.” for Italian or Italian vermouth).
  25. 13:37 for me, with the last few minutes spent agonising over BAR and LAND. I wasn’t too taken with either of these: even with quotes, “fish” doesn’t seem a good enough indication of someone who drinks like a fish; and I kept thinking there ought to be a better answer than LAND, even though I felt I’d probably be able to make a case for it as an alternative if it came up in a Championship puzzle.

    There were one or two nice clues in there, but overall I didn’t enjoy today’s puzzle as much as I usually do.

    1. Tony, I don’t understand your reservation about LAND. ‘Put in’ for land is common enough, and has a history too, as in ‘After we put in at Syracuse, we stayed there for three days’ (AV), while ‘soil’ for ‘territory of a nation’ (close enough to’land’ for me) is common too.

      I appreciate the elegance of short clues of this type, so long as they are fair, and I think this one is.

      1. My understanding is that “put in” is what you do before you “land”. Chambers (2011) for example defines it as “to enter a harbour”. There would have been no particular reason for the AV to mention the actual landing. (Perhaps they stayed on the ship the whole time and never actually went ashore.)

        Given the many possibilities that -A-D offers, I felt I’d have liked a little more precision from the setter.

        1. I see what you’re saying. If ‘put’ (of a ship), as Oxford Online (ODE, I believe) says, means to ‘proceed in a particular direction’, then one can have a boat putting out to sea, putting in at Southampton and putting about to avoid pirates.

          Perhaps, given the definition of entering a harbour and also given the inherent semantic fluidity of a phrasal verb, we can posit that an extended meaning of ‘put in’ would be to do the natural thing after entering a harbour, i.e. land. I don’t have other dictionaries to hand, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find ‘land’ as a meaning of ‘put in’.

          I checked my Greek NT and the word used in (more than one place in) Acts for ‘put in’ is the passive of katago (κατάγω). Among the active meanings of the word in Classical Greek are ‘bring down to the sea-coast’ and ‘bring a ship into port’, and in the passive (as used in Acts by Luke) the meaning is given as ‘come to land’ or simply ‘land’.

          Interestingly, the King James Version (Cambridge Edition) translates the verse (Acts 28:12) ‘And landing at Syracuse, we tarried there three days.’ (The translation in my previous post is from the New American Standard Version.)

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