Times 27859 – Missing a bicycle?

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Time: 29 minutes
Music: Balakiriv, Tamar, Svetlanov/USSR Symphony

I  had a tough time getting started tonight, and read through nearly all the clues before solving a single one.   However, once I had three crossing letters, I was able to put in the answers quite rapidly, and ended up biffing about half of them.   This is good for your time, but if you’re the blogger, your work is only half done – you now have to go back and figure it all out.
There was one strange Mephisto-like clue that forced me to think a bit towards the end, but since I am a Mephisto blogger as well, it is reasonable to expct me to deal with it; others may not be so well-situated.   I did check Chambers after completing the puzzle, and my answer seems to be justified – not to mention getting an all-clear from The Times web site.

Across
1 Cross put back nearly damaged element (7)
SULPHUR – PLUS backwards + HUR[t].   I’ve never seen the plus sign referred to as a cross, but it works for me.
5 Piccard finally cracks two ways to secure source of hot air (7)
WINDBAG – WIN ([piccar]D) BAG.   You might think secure is just a connector, but no, you are looking for two ways to secure something.
9 Church conservators never hosting Eastern anniversary (9)
CENTENARY – CE + NT (E) NARY.   Nary usually means not any, but, come to think of it, so might never in colloquial speech. 
10 Clerical group mired in controversy, no doubt (5)
SYNOD –  hidden in [controver]SY NO D[oubt] – sounds likely enough, whether we mean theological disputes or the racier tabloids.
11 English officer opening US lawman’s letter (5)
DELTA – D(E LT)A, a compendium of cryptic cliches.
12 Grave scene of western battle (9)
TOMBSTONE – Double definition, referring to Tombstone, Arizona, site of the O.K. Corral. 
14 Missing curate found on ground outside front of chapel (11-3)
UNACCOUNTED-FOR – Anagram of CURATE FOUND ON + C[hapel]. 
17 Stove, frying pans, then old bikes (5-9)
PENNY-FARTHINGS – Anagram of FRYING PANS, THEN, an obvious biff from the enumeration.
21 One person from Far East owns clothes range (9)
HIMALAYAS – H(I MALAY)AS, another easy biff.
23 Republican is meeting HM? That’s certainly a step up! (5)
RISER – R + IS + ER.
24 Left expert holding knight’s weapon (5)
LANCE – L + A(N)CE.   My FOI, at last a foothold somewhere!
25 Chimney cleaner had to cover tip of chin and part of face (5,4)
SWEEP HAND – SWEEP + HA([chi]N)D. 
26 A few mentioned pinching diver’s bone (7)
STERNUM – S(TERN)UM, since sacrum doesn’t fit!
27 Major books hoarded by economist briefly (7)
KEYNOTE – KEYN(OT)E[s]. 
Down
1 Dry old PM (not North) quit (6)
SECEDE – SEC + EDE[n].
2 Laughing out loud about article in woolly extract (7)
LANOLIN – L(AN)OL + IN. 
3 Under Henry I, archery revised pecking order (9)
HIERARCHY – H I + anagram of ARCHERY.
4 Old-fashioned, to bring up young primarily to keep fighting (11)
REACTIONARY – RE(ACTION)AR + Y[oung].
5 Wrong sorts of whiskey last to go (3)
WRY – W + RY[e].    That is, whiskey as a letter in the NATO alphabet, and a type of whiskey – two sorts, indeed.   Wrong is about the 5th definition for wry in Chambers.
6 Homes built in spring succeeded in goals (5)
NESTS – NE(S)TS, the goals in games, that is.
7 Don’t go to expert to cover new floor (4,3)
BUNK OFF – BU(N, K.O.)FF, a little tricky, requiring careful consideration of the cryptic.
8 Pledge attempt to seize duke’s equipment (8)
GADGETRY – GA(D)GE + TRY.
13 Records timber that may be rare (6,5)
MINUTE STEAK – MINUTES + TEAK. 
15 Odd pie chart at end of cursory study of inscriptions (9)
EPIGRAPHY – Anagram of PIE + GRAPH + [cursor]Y, an obvious write-in for students of ancient inscriptions. 
16 They offer covert views of mole on parts of course (8)
SPYHOLES – SPY + HOLES,, which are part of a golf course – the other parts being brush, forests, ponds, streams, and hayfields, which is where my ball often ends up.
18 No energy inspires pit candidate (7)
NOMINEE – NO (MINE) E. 
19 Parisian is probing hole? Ring police (7)
GESTAPO – G(EST)AP + O.
20 The Woman in White garners Grand Cross (6)
BRIDGE – BRID(G)E, cross and bridge as verbs.
22 Bond grabs one extended rest (3-2)
LIE-IN – LIE(I)N, not the secret agent, but a legal document.
25 Problem with German missing top meeting (3)
SUM – SUM[mit], easy to biff, hard to parse.

45 comments on “Times 27859 – Missing a bicycle?”

  1. The flag of England features the St George Cross, which has horizontal and vertical bars like a plus sign.

    In contrast, the flag of Scotland has the St Andrew Cross, which has diagonal bars. QED, were it needed.

    Edited at 2020-12-28 03:39 am (UTC)

  2. 40 minutes with a wrong answer at 15dn where I knew I didn’t know the word and assumed the answer would be an anagram of pie chart followed by the y from study. No problems with WRY though as ‘awry’ meaning ‘wrong’ is commonplace and I just assumed the words were interchangeable.

    SWEEP HAND was unknown to me so I was surprised to see that Collins says it’s British English as opposed to ‘second hand’ which is American. I can’t imagine why as an English child of the 1950’s I would have learned ‘second hand’ and not the other.

    GAGE as ‘pledge’ wasn’t familiar although on reflection I suppose it must be connected with ‘engage’.

    My FOI was SYNOD but I was unable to build off it so I looked elsewhere and PENNY-FARTHING jumped out at me and that led me to dealing with the lower half of the puzzle first.

    Edited at 2020-12-28 06:25 am (UTC)

  3. Like vinyl I only had two in when I got to the end of the across clues, but starting back up from the bottom with the downs things fell right in place. I found a bi-modal group of definitions – some pretty clear (Pennyfarthings), and some needing a lot of thought (major = Keynote).
    I liked ‘stove’ as an anagrind.
    Thanks, v, and setter

    Edited at 2020-12-28 03:54 am (UTC)

  4. A fraught hour but all went in correctly in the end.
    I was surprised our blogger, Lord Vinyl, did not mention the alternative spelling for 1ac SULPHUR. I do not believe that originally a right of lien required a document – but was simply a widely attributed right under common law.

    FOI 3dn HEIRARCHY

    LOI 5dn WRY

    COD 15dn EPIGRAPHY – a well concealed entrapment

    WOD 25ac SWEEP HAND – aka a second hand. Who famously had a sweep hand and a sooty hand?
    And why was a 17ac the motif for ‘The Prisoner’? Anyone?

    Edited at 2020-12-28 04:25 am (UTC)

    1. Okay, as it’s Christmas I’ll bite. The first question is too easy so I’ll leave that. I think the wheels of the penny-farthing represent Earth and Universe. It was The Village logo appearing on items in the shop etc, and was also in the closing credits where a cartoon of it assembled and then transformed itself into the mysterious balloon.

      I bought the boxed set of THE PRISONER last year prepared, as a fan of Patrick McGoohan from his DANGER MAN years, to give it another go, and thinking it couldn’t really have been as bad as I had thought first time round. But it was. Pretentious twaddle of the first order. I’m about half way through the DVDs after a long struggle to sustain interest but I have no plans to finish them any time soon.

      Edited at 2020-12-28 02:58 pm (UTC)

  5. Chemists agreed to change the spelling to Sulfur in the 1970’s, in accord with the American spelling. The town Sulphur Springs is in Texas, and there are two other towns called Sulphur in the US. Go figure.
    26’12”

    Edited at 2020-12-28 04:40 am (UTC)

  7. I’m glad to see this made it into the ‘harder’ SNITCH category, as harder is how it felt. FOI SYNOD (that has to be my first hidden FOI), POI WRY, LOI CENTENARY, which I semi-biffed, having forgotten about the NT. DNK BUNK OFF. TOMBSTONE=grave? not in my book.
  8. But more than 10 minutes spent on WRY and BUNK OFF. I did feel I was channelling you, Vinyl, as I got the latter.

    I did not see the anagram indicator for PENNY-FARTHINGS, but this was one of those I was able to write in without having any conscious recollection of the word or its definition.

  9. …turns out I didn’t finish, because I hadn’t yet finished BUNK OFF when I came here.
    Fair’s fair, though—I honestly didn’t know the expression.

    My LOI was SWEEP HAND… where it took forever to realize that the “tip” of “chin” here is the last letter, the extremity, a definition of “tip” that came up in a puzzle I blogged about a month of Sundays ago.

    I also bunged in PENNY FARTHINGS without even consciously seeing the excellent (thanks, Paul) anagrind. Impatient to start the Bank Holiday Jumbo…

    And just like Kevin (and I just saw Jeremy’s comment), my FOI was SYNOD.

    Edited at 2020-12-28 06:00 am (UTC)

  10. But no knowledge is useless and pointless in Crosswordland, and it’s the lack of it that drives you insane. Despite being the proud owner of 1770s Grandfather Clock with a second hand, I’ve never heard of LOI SWEEP HAND. Nor did I know that GAGE could be a pledge. So I was 45 minutes on this today. COD to NESTS for its charm, with honourable mentions to BRIDGE and MINUTE STEAK. Thank you V and setter.
  11. …Hatching in the hawthorn-tree.
    25 mins pre-brekker.
    Only MER was the cross=plus, ‘cos you don’t actually ever say cross to mean plus. But I do remember the Swiss bloke who was asked what he liked about Switzerland. He said, “Well, the flag is a big plus!”
    Thanks setter and Vinyl.
  12. A BUNK OFF and LIE-IN Monday
    I was no early RISER today
    UNACCOUNTED FOR stuff
    In SUM, this was tough
    Even WRY was quite hard, would you say?
  13. Well, a DNF as, like Jack, I was convinced that 15d was an anagram of pie chart with a y at the end. So I had ETICRAPHY which might just as easily have been ECITRAPHY. Well it could have been, for all I know. Logically, of course, ÉPI can be initials, thereby inscriptions, and GRAPHY the study of….. but I didn’t think of it. Bah. I liked HIMALAYAS, which, unlike our blogger, took me a while to fathom out. NHO SWEEP HAND either but it had to be. I liked the surface too for 14ac. Thank you vinyl and setter.
  14. I found this one easy to start and harder to finish, with problems in the NE especially.
    No chemist is ever going to make me spell sulphur without the ph, so there..
    By great good fortune, the answer to a question in the Christmas University Challenge I watched only last night was Epigraphy. Epi- just means “on” apparently, so epigraphy is an inscription, written on something..
  15. A not-easy 24.21, with the NE corner resisting mightily. BUNK OFF was particularly fiendish, pushing me to look for an answer meaning floor (by which I understood knock out/down) while the rest of the clue sniggered at me.
    Arguably TOMBSTONE has a doubly dodgy clue – not really a grave (Kevin), and not really a battle. The gunbattle at the O.K. Corral?
    On the other hand, I thought +=x acceptable, even if I’ve never thought of it that way. It is what it is.
    For me the Mephisto-clue was EPIGRAPHY, a word that makes perfect sense but which I’ve not knowingly met before. Did V’s excellent blog reference a different one?
  16. Put in MAL for 5d to begin with (Malt without the T). Needed WINDBAG to sort that out. A mixed bag of clues, I thought.
  17. 24:10 but 1 wrong – another who failed to get 15D by muddling “pie charty”. Also DNK GAGE for pledge. Also took unaccountably long to see UNACCOUNTED FOR. Oh well. It will be 2021 soon.
  19. 17:08. Tricky. I also failed to get many on my first pass through the acrosses, and the ones I did get were short so not very much help.
    I was held up at the end for ages by three clues:
    > 15dn where like others I was trying to make an anagram of PIE CHART + Y. When the best I could construct was ECITRAPHY or ETICRAPHY, neither of which looked remotely like words, I eventually reconsidered.
    > WRY: a meaning I wasn’t familiar with and it took me a while to figure out the wordplay. The ‘wrong’ meaning is also in Collins.
    > SUM: for some reason I didn’t want to biff this and it took me a while to parse.
  20. Lower half seemed easier to get into and completed bar the hit-and-hope SWEEP HAND with only a single clue entered in the top half.

    UNACCOUNTED-FOR and LANOLIN opened things up a lot after which it was a steady solve, though failed to parse BUNK OFF (did consider BANG OFF but could not justify).

  22. 23 minutes with only the WINDBAG, BUNK OFF and WRY constellation giving any problems.

    I balked at the jumbo cryptic yesterday and tried the mephisto for the first time since being comprehensively frightened off many years ago. I found it surprisingly approachable.

  23. I had the much the same experience as others, not finding this at all easy. SWEEP HAND and BUNK OFF were DNKs and took time to unravel. EPIGRAPHY looks funny with the pig in there but it had to be, although I didn’t parse it and was another who was trying to jumble the chart letters. I wondered if people really did ride PENNY-FARTHINGS – you would have to be almost a circus performer to be able to do it. 18.30

    Edited at 2020-12-28 12:36 pm (UTC)

  24. Finished but didn’t correctly parse “Bunk Off” – I had expert as “Boff” (short for boffin!) and thought somehow (P)unk might mean new. Ah well – the end justifies the means.
    Didn’t know gage=pledge either, but nothing else would fit.
    Thanks for the blog.
  25. SULPHUR( I can’t get used to SULFUR) was my FOI followed by a biffed LANOLIN which was soon reverse engineered. CETENIAL and MAL then went in, immediately replaced by CENTENARY and ??Y, followed by REACTIONARY. Never did quite parse WRY, but put it in after WINDBAG came along. Similarly with SUM, missed the parsing, but shoved it in anyway. Managed to parse BUNK OFF without too much grief. I’ve never heard of SWEEP HAND either, so spent some time wondering about it, but the wordplay was clear enough. I didn’t know GAGE for pledge, but again trusted the wordplay and checkers. I biffed EPIGRAPHY without completely following the wordplay as the word seemed familiar. I was surprised to find myself at 37 on the Leaderboard as I didn’t find it too difficult. Must be a wavelength thing! 18:06. Thanks setter and Vinyl.
  26. I was surprised to see the SNITCH over 100, as I found this quite Monday-easy. A moment’s thought to relate WRY to AWRY, and an informed guess at SWEEP HAND given the chimney cleaner giveaway; otherwise not a bother.
    I’m obviously PITW if I moaned about the PH in sulfur, so I won’t. We’ve had that debate before, I remember.
    I liked SUM(MIT).
  27. A bit sharp for a Monday but enjoyable nevertheless. I liked Sweep Hand and Lanolin. Wasted time trying to get an anagram out of pie chart.

    It conjured up a nice image of reactionary windbags on penny farthings

  28. ….and having biffed WRY and BUNK OFF, I gave up without GADGETRY. Nothing wrong with the puzzle, just not up for it.
  29. To continue a theme this was easy except where it wasn’t. I had ETICRAPHY. DRAUGHT at 5a unparsed. AWRY waiting at 5d but did not see how to convert. BUNK OFF seemed right for 7d,although unparsed. At 6d – AISMS- succeeded in goals. And did not know GAGE.
    Also NHO SWEEP HAND but could think of nothing else.
    Thanks for all the explanations.
    David

    Edited at 2020-12-28 02:25 pm (UTC)

  30. 20.36. A stiffish bank holiday Monday sort of tester. NHO of Auguste Piccard (I assume) or of sweep hand but once I decided had was had and not ate, the latter wasn’t too hard. Wry and sum were particularly tricky to parse and I was very reluctant to biff as it felt like the sort of puzzle with traps for the unwary (not that biffing wry from wrong was ever likely).
  31. About half an hour, with NE corner recalcitrant – never did parse 5ac, where Piccard did get me thinking about a balloon, or LOI 5dn for which I couldn’t think of anything better than WAY – having ‘way to go’ from the QC still in mind. NHO SWEEP HAND as such either: I’d usually call it a ‘sweep second hand’.
  32. Foiled, like others, by 15d. Never once considered that “chart” might not be part of the anagram. Bah.

    WRY was my last one in – I was left with W_Y, and had no idea at all why any of the potential options would be right. In the end I plumped for the right one, thinking it must be something to do with awry.

    Thought BUNK OFF was a very nice clue.

  33. 35.50. A reasonable time ruined by getting totally bogged down in the NE corner. Last three in were windbag which eventually led to bunk off ( not sure about boff I thought it was usually boffin). Finally guessed wry.

    A good puzzle and hopefully the cobwebs in my brain will be gone tomorrow.

  34. Not easy at all (about 50 minutes) but very enjoyable. Like vinyl, my FOI was LANCE and then things improved, but very slowly. LOI was BUNK OFF, which almost no one seems to have heard of before; I needed to see the BU FF in it before I could decipher the wordplay.
  35. Standard Schoolboy English – but not boarding school as there is no where to bunk of to! More ‘William’; than ‘Jennings and Darbyshire’.
  37. 20 d The blog is on the right lines but surely the son is ‘ below par’ , the idiomatic expression.

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