Times 29275 – Playing bridge?

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Time: 30:16

Music: Shostakovich Symphony #8, Bychkov/Berlin Phil

While I did solve this puzzle fairly promptly, there were some rather tricky cryptics.  Fortunately, regular solvers don’t have to dive in the parsing for every clue – that task is reserved for the blogger.   Here we are offered a subtractive anagram, a quadruple definition, an interwoven assembly, a double anagram,and a very technical cryptic hint.   Now there is nothing here that experienced solvers have not seen before, but this is definitely a step up from the usual Monday doddle.

I would like to thank Ulaca for taking the Mondays in June, which was in return for the Mondays I took in May while he was away junketing.     With the return of Bletchley Reject, everything is now back to normal around here.

 

Across
1 Value a very quiet lift (8)
APPRAISE – A + PP + RAISE.
5 Inhabitant of one African state thus joined with another (6)
SOMALI – SO + MALI.
9 Our request for communication about copper’s mathematical system (8)
CALCULUS – CAL(CU)L US.
10 Mass reflected on sanctimonious saint’s piece (6)
PISTOL – PI + S + LOT backwards.   Remember either S or St can be an abbreviation for saint.
12 Intermediate delay, we hear, for pugnacious sportsman (12)
MIDDLEWEIGHT – MIDDLE + sounds like WAIT.
15 Capital including a reduced number in greeting (5)
HANOI – H(A,NO)I.
16 Change circumscribing degree repeatedly in university, say (4,5)
ALMA MATER – AL(MA,MA)TER.
18 Sailing vessel caught a sailor tangling with a man at regular intervals (9)
CATAMARAN – C + A T(A M)AR(AN), an interleaved cryptic.
19 Abode briefly had severe blow (5)
DWELT – ‘D WELT.   Abode is a verb here, past tense of abide.
20 In extraordinary way, like friend embracing male? Correction, males (12)
PHENOMENALLY – P(HE, NO, MEN)ALLY.   A very tricky cryptic, but an easy biff.
24 Selected for team in okay position to play (6)
ONSIDE – ON SIDE, which is what happens when you are selected for the team.
25 One at home in church (8)
MINISTER – MIN(I)STER, an &lit.
26 Something felt on head he removed from forehead, oddly (6)
FEDORA – Anagram of FOREHEAD – HE.
27 Recollected ancients, for example (8)
INSTANCE – Anagram of ANCIENTS, very clever.
Down
1 Knowing chief, initially, ruler finally, in a word (4)
ARCH – Four definitions.   The last is the trickiest, referring to words like oligarch, monarch, etc.
2 Merchant of Venice, something that’s played up (4)
POLO –  Double definition, where up means on horseback.
3 Metal that carries half the current in America (9)
ALUMINIUM – In America, aluminium is spelt and pronounced aluminum, so it has only one I for current.   Aluminum electrical wiring is actually allowed in some US states, but is not recommended.
4 Orthodox playwright first to recognise resistance to rapid transit system? (5,7)
SOUND BARRIER – SOUND + BARRIE + R[ecognise].   I have gotten wise to Barrie as a playwright.
6 What may be added to cocktail? Nothing, as it happens (5)
OLIVE – O + LIVE.
7 Counting everything wrong in eg her total he later got revised (10)
ALTOGETHER – Anagram of EG HER TOTAL, with another anagram of HE LATER GOT.    You can never have too many anagrams.
8 Not prepared to read statement of my intention to go through again (10)
ILLITERATE – I’LL ITERATE.
11 For instance, workers in office breaking up (12)
SEGMENTATION – S(E.G. MEN)TATION.   Is a station an office?   Maybe.
13 Wine in small measure of alcohol designed to avoid damage (10)
SHOCKPROOF – S(HOCK)PROOF.
14 Like one part or another of minute without anxiety (10)
UNSTRESSED – Cryptic hint alluding to the two possible meanings of minute and the corresponding pronunciations.   My junior high football team was the Minutemen, and of course the 14-year-old wits used the pronunciation that made them Lilliputians instead of the heroes of Lexington and Concord.
17 Recipient of gold possibly reconstituted metal lids (9)
MEDALLIST –  Anagram of METAL LIDS.
21 Contents of folders delivered earlier (5)
OLDER –  Hidden in [f]OLDER[s].
22 Render senseless conclusions in erroneous report you return (4)
STUN – Last letter of [erroneou]S [repor]T [yo]U [retur]N.
23 Diagram showing family targeted in odd places (4)
TREE – T[a]R[g]E[t]E[d].

88 comments on “Times 29275 – Playing bridge?”

  1. 25:29
    Definitely un-Mondayish. I biffed SOUND BARRIER, only saw BARRIE after. I forgot about S=saint, thought of LOTS for ‘mass’, and didn’t know what to do with ‘saint’! Not knowing anything about soccer or rugby, I wasn’t sure why ONSIDE was OK. I liked the definition of sound barrier. Vinyl, you need another A for CATAMARAN.

    1. I didn’t see Barrie either until I came here.

      I’d actually biffed Squad Carrier, then realised I had merely invented the Squad Carrier (patent pending) and made a few changes.

  2. Held up for a moment at the end by POLO. since I was fooled by “up” and so was looking for something that could be played reversed. Like SLAP (I think SLAP is a way of playing a bass but that seeemed too obscure so I kept looking until the Marco POLO thing dropped). At 10A I figured “mass” was LOTS and that the “saint’s piece” was a reference to Simon Templar. I didn’t get all the meanings of ARCH but enough to fill it in confidently.

    1. I had a similar experience with POLO at the end. My knowledge of Shakespeare is scant, so I briefly wondered if the titular merchant was PILC! But that too seemed rather loose, and thankfully the right word popped up not too much later, & I at least understood the second definition.

      1. No knowledge of Shakespeare required… the merchant of Venice referred to was Marco Polo.

        1. Yes, I googled after seeing it was right – would *never* have thought of that in-flight!

  3. Bit slow this morning. The only bits of ARCH I get are ‘chief’ and ‘Mon(arch)’. Any help with ‘knowing’ and ‘initially’.

    1. Can’t work out initially either, but here’s Wiktionary on knowing:
      Adjective
      1) Knowing, clever, mischievous.
      I attempted to hide my emotions, but an arch remark escaped my lips.
      2) (Ireland) Cute, sly, prematurely wise.
      3) Principal; primary.
      They were arch enemies.

      1. Thank you. I found ‘knowing’ eventually too but ‘initially’ is still MIA.

          1. Thank you. I’d discounted those as I thought while ‘initial’ fitted, ‘initially’ didn’t quite sound right for ‘arch’.

              1. Indeed, apologies. Initially is very definitely adverbial, and arch very definitely isn’t.

              2. Nobody above has mentioned (for those confused by the various senses of ‘arch’) that in two of them the ‘ch’ is pronounced as in the Scots ‘loch’ (‘initial’ as in ‘archetype’ and ‘-arch’ as in ‘monarch’. The setter could of course have included yet a fifth sense as in the stone structure. Perhaps that would have been OTT.

      2. How about this:
        When ‘arch’ is used ‘in a word’ to mean ‘chief’ it comes INITIALLY, as in archbishop.
        When ‘arch’ is used ‘in a word’ meaning ‘ruler’, it comes FINALLY, as in Monarch.
        Knowing is the definition.

        3. This was what I thought, so not a quadrouple definition, but a triple one. Initially goes with chief, ruler goes with finally.

          Although I confess I didn’t get it all until I read the blog, at which point I came to this conclusion.

  4. 43 minutes. Some of this was tricky, and also disconcerting for me as there were several answers readily biffable that then seemed almost impossible to parse. I’ve been having a lot of that recently in Guardian puzzles but it’s par for the course there with some of their setters who make up clues with so many WP elements in them that it’s hard to see the proverbial woods for the trees. After a tough few days of it there, to find myself having similar problems at The Times made me wonder if perhaps my analytical skills regarding crossword clues are beginning to wane. But anyway I think I deciphered them all eventually.

    ALUMINIUM and UNSTRESSED were the last to fall in this regard.

    At 19ac ‘D for ‘had’ was particularly devious in a clue which relied on ‘abode’ as the past tense of ‘abide’ (has anyone ever used it?) and WELT for ‘severe blow’ rather than its more usual meaning as a mark, scar or weal that may result from one.

    Choosing ‘at home in’ as containment indicator for I in MINISTER seems deliberately designed confuse the wordplay. I (one) in MINSTER is one of the oldest chestnuts around but ‘home’ will make most solvers immediately think IN, and there it is in the answer, but it’s completely irrelevant in this case.

    And as for ‘at regular intervals’ in the CATERMARAN clue, that really took some squinting to see it!

    As I’ve said before of certain puzzles, very enjoyable but in a masochistic sort of way, and probably the merry biffers and speed merchants amongst us may have found it a lot easier than I did.

  5. 15:20, LOI DWELT as I don’t think I would have come up with the past simple reading of ‘abode’. I thought this was a nice puzzle in general. It’s also not the first time I’ve stared and taken a while to get HANOI recently, which is irritating. Wouldn’t have seen the quadruple definition had you not pointed it out. Thanks all!

  6. Oh, THAT merchant of Venice! Very clever, as were many of the clues here today. I was pleased with my time of 22.48, it felt harder than that. The double anagram had me all at sea for a while and I had to come here to have Vinyl explain PISTOL. Good puzzle.

    From Hurricane:
    Meanwhile far away in another part of town
    Rubin Carter and a couple of friends are out driving around
    The number one contender for the MIDDLEWEIGHT crown
    Had no idea what kind of s— was about to go down

  7. 16’o7 – must be the half a banana I ate while dashing out the door!

    22nd? Never seen my name in the top 25 before – by the time I eat the second half no doubt I’ll have sunk somewhat but I shall bask in this temporary glow nevertheless!

    COD – POLO, yes that other one. This certainly had me going the longest.

  8. 13.42 with a fast start and then got tougher. LOI minister which was obvious enough when I got all the crossers. Wasn’t convinced by dwelt but put it in for want of something better. Welt for blow? Is abode a noun and a verb?

  9. 39 minutes. I’m glad I didn’t have to explain everything here as the quad def for ARCH, and the parsing for ALUMINIUM and UNSTRESSED were beyond me. I liked POLO, for which I thought ‘up’ in the wordplay was going to be a reversal indicator and the ‘Something felt on head’ def for FEDORA.

  10. 26 minutes with LOI UNSTRESSED. I justified this by saying that neither the MI or the NUTE were stressed syllables. COD to POLO. I didn’t fully parse PISTOL, not seeing LOT as Mass, not saint only as S. Otherwise, I liked this. Thank you V and setter.

  11. 35 mins with quite a few biffed includingLOI ARCH where I did not see the quadruple clues.

    Quite enjoyable though, as has been mentioned, DWELT was a bit weird. I liked SOUND BARRIER.

    Thanks V for the heavy lifting, and setter.

  12. DNF, the NE beat me, and I blame it all on the tiresome PI, No 3. on my list of pet peeves. Should have seen ALTOGETHER, but adding another anagram doesn’t make the clue easier! And although I saw what was going on with ILLITERATE, I couldn’t see the second word. And managed to see DWELL but couldn’t make it DWELT. The D for “had” is new to me, not sure I like it.

    I also went with SLAP for POLO, the italics were good misdirection.

    Really liked FEDORA. But COD to ALUMINIUM and UNSTRESSED.

    1. All the usual sources list ‘d for “had” and Chambers offers “did” and “would” too, but I guess the question is whether they are valid without an apostrophe. There’s no room for it in a crossword grid of course but I’m inclined to give the setter the benefit of any doubt as he was kind enough to clue it as ‘briefly had’ indicating an abbreviated form was required.

    2. Re 10a, I saw that ‘piece’ must be the definition and that PISTOL would fit, and when parsing the clue I spotted ‘lot’ reversed with ‘s’ for the saint. But I don’t understand how ‘pi’ is obtained – can anyone please enlighten me?

  13. 32 minutes (with one genuine typo but I don’t count them). I am not sure if it’s similar to what the bloggers getting at but this seemed a Mondayish puzzle set in a very unmondayish way. There was some tricky wordplay but the literals were often quite kind so you could work backwards.

    ARCH I only spotted two of the definitions but that was good enough with the crossing letters.

    ALTOGETHER we all love an anagram but did having two add to the clue? If anything I thought it made it less satisfying.

    This seemed out of kilter for a Monday but I quite enjoyed the change.

    COD: UNSTRESSED

    Thanks blogger and setter

  14. I really laboured with this, and dropped anchor with 7 clues left to go in search of a bacon butty and a cup of builder’s tea. It seemed a tad more accessible when I picked it up again, and 4 of those 7 clues went more or less straight in. I then biffed ALTOGETHER – far too convoluted for my morning brain nowadays – and SOUND BARRIER, parsing both only after I’d finished. THAT didn’t happen until I realized that “piston” was NOT the answer to 10A and entered ILLITERATE before amending it. Not my finest hour, and my poorest Snitch rating for some considerable time.

    FOI APPRAISE
    LOI PISTOL
    COD SHOCKPROOF
    TIME 15:39

  15. Even with the explanation given by Vinyl, I confess to not really understanding the parsing of ‘unstressed’ with regard to ‘minute’. Any help appreciated.
    23m of pleasant solving.

    1. In relation to ‘small’, the first syllable is unstressed. In relation to the unit of time, the last syllable is unstressed.

    2. I read it as either the first half or the second half stressed/unstressed, depending on whether it’s size or time.

      1. Thanks. I think it might have been possible to improve this clue, even though the idea behind it is clever.

  16. 15:11 A bit sluggish but there was some complex wordplay to unravel in places. Not my favourite.

  17. 10:17. I was on for a sub-10 minute solve until I got held up at the end by POLO thinking “up” was a reversal indicator and worried that I didn’t know the dramatis personae of Merchant of Venice… until I realised I didn’t need to know it when an alphabet trawl led me to the answer. Thanks Vinyl and setter.

  18. A salutary wake-up call on a clammy Monday. Lots to like: SOUND BARRIER, SHOCK PROOF, UNSTRESSED, Unravelling ALTOGETHER almost gave me a nose bleed and I needed Vinyl to explain ALUMINIUM, PISTOL and DWELT.

    Thanks to Vinyl and the setter

  19. As has been said, easily biffable, but not so easy to parse in places. Very mixed in terms of difficulty I thought with STUN being at the easiest end of any crossword spectrum, and DWELT rather more difficult.
    I agree with Boltonwanderers parsing of unstressed, but the answer went in with a shrug rather than a smile.
    COD to FEDORA

  20. 20:50

    A middle-of-the-road solve – some parts relatively straightforward whilst other parts were trickier to break down.

    PISTOL – forgot saint could be S rather that ST and wondered what to do with the OL
    DWELT – didn’t know abode in its verb form
    ARCH – got the first two definitions only
    POLO – LOI – took a while for the penny to drop

    Thanks V and setter

  21. A bit of a biff-fest here. Glad I am not blogging it.
    25a MinIster. Too clever for me.
    1d Arch. I missed the last of the defs so it was (yet another) biff, also didn’t see “initially”. I have to say it is pretty clever.
    2d Polo. Didn’t work out what UP was doing.
    3d AluminIum, missed this too.
    7d Altogether. Missed the double anagram here.
    LOI 11d Segmentation.
    Many thanks to vinyl1 and setter.

  22. I thought I’d finished when I optimistically put in dwelt in about 90 mins which would have been quick for me. Unfortunately I had guessed fermentation for “breaking up” having failed to see segmentation despite thinking it should contain e.g.

  23. 9:42. Not too difficult but biffing without attempting to unravel wordplay certainly helped.
    Like a couple of commenters above I can’t account for ‘initially’ in 1dn.

    1. I think it’s a *triple* definition rather than a quad? If ‘arch’ is a prefix it means ‘chief’, whereas if it’s a suffix it relates to a ruler. Perhaps.

      1. Actually I think you’re supposed to take the second part of the clue all together: so ‘in a word’ applies to both ‘chief initially’ and ‘ruler finally’. It’s really just an elaborate DD.

          1. No, chief is part of the second definition. There are kind of two definitions here – ‘chief, initially in a word’ and ‘ruler, finally in a word’ – but they have been combined so that the words ‘in a word’ are only used once.
            This is the only parsing I can see that accounts for the word ‘initially’ (which doesn’t mean ARCH so cannot be a definition) in the clue.

            1. So at the risk of flogging a dead horse the clue is saying ‘something that means chief when it appears at the beginning of a word, and ruler when it appears at the end’.

                1. Well if by ‘earlier’ you mean Quadrophenia said at 2.56 what I said at 12.22, then yes 😉
                  (To be fair my first attempt at an explanation was perhaps not the most lucid I have ever managed!)

                  1. Apologies. I’d been watching the tennis and didn’t do a catch-up on the blog before posting.

                    1. No problem – seems my initial attempt at an explanation was completely incomprehensible anyway!

                  2. Oh yes. Sorry, that was too Delphic for me, I needed Q to spell it out 😂

  24. I like to parse all answers, so found it tough – bit of a meh at minute, missed the double anagram and the fourth ARCH, never would have postulated friend-like could be pally (not red-squiggled, so it must be a word), but guessed it after guessing the answer. Liked the sound barrier, instance and calculus. (Do I like calculus? … Yes, an engineer with a bent for mathematics!)
    No trouble parsing aluminum, but I parsed MINISTER as IN (at home) in Minster. Ooops! In my defence: tired after a hard day.

  25. It seems people are very relaxed about not knowing all four definitions in 1dn. I want to know what they are and so far as I can see (I may well have missed it) nobody has explained how arch = initially. These peculiar clues like the ALTOGETHER one, where there are two lots of wordplay (in this case both anagrams), strike me as very unsatisfactory: where is the indication in the clue that it is one anagram or the other that will do, something like ‘in eg her total, or he later got, revised’ (although of course this is no good)? The unstressed clue totally fails to convince me. Generally rather slow, 52 minutes.

  26. Sluggish for me in 22.08, thrown at least in part by the quad definition (I only related to two) and the extra anagram fodder for ALTOGETHER, which was perhaps too generous for its own good. There were too many “ins” in the MINISTER clue, too. I only adjusted FERMENTAION to SEG- in my final typo spotting run through because FERTATION isn’t a word I know. It also to me a while to give up trying to work out where the “regular intervals” were in CATAMARAN. Perhaps an excess of cleverness?

  27. Perhaps I’m groggy from a busy weekend’s celebrations, but I found that a bit of a chore and didn’t enjoy it, even though I eventually finished with more or less everything parsed apart from ARCH. I didn’t see the double anagram for ALTOGETHER and was actually delayed for ages by the verbosity of the clue. As Jack mentioned, I was also distracted by the clue for MINISTER, and squinted, biffed and moved on. A soul destroying 49:52. Thanks Vinyl, and setter (I think).

  28. DNF, Found this really hard for a Monday, as others have noted. Lots of difficult insertions. Flew through the ones I could get and once I looked up a few answers, I thought I’d rather give up than plough on with those checkers.

  29. Returned from a holiday which obviously did me good as I completed in under 20 minutes with very little biffing. Only had real difficulty with PHENOMENALLY and SOUND BARRIER. Also SOMALI took longer than it deserved. COD for me was DWELT.
    Needless to say, in view of my success, I thought it a cracking puzzle!
    Thanks to setter and vinyl1.

  30. 19:27, found this quite easy though I didn’t get where the -OL of pistol came from because I saw saint as st
    Regarding arch, I think it’s “chief, initially” as one thing not chief and initially ssparately. Like archbishop or whatever.

  31. I felt very pleased with myself for spotting that the Merchant of Venice was Marco Polo, so biffed the clue, but the rest completely eluded me. I was determined that something that was played would be an LP, leaving me with OO to grapple with!

  32. Felt a bit like one of those Guardian puzzles where I put in the answer but have no clue how the 17 elements of wordplay make it correct. Not quite as extreme perhaps, but definite hints. Got there in the end with ALTOGETHER going in last.

    Edit: I see Jack beat me to it with the Guardian comparison.

    17:49

    1. Indeed, and by contrast today’s Guardian puzzle by Brummie felt more like a typical Monday Times.

  33. 40 minutes with the use of aids to get POLO, and a different route to get ARCH – Chief initially, ruleR finally, in AH, a word.
    On reflection, allowing setters to use “a word” to mean any word might be giving them too much scope for ambiguity.

  34. 19 minutes on a yacht between Kos and Pserimos. Now, that’s the life!

    19 minutes. Enjoyed POLO

  35. 39 minutes while rattling through Kent on the train. A considerable mismatch between biffability and parsability today, so I often just did the former. Found it very enjoyable though.

  36. About 20 minutes.

    – Didn’t parse DWELT as I didn’t know welt=severe blow
    – Didn’t parse ARCH
    – Missed that ALTOGETHER had two separate anagrams
    – Entered UNSTRESSED without understanding how it worked

    Thanks vinyl and setter.

    FOI Appraise
    LOI Polo
    COD Aluminium

  37. 51 minutes. Most of the trickier parsings bamboozled me but I did manage UNSTRESSED. SOUND BARRIER was nice. Thanks vinyl1.

  38. I thought this was tricky, for me especially due to some very well hidden definitions. From the SNITCH I’d thought I was the only one, but I see alot of today’s posts also report some difficulty.

  39. A rare finish for me in about 20 mins. Thoroughly enjoyed and almost all parsed, though I couldn’t make much of ARCH and was mightily relieved to read Quadrophenia’s explanation above. Many thanks vinyl.

  40. DNF by quite a way for me today, so nice to see others found is trickier than usual for a Monday, and many I could biff I still had trouble parsing – CATAMARAN got me counting letters trying to see how it worked and I’d not heard of the playwright for SOUND BARRIER. ALUMINIUM was nice once I got that in, though, and PHENOMENALLY.

    Thanks Vinyl, for the many needed explanations!

    1. You might have come across Barrie as the author of Peter Pan. Occasionally referred to as “Scottish writer”, but never the first author or playwright I think of.

      1. Ah, that Barrie! Yes, though I wasn’t aware he was a playwright – thanks.

          1. Something else I can add to the ever-expanding list of things I’ve learned, then, regularly making me wish I’d got into doing crosswords a fair bit prior to just a few months ago.

            1. Well indeed. This is definitely something I know from crosswords – like about 80% of my knowledge!

  41. Just in late from QC land to say how much fun I had biffing my way through this bewildering puzzle, taking a for-me-speedy 35 minutes. A thousand thanks to you, vinyl, for elucidating the mysteries, and to Quadrophenia for the analysis of ARCH, my very favorite clue.

  42. Good to ‘see’ new faces here all the time; but the olduns are still required for unraveling intricate parsings, of which there were many here. Liked this puzzle a lot, not least because I managed most of it quite quickly. But then a hiatus when it came to POLO ( wasn’t aware of Marco Polo being a merchant), and DWELT, where I have two questions: first the most unlikely past tense of “abide”, and second my understanding of a welt being the scar left after the blow, and not the blow itself. Otherwise, this was fun and just about doable for me. COD ALMA MATER and MINISTER.

  43. I’m glad this non-mondayish puzzle appeared in The Australian on a Saturday, which gave me ample time to finish, mostly parsed. Catamaran was biffed, and fedora for felt on head raised a smile. Thanks a lot setter and blogger.

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