Times 26433 – almost tasteless?

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Today’s offering began with writing in 1a and 1d, wondering if this was setting some kind of theme for the day (and the crossword). Well, almost, it was; with more slightly distasteful words or negative thoughts cropping up here and there – 24a, 16d, 12a, 20d, for example. But in between are some fine clues and witty definitions, with only one answer (9a) requiring me to check afterwards the secondary meaning of its part. Half an hour at leisure in bed with the tea and toast had it polished off and understood.

Across
1 GOD-AWFUL – (WOULD FAG)*, anagrind ‘chewed’, D ‘taste thus’, or &lit.
5 EQUIPS – Insert QUI (French for which) into EPS (records); D supplies.
9 UNBURDEN – UN troops have blue berets, and BURDEN is an old word for the refrain or chorus of a song (I had to check this afterwards); D relieve.
10 MANTRA – Hidden word in BRAH(MAN TRA)DITION, D it’s said to aid concentration, as in meditation.
12 BLIMP – B is Bulging at first, LIMP is sagging, D pompous colonel.
13 FOG SIGNAL – FOAL is a young horse; insert G and SIGN = indication, D bang on track? Before the days of radar, and more of a booming noise as I remember from living in Castletown, IOM. and from visiting Portland Bill as a kid. Edit: further research tells me they used explosive caps on railway lines to warn of oncoming trains in fog. So the clue is bang on.
14 VARICOSE VEIN – (CIVVIES ARE ON)*, anagrist ‘manoeuvres’, D faulty vessel. I’m not a squeamish chap but I tend to squirm at the sight of these and the notion of them being ‘stripped’ i.e. pulled out by some sadistic medic.
18 PUMPERNICKEL – Well, a PUMPER could be someone who grills you for info, and NICKEL is a coin, giving you this sort of bread.
21 CASTELLAN – CAN is the cooler, jail, insert STELLA for the girl, D keep chief, a chap who is in charge of a castle. I wanted it to be CUSTODIAN at first but couldn’t make it work, then 4d put paid to the idea.
23 GUAVA – GUV for boss, around A, another A; D fruit supplier.
24 OTIOSE – O TIE is a love match, insert O’S = rounds; D pointless. A useful word not used enough IMO.
25 TEST CASE – Here we have that old favourite where GUY means TEASE; Insert ST and C = carrying, original; TE(ST C)ASE: D suit.
26 SIGNET – D a small seal e.g. on a ring, sounds like CYGNET a small swan, a pen being a female swan.
27 STOCKING – Double definition, a nice surface which I suspect we’ve seen before in a similar guise.

Down
1 GRUBBY – GRUB for food, BY = times, multiply by; D needing cleaning.
2 DEBRIS – DEB for young lady joining society, RIS = SIR, reversed; D refuse.
3 WORKPLACE – (LACK POWER)*, D office. ‘Supply’ not the strongest anagrind, but it works.
4 USER-FRIENDLY – (INSURED FLIER)*, anagrind ‘strangely’, D not requiring guide?
6 QUASI – QUI(T) = almost leave, insert AS = when, D as it were? Or is it better &lit.? The Q in QANGO or QUANGO. From the Latin, ‘as if’.
7 INTENDED – IN = at home, TENDED = looked after; D fiancée. One for the Quickie.
8 STARLING – D flier; if you inserted a T (sort of square), you’d get startling, meaning alarming.
11 AGE OF CONSENT – (ONE CAN GET SO F)*, the F = fine, D legal term.
15 ENERGETIC – CITE G RENE would be ‘commend grand Frenchman’; all reversed (given up); D bubbly.
16 SPECIOUS – CEPS are fungi, reversed = SPEC, add I, O, US; D deceptive.
17 SMASHING – S for small, MING for porcelain, insert ASH for remains; D beautiful.
19 SALAMI – SALA(D) = healthy food, mostly; MI a note, D sausage.
20 BAD EGG – BADE = ordered, GG = goods, D villain.
22 ENSUE – To ENSURE would be to guarantee, delete the R for king, D come next.

38 comments on “Times 26433 – almost tasteless?”

  1. About 40mins, ending with some unknowns / half knowns in the SW: CASTELLAN, OTIOSE, SPECIOUS. VARICOSE VEIN took far too long, given the two Vs, it should have been a write-in. UNBURDEN went in unparsed.
  2. Very entertaining, I thought. Managed not to convince myself that there must be a sort of mushroom called a SPUR (the outcome of having spent many years learning the hard way that if you can’t parse it, its usually because you’re wrong), which saved me a lot of trouble with 21ac. If you’ve learned to spot it as an anagrind, “supply” might be a bit of a giveaway, so disguising it as part of “power supply” was the sign of a devious mind. Which I like in a setter.
    1. How is it that despite always bearing in mind the principle you mention, “if you can’t parse it, its usually because you’re wrong”, I can still so often manage to convince myself of an unparsed answer?!
      1. One might as well ask how I manage so often to be certain I’ve never heard of a word before…until I discover I said exactly the same thing a year earlier. The capacity of my brain to learn things is matched only by the apparent randomness of those things.
  3. …with almost a third of that time spent on my LOI SIGNET. Missed the pen reference, not for the first time.

    Thanks setter for the nice long anagrams, and thanks Pip for explaining UNBURDEN.

  4. Ground to a halt after forty minutes, then spent the rest of my hour basically just staring and frowning. Not sure why; there wasn’t much I didn’t know, and it was all quite fair. My anagram computer wasn’t online, apparently, and I was nearly there with quite a few of the rest, but didn’t quite get to the end. I suppose this is pretty much the definition of “not on the wavelength.” Unsatisfying, but my fault, not the setter’s. Thanks for the explication!

  5. I’ve never really thought about this phrase before. God’s awful judgment to be wreaked upon crossword solvers? Biffed UNBURDEN and CASTELLAN. 35 minutes and enjoyable. It took me longer last night to take the Gazebo down.
  6. 15m. I enjoyed this one, and didn’t notice any of the apparently unsavoury things highlighted by Pip, perhaps desensitised by the puzzle I blogged on Sunday.
    This meaning of BURDEN came up in December, but I had forgotten it. No other unknowns for me, but not much by way of biffing either, which is an indicator of fine setting in my book. So thanks setter, and blogger as always.
    1. BURDEN did seem familiar from somewhere; I can’t really imagine it was from anywhere other than another puzzle. Nice straightforward midweek puzzle apart from that.
  7. 52 minutes, finishing with CASTELLAN after I’d changed ‘spurious’ (which almost works if you think ‘spore’ is sufficiently fungal and you take ‘picked up’ as a homophone indicator) to SPECIOUS. I also wanted the solution to the USER-FRIENDLY clue to start ‘self-‘.

    Particularly liked DEBRIS and GOD AWFUL.

  8. Disappointed that my mind is not as dirty as I thought it was, having investigated 12 and 24 across. Or is it all that living in France, I wonder?
  9. Needed most of an hour to put this to bed with CASTELLAN as my LOI. Took for ever to work out what was obviously an anagram at 1ac.
  10. Sorry Pip,
    I thought this was a cracker with only little unpleasantness with 14ac VARICOSE VEIN(fine anagram setter!)
    I was just under forty minutes. FOI 12ac BLIMP quickly followed by 1dn GRUBBY made me think of Sir Grubby Foster and 1ac GOD-AWFUL – made me think of David Bowie.
    LOI 6dn QUASI which I originally had in as QUITE until 13ac FOG SIGNAL put me back on track,as it were.

    COD GUAVA – tres amusant. WOD 24ac OTIOSE

    horryd Shanghai

  11. Another delightful puzzle, with nice anagrams. Dnk BURDEN, despite singing in a choir. Also FOG SIGNAL, thought now occurs that if Jenny Agutter had had those she wouldn’t have stood on the track waving her red…. 18’15”

    Edited at 2016-06-08 10:48 am (UTC)

  12. A fine puzzle with what felt like having an unusually large number of anagrams. Perhaps I subconsciously recall earlier days when the number of anagrams was restricted. Anyway, an enjoyable 22:14 solve so thanks setter and blogger
  13. 14 mins helped by a rare early solve. Unlike Pip it took me longer than it should have done to get 1ac/1dn, and like yesterday I finished in the SW with OTIOSE my LOI after the CASTELLAN/ENSUE crossers.
  14. 47:22. Agreed with others this was a good puzzle with some nice penny-dropping moments, such as WORKPLACE for which I couldn’t get WALLPLATE out my mind for some time. For 18A I came up with (though didn’t write in) PENNY for the coin and TOASTER for someone who grills given me PENNYTOASTER for a type of bread – perhaps a cheap loaf best for toasting? An incorrectly written in GUN SIGNAL delayed me for some time, and realising my mistake here enabled me to finally finish.
  15. Pretty gentle for a start before getting stuck in the lower half, particularly the SW corner. Missed out on OTIOSE (I had ‘oviose’ – correct parsing (sort of), wrong answer) which was my last in. I’d never heard of BURDEN in that sense before. Liked SPECIOUS (another appearance by ‘ceps’ which seem to be the favourite fungi in crossword land) and PUMPERNICKEL.

    Thank you to setter and blogger.

  16. All correct in 46 minutes today. FOI GOD AWFUL which stopped me wasting too much time on SELF something for 4d.Failed to spot the anagram in 3d which I biffed from the checkers. Knew the word OTIOSE but not its meaning until I solved the wordplay. Didn’t know the required meaning of BURDEN, but it had to be. Didn’t know CASTELLAN but hit on the correct meaning of “cooler” which helped. After 30 minutes the SW was still empty apart from 18a, with OTIOSE taking up the last 5 minutes of the rest of my pondering. Thanks to the setter and Pip.

    Edited at 2016-06-08 01:10 pm (UTC)

  17. 17:50 after straying up pretty much every blind alley going:

    – With 2 Vs in the fodder and “vessel” in the def 14a has to be something vase.
    – “Picked up” in 16d has to be a homophone indicator
    – Custodian looks a likely bet for 21a
    – Looking at the fodder and “not requiring guide” and enumeration of 4-8, 4d absolutely has to be SELF-something
    – The way I’m reading “imported” means that 5a requires putting something inside QUE or QUI.

    Unfortunately for those among you with shares in TippexTM I didn’t actually write all of those in (just SELF) but progress on crossing clues was certainly hindered.

    I also had trouble unravelling the anagrams. Normally I can resolve them in my head but today my copy of the puzzle is soiled with 4 little jumbles of letters (well 5 actually if you count what was left of the fodder for 4d after I’d removed S E L F.)

  18. 35 minutes. It seemed a fairly average mid-week puzzle, though a few stupid mistakes held me up, and I took ages to see 1a even though it was obviously an anagram. Wordplay was pretty straightforward throughout. I knew BOURDON so I guessed BURDEN must be the same, once I solved the clue. For some time I was expecting OR or some other indication of soldiers such to follow UN.
  19. No time as I fell asleep half way through due to the south of France sun, 3 Heinekens and getting stuck for answers. My snooze reinvigorated me and I whizzed through the rest with my LOI being BAD EGG.
  21. A slow start – nothing at at all in the NW, which is always a bit of a brake on proceedings, and a steady finish gave a time of 32-odd. None of the copious anagrams fell easily, but I’m not complaining: you you know (eventually) when you’ve been bamboozled by an artful setter, so respect is due.
    My last one in was STARLING, because I had a confident SEAPLANE in until I remembered on final check that this is a cryptic crossword in which the wordplay is also important.
    1. I imagine travelling in a seaplane can be quite alarming if, say, the things you land on fall off, or if the lake’s dried out.
  22. Under the half hour for all bar the SW, and then more than as much again to finish.
    I think the definition in 25a is “original suit”, and the first letter of “carrying” is indicated by “initially”, not “original”.
  23. About 25 minutes, with the only biffing occurring at UNBURDEN, where the refrain didn’t mean anything to me. Not much else to say, really. Regards.
  24. I was on the setter’s wavelength today, except for UNBURDEN which went in from definition and being sure that the first part of 4 down was SELF. It seemed during solving there were a lot of anagrams (I think the Times has a limit of six) but there’s only five. Fun puzzle!
  25. I took a long time for this (1:24 says the timer), but much of that spent on the LTI, which were OTIOSE (unknown and unknowable until I saw that the rounds could be OS rather than OO) and UNBURDEN (which actually went in rather early, but I took a long time to convince myself that it really did end in BURDEN and not in something far better I might have overlooked). I often fill in parts of anagrams if they seem likely and so I was also one of those convinced that 4dn must start with SELF. A fun puzzle, worth persevering on.
  26. 14:52 for me, yet again failing to find the setter’s wavelength.

    I made particularly heavy weather of the anagrams, failing to get any of them first time through, and then being so convinced that the first word of 4dn was going to be SELF that I assumed that 1ac wasn’t really going to be an anagram after all. (Doh!)

    -E-T -A-E for 25 ac put the wind up me as well, holding me up for minutes at the end. No complaints though.

  27. Re 5 across: ‘qui’ is French for ‘who’ (interrogative and relative) not ‘which’. The French for ‘which’ is (1) ‘que’ (relative) or (2)’quel(le)(s)’ (interrogative).
  28. I think BURDEN is from Shakespeare where there are several instances of this meaning particularly in AYLI as I recall (studied for O-Level in an earlier century!)

    Also I parsed 25a as definition ‘original suit’ as a test case is the first of its kind. The remainder fits accurately as wordplay.

  29. They’re both verbs for the same action. Tease is the more familiar, guy is probably past its sell by date, but Chambers records it as “to turn to ridicule, make fun of.”

    By the way, you can easily and freely register on this site with create an account under the login button, it’s perfectly safe and lets the rest of us know who you are, or how you’d like to be known. This is a really good place to learn and enjoy the complexities of the cryptic crossword, and you’re very welcome.

  30. I’m a newby on this forum and haven’t understood yet why I’m posting this comment only 1 day after publication but 4 days after all previous comments.
    Never mind. Thanks to all for your comments.
    One thing I can never do is post a solving time, so I’m sorry if I’m persona non grata here on that account. The only reason is that I have a life and am in the habit of putting the crossword down a few times or many times in the course of solving it. I guess this one took me a total of 30 minutes. Having said that, I failed on TEST CASE, which didn’t yield quickly and I didn’t really want to spend time going through all the possibilities (lacking access to any crossword aids at that time).
    I thought 5 clues were excellent: 13A (FOG SIGNAL), 14A (VARICOSE VEIN), 2D (DEBRIS), 4D (USER-FRIENDLY) and 11D (AGE OF CONSENT). Like Ulaca, I tried SELF- first instead of USER- at 4D.
    21A (CASTELLAN) is the sort of clue whose answer has to be guessed first and then retrofitted to the word play. (‘girl’ has about 400 plausible possibilities in a crossword clue.) Having said that, this was not a difficult clue given a couple of crossers.
    ‘blue berets’ doesn’t quite make it as an indication for UN in 9A, nor ‘fruit supplier’ for GUAVA in 23A, nor ‘original suit’ for TEST CASE in 25A.
    I know the use of ‘in’ as an innocent filler (or ‘padding’) in clues is well established, as exemplified in 3D in this crossword, but I thought the use of ‘at’ in 1D (and possibly ‘being’ in 7D) to perform the same role, just to give a smoother surface, was a bit iffy.
    On the whole, this was an enjoyable puzzle with some clever indications and wordplay. Thanks to both setter and blogger.
    Alan Browne
    1. My 2c FWIW:
      Many more than 400 girls – not my favourite clue element, or answer.
      Blue Berets close enough for a crossword, exactitude not required.
      TEST CASE ditto.
      GUAVA – the tree – is a fruit supplier, absolutely spot-on clue.
      Agree with you that “at” and “being” are a step too far in extraneous padding.

      Perhaps you did this the day after it was published in the Australian? Your comments are about 5 weeks (not 4 days) after everyone else who did it in UK.

      Cheers,
      Rob

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