Times 26199

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
The PDMs were a bit slow to arrive this morning after watching too many hours of cricket and tennis last night (Aussies fall short this time!). This took me 30 minutes to finish, hopefully all correct, although there’s one I don’t fully understand.

D = definition, DD = double def.

Across
1 ADJACENT – A DJ (record player) ACE (expert) NT (book collection); D near.
9 WIND DOWN – WIND (snake) DON (fellow) around W(ife); def. tail off?
10 COOLIDGE – COOL (excellent), ID (papers) GE (extremes of gullible); D president. The one of whom Dorothy Parker, when told that he had passed away, was supposed to have replied, “how do they know?”. At risk of overdose, here’s another Coolidge-ism:
The President and Mrs. Coolidge were being shown (separately) around an experimental government farm. When [Mrs. Coolidge] came to the chicken yard she noticed that a rooster was mating very frequently. She asked the attendant how often that happened and was told, “Dozens of times each day.” Mrs. Coolidge said, “Tell that to the President when he comes by.” Upon being told, the President asked, “Same hen every time?” The reply was, “Oh, no, Mr. President, a different hen every time.” President: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”
11 ERUPTION – NO I PURE (no one perfect), all reversed, insert T(ories); D rash, as in skin condition.
12 BOX NUMBERS – BOX (scrap, fight), NUMBERS (book of OT); D people use for addresses. I had ROW NUMBERS posted in the blog until Sotira advised us it was BOX in the correct online solution; I think ROW is a better answer, as in spreadsheet addresses, see my little rant below her comment!
14 EZRA – Insert Z into ERA (age); D priest, in OT.
15 ALREADY – A (answer), ER (queen) reversed in LADY (woman); D previously. It took me a while but once I had it, it felt like I’d seen it before but forgotten. Chestnut?
17 AT LARGE – DD.
21 OKAY – O (old) YAK (rabbit) reversed: D up to scratch.
22 CONTRIBUTE – (COUNTER BIT)*; D chip in.
23 VIOLATOR – VIOLA (instrument), TOR = ROT (drivel) reversed; D chap disrespectfully damaging.
25 OBLATION – (LATIN BOO)*, BOO being short book; D sacrifice.
26 ROSE BOWL – ROSE (increased) followed by BOWL (jack, the bowl you aim at); D sporting arena. The lovely one in Southampton has been renamed the Ageas Bowl, but there’s a Rose Bowl in Pasadena, I’ve seen it floodlit, from a friend’s house in Glendale.
27 LEMONADE – (ONE D MEAL)*; D drink.

Down
2 DROP GOAL – DROP = kick, as in kick the habit; GO = game, AL = B(AL)L endlessly; D score.
3 ALLIANCE – Please explain! Ah, thanks to those below, it’s D(ALLIANCE) (= sporting) topped.
4 EDDY – Vacations of E(mbattle)D D(ignitar)Y; D circulate.
5 TWEETER – TWEE (cute) TER(M) = expression with M overlooked; D speaker, the one with the high notes, nothing to do with Twitter and tweeting, in which I refuse to partake.
6 INQUISITOR – IN (home) QUITO (capital) insert IS, R (close to border); D feared churchman. This sprang to mind right away before I could deconstruct it, as I’m in the middle of Heresy by S J Parris. She’s as good as Sansom, I think.
7 HOWITZER – H (husband) (I WROTE)*, insert Z (unknown); D sort of gun. Think of sort of gun (8) beginning with H, then work out why it’s correct.
8 INUNDATE – NUN (woman in order) inside I DATE (current, meeting); D overwhelm.
13 MEDICATION – DEDICATION = commitment; replace D (500) with M (1000); D drug.
15 ALOE VERA – (VOLE)* inside (AREA)*; D juicy plant.
16 REAROUSE – REAR = back, ‘OUSE = ‘ome; D get excited again. Today’s cockney clue.
18 ALBERTAN – BERT = boy, inside A(rea) LAN(D); D Canadian. A biffer’s delight.
19 GATEFOLD – GATE = a number of fans, FOLD = fail; D opening page, the one that opens out, to show a map or whatever, not the first page.
20 ON A ROLL – DD.
24 GLAM – GLAM(ORGAN) part of Wales briefly; Glam rock as in Freddy Mercury’s lot for example.

45 comments on “Times 26199”

  1. 13:36 … a bit astonished, at time of writing, to find myself at the top of the leader board. The more so as I spent at least 3 minutes at the finish line staring blankly at _O_ NUMBER before the penny dropped.

    I saw the (d)ALLIANCE thing and was in the right mood not to think about it too much. Appreciated the helpful wordplay for OBLATION.

    Edit: Pip – just realised you have “row numbers’. BOX is ‘correct’, according to the online version. I did question scrap=box when it finally dawned on me, but put it in, like ALLIANCE, with a shrug.

    Edited at 2015-09-09 07:55 am (UTC)

    1. Really? Well I think ROW works better, but if it’s wrong, I’ll change it. I know of PO Box numbers but box numbers alone? And boxing isn’t the same as scrapping… thanks anyway S.
      1. I agree about scrap/box. I imagine boxing aficionados would want to make a distinction between the two. But close enough for government work. I’ve definitely heard “box numbers” without the P.O. bit.
  2. I had BOX NUMBERS (luckily I’d never heard of row numbers), but had GATEload (unparsed), and a blank at ROSE BOWL. Sport’s def not my thing…

    Thanks for sorting out MEDICATION. I worked out that it had summat to do with dedication, but those pesky Roman numerals always seem to catch me out.

  3. Pip, my guess was that we get to ALLIANCE by “topping” DALLIANCE. That of course requires “sporting” to clue “dalliance”. Will leave it to the experts to discuss that one.
    1. Whoops, forgot to log in. Some great clues today I thought. Nicely hidden defs, such as “tail off” and “up to scratch”.

      Thanks setter and blogger.

  4. 38 minutes for a puzzle I’ve largely forgotten. Nice Coolidge story, Pip. New to me.

    The idea at 3 dn is that you take the top off DALLIANCE, which has a similar meaning to ‘sporting’ (gerund), to indulge in frivolous pursuits. Um, enough…

    Edited at 2015-09-09 07:42 am (UTC)

  7. Found it a little tricky and ended with a shrug with jot numbers, which I’m sure are coming in anytime soon. I rather like the olde-worlde sporting as dalliance. Thought there might be a hidden HM nod but nothing. Splendid Victorianesque regal snap of her on the front of the paper today.
    1. There is an excellent crossword in today’s FT by GAFF (15,031) which is an exceptional and relevant Nina.
      If you cannot find it, look at the solution on Fifteensquared?
  8. 18m. Another very good puzzle that requires some careful lifting and separation in places: ‘cut tail off’, ‘coming back up to scratch’, ‘chip in counter’, ‘sporting association’, and so on.
    No out-and-out unknowns today, although I hesitated a bit over the absence of ‘P.O.’ in 12ac.
  9. NW was almost blank with rest done – eventually got 1ac, and then saw I only needed an X for the pangram, so 12ac had to have BOX, so that was LOI.
    Thanks for explaining 3dn. At 26ac, I agree jack=bowl is unsatisfactory (BTW, I’m only just accustomed to not being at The Dell anymore.)
    1. SOED has:

      Jack: Bowls. A smaller bowl placed as a mark for the players to aim at.

      It’s actually a contraction of jack-bowl.

      Collins has ‘Bowls’ as: a game played on a bowling green in which a small bowl (the jack) is pitched from a mark and two opponents or opposing teams take turns to roll biased wooden bowls towards it, the object being to finish as near the jack as possible.

      Edited at 2015-09-09 10:24 am (UTC)

  10. Got there all correct in the end and not quite resorting to aids, but it was a close thing as I hit a brick wall in the SW corner which sent my solving time off the scale. After 10-15 minutes of no further progress I would have cheated to get myself going again but I didn’t have enough checkers for anything outstanding to feed into a solver. Eventually I came up with ALOE VERA (learnt only recently from a shampoo bottle) and that was the beginning of the home stretch.

    Didn’t understand how ALLIANCE worked and have to say even now I think it’s a bit of a stretch but I had no problems with BOX NUMBERS. ROSE BOWL was also unknown. LOI was OKAY having spent ages thinking GAS and GAB for ‘rabbit’ which prevented me seeing the obvious.

    Edited at 2015-09-09 08:37 am (UTC)

    1. Obviously you live in an environment where the sun is your friend! Everyone down here would be aware through painful experience of the sunburn-soothing properties of aloe vera. Although we’ve finally twigged (fifty years too late for many of us) that it’s best not to get burnt in the first place.

      Having said that, I read somewhere recently that the incidence of skin cancer in the UK has risen dramatically, possibly because of the proliferation (and affordability) of sun-seeking holidays in recent decades?

  11. 34:37. Nice puzzle where I had to use a lot of the cryptic to break clues down.

    I was at the Rose Bowl in Southampton (as Pip says, now the Ageas Bowl) a couple of months back and had heard of a Rose Bowl in the US – has the Superbowl been held there?

    I’ve not thought of Queen as glam rock, Pip, but I guess that others do. For me The Sweet were the epitome of glam rock.

    1. I agree Queen aren’t glam rock and Sweet are the absolute zenith of glam. Queen never failed to mention how much their multi-layered harmony vocal approach owed to Sweet who, as great as their hit singles are, were an altogether much more credible music outfit than they are generally remembered.
  12. Wow, that was a seriously good time Sotira – you must be in training for October. I certainly didn’t know that meaning for BOWL though I see there’s some doubt about it, and DROP GOAL was another guess. The pangram (when I finally twigged it) was the clincher for BOX. 25.36
  13. I found this more than a bit tricky. At 13 I took “supply” as an anagrind and spent an age trying to make C(ommitment) DOUBLED TO into the name of a drug, encouraged by the D,C,T,O checkers.

    Never heard of ROSE BOWL which went in on a prayer, although I’m not sure that a jack is actually a “bowl”.

    Dereklam

    1. Sorry. I took a long break in the middle of writing my post and didn’t see jacckt’s post on JACK.

      Dereklam

  14. Took me ages. After ten minutes I had only four answers. At one point I don’t think I made any further progress for about fifteen minutes, then 6d got me going again. As noted above, the separation between definition and wordplay was brilliantly disguised at times. An hour and five minutes in the end with one wrong – GATELOAD for 19. I’ve never heard of a gatefold.
    1. If you ever used to buy vinyl LPs the ones that opened out like a book were known as gatefold sleeves (I guess they still are!). This particularly applied to double albums.

      Oh the joy of getting a new record home and discovering that it was gatefold… and had lyrics… and a booklet of photos…

      1. It would appear you’ve never read the excellent articles about LPs and other musical items in Playboy, where a gatefold was a regular feature (so I’m told).
  15. A sign of poor clueing when so many people are saying that the pangram requirement clinched it. It’s not as though the puzzle says anywhere it’s a pangram so that’s not puzzle solving – it’s just hoping you’re on the same wavelength as the befuddled setter.

    Not sour grapes – I opted for box eventually but row is just as good. In the absence of ‘PO’ then the partial spreadsheet address argument is just as valid. Unexpectedly and unhelpfully poor from the setter and editor.

    1. My experience may be unusual but in 20 years of working with spreadsheets I can’t remember anyone ever referring to a cell or cell reference as an ‘address’. I also can’t find any evidence of this usage in a dictionary, or online. I’m happy to be corrected on this but in the absence of contrary evidence I’d say ‘woeful’ and ‘poor’ are a bit harsh. Edit: the Wiki article on spreadsheets does actually talk about ‘addressing’ cells, so I’ve corrected myself! I’d still categorise this as ‘unfortunate’ rather than ‘woeful’.

      Edited at 2015-09-09 12:03 pm (UTC)

      1. Sorry keriothe (and setter) – you’re right, I was too harsh; it’s only a crossword.

        I’m, sadly, even longer in the spreadsheeting tooth that you (Anyone for Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 or Symphony?). I’d say address is the normal way of referring to the conjunction of row & column – it even has it’s own function in Excel which both shares its name and uses the word to describe the cell location:

        (from Microsoft Exel help)
        “ADDRESS function

        This article describes the formula syntax and usage of the ADDRESS function in Microsoft Excel…

        Description

        You can use the ADDRESS function to obtain the address of a cell in a worksheet, given specified row and column numbers. For example, ADDRESS(2,3) returns $C$2. As another example, ADDRESS(77,300) returns $KN$77. You can use other functions, such as the ROW and COLUMN functions, to provide the row and column number arguments for the ADDRESS function.”

        1. Lotus 1-2-3 was like something from Tomorrow’s World if, like me, you started out with Supercalc on a green screen in about 1983/4.
        2. I stand even more corrected! Funny that I’ve never come across this way of referring to a cell reference in all these years. I guess 20 years makes me a bit of a newbie.
          If ROW NUMBER were the answer, there would be a strong argument that it’s ridiculously obscure for the Times crossword, but I don’t think that in itself invalidates it.
      2. BOX NUMBERS have been about all my life (I’m 68 this year) and they don’t actually need PO in front of them especially when not held at or administered by the Post Office. Many are operated by newspapers, periodicals and other organisations when the prefix PO would not be appropriate.
  17. 16.08 for me, in a mid afternoon solve, and thanks to box numbers still on page one. Could something like this be organised for October? Oddly enough, the one that held me up was OKAY, osag and owaj not being recognised words. Liked the M/D device – always a tricky one to spot.
    I didn’t expect 6 down….
  18. BTW I tried to delay-post a blog today to TFTT, it refused me saying ‘no password provided’ in a nasty pink box, although I was logged in; anyone else had this problem, or got a work-around please? I have sent a support RQ to LJ.
  19. 25 mins, so a bit of a struggle for me today. I got through the top half in reasonable time but for some reason I found the bottom half a lot trickier. I agree that some of the definition/wordplay splits were very cunningly constructed, and I think I fell for just about every one of them, particularly “chip/chip in”. GATEFOLD was my LOI, and I only parsed ALLIANCE post-solve.

    I didn’t consider “row numbers” for 12ac, which is probably just as well. I had very similar experiences to Penfold with Supercalc and Lotus 1-2-3 in the early 80s, so the reminder was much appreciated.

  20. About 25 minutes, ending with GATEFOLD. I was OKAY with the BOX NUMBERS, which we use over here all the time, although often accompanied by “PO”. Another Coolidgism: A very comely lady was introduced to the President, and said “Oh Mr. President, my husband bet me that I couldn’t get you to speak more than two words!” Coolidge: “You lose”. Regards to all.
  21. Didn’t spot the pangram, but figured BOX NUMBERS looked like the best option and dredged up GATEFOLD from somewhereorother. Lots that needed the wordplay here.
  22. 41:15… with 2 wrong. Struggled with this, maybe by doing too late in the day. Right hand side went in first but then I got stuck. Didn’t spot the pangram and ended with ZIP NUMBERS which stumped kme for 1d.
  23. I’m still so desperately tired that once again I’m not all that displeased with my sluggish 16:39. I was on the setter’s wavelength, but just couldn’t come up with the answers, even for such old chestnuts as (D)ALLIANCE.

    I raise my hat to the setter, though, for a wholly delightful crossword. If he or she taps me on the shoulder the next time we meet, I’ll be delighted to buy him or her a drink on the strength of it.

    Great time, Sotira. That’ll give the rest of us something to think about come October!

  24. Thought that I would be amongst the laggards tonight, but, judging from the comments of others, my solving time was not too dusty. Not to compare with sotira, of course, RESPECT.
    ‘Box numbers’ was my last one in, but I never considered ‘row numbers’, spreadsheets being something I have studiously avoided.
  25. Help! Even after reading all the comments I cannot equate ‘sporting’ and ‘dalliance’. Could someone give me an example of where these two words could be interchangeable?
    1. Sorry that this is late, but we take our crosswords in a leisurely fashion at odd moments in the day.

      Spouse quotes “…sport with Amaryllis in the shade”, which she thinks is Milton.
      TLS tomorrow!

Comments are closed.