Times 26,111: My Blog Has No Nose. How Does It Smell?

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Somewhat exemplary fare this morning – neat and tidy construction, convincing surfaces, all fair to the solver without any vocab or general knowledge demands likely to prove controversial. I have to confess that when confronted with something like this I do pine for the anarchy of Rochester’s housekeeper or even an unfair oread (see blog posts earlier this week if that makes no sense whatsoever), something to get us at loggerheads in the comments. But one can’t really complain. Blogging the Friday puzzle as I do I can always repair to the TLS straight afterwards for a double dose of the literary bafflegab that I like.

12 and a half minutes on the clock, neither fast or slow (definitely outside 2xMagoo though), just working steadily through. FOI was 11A, and the bottom RH corner the last to fall – I think 28A was my LOI despite the fact that I feel like I’ve seen P + RESERVE about three times in puzzles in recent memory, not that RE-SERVE isn’t an innovation. COD probably to 1D for some clever “lift and separate” action and being otherwise relevant to my interests. It’s only rock and roll, but I like it more than ballet.

Much obliged to the setter, another tidy week of cryptics in the bag. See you all for the next one!

Across
1 CHILL OUT – veg: OUT [blooming] “accompaniment for” CHILL [cold]
5 PATTON – general: P [P{rogressing} “initially”] + AT TON [at | great speed]
10 BED AND BREAKFAST – accommodation: BAND BREAK [group (taking) holiday] around ED [“centre of” {sw}ED{en}] + FAST [stuck]
11 LIGHT ON – discover: double def with “what makes night time reading possible?”
12 FLANKER – rugby player: reverse of REF [“about”] “to detain” LANK [scrawny]
13 MASSAGER – “I’ll work my fingers to the bone?” (cryptic def of the masseur’s art): reverse (“knocked back”) of R E.G. ASSAM [“initially” R{esuming} | say (before) tea]
15 DRILL – instruction: DR ILL [drive | badly]
18 ANTIC – used to be (i.e. an old word for) bizarre: ANTI C [“supporting Labour presumably”, i.e. anti-Conservative]
20 OVERCAST – dull: and a theatre director’s place is OVER (the) CAST
23 SET DOWN – note: double def with “tennis player is losing, if this” (i.e. if a set down)
25 SCREECH – outcry: CREE [Indian language] is introduced into SCH [school]
26 CLEAN AS A WHISTLE – innocent: (CALAIS THEN WALES*) [“abroad in”]
27 MADE DO – managed: (A DOMED*) [“structure”]
28 PRESERVE – guard: P [pressure] + RE-SERVE [to join ranks again]

Down
1 COBBLE – little rock: COB [roll] + BLE [B{a}L{l}E{t} “every now and then”]
2 INDIGNANT – cross: DIG NAN [like | elderly relative] “confined to” IN T [home | “a short” time]
3 LINCTUS – remedy: homophone of LINKED [“reportedly” associated] + US [the States]
4 URBAN – Pope: “part in” {o}UR BAN{ishment}
6 AWKWARD – hard to deal with: WARD [child in care] after A WK [a | week]
7 TRACK – dog: TACK [food] with R [runs] “inside”
8 NATURALS – talented people: reverse of TAN [become less pale, “climbing”] + URALS [mountains]
9 PERFORCE – unavoidably: MAN “has to pull out” of PERFOR{man}CE [show]
14 GOODNESS – my: (DOG’S NOSE*) [“twitches”]
16 INSPECTOR – examiner: IN SPEC{s} [wearing glasses “mostly”] TO R [R{ead} “at first”]
17 CAPSICUM – salad ingredient: SIC UM [so | {y}U{m}M{y} “regularly”] with CAP [better] “for starters”
19 CROWNED – C.R. OWNED [King Charles | had], and a crowned head is what King Charles had (until divested of it)
21 CURRIES – spicy meals: CUR [rogue] + RI{s}ES [appears “to lack the heart”]
22 WHEEZE – gag: double def with “how heavy smoker might cough”
24 TWEED – woollen material: TWEE [rather cute] on D [daughter]
25 SOWER – broadcaster: H [“initially” H{oping}] “to avoid” S{h}OWER [downpour]

49 comments on “Times 26,111: My Blog Has No Nose. How Does It Smell?”

  1. Solid end to the week. Would have been my best solving week ever if not for…ah, forget it. Move on.

    Slowed down by having PEBBLE at 1dn for far too long, only vaguely concerned at what a PEB might be. After sorting that I was able to get my COD, the nicely disguised definition for CHILL OUT.

    An exemplary blog as usual. First commenter usually gets to spot the deliberate error, but it looks pristine to me.

    See you all next week.

    1. 24:23… and also got stuck with PEBBLE for 1dn… and then RUBBLE, before I saw the light. Never knew that old meaning of ANTIC, but wordplay was clear. Liked 13ac, but doesn’t a massager work the muscle, not the bone?.
  2. . . . with a surprisingly large number biffed, especially in the top half. After all, when you see ‘accommodation’ and (3,3,9) you dont bother with parsing. Of course, this approach led to PEBBLE which in turn led to P-I-L/-U- and slowed down what would have been a very fast time for me. LOI 1ac. Thanks setter and blogger.
  3. Failed at the last hurdle with 18a. I didn’t know the old term for bizarre and couldn’t make the cryptic bit work. Although I originally had ANTIC, in the end I plumped for AZTEC as I presumed this may have meant something bizarre in days of yore.
  4. 21:01, several minutes of which were spent at the end pondering ANTIC and CROWNED as I couldn’t parse the former and could only see the literal meaning of the latter. So thanks to Verlaine for explaining these two.

    COD to PERFORCE for such a smooth surface.

  5. Just over 20 today, entirely because 1ac went straight in as SWEET PEA – it’s blooming, and after cold veg you might have a sweet of pea – made sense when I put it in, and even “felt” right. That meant I couldn’t have PEBBLE at 1d. The obvious URBAN shattered my illusions, and I rambled round the rest of the grid before coming back at the last to that top corner.
    CROWNED was the best of the bunch for me, if only because it wasn’t SEVERED. Or DETACHED. Or CHOPPED. Come to think of it, there’s an almost infinite stream of such possibilities.
  6. Routine solve here with only 18A ANTIC causing a lifting of the eyebrow. Not convinced by “supporting Labour presumably” for ANTI-C nor by the use of an old meaning of “bizarre” as definition. How about “Buffoon favours Farenheit presumably” – or is that a bit too scientific?
  7. 12 mins, so back to some kind of form after yesterday’s nightmare. I also finished in the SE, but with CURRIES after SCREECH. I almost biffed “pebble” at 1dn but stopped myself because I really couldn’t see how “peb” worked, although it was only after I got CHILL OUT that COBBLE fell into place fully parsed.
    1. Yep, like many others it seems my first instinct was PEBBLE. Fortunately it was accompanied by loud alarm bells and COBBLE swam into my brain not long after!
  8. 21.36. I knew cob as a loaf. I suppose it’s well and truly out-of-date now but I dig ‘like elderly relative’. Re 1 ac. have we had chillax yet?
    1. I would be amazed if CHILLAX hadn’t appeared in the Guardian at some point. Probably in a Paul puzzle.
  9. 26 odd minutes for me. I’ve only ever come across clean as a whistle in the sense ‘without difficulty’ or ‘smoothly’, as in ‘The tape came off as clean as a whistle after a few days’.
    1. I suppose you could say ‘Mr Blatter claimed to be clean as a whistle, in spite of…’
      1. Leaving aside the truth value of the utterance you give, it still sounds odd to me.

        Staying with football, ‘he struck it [as] clean as a whistle’ has some support on the Internet.

        1. For some reason I was imagining a bunch of 70s coppers with interesting facial hair saying “we tried to find something to pin on him, sarge, but he’s clean as a whistle”. My imagination does have a habit of running away with itself…
          1. I think it is. A bunch of 70s’ coppers *would* have found something to pin on him.
  10. Count me as another who at first had POBBLE or PEBBLE for 1d, POB being BOP = rock reversed! Until COBBLE arrived and then put in CHILL OUT as LOI without really seeing the veg definition. About 25 minutes with some fine clues, hard to pick a CoD, perhaps PERFORCE or MASSAGER or even WHEEZE.
  11. Thanks to my chum for the blog!

    Lovely puzzle, but in truth not as nice as today’s cracking Telegraph Toughie – which may be worth begging stealing or borrowing.

    Sample

    What might suggest Doug or Pitt is sweet but easily crumbling (10)

  12. 15m. Nice smooth puzzle but with a fair bit of biffing. I considered PEBBLE, but managed to resist bunging it in. I also considered the NATSRATS mountain range at 8dn, but fortunately it doesn’t look very likely.
  13. Struggled a bit with this, finally entering 1a after 43 minutes. Very nice clues, especially 2, 8, 14, 19. I didn’t quite see the reason for the plural, ‘starters’ in 17 since only one item, ‘better’ is stuck at the front. And 25a doesn’t make sense unless there are two deleted initial letters, H(oping) and T(o); in fact “hoping to avoiding” makes lousy surface sense anyway. A misprint?
    1. I’m with you on 25d but I suggest the colloquial ‘for starters’ needn’t imply number.
  14. There is obviously a need for a roll called a ‘peb’ considering how many of us thought of that first before realising that a COB made much more sense.

    Just the right side of Verlaine today as I finished in 12:01

    1. I hadn’t even thought of that! But it’s certainly better than the PEBBLE trap that most of us fell into temporarily…
      1. similar to the above anon, I started out with BASALT, then rejected PEBBLE for RUBBLE. R_I_L OUT became C_I_L OUT before PERFORCE was finally biffed in for an amazing 26m Friday finish

        still don’t understand URBAN = pope though

        jb

        1. There were a whole load of popes who took the name Urban before cuddly names like John Paul and Francis came into vogue.
  16. Just put in —BLE at 1d suspecting that PEB probably wasn’t an unreasonably obscure dialect term from the depths of Chambers. It wasn’t until I got CHILL OUT that the penny dropped for my LOI after 20 minutes. Nice puzzle for the reasons set out by our blogger.
  17. 28 mins so on the tricky side for me. Fell for the all the usual suspects mentioned above with LOI being CHILL OUT on the basis that it seemed to fit without spotting the definition. Just off now to slip some ham into a peb for a light snack.
  19. G35m in a noisy allbarone in Cambridge before heading for Turkish night at the excellent Efes so pleased to finish this chewy for me offering. No quibbles but also had pebble and a misspelled inspector (double s if you must know) both of which errors held me up. Eyebrow up at definition of innocent but no doubt just a usage I’ve never come across.
    1. Veg in the sense of ‘veg out’ (from ‘vegetate’) – i.e. relax and do nothing 🙂
    2. This quote from Pretty Woman says it all:
      Vivian says to Edward: – Let’s watch old movies all night. We’ll just veg out in front of the TV. – Veg out? – Yeah. Be still like vegetables. Lay like Broccoli

      jb

      1. If Ed in Pretty Woman does not understand this word I don’t see why I should. How is pronounced? Does it rhyme with egg or sledge?
        1. Definitely to rhyme with “sledge”. I wonder when this usage came in. I think we did a lot of vegging as students back in the 1990s, for sure…
          1. Chambers defines ‘veg’ as ‘to laze about or engage in mindless activity, esp after exertion’. The last part of this definition is not familiar to me.
        2. “If Ed in Pretty Woman does not understand this word I don’t see why I should.”

          That’s my favourite line on this site in quite some time. Thank you 🙂 LOL

  21. Back to normal after yesterday’s defeat, around 15 minutes ending with MASSAGER. I thought immediately of PEBBLE but resisted when I couldn’t see 1A. And I couldn’t easily see how a roll equated to either ‘peb’ or ‘cob’, so that waited until I finally figured out CHILL OUT. Regards.
  22. 11:23 for me, making the same mistakes as others, sc. bunging in SWEET PEA at 1ac (seemed a good idea at the time) and then (having abandoned that) trying to work out which of PEBBLE and RUBBLE was going to be the answer to 1dn.
  23. 75 minutes for me in two sessions. Pebble at 1dn and spectator at 16dn caused no end of problems, but got there in the end. Was fine with anti-c supporting labour, so put it in without fully understanding why this would be bizarre. Thanks to the blog for elucidating.

    Really enjoyed this workout – for me the right balance between enjoyment and convoluted torture. I also seem to be at a tipping point between failure and success on these so quite pleased with that, especially as comments seem to suggest that, although not hard, this wasn’t at the easiest end of the spectrum.

  24. Half an hour here, starting with WOBBLE for 1d, which didn’t help matters but at least seems to be a novel error.

    My only quibble (at least as far as the puzzle goes; I have a great many quibbles with the rest of lift, and would like to speak to someone in charge) is 22d, where “how a heavy smoker might cough” doesn’t really work. “Wheezily” or “wheezingly”, yes, or even “with a wheeze” but not “wheeze”.

    I was going to grumble about 19d being a feeble clue, but it turns out that I had failed to parse it, so the joke is on the other foot.

Comments are closed.