Times 25676 – Gee, this seems rather familiar…

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 50 minutes

Music: None, golf is back on TV

Today’s puzzle is a bit difficult for a Monday. There is some clever wordplay that makes it difficult to find the literal, so I had to pay more careful attention than I am usually inclined to do. I was not helped at all by bad handwriting, putting a ‘c’ that looked like a ‘p’ at the beginning of 9 across.

I was not much distracted by the golf tournament, since for some reason they’ve decided to have a Monday finish. The last nine holes, as I was writing up the blog, were more dramatic; fortunately, we don’t have to give the times for blog writing.

Across
1 ROPY, double definition, one referring to the nautical rope.
3 BLOODSTAIN, anagram of NOT SO BAD I + L, a different kind of clue from the one at hand.
9 CLOBBER, double definition, one of them UK-centric slang.
11 CLUTTER, CL[ass] + UTTER.
12 SPECTACLE, anagram of ACCEPTS + LE.
13 DACHA, A C[ommunist] inside anagram of HAD. One of the view obvious literals, nearly a write-in.
14 ABBREVIATING, A(I VERB backwards)BATING.
18 WILLIAM BLAKE, WILL + IAMB + LAKE, e.g. carmine lake. Quite a good clue, but there are not many who fit the literal.
21 BRING, B[ishop] + RING.
22 GALVANISE, GAL(VAN IS)E. I wasted a lot of time with ‘gust’, not even considering ‘gale’ until I saw the answer from the literal.
24 INSTALL, IN (ST) ALL, where ‘st’ is the standard abbreviation for ‘stone’, the UK measure of body weight.
25 MIDRIFF, M(I DR)IFF. I wanted to put in ‘ribcage’, i.e. R(I BC)AGE, but there is no doctor who abbreviates to ‘BC’….a Bachelor of Chiropractic, I suppose.
26 TROTSKYITE, TROTS + K(Y)ITE, a word not often fully spelled out in crosswords.
27 STOW, [-e+S]TO[-n+W]. A clever substitition clue with some good misdirection, or missed directions if you don’t get it.
 
Down
1 RICKSHAW, RICKS + HAW.
2 PROVERBS, PROVER(B)S.
4 LYRIC, [p]L[a]Y(R)[d]I[s]C. The ‘lyric’ is not really the whole song, but the cryptic hands you the answer.
5 ORCHESTRA, anagram of HER ACTORS.
6 SOUNDING BOARD, double definition.
7 ANTICS, ANTI(C)S.
8 NORMAN, NOR MAN.
10 BATTERING RAMS, BATTER + IN GRAMS. A brilliant clue, as many solvers will think that ‘mix’ is an obvious anagram indicator.
15 ILLEGALLY, ILL + E.G. + ALLY.
16 PACIFIST, PAC(IF I’S)T.
17 FEVERFEW, F(EVER F[lu’s])EW. Nearly the same clue as in the puzzle I blogged two weeks ago, where the medicinal plant was also 17 down. What happened?
19 OBOIST, [j]OB [t]O [l]IST, one of the few easy ones.
20 FIASCO, FI(AS)CO, i.e. the ‘fico mano’.
23 LIMIT, sounds like ‘limn it’. The problem is, no one ever says ‘limn it’.

47 comments on “Times 25676 – Gee, this seems rather familiar…”

  1. Yes, it was quite tough and took me exactly an hour having become completely stuck for a while about half way through.

    Didn’t know (or had forgotten) FICO or LIMN.

    I was going to have a moan about 27 because I was led to think of another public school, STOWE, which has an E at the end, but then I realised that this was irrelevant.

    4dn is LYRIC btw.

  2. 17:21 .. whenever TROTSKY-ITE/-IST I invariably start with the wrong one. Otherwise no real problems.
  3. Expecting a typical Monday … but not quite as usual.

    20dn was a bit hard to parse and I did it as: FI (contemptuous gesture) + AS (for example) and c/o (care of = “conveyed” [by?]). —Not sure whether the “by” is part of “conveyed by” or whether it indicates “next to” (the FI).

    27ac was a good clue, eliciting (as Jack says) STOWE which turns out to be a red herring.

  4. 63 minutes with the ‘unknown’ FEVERFEW last in. (If a week is a long time in politics, 2 weeks is an eternity in my short-term memory.)

    Lots of weird stuff in the wikipedia entry for ‘fig sign’. En route to that, I stumbled across an Italian dictionary and discovered that ‘to not give a fig’ is the same in Italian, so I’m assuming we borrowed it from them, being figless ourselves. Also no clue about the ‘lake’.

    Had the same thought processes re the alma mater of Branson spelled as if it had shifted to the Cotswolds.

    1. As you may have read, I don’t think the clue has anything to do with the ‘fico mano’ or the ‘mano fico’. Seems more like plain English to me! Your thoughts kind sir.
      1. I had – of course – read your parsing, but remain unconvinced, on account of the difficulty of ‘fi’ as a gesture, the unlikeliness of ‘c/o’ as ‘conveyed [by]’ + the awkward word order it would all entail. Well, you did ask… 🙂
        1. Oh well … I guess you’re right. Thanks for taking the trouble mate.

          As a meagre thanks, ODO’s etymol. for “fiasco”:

          ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Italian, literally ‘bottle, flask’, in the phrase far fiasco, literally ‘make a bottle’, figuratively ‘fail in a performance’: the reason for the figurative sense is unexplained.

          Looks like I made a bottle of that parsing.

          Edited at 2014-01-06 06:44 am (UTC)

  5. I had forebodings about this one when I started (sluggishly), but after a bit things picked up. Oddly enough, LAKE came to me fairly early on; had no idea I knew the term until I remembered I did. ‘Truthful expressions’ struck me as a bit of an odd definition for PROVERBS; e.g., ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ vs. ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’.
    1. That could be set as a task for trainee lawyers: ‘Demonstrate in no fewer than 10,000 words how ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is wholly compatible with ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’.

      The other half of the class get to show how they are incompatible, and the client gets the bill.

      1. ODO: “a short, well-known pithy saying, stating a general truth or piece of advice”. Hence truisms are not all true.
      2. You’ve reminded me of the old story of the lawyer’s 3-point defense of a client charged with stealing a valuable Ming vase: 1) My client never took the vase; 2) in any case, it’s a worthless imitation; 3) in any case, my client intended to return it.
    2. I dare say for any proverb there’s an “opposite”. Two examples that spring to mind are “look before you leap”/”he who hesitates is lost” and “too many cooks spoil the broth”/”many hands make light work”.

      Any more?

  6. 35 mins for me but with about 5 or more spent dealing with email while i solved. So probably broke the 30 mins if I’d been doing it continuously.

    Loved the batter in grams, my cod

  7. Off and running for the year. FEVERFEW and DACHA were new to me, 1ac and 1dn were LOI.
  8. 14 minutes. I thought this a fine example of an easyish, Mondayish crossword that did not sacrifice elegance, humour and guile. STOW a good example, not least given that it’s where the Heythrop Hunt meets on New Year’s day for not fox hunting, or indeed point to point with dogs.
    Liked the cake clue very much.
    Fico turns up in Henry V before Agincourt reduced the obscene gesture using three fingers to the long lived Harvey Smith using two. I can do history, me.
  9. Slow getaway then a reasonable canter at 18.04. Residual slight dissatisfaction with 27’s surface though the concealed stitching is good. Yes, 10 a little special. Looks like the double l for install has set in.
  10. 15 mins with the last two of them spent on my LOI, WILLIAM BLAKE, where for some reason I thought “pigment” was going to be the definition until I saw the obvious. FIASCO was entered from the definition because I didn’t know “fico”, but I remembered “limn” so 23dn went in without a second thought.
  11. I had never heard of limn, but on investigation there is a blog with the internet name limn.it .
  12. I found this a relatively easy, a fairly typical Monday offering which took me 28 minutes. The only brief hold-up was at the end with 23, since I’d hurriedly entered TROTSKYIST for 26 without studying the wordplay carefully enough. There were some nice clues (10, 11 27). I also thought “alternative to Eton” was a reference to Stowe and wondered what led to the removal of E.
  13. 12min – one of my best times ever.
    FIASCO LOI from checkers, but then remembered ‘fico’ – I’d come across LIMNER for ‘artist’ (probably in some other puzzle) so LIMN came to mind at once.
  14. I don’t think anybody says just “limn” any more either, which rather limits the opportunities for “limn it”.
    1. I’ve met limn occasionally in crosswords but otherwise it seems to have found its home in Woody Allen’s written work, where 9 times out of 10 he will prefer it to paint or draw.
  15. I wrote in FIASCO because it fitted but despite the explanations above I still dont see it. Obviously I am getting off to a thick start to the week. Also agree with sotira about Trotskyite/ist.
  16. Thank you, vinyl1 for explaining fiasco. I had to go to Wikipedia to find an explanation of fico mano. My TST was 1h 12m 57s so i’m not yet up to my targeted average of less than 1hr for completion of the Cryptic but this was a more challenging Monday puzzle than normal. I particularly liked ROPY, RICKSHAW and STOW but my favourite was BATTERING RAM. All-in-all a very pleasant puzzle and one to take my mind off the dismal weather. At least, here in western France, we are only receiving the outer edges of the storms that are battering the U.K. My reference to “You can’t always get what you want” refers to 3ac and comes from the lyrics to that song…”She was practiced at the art of deception, I could tell by her bloodstained hands”.
    1. I’m less than 50 miles north of London (30 minutes by train to Euston) and there have been no storms of any significance here in the past month, only a few blustery days. The weather’s bad where it’s bad but the media only report the worst of it.

      Edited at 2014-01-06 02:17 pm (UTC)

  17. 10:29 – I had to come here for the explanation to FIASCO – thank you. Also held up slightly by the TROTSKYITE/IST!
  18. Got off to a slow start (for Don’s benefit this was due to noisy/inane office discussions about diets disrupting my concentration) and plodded a bit due to fico, limn and lake being unknown. 20:31 in the end.

    The cleverness of 27 went way over my head (I just assumed there was a public school at Stow-on-the Wold) but, like others, I loved the batter in grams device.

  19. A nearly finished as still had 1d unsolved as I hit the hour mark. A clever and fair clue which defeated me – hat off to setter. Otherwise steady if slow solve; the cleverness of 27a passed me by as I had forgotten the school had an ‘e’ so thanks for the explanations.
  20. Was looking forward to today’s crossword after revelling in 20dn from
    Saturday’s crossword – my COE (not clue of day but of ever). The laws governing such things then came into play and I had a really bad day getting a lot on definition and getting into knots on word play and in the end DNF. Hey ho.
    1. Without saying anything too specific, I thought Saturday’s was an absolute belter of a puzzle, and with quite a different feel to it. Is there a new setter in town? Either that or I’d like a bottle of whatever the old setter found in their Christmas stocking!
  22. I put FIASCO in from definition only. My LOI and, in my opinion, not a very convincing clue. Otherwise I seem to have been on the right wavelength with this – 19 minutes, which is a good time for me. BLOODSTAINS reminded me of dear old Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders.
  23. Just under 50 minutes, as just couldn’t get into my stride with this one, but once I did, the answers came reasonably quickly. Totally missed the elegant parsing of CLUTTER, and FIASCO also went in unparsed, as the mano fico had hitherto passed me by.

    24ac took longer than it should have as I tried desperately to fit “nude” or “bare” round “(1)st”. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

    For wit, misdirection, and general brilliance my COD is BATTERING RAMS.

    Agree with sotira that Saturday’s was a corker and, well, different.

  24. A fairly fast time for me (42 minutes) but with two mistakes: ABBREVIATION instead of ABBREVIATING, and the wrong crossing letter induced me to fill in SQUADRON BOARD for 6dn. That didn’t make much sense to me, but I couldn’t think of anything but SQUADRON to put in the partly filled in 6dn and it was fatal that CLUTTER confirmed that the U was in the right place! And I also couldn’t be bothered to look for a mistake and was more prepared to believe this was some kind of strange military tribunal and a piece of unknown vocabulary, so frequent in the Times crossword. Oh what a difference the two wrong but plausible letters in 14ac made.

    I’ve seen FEVERFEW recently in a puzzle a week or two ago, or is my memory failing me?

    And yes, BATTERING RAMS is brilliant.

  25. Rather slow today, though I don’t really know why. I suppose it didn’t help when I started entering a solution in the wrong place; a sure sign of lack of concentration. Still, all correct in the end, without aids, so it’s not all bad.
  26. 27:49. I got to this late, and seem to have struggled with it more than most. I spent nearly ten minutes at the end staring at 1dn, and very nearly gave up. All my difficulties came from the use of obscure terms: painter, lake, haw, fico, FEVERFEW, limn. I knew some of them but they don’t really spring to mind so I got a lot of answers from the definition and reverse-engineered the wordplay (or in the case of FIASCO, didn’t). Not my cup of tea, but perhaps I’m just tired.
  27. About 25 minutes, ending with WILLIAM BLAKE. The only unknowns were the lake as pigment and fico, everything else went in OK. I agree with all those praising BATTERING RAMS, a very fine clue. Regards.
  28. A whisker under the half hour, with which I was happy. Well, I say happy; it’s Monday 6th of January and I’m in East Anglia, so that’s clearly an overstatement.

    Liked BATTERING RAMS. RICKSHAW took me a long time (and was my LoIn), though I can’t think why.

    Failed to parse FIASCO although, since I work in the NHS, the word itself sprang to mind almost unbidden.

    Injury of the day (possibly of the week, though it’s early) was an impressive two-for-one deal: middle-aged gentleman had, with the aid of a nailgun, nailed his hand to his wife’s knee. What is it about East Anglians and nailguns? To give him due credit, by the time he’d finished explaining how he did it, it seemed like the sort of accident that could easily happen to anyone.

    Honestly, sending any machinery more complex than a pointy stick into East Anglia is just asking for trouble.

    1. I’d have thought quite a lot of damage could be done with a pointy stick – especially if someone’s eye got in the way of it!
      1. You’re right, Tony, though there’s only a 50:50 chance that they’d be holding it the right way around at the time.

        On the plus side, sea level rises in coming decades will make webbed toes an advantage.

  29. 26/28 today with Feverfew and Stow missing. Am loving solving on the iPad!
    Fiasco from checkers and definition.
  30. 9:34 for me, getting off to a decent start but then flagging a bit in the bottom half (wasting time trying to justify TROTSKYIST and the like).

    I knew “fico” so had no problem with FIASCO once I’d stopped wasting time looking for a word with EG in it.

    Nice puzzle.

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