Times 25505 – A turn up for the books

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: It’s rude and a bit obsessive to count

Well, this is a blast from the past, although not necessarily for me… a blast that is. I’m a little rusty (if you’ll pardon the pun), having hung up my solving boots some months ago and only just taken it up again, thanks to an impassioned plea from mctext. The remarkable news is that I now solve online and have reconciled myself to the software and doing anagrams in my head. Who would have thought? Anyway, enough about me. On y va!

Across
1 SETTLE FOR = (OF LETTERS)*. An easy start to proceedings.
6 BRAWN = RAW inside NB reversed. It’s a long time since I had any, and I thought describing it as meat was a bit of a strech, but my dictionary says it’s cooked meat from a pig’s or calf’s head pressed in a pot with jelly. Yum! Brainfood!
9 ASK OVER = SKO(l) in AVER. Skol would be Scandavian toast, possibly served with reindeer brains in jelly.
10 GALLANT = GAL + (s)LANT. Not too many around, these days.
11 EASEL = EtAtS nEiLa. Reverse it first, then take the odd letters.
12 ALEXANDER = EX inside A LAND then E.R. for Her Madge. A former Macedonian.
13 DADO RAIL = DAD + ORAL around I. T’apostrophe for “has” in the cryptic. Now largely decorative but originally a rail to hang your doodahs from, I surmise. It’s actually the bumper bar of interior design.
14 BULL = BULL(y).
17 MEMO = ME for note + MO for second. Me is the minor third in the solfege, pronounced may like re, and not to be confused with mi, the major third, pronounced me like thee, although it always is. It’s the interval in nah nah nah nah nah, as in you can’t catch me.
18 SILENTLY = ENT for Otorhinolaryngology in SILLY.
21 AGITATION = A + GI next to (s)TATION
22 SECTS = Cults in SETS for an &lit
24 TOW ROPE = Trouble + O for over + POWER*
25 CONTACT = CONT(r)ACT. What hotel reception might once have done before staff cutbacks.
26 NIFFY = detaiN + IFFY
27 OKEY-DOKEY = O for nothing next to DO inside two KEYs as in Largo, to continue our musical theme. I had OVEN-READY for a while, thinking, in desperation, that it might have been the worst cryptic definition I had ever encountered. Well, you have islands in kitchens don’t you?
Down
1 SLATE = pikS LATEm. My LOI. What wasn’t I thinking.
2 TAKES A DIM VIEW OF = (A FEW KIDS AT MOVIE)*
3 LOVELORN = ROLE in N for new VOLume all reversed
4 FORMALIN = FORM A LIN(e)
5 RAGMEN = GERMAN*. A TV comedy with Wilfrid Brambell typecast as the dirty old man.
6 BALZAC = BAL(d) + AC for account around Z for an algebraic unknown. Two crossword conventions there; detailed for minus tail and describing for containing as a circle might a triangle.
7 A HARD NUT TO CRACK. A cryptic definition? I had the nut at step one, but couldn’t complete the sentence until all checkers were in.
8 NATURALLY = NAtion at a Trade Union RALLY. What else?
13 DUMBARTON = DUMB ART for a mummer’s talent + ON for performing
15 PINNACLE = EL(k) + CAN + NIP all reversed
16 SEASONED = SEED around A SON
19 SAVORY sounds like savoury. Summer savory appears in spring as opposed to winter savory which grows all year round and is quite bitter about it.
20 LIKE SO = LIKES O or likes nothing
23 SATAY = SATurday + AY as in Scotland. I thought AY could be the Coolangatta n’est-ce pas, but that would be EH.

41 comments on “Times 25505 – A turn up for the books”

  2. 42 minutes for all bar 1d, 13a, 19d and 20d, seven more to get all bar 1d, and then another seven to get 1d wrong. I think I am being punished for sins in another life by being touched with the inability to see reverse hiddens!

    Quite a few unknowns, with years of listening to the football results coming in handy with one of them. COD a toss-up between PINNACLE and A HARD NUT TO CRACK, with the nod going to the latter, as I love a good cryptic definition.

    Nice to see you back, Mr K.

    1. And it’s nice to be back, for auld lang syne, but I doubt I’ll be making a habit of it. Though I could run it up into a passable frock.
  3. A really enjoyable crossword (around 40 mins), up until the point I hit the Stats button and saw I had three wrong. Missed the reverse hidden at 1d, thought that SE was the sign for an element somewhere between tin and iron ,and that PAR would fit nicely between. Couldn’t see beyond REASONED for 16d despite the the fact that REED didn’t make sense, and had DADA for DADO. Moral, 3am is probably not the best time to attempt any task requiring more than minimal powers of deductive reasoning.

    Andrew R

    1. Andrew, I too thought of SE being an element which indeed it is. Unhappily for the clue though it’s a NON-metal-Selenium.
    2. My thought processes exactly, Andrew. And although selenium is indeed a non-metal, it has “properties that are intermediate between those of its periodic table column-adjacent chalcogen elements sulfur and tellurium” – which is obviously what we were both thinking.
  4. Yes, welcome back, koro. I knew you had stopped blogging but not that you had given up solving for a while.

    What started out as easy-peasy turned into a solving nightmare for me and I eventually staggered home only 3 minutes under the hour. The SE was the worst area and last completed although I had problems of sorts in all the other quarters too. At 22dn I became fixated on “it” cluing SA with “24 hours” giving DAY and wasted ages wondering if there was an alternative spelling of the dish that had so nearly emerged. Dumb or what!?

    As I’m feeling ratty after this humiliation I would quibble that OKEY-DOKEY (27ac) does not mean the same as “of course” although they are both affirmative.

    Edited at 2013-06-19 05:48 am (UTC)

    1. I thought I was getting stale, but it turned out that was just some old Castello at the back of the fridge. Actually, I got very busy with some kitchen renovations (plural) and when my main computer packed it in, I couldn’t seem to summon the energy to plug my laptop into the printer. When something as simple as that stops you solving, you know there is a problem at a much deeper level, but I can’t think what it might have been. Anyway, the good news is I have a huge backlog to catch up on and I’ve banished the printer possibly for good.
  5. Give up solving? Can you DO that? Anyway, welcome back, koro.
    DNF for me, as I couldn’t come up with the aromatic plant. Of course, that was largely because I’d stupidly–but stupidly, of a stupidity– put in ‘tow line’. As the poet says, aaargh.
  6. A straightforward solve until the SE corner, which took a while. Didn’t know that A HARD NUT TO CRACK meant anything other than a difficult problem, and SATAY makes me think of peanuts rather than much in the way of spice. Also didn’t know SAVORY but there weren’t many alternatives from the wordplay.

    COD to 2D.

  7. Another (relative) quickie for me, with a third under 40mins in a row, all correct, no aids! Either after several years I’m finally making some sort of progress, they’re getting easier, or it’s just a wavelength thing. Whatever…

    Really enjoyed this puzzle – no unknowns, and the only one left unparsed at the end was BALZAC.

    Never really think of SATAY as being spicy, but it had to be.

    LOI and COD: SILENTLY

    Koro, welcome back… I’ve only recently started solving online, and now find I prefer it (but I do try to have a pen and paper to hand for the tricky anagrams…)

    Edited at 2013-06-19 08:34 am (UTC)

    1. I have to confess I keep a pen and paper handy, too. I’m still on trainer wheels.
  8. Great to see you back K – I do so miss the view through your window. Not sure how one gives up solving – I find it as addictive as any drug!

    25 minutes for this but thankfully without the trauma suffered by others. I’m of the age that recalls granny hanging pictures from a DADO RAIL so that went in on definition. SATAY my last in so no problems there. I won’t join the praise for 7D – just not my type of clue and a meaning of “cool” I’m not familiar with

    2. I too remember hanging pictures from the dado rail, and for a long time believed that all walls inside houses had such a thing about 18 inches below ceiling level. You wallpapered up to there and painted above it the same colour as the ceiling. Apparently, I was wrong, and a dado rail is the one just above the wainscotting, and the one I hung pictures from was a picture rail. I just think the rest of the world doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
      1. Now you mention it my gran’s house did have 2 rails, one halfway up the wall and one just down from the ceiling. If that was a picture rail (seems logical) what was the purpose of the lower dado rail?
        1. Don’t think it did anything except top off the panelling below. I’m also pretty sure you could buy thin strips of wallpaper to create the top margin a bit below the ceiling, and that it was called dado. Maybe it was a family thing.
          1. The dado rail was there to prevent damage to walls from chair backs and other furniture. What prevented damage to the dado rail is a mystery. Dado rails in their original rather than decorative incarnations are still common in hospitals and nursing homes.
            1. Well you’ve educated me there. In rebuilding of my kitchen last week, the builders removed the existing dado rail and asked what my thoughts were about reinstating it. I then realised I’d reached my mid 40s without ever being asked my opinion on dado rails, and more to the point, didn’t actually have one.
              1. “I then realised I’d reached my mid 40s without ever being asked my opinion on dado rails, and more to the point, didn’t actually have one.”

                Second best comment I’ve ever seen on ablog 🙂
                Rob

          2. It’s sometimes called a chair-rail. As Koro says, it’s to prevent damage from chairs. It’s a relic of the days (18th century) when chairs were placed against the wall, often against astronomically priced wallpaper, and moved forward when necessary. In my experience they are a boon when wallpapering because you don’t have to wrestle with enormous lengths of paper. Same goes for the picture rail. My house has plenty of both and where they weren’t originally installed I glued some on with a brilliant product called “No More Nails”. Thus endeth the product placement. Nice puzzle but took me ages. 46 minutes, not helped by my having the wrong numeration at 1a and trying to fit 3,6 instead of 6,3 into the grid. Ann
    3. Jimbo, not even vaguely familiar with ‘hard nut to crack’ as the opposite of someone who wears their heart on their sleeve?

      Edited at 2013-06-19 09:07 am (UTC)

      1. I didn’t even notice this while solving but now that you mention it, no, I am not even vaguely familiar with this meaning. I only know it as meaning a difficult problem to solve.
  9. 90 long minutes for me, missed the hidden clue in 1d and guessed SKATE (over) as in skip! And for the aromatic plant I put PAEONY even though I couldn’t figure out the cryptic… well it’s an aromatic (ish) plant and it fits!
    Cozzie
  10. 21:23 on the club timer. I found this pretty tricky, with very few going in on my first pass and then much of the rest needing to be worked out from close attention to wordplay. No unknowns at all today though so difficult without any recourse to obscurity.
    In short just my sort of puzzle.
    Welcome back, K. Nice to see you again.

    Edited at 2013-06-19 07:53 am (UTC)

  11. 20 mins mid-morning and I’m glad I wasn’t trying to solve it post-lunch.

    About three-quarters of the puzzle went in fairly quickly but I ground to a halt in the SE for a while. I took much too long to see BULL, which should have been a write-in, but when I finally did the ‘u’ checker gave me enough to solve A HARD NUT TO CRACK. The ‘k’ checker from that then led to OKEY-DOKEY (SEASONED was already in), I finally saw CONTACT, which in turn gave me PINNACLE, and my LOI was SILENTLY, which was one of a nice couple of misdirections because I had been assuming the definition was senseless. The other misdirection, for me at least, was CONTACT, which had taken so long to solve because I had been looking to fit w(r)it around something that meant page.

  12. A most enjoyable 20 minute solve, liking especially “dumb art”, FORMALINe and the beautiful &lit that was SECTS.
    Like others it seems, the SE was the trickiest, though my hold up was the innocuous LIKE SO, where I resorted to alphabet soup straining and still struggled.
    PINNACLE presented difficulty because I refused to accept that “can” would go in just like that only backwards, and tried to make it tin.
    I supposed A TOUGH NUT TO CRACK would be “cool” in a crisis and thought little more of it, but it’s an odd definition.
    Considered getting SAVORY a sign that my plant knowledge is on the upswing, solely thanks to crosswords, as I have little other use for it.
    Welcome back kororareka!
  13. Welcome back, guest blogger. My 14 minutes felt like a very zippy solve given how tough that SE corner was. Until I got SATAY, I was scratching around wondering how on earth DUKES or DYKES or indeed anything at all could fit that space. I liked 6dn; though memories of Steptoe and Son make me feel slightly melancholy these days (I am reminded of the analysis of Withnail and I, which says that the older you get, the more you come to realise it’s a tragedy, not a comedy).
  14. Welcome back – like others I am not sure how you give up solving cryptics, I have tried while away on holiday and end up sneaking into a shop to buy a paper after a few hours of doing without my daily cryptic fix.

    Todays crossword took me 12.48 with my major failing being my inability to see the cleverly hidden word in 1d.

  15. All but one in 15 minutes then totally, utterly beaten by the hidden word at 1d. I guess I owe the setter a pint of creme de menthe. I spent a full 10 minutes on it before settling, reluctantly, for SPARE.

    Welcome back, koro – glad to see you prove it’s not an addiction at all. Just a bit of fun, right?

    Seriously, welcome back. You’ve been missed. Your account of stopping because you couldn’t be bothered to plug the laptop into the printer struck all kinds of chords. And I’m now going to spend all day wondering what did prevent damage to the dado rail.

  16. >what was the purpose of the lower dado rail?

    To hang pictures for children and dwarves to enjoy?

  18. Welcome back Koro, nice to have you back (for however long).

    15:03 so I must have hit the wavelength (proven, perhaps, by slate being my first in).

    As Andy above says there was some clever misdirection where definitions are concerned. To his list I’d also add 13, where I thought the def was talent, and slate although I wasn’t falling for that one. Silently was my LOI so the setter did his job there.

    Thanks for the explanations for Balzac and Dumbarton, COD to okey-dokey.

  19. Nice puzzle, with a lot of clever definitions. About 30 minutes, ending with PINNACLE, right after finally seeing SILENTLY. The ‘cool customer’ definition seems fine to me; what I never heard of was the word NIFFY, although the word play for that was more like direction than a puzzle. Thanks to the setter, and a hearty welcome back to Koro. Regards to all.

    Edited at 2013-06-19 06:11 pm (UTC)

  20. Couldn’t finish this last night so came back to it on a break at work, I guess that means about 18 hours. DADO RAIL and SAVORY from wordplay, ASK OVER from definition. Commenting about 45 minutes before I should be blogging, whee.
  21. Considering how tired I was feeling, my 11:46 perhaps wasn’t so bad after all. But the tiredness turned my fingers dyslexic and it was ages before I spotted SLIENTLY. Apart from that, things had gone pretty well, with a clean sweep of the top half apart from FORMALIN (nice clue). A most enjoyable puzzle.

    Welcome back indeed. But one request: please could you put the number of the puzzle in the subject line?

    1. Oops! I’m obviously out of practice. I knew that header line didn’t look right, but I couldn’t think what was missing. Thanks for heads up. Now fixed.
  22. My internet connection’s been down for almost 24 hours so I couldn’t comment yesterday. Seeing how some struggled, I’m not so despondent about my solving time of 40 minutes. I’m embarrassed that I took so long to get Balzac, when the “unknown” should have given it to me immediately.
    The anagram for 2dn was superb.
  23. And thanks also to everyone else who contributes to this brilliant site… Please don’t let it die!

    I’m sure we must belong to a large crowd of onlookers who wouldn’t dare be ‘rude’ or ‘obsessive’ enough to count their times, but are grateful for the opportunity to learn (and laugh!) with you all. We don’t have an online account, and don’t buy a paper every day, so you have saved us from much frustration, AND let us into the secret of all that impossible wordplay. It’s been a great way to learn. We managed to solve this completely unaided and only came to you check the wordplay for 3d and 6d.

    Do please find a way to keep this fun teaching aid going, and maybe one day we’ll come and join the big boys to offer contributions of our own.

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