Quick Cryptic 3030 by Teazel

Author   DoofenschmirtzPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic

 

I enjoyed this one a lot. All done in 14:42, just a smidge below my average time, so I’ll put this one squarely in the “medium difficulty” bucket.

There were two pieces of general knowledge that were new to me: the bicycle and the butterfly, but both were generously clued and the enumerations were helpful. I particularly noticed the near-total absence of the “first letter of” and “last letter of” style of cluing, which made the surfaces very smooth, I thought.

My FOI was MOCK, LOI was RESIDE, and my COD award goes to BALLERINA.

Definitions underlined, synonyms in round brackets, wordplay in square brackets and deletions in strikethrough. Anagram indicators italicised in the clue, anagram fodder indicated like (this)*.

Across
1 Run around quickly in small sort of van (7)
SCAMPER – S for small + CAMPER (van).
5 An exam  to treat with contempt? (4)
MOCK – Double definition.

For those outside the UK, “mock” exams are dry runs that students take in the run-up to the actual exams. If memory serves, we took our mock O and A levels in December, with the real exams the following June.
7 Giant bird with a name (5)
TITAN – TIT (bird), A, N for name.
8 What insects may have done as south got hotter (7)
SWARMED – S for South, WARMED (got hotter).
10 Run smartly back for tack (3)
PIN – NIP (run smartly), reversed [back].

This took me longer than it should have done.
11 Commissioned exactly what’s required and was sure of success (3,2,4)
HAD IT MADE – Another double definition.
13 Students receiving substantial amount of storage in the cloud (6)
NIMBUS – NUS (National Union of Students) including [receiving] IMB for 1 megabyte (substantial amount of storage).
14 Came across bricklayer’s tool and how to use it? (6)
METHOD – MET (came across) HOD (bricklayer’s tool).

If I recall correctly, there was a discussion here recently in which a bricklayer was quoted as never having come across a hod in his entire career.
17 Book all-Ireland ace dancer (9)
BALLERINA – B for book, ALL, ERIN (Ireland), A (Ace).

A four-part IKEA clue in five words. Very nice.
19 Number required to constitute company? (3)
TWO – A cryptic definition, referring to the saying “two’s company, three’s a crowd”.
20 Girls following grand spectacles (7)
GLASSES – G for grand, LASSES (girls).

If you look up “G abbreviation” you get plenty of hits, but I can’t recall ever seeing this in real life.
22 Undercover police operation  hurt a little (5)
STING – A third double definition.
23 Carry on, but glance back (4)
KEEP – PEEK (glance), reversed [back].

“Keep” can replace “Carry on” in “Carry on doing that”.
24 Remove perfume? That’s a comedown (7)
DESCENT – descent, with “de” as in defang. Ho ho ho.
Down
1 Boxer possibly trained to do this  sort of bicycle (3,2,3,3)
SIT UP AND BEG – our fourth double definition.

The first definition refers to a dog, the second is a type of bicycle, which was news to me.
2 Not many misused “bad” for “good”, for example (7)
ANTONYM – (NOT MANY)*
3 Quietly show excitement about old luxury flat (9)
PENTHOUSE – P (quietly, from music) + ENTHUSE (show excitement) including [about] O (old).
4 Live on edge (6)
RESIDE – RE (on, as in email reply subject lines) + SIDE (edge).

I initially had this as BESIDE, parsed as “to be” = “to live” + the on SIDE from cricket, but the definition wasn’t quite right, and then the R of SCAMPER turned up to push the penny off the ledge.
5 Samoans corralling flightless bird (3)
MOA – hidden in SaMOAns, with “corralling” acting as the containment indicator.
6 In deep sleep, minute butterfly (5)
COMMA – M for minute (as in HH:MM:SS) in COMA (deep sleep).

I pencilled this in from the wordplay, and then all three of the crossers came, so it had to be correct. But I’d never heard of the comma butterfly before today, so that’s two things I’ve learned.
9 Never fear a battleship (11)
DREADNOUGHT – dread nought – never fear.

Barely cryptic, since this is precisely where the word “dreadnought” comes from. There have been several ships in the Royal Navy called HMS Dreadnought, but the one that gave its name to the class of ships was the one launched in 1906. So says Wikipedia, and who am I to argue?
12 Ordinary people, those fools (3,6)
THE MASSES – THEM ASSES (those fools)

Slightly ungrammatical, but fun.
15 Emergency resource in hotel is out of order (7)
HOTLINE – (IN HOTEL)*
16 Prejudiced bishop cast aside (6)
BIASED – B for bishop (from chess notation) + (aside)*.
18 Contract to rent meadows with house at the rear (5)
LEASE – LEAS (meadows), with the last letter of housE [at the rear].
21 Cat shortly coming up to drink (3)
SUP – PUSs (cat), reversed [coming up, in a down clue] and without its last letter [shortly].

89 comments on “Quick Cryptic 3030 by Teazel”

  1. 15:22
    COD THE MASSES

    Last ones in were SCAMPER/RESIDE. I had ONSIDE, because if a player is onside, he is live. This left SHAMPOO which fitted nicely but made no sense.

    Not sure why we need “exactly what’s required”, “commissioned” by itself is fine for HAD IT MADE.

    G for Grand as racy speak where the G refers to a thousand dollars, “that’s a nice car for 40G”. Not the worst abbreviation, but once you ask to see them in the wild, rather than in Collins you often come up short.

    1. I had the same feeling about ‘exactly what’s required’, but ‘commissioned’ by itself won’t account for the IT; some sort of object phrase is needed.

    2. Merlin – I saw “Stone outside good school (5)” in another puzzle today and thought it would please you!

  2. DNK the bike. We’ve had COMMA in 15x15s, and it came to me once I had a checker or two. 6:28

  3. Not the easiest of quickies with some clues requiring a bit of thought, for me anyway. I’d hardly call one megabyte of storage ‘substantial’ these days but in it went for NIMBUS. We’ve had ‘hod’ for a bricklayer’s tool a couple of times recently, something I’ve known of all my life but I’m not sure you’d call it a tool as it’s only used for carrying bricks, does that make a shopping bag a tool? I liked METHOD anyway. Liked HAD IT MADE and didn’t really think about the wordplay, just assumed it meant ‘made to one’s own specification’. COMMA rang a distant bell for the butterfly but the wordplay was clear. COD to RESIDE.
    Thanks D and setter.

    1. I worked for an Atari shop in 1989 and remember the awe when the 30Mb Megafile 30 hard drive came out. These days 30Gb is pretty insubstantial.

        1. I had a Sinclair Spectrum 48k – many hours were wasted on Atic Atac, Manic Miner and many other games made by Ultimate, Ocean and the rest.

    2. I agree re ” substantial”. My phone is 500GB.
      I remember somehow compressing my hard drive decades ago to increase it from 20MB to 40MB.
      Nowadays I can take a photo that would use up that hard drive.

    3. I had a great time selling 35M hard disks in the 1980s. you get 128G on a stick now. I gather fractals and FFT are used for data encoding so I guess it’s a virtual 128G rather than that many transistors.

      I remember semiconductor physics 1972 when it dawned on the class that a junction only need be about 20 atoms across.

  4. 13.10, tough going and I was slow to get started. Apart from SWARMED I got nothing in the top half of acrosses so switched to the downs. HOTLINE and METHOD were last in and took some figuring out. Same same re bike and butterfly. As Merlin says, I’ve heard people refer to sums of money as 10G or whatever, but these days they are more likely to say 10K. Thanks to Teazel and the Doof.

  5. 10 minutes. Lift and separate at 12dn does away with with concerns about grammar: THEM (those), ASSES (fools). A sit up and beg bicycle also refers to a dog indirectly. It’s the traditional basic type with high handlebars (as opposed to drop handlebars) that result in the cyclist sitting in an upright position like a dog begging. I’d have expected the enumeration to indicate hyphens throughout, but no doubt (3,2,3,3) is listed somewhere or other.

    I nearly went over 10 minutes as I was missing HAD IT MADE as the clock ticked down.

  6. Some interesting stuff today. Didn’t know the bike. I don’t have ‘run smartly’ in my idiolect, so didn’t see that for ‘nip’. ‘G’ is used quite often in rap and related styles, eg ‘Issmad’ from JME:

    My booking fee was under 1G
    When I started spitting in the year 2G
    Feds don’t like me or my three G’s [Gs here means ‘friends’, ‘associates’]
    ‘Cause we film them and upload on 4G

    6:19, not finest hour. Thanks all!

  7. NHO the bike, or MOA and couldn’t parse NIMBUS or BALLERINA. Enjoyed nevertheless

    1. Moas are about as big as birds come. In fact they may have been the biggest. Unfortunately, we killed them all a few hundred years ago although that doesn’t stop the odd hotel in NZ reporting sightings to try and drum up trade.

  8. Once saw an amazing butterfly with wavy edged wings in the Chilterns – looked it up, saw it was a COMMA and hoped to see others – never have. A solid six on the first pass of acrosses but I thought I might find things hard – and I did. Ended up with a pink square of my own making. Knew the opposites were going to be a something -nym, write in the checkers and thought I had a spare U. Looking at the piece of paper I wrote the anagrist on I didn’t. Really enjoyed THE MASSES, METHOD and especially NIMBUS. Not fast but a great puzzle – really quite stuck until SIT UP AND BEG arrived, which I associate with motorbikes.

  9. Got there, albeit slowly, despite having NHO COMMA or ERIN. And, as others have commented, it’s been a very long time since 1MB storage could be considered substantial. I remember being wowed by the 16K RAM expansion pack for a ZX81.

    Pi ❤️

    1. Oh yes. About the size of a pack of cigarettes, and had to be held on with an elastic band, which always failed just before you were ready to run your program.

      1. Mine was a Commodore PET with 16K RAM, in which I created what then seemed like extraordinary programs. I still chuckle when I save an “empty” Word document and see that it’s twice that size!

          1. My first IT job in 1979 was programming a computer (Rank Xerox Sigma 9) with 16k of memory, and that was classed as a mainframe with up to 32 users.

  10. Steady going today.

    I was pleased to dredge the bicycle from the depths of memory banks which gave me lots of handy starting letters but I made hard work of HOTLINE as I was trying to anagram ‘hotel is’. Like our blogger I initially went with ‘beside’ at 4d before deciding that the van was very unlikely to end with a ‘b’.

    Started with SIT UP AND BEG and finished with SWARMED in 8.17 with CsOD to PENTHOUSE and THE MASSES.

    Thanks to Doofers and Teazel

  11. A lot of wavelength clicking today, and saved myself from a DPS by remembering to return to my first plausible-but-not-really-parsing answer at 1a, correcting “scarper” to SCAMPER at the last moment. Phew.

    COD to THEM ASSES, made me chuckle. All done in 05:52 for a Red Letter Day. Many thanks Teazel and Doofers.

  12. A fair challenge. THEM ASSES was good. Knew the bike. LOI HAD IT MADE. 9:25.

  13. 9:50

    Very slow to gain any traction today, not knowing the bicycle, picking up the wrong anagrist for 15d (HOTEL IS rather than IN HOTEL), and taking several moments to come up with LOI HAD IT MADE. COMMA seen in the 15×15 so no problem there.

    Thanks Doofers and Teazel

  14. 19:02 for the solve. About half my time spent up in the NE where couldn’t think of the van, had-it-nade and only vho COMMA – so think we must have had it here. Overall felt a bit tough with the wording of clues. NHO ERIN=Ireland or the bike

    Thanks to Doofers and Teazel

  15. Nothing to add to the foregoing. I was briefly breeze-blocked in the NW corner, where I can’t justify not seeing RESIDE much more quickly.

    FOI TITAN
    LOI SCAMPER (luckily I didn’t biff “Transit” right at the start!)
    COD THE MASSES
    TIME 5:10

  16. I enjoyed this, and learned a new word with ANTONYM. Knew the butterfly and the bike so that helped the top to fill up nicely, MOCK had me puzzled until COMMA made it obvious.
    Teazel and I are not always compatible but today was harmonious. Liked THE MASSES and METHOD.
    Never having had aspirations to be a speed solver I have turned off the timer completely when I solve and the subconscious urge to just have a glance every few answers is therefore removed. I am finding this enhances my enjoyment and actually seems to help my solving! I realise that this may have me brutally thrown out of a blog whose original purpose and name revolve around times, but…
    Today’s time: pleasantly constant with flashes of inspiration and mild periods of consideration.

    1. I’m with you; never tried to time it, which would spoil the enjoyment. But for that reason I’ve always felt I don’t “properly” belong but am only allowed in under sufferance. Nice to know I’m not alone!

    2. I can’t imagine there is anyone here–not one single person–who disapproves of your ignoring the time.

      1. I stopped timing after QC about 500. It gives much more satisfaction IMHO, I always write down anagrams and cross off the letters to be sure. If I think a clue is “iffy” I will try to make up one that I like better (almost completely unsuccessfully), and making the second cup of coffee is an essential.

        You are definitely not alone

    4. Brutality and TftT don’t mix!

      I time but stopped looking at the timer during solving early on. You can turn it off but I don’t bother any more. It’s very disruptive to think about how long things are taking and spoils the fun.

    5. Yes, I’m the same, timer is off, when I solve. I’m not a competitive person, except with myself.
      I’m sure that there are many of us, ‘out there’.

  17. On wavelength today for an 8:10 solve, though neither NIMBUS nor THE MASSES parsed as I turned to Doofers’ excellent blog for illumination. Obvious once explained but add me to the camp of “a megabyte isn’t much storage these days”.

  18. Just not on the wavelength today, slogged our way through with method, comma and mock bringing up the rear at 31.07. I put it down to an extra hour in bed! On the plus side we did parse it all.

    Done up like a kipper on virtually every misdirection so boxer as dog never occurred until the bicycle got there. COD to antonym.

    Thanks Teazel and Doofers

  19. 5:15. As Doofers says, “medium difficulty” and an average time for me. I liked the boxer training device. LOI HAD IT MADE where I struggled to remember the last word for a moment. Thank-you Teazel and Doofers

  20. 9:39 (death of Æthelstan)

    I am yet another who struggled over HOTLINE by thinking the anagrist included the “is” rather than the “in”.

    Thanks Doofers and Teazel

  21. I enjoyed METHOD, NIMBUS (although as many have pointed out, 1MB is hardly substantial) and THE MASSES.

    I have had builders in recently, doing a front extension. I can confirm that I didn’t see a hod. Also, over the road a new house is being built. I noticed that on various occasions they had a sort of portable conveyor belt thing conveying bricks / breeze blocks up from street level to the first floor where they were working. I think a hod was the thing you used to carry bricks up to higher levels via scaffolding, so perhaps it is largely obsolete now because of these conveyor belt things?

    1. As I mentioned last week when hod came up. While the three-sided box hods still exist, some brickcarriers are big pair of tongs/ clamp carried like a suitcase with 6-12 bricks at a a time . I would think from a H&S / ergonomic perspective this is also better as putting a hod over one’s shoulder would create muscular imbalances.

  22. Nice and witty. Learned the bicycle, and I’ll not look at one quite the same way again. ta doofenschmirtz

  23. Slow but steady solve today. Initial thought of BESIDE soon corrected. Sometimes wonder where random bits of knowledge come from, but did know the bike and the butterfly. Thanks Doofers and Teazel.

  24. Called a comma due to the comma-shaped marks on its underwings. We have them in our garden at the moment.

    1. Yes, we have them too (together with an unusually wide range of other species this year). Our Buddleia bushes have benefitted from the spring and summer weather (despite some crude hacking so we could see the rest of the garden!) and must be 15 feet high. They are covered with butterflies and are a joy.

  25. An enjoyable but quite testing (for me) outing with Teazel. I thought I was going to manage a quick solve at first but there were enough chewy clues to bring me within seconds of the SCC (19.50).
    There were quite a few clues that I think were probably less accessible to younger solvers and I must confess to biffing a couple, given crossers (but I could see the parsing without spending time on it). Now to read Doofer’s take on it all.
    Thanks to both.

  26. I knew reality would hit and after two good days, came back to normality with 17m57s. Very slow on Scamper – reminded me of the Secret Seven’s dog which, unlike Timmy from the Famous Five, wasn’t counted in the 7. Thanks Teazel and Doofers

  27. From SIT UP AND BEG to HOTLINE in 5:33. It had to be NIMBUS, as NIPBUS, NITBUS and NIGBUS didn’t seem to work! HAD IT MADE took a bit while. THEM ASSES helped. Thanks Teazel and Doofers.

  28. I agree with those who say this was of medium difficulty. Like my recent QC solving of late, I didn’t have too much joy with the across clues, but the down clues were perhaps easier, and I eventually stopped the clock at 8.30.
    I agree with the previous comment about a ‘hod’ not being classed as a bricklayers tool. Although I’ve been retired as an architect for nearly ten years, I’m pretty sure that on site visits made in the twenty or so years previous to that, I never saw a bricklayer utilising a hod. With modern building practices, the mechanical lift or conveyer has replaced the hod, much to the relief of the brickies I’m sure!

  29. Tricky start today, not feeling it at all before taking a break to do some (ugh) work, but after that things seemed to flow in nicely – though I too hadn’t heard of the butterfly, or ERIN for Ireland (and I got the parsing for MOA but had to check that it was indeed a bird). Thanks Teazel and Doofenschmirtz!

  31. There’s always a STING in the tail of a Teazel and I found three difficult: NIMBUS (add Mrs M to the “1 MB hardly a substantial amount of storage” club), HOTLINE, and LOI METHOD (DNK what a HOD is). Got there in the end, though. Thanks you, Doofers, for a useful check; we’ve NHO the comma butterfly but do see it’s there.
    Oh! I just bunged in the obvious BALLERINA but NHO Ireland = ERIN; what’s that, please? Erse for Eire? Analogous to Scotland = Alba?
    Interesting that so many have NHO this bike. My normal mode of transport in London is what I call a bicycle (it’s 3-speed with a basket on the front); but there are so many kinds of high-falutin racing bikes around these days that people seem to call mine a SIT UP AND BEG (insultingly, I feel) – don’t know why they do. (Jackkt: don’t see any connexion between sitting upright – as we all do when sitting in a chair, after all – and a dog begging?)

  32. 17:48

    Had no idea on either definition for SIT UP AND BEG so just made random words to fit the checkers. Struggled with HOTLINE as was distracted by hotel which I took to mean H and missed the anagram. Looked twice at NIMBUS. 1MB is a rather insubstantial amount of storage these days. LOI METHOD.

  33. DNF at 21mins . METHOD defeated me despite getting HOD from crossers. Obvious once I saw the answer.
    I had heard of comma butterflies – and do see them so no problems there.
    Much to enjoy. SIT UP AND BEG my COD.

    Thanks Teazel and Doofers.

  34. Another super one, thanks to Teazel and Doofers. Didn’t know Erin but obvious from the wordplay.

    Bricklayers used to get their own bricks from the supply and carry them in a hod to where they were working which was fine for small buildings, but as the buildings got higher they were spending all their time running up and down ladders. So they came up with hod-carriers (unskilled) to do the grunt work and left the brickies (skilled) to just lay bricks. A guy called super-hod made himself a fortune by using a quadruple-size hod and sprinting up and down the ladders with it all day. Nowadays a crane just lifts a pallet of bricks and places it next to where the brickie is working.

    Smile at 1 Mb being “substantial”, several products now come with free cloud storage, my laptop came with 5Tb which is 5,000,000 Mb, and that is just the free sample.

    GP is Grand Prix in motorsport.

  35. On the wavelength today. A steady solve until I had to think about LOI KEEP. Had pencilled in Peep but knew it did not parse.
    Fortunately, the bike sprang to mind from nowhere as FOI which helped. Knew MOA, ERIN and butterfly and battleship.
    THEM ASSES made me smile. Also liked METHOD, STING, NIMBUS and, of course, SIT UP AND BEG.
    Thanks vm, Doofers.
    John, no problem logging in today, so thank you too.

  36. After two days of being out of the SCC I’m back in my usual territory of 50 minutes for this solve 😁 COD goes to DREADNOUGHT for me, very clever. Learnt a lot about micelles and butterflies from this puzzle. Thank you for the blog, some clues still had me confused at the wordplay at the end, especially NIMBUS, but makes sense now.

  37. 22 minutes today, which is fast for me. Just a slight (3-4 mins) hold-up at the end with the intersecting COMMA and MOCK, but my alphabet trawls were productive.

    My F2I were TITAN and SWARMED. I DNK ERIN for Ireland, so BALLERINA was a partial biff. My CoD was THE MASSSES, as it made me smile.

    Many thanks to Doofers and Teazel.

    P.S. Famous last words maybe, but might I just commend the editor and setters for appearing recently to have settled on an appropriate level of difficulty for something billed as a QC. There seems to be far less gnashing of teeth from us regulars these days, so well done from the less competent half of the Random household – and long may it continue.

  38. We have a lot of bikes in our household, mostly road bikes, a few mountain bikes and a new gravel bike but not the unknown SIT UP AND BEG bike. Not surprisingly that was my LOI. I also DNK the butterfly but the wordplay was generous. I biffed PENTHOUSE and NIMBUS and parsed post solve. My FOI SCAMPER came very quickly as I have just returned from Glastonbury and I was surrounded by campervans. 7:23 Thanks Doofers

      2. Thanks….just looked at an image of the bike…..it is what I’d call a shopper (not a chopper!).

  39. 11 mins…

    Another enjoyable puzzle. As a cyclist, I knew about Sit Up and Beg bikes, but I didn’t know there was a Comma Butterfly. As many have noted above, 1MB isn’t a substantial amount of storage, but I still enjoyed the clue for 13ac. With regards to Dreadnought, I believe it is the name of the new class of nuclear submarines that will be built as part of the Trident programme going forward.

    FOI – 1ac “Scamper”
    LOI – 11ac “Had It Made”
    COD – 13ac “Nimbus”

    Thanks as usual!

    1. Yes, and also the name of Britain’s first nuclear submarine (SSN01), albeit it had an American S5W reactor.

  40. Well, the answers just seemed to fly in today! Loved the puzzle from start to finish. Plenty of wit. Particularly liked NIMBUS and THE MASSES

    Thanks Teazel and Doofers

  41. A lot of biffing today. Didn’t find it too taxing overall. No exact time as done surreptitiously at work, but around 12 mins at a guess.

  42. Defeated by METHOD, which in retrospect ought to have been a write in,apart from that average difficulty

  43. The bricklayer anecdote told by Gerard Hoffnung cemented the hod in my brain many years ago. “The barrel…the barrel…” wonderful comic timing and mastery of your audience. Nice to see those early computer memories, stimulated by 1MB. It would indeed have been magical to have that amount of memory in an Amstrad CPC 464! I needed 15 minutes plus for this one, but got there: equal cods were THEM ASSES and DE SCENT. Getting the hang of split words! Wouldn’t say 11a applied but had fun and Wimbledon now beckons. Thanks Teazel and Doofers

  44. 8.24 – all very gettable but a couple not fully parsed so thanks Doofers for the blog.

  45. 9.43. some quite tricky clueing here – COMMA was one I only knew from the 15×15 – (and I spent far too long trying to make MO fit inside REM!). DREADNOUGHT was a fun one, easily gettable. I’d query whether 1MB was substantial storage these days? perhaps the setter is still working on the old floppy disk system!

  46. 17:14. Another admirer of THE MASSES. I always wondered about Ireland being called at times Eire, at times Erin. It appears Erin comes from different grammatical cases of Eire- Eireann(genitive) or Eirin(dative) and became popularized from phrases or slogans such as In Eirin go Brach(Ireland Forever), usually seen as Erin Go Bragh.

  47. Didn’t know the butterfly or that Erin was Ireland but knew the bike (and indeed owned one back in the day). Always love a Teazel puzzle and really enjoyed this one. Couldn’t parse NIMBUS (ah, NUS, ok – now COD) but otherwise a very steady solve. Many thanks for the blog. Off to check out what a comma butterfly looks like…

  49. Avoided SCC by 20 seconds. There was method in Teazel’s masses.
    Cheers D&T

  50. Discovered Comma butterflies yesterday when I spotted one in my garden and tried to identify it. Sit up and Beg bikes are similar to Dutch bikes – easy to ride in normal clothing, minimal gearing so they don’t go very quickly and often a basket on the front.

    Swarming took me longer than it should have…

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