Times 24065 – Solver’s Block

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

This took me an hour with most of the lower half completed in 15 minutes. I don’t know why I found the top half so difficult.  I certainly thought this the most difficult of the week so far but there was lots of quirky cluing which kept me amused throughout.

Across
1 JOHN DORY – A type of fish. Hunky-dory = completely satisfactory
5 GO,S(S)IP
10 HO,AXE,R
13 S(QUEE(n),G)EED – Intricate cluing of a less than familiar word. I may be mistaken but I think years ago there was a mop sold under the trade-mark “Squeegie” and I was expecting “IE” here rather than “EE” until I spotted the wordplay. I think QUEE clued by “Manx cat” has come up before.
14 WIND OF CHANGE – A phrase famously used by Harold MacMillan in 1960 with reference to the changing political climate on the African continent. Not sure whether he actually coined it.
18 WRITER’S BLOCK – But not solver’s over this one I’m pleased to say
21 DA,TE ST,A,MP – My first one in today
23 (f)IN ALL(y) – I spotted the answer straight away but took ages to work out why
24 LAID ON – NO. DIAL (rev) Dial being the means to call the number, I suppose.
25 ON TIPTOE – (INTO TOP + E)*
26 DAEMON – oN fOrM dEmAnD (rev). I don’t associate demons with divinity, but “daemon” with an “a” has an alternative meaning according to the ancient Greeks: A divinity or supernatural being of a nature between gods and humans.
27 THE, H,AGUE – Ague = Fit here
 
Down
1 JU(LIA)N(e) – JUNE cut short around AIL (rev). I’m not familiar with “Julian Date” and I’m in good company because it’s not in COED, Chambers or Collins but I suppose if one knows of the Julian Calendar and the Julian Year it’s not too much of a stretch.
2 HUNG,RY – I pencilled in FISHED on first reading and was ready to moan about a rotten clue, so I was relieved to find the setter had something much better in store.
3 DI’S,K, DRIVE – K = Grand (as in £1,000) here
6 OZ,ONE – It’s hard to explain this homophone in writing as ONE sounds like OWN looks daft, but it works in context. In my experience the so-called invigorating air people believe they can smell at the seaside usually has more to do with rotting seaweed than anything else.
7 SIXPENNY – (EX SPY I + N + N)* I took a long time to solve this one because I missed “news” as the plural of “new” to complete the anagram material. This one shows the impact of inflation over the years as in my childhood sixpence was worth quite a lot and something of little worth would have been termed twopenny-halfpenny.
8 PA(ROD,IE)D
11 SU(FFO)LK PUNCH – Pet = SULK containing OFF (rev). I’m not completely sure how Up = Off but I suppose if one takes off one goes up in the air. Edit: Oops! Thanks to Keith for pointing out that it’s Turned = Off and “Up” is the reversal indocator.
15 HO CHI MINH – The revolutionary leader of Vietnam composed from the first letters of House Of Commons History Is Mentioned In New Hansard.
16 SW,ADDLED – WS (rev) from W.S.Gilbert
19 RAG,TAG – I hastily wrote in RAG BAG and then had to waste time sorting it out when I realised there was no B in the anagram material at 25
20 FLEE,CE –  I must be missing something here. Do = Fleece. FLEE = Seek asylum and CE = Church (of England), so why  “Roman Church”?  Or is it FLE(EC)E and EC somehow means Roman Church?   Edit:  Thanks to Mike for pointing out Flee C of E might = Go to Rome
22 SLO-MO – Hidden word reversed

25 comments on “Times 24065 – Solver’s Block”

  2. My experience was very similar to Jack’s. After about 30 mins I had completed everything except 20D and the NE corner where I no toehold at all. When I went back to it later I saw 13AC and completed it in about another 10 mins.

    Thanks Jack for saving me the trouble of working out 23A. I wish I could reciprocate by explaining 20D, but I can’t.

    Isn’t “it” redundant in 24A? I thought the clue might have been better as “Provided number and means to call back” but I expect I have missed the point as usual!

      1. Looking back I have no idea why I wrote that. Still, I suppose every blog needs its resident idiot.
  4. About 60′ here today with the NE corner proving stubborn. Incomprehensibly, 5a held me up for ages. Once I’d got that, the rest slotted into place.

    Didn’t understand 20d, so thanks for explaining it.

  5. My times are usually very similar to jackkt’s, so I’m surprised I finished in 30 minutes. I must admit that I didn’t think too much about the wordplay, but whacked in answers that fitted the definition and the letters in the grid, then thought about the wordplay later. The one clue where I was disappointed with myself for not solving sooner was 1a. HUNKY should have suggested HUNKY-DORY immediately.
    I like the clues, many of which were inventive. The clueing of SUFFOLK was particularly good
  6. 12:34 for this, including time to understand the wordplay on 23, though I should probably have concluded that (2,3) and I?A?L only allows one answer. Nice combination of fairly regular answers like JOHN DORY and SUFFOLK PUNCH, with novel ones like DIRT BIKE and HO CHI MINH, giving us a pangrammatic grid. And lots of really good clues.
  7. Didn’t spot the pangram until after Peter pointed it out, that was a nice touch. Didn’t get an uninterrupted time to solve last night, but the overall time was 35 minutes and I liked a lot of the clues. 15 is terrific, I liked the cryptic definition at 18, and 14 sums up this week in the You Ess of Eh? And there were no Scottish towns I’d never heard of clued with TV shows I’d been trying to block from memory, so several thumbs up!
    1. Damn! I considered the pangram as soon as the Z and Q were in, but forgot to check before writing the blog.

      Sabine, the anagram at 4D foxed me too. I was convinced the second word was STAR.

  8. 10.00. Enjoyed this one. Had something of a blind spot with the long anagram at 4d, mainly due to a wrong assumption that there would be an S at the end of the first word.

    The wordplay at 23 was of a kind that has twice totally defeated me since I started doing blogs here, but this time I saw it right away.

  9. 16:17 for this one which looks pretty quick in context.

    No particular hold-ups, just a few clues needing more than a moment’s thought and, like others, some going in based on def and checkers with wordplay unravelled later (Suffolk punch, Julian).

    Plenty of interesting clues made this very enjoyable.

    Q-0, E-8.5, D-6, COD 1a

  11. Cracker. No idea how long it took but it seemed like 15-20 mins. 2d gets my COD nod. I’ve never seen news=NN before – belting!
  12. Pretty tricky today, I thought. I crawled through this for 50 minutes before I ran out of time, with 1ac / 1d / 2d / 20d / 25ac still blank. I would probably have got there in the end, but this was a bit of a slog.
  13. Excellent puzzle and a real challenge. Looking back only 3 of the clues were solved at first sight. Every corner presented problems and the last two which took about 10 minutes to solve were SQUEEGEED and FLEECE. I did think of squeegied which didn’t fit and 20 was really devious. COD – could have been a few but 13 gets my vote as an original word. 27 minutes.
    Good end to the week
    JohnPMarshall
  14. Thanks to Mike for explaining the full wordplay of FLEECE, an answer which I got without fully understanding. A cracker of a clue like many in this superb puzzle. My experience was similar to that of others, with answers going in fairly steadily at first but then getting bogged down, in my case, in the SE corner. 1dn – JULIAN – also resisted solution for some while. All in all, about 1 hour. An excellent Friday work-out for the old grey matter.

    Mike H

  15. About 35 minutes, no real quibbles or obscurities, except that ‘Gilbert’ doesn’t make this Yank think immediately of the G&S Gilbert. I shall try to remember that when doing this puzzle, it probably should. I agree that WIND OF CHANGE is apropos for the US right now, but my favorites were SQUEEGEED and HO CHI MINH. Regards, have a pleasant weekend.
  16. 15 Min for all but 20 Dn.Returned after an interruption and realized that fleece (which I had earlier considered but rejected) must be correct. Didn’t understand the Roman bit until coming here. (But then why not the Scottish church?)
    1. Agreed. Hence my “Hm” above. It might have passed without comment on another day but this puzzle is otherwise so good, it rather spoils it.
      1. In theory you could flee from any church to any other, but at least in Britain the most obvious pair of “opposed” churches are the Alglicans & Catholics (CE and RC in xwdspeak). One person in the news lately to “FLEE CE” in this way was Cardinal Newman.
  17. ‘date stamp’ is IT jargon, too. Date stamp columns in database tables maintain audit information of records.
  18. This was highly entertaining – I agree with all the good comments above.

    Just the 4 “easies” in this one:

    9a Promontory has light attached to post (5,3)
    LAND SEND. Light as in “a bird lights upon a branch”.

    12a Lacking water drinking cold bitter (5)
    A C RID. The clue sounds like a perfect solution to the problem.

    4d Garden site is prepared as place with great view (8,4)
    RINGSIDE SEAT. A splendid anagram of (garden site is) that did not resolve as quickly as it’s inclusion here might indicate.

    17d Bit irked after breaking scrambling machine (4,4)
    DIRT BIKE. Scrambling – as it was called then – used to be televised on BBC on Saturday afternoons in the 1960s.

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