Times 24091

Author   foggywebPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 36 Minutes

Quite fun and not too difficult. NW corner last to go in for me. As soon as I got VARNISH, the rest fell into place.
Mostly familiar, although I learned the name of a Methodist preacher.

Across

1 LULU – LU=Lutetium, not an element I know.
3 U,SQUEBA,UGH – SQUEBA=anagram of BASQUE – odd-looking word, but familiar to whisky-drinkers. Pleased to spell it right first time.
11 SA,TSUM,A – A,MUST,AS(=when) reversed.
12 ROBIN GOODFELLOW – anagram of ‘below floor doing’.
13 TH[e],RIFT
17 MI’S CHIEF
18 BELL,O,C
21 BREACH,OF,PROMISE – the last of the long ones to fall for me. A breach of promise is when a man calls off his marriage proposal. I think the wordplay is a bit boring here, unless I’m missing something.
24 DR,EDGE,R
25 REPOS,1,TORY – I didn’t know Donald Soper, so this took a litle while.
26 TYPO – hidden word. I thought this was a neat clue.

Down

1 L(EVER)ET
2 LYREB,1,RD,S – LYREB=BERYL reversed.
6 BY THE SAME TOKEN – BY sounds like buy.
7 USUAL – oUtSwUmAlL – all the others means every other letter. Apparently.
9 SIGN OF THE CROSS – anagram of ‘of this Congress’ – ‘sign of the times’ popped into my head before I properly read the clue.
15 WIL(LING)LY – made me smile.
16 RE(DOLE)NT – thought of rent straightaway, but didn’t get dole for a bit.
17 MO,B[u]STER – confusingly online the clue has ‘to omertà’ as toomertà.
19 CHEER,10

33 comments on “Times 24091”

  1. I agree, foggy. About 18mins here – a nice puzzle to start the week.

    At 3ac I knew the word roughly but waited for the crossing letters before inking it in.

    Following Ross’s tui last week, the lyrebird is an amazing mimic – the following extract is brilliant.

    http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=WuFyqzerHS8

  2. 30 minutes for this one. I didn’t know USQUEBAUGH but mangaged to guess it correctly from the wordplay. Also I had never heard of “omerta” let alone “toomerta” as given on-line, but fortunately I couldn’t think of many options for “Keaton” in the clue so I solved it without difficulty.
  3. 8:54 for me, so a nice easy start to the week. As I’m a bit of a whisky buff, I had no trouble with 3A and it was the first one I got (actually Foggy, you’ve spelt it wrong in your blog entry, but I guess you must have got it right in the puzzle or none of the downs would have fit). I wonder if the 5 U’s in the top row make for some kind of record?
  4. Sorry. Don’t get this at all. I put LEAD instead. Rest of puzzle okay and quickly solved – but LULU… NO!
    1. I pencilled in LEAD too but couldn’t explain it so rubbed it out. Fortunately LULU came up quite recently defined as “outstanding” and I remembered it.
      1. A triple def? Outstanding; person; element twice. Can’t say I recognised the element either. I did get up to lithium (not hard: it being #3 in the list), and remembered Lr (Lawrencium) but La, and Lu are two of those boring elements somewhere in the middle…
        1. Can’t be a triple – outstanding is an adjective, lulu is a noun. And ‘person’ is horribly vague for ‘lulu’. Whereas ‘outstanding person’ is a precise def and the right part of speech.
  5. I made several mistakes – Mondayitis, perhaps. Not knowing 3A or Soper didn’t help. I agree that 21A is unexciting; is ‘giving’ meant to indicate OF?

    Tom B.

  6. As an aging lapsed Methodist I do remember Donald Soper but a teetotal background doesn’t help with USQUEBAUGH – fortunately the word play was pretty clear. Nice easy start to the week – about 6:30 ish.
  7. I expect there will be some sub-5-minute times. I felt this was about as easy as they come, though I failed to solve it in the 15 minutes I was aiming for – 18 minutes in the end. Getting 1A and 3 immediately helped me to fill much of the upper half. Thereafter it was just a question of fills based on definitions. I hardly looked at the wordplay in many cases.
  8. I fell for just about every trap put in place – wrote in SIGN OF THE CROSS without thinking and since there was a simlar clue elsewhere last week spaced on 18 and wrote in CIRCLE, then wondered why a bunch of answered didn’t fit.

    Once I realized what was afoot (somewhere around the second gin and tonic), I corrected those mistakes and was home in 22 minutes. USQUEBAUGH from wordplay, MOBSTER from part wordplay and it being the only word that came to mind that fit, REPOSITORY from definition and part wordplay.

  9. 7:03 here – various answers took just that bit too long for a really quick time. Apart from the SIGN OF THE CROSS, all the 15s were stock choices worth remembering. LULU was last in through not knowing about Lutetium, the BERYL in 2D having been fairly late too. LEVERET, BELLOC, SATSUMA, REDOLENT and TADPOLE seem like frequent grid entries too.
  10. A very fast (for me, at least) 27 minutes, with just a couple of unfamiliar words / phrases that fell into place without many problems (3ac / 21ac). COD 23ac, for the nice smooth surface.
  12. 7.25. Left myself with 13ac the end which I couldn’t solve for a while because I was reading the F in 9D as an E. E is so much more common a letter than F that it’s all too easy (for me, anyway), especially in a multi-word clue where I’ve barred off the separate words, to “see” the bottom line of the E that isn’t actually there at all.
  13. 9.54. Ashamed as a Scot to say that I had most problems with the whisky as I thought it would start “uis…”. I am sure(?) this is a variant.Anyway,managed to get the correct entry from the wordplay and checking letters. I also remember LULU from a puzzle earlier this year where it caused a few of us problems , so no problem this time.
    JohnPMarshall
    1. I think you’re remembering the the Gaelic word uisgebeatha from which the “English” one usquebaugh is derived.
      1. I immediately reached for the uisge beatha as well, which probably says something about my ancestry or my disposition.
  14. 25 minutes and no real problems. Couldn’t remember how to spell the whisky but it was easy enough with the checking letters. Agree with Peter a lot of these words seemed like old crossword friends.

    For those who are interested in the history of crosswords, Jeremy Morse is 80 this week. JM is the man whose name Colin Dexter used to create Inspector Morse. AZED has a delightful puzzle dedicated to JM which you can find on the Guardian crossword site.

  15. A nice 2 hours wlile watching Inspector Morse. Didn’t know the connection until I read dorsetjimbo above. I failed at 17D because of printing, and 1A. I thought Lulu was a second rate singer from way back.
    1. Jeremy Morse and a chap called Lewis used to vie with one another in the monthly clue writing competition first started by Ximenes and after his death continued by AZED. We mere mortals could rarely get a look in and Morse and Lewis used to bat the cup back and forth to one another. JM won a bit more often than Lewis and so Dexter called hie detective Morse and the sergeant Lewis!

      A lulu is a generic term for an outstanding (good or bad) person or thing. The “singer” just pinched it.

      1. Lulu was also the name of a character in a couple of plays by German dramatist Franz Wedekind. Too obscure a source? Well Engelbert Humperdinck borrowed his name from a German composer, so why not?
  16. 26 minutes. I managed to make really heavy weather of this. Depressed to note Jimbo’s comment about “old crossword friends”. I’ve been solving the Times for 20 years, but I’m afraid they could print the same grids on an annual rotation and I wouldn’t recognise one of them.

    This crossword earned its keep with 12a alone. The devil as the troublemaker below the floor is a lovely idea.

  18. Yes a very pleasant start to the week, about 20 minutes, no real hold-ups. Got a lot of these from wordplay that was clearly pointing to the answer, even when I was unclear on the definition, i.e. SATSUMA, LYREBIRDS, WILLINGLY. ‘Nothing loth’ must be British idiom. Regards, see you tomorrow.
  20. Steady on folks – Lulu is not my particular favourite artist either but to call her “second rate” is unfair. She has a very strong and distinctive voice that suits her style of music very well. She was a joint winner of Eurovision in 1969 with Boom-bang-a-bang (not written by her) which bizarrely – this is where research in Wikipedia really gets worthwhile – was banned by the BBC during the 1991 Gulf War. Is that really true?

    Oh yes – the crossword. An excellent offering that I did not find quite as easy as others above. I did complete it successfully thereby learning about USQUEBAUGH at 3a (I was familiar with the gaelic spelling but not this variant), Mr SOPER at 25a and OMERTA at 17d.

    There are 8 “easies”:

    10a Peter out without right coat (7)
    VA R NISH

    14a Remove crockery, etc, omitting one area where you can’t stop (8)
    CLEAR (A) WAY

    23a A little Eastern European larva (7)
    TAD POLE

    4d Train a group of swimmers (6)
    SCHOOL

    5d Ploughed land used to tend horse (8)
    UNSADDLE. Anagram of (land used).

    8d Teacher means to make progress (7)
    HEAD WAY

    20d Pride’s damaged by small creature (6)
    SPIDER. Anagram of (pride’s).

    22d Turn out to be inverted (3,2)
    END UP

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