Times 24148

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

I was very surprised that this took me nearly an hour to solve because  I did not feel I was stuck at any point, just making steady progress. I had to go back after completion to decipher some of the clues and I am still unable to explain 14a fully. Edit: Just spotted it! 

Across
1 PA’S,S UP
9 SELF-HELP – SHELF with H moved to the end + PLE(ase) reversed
10 A,B,R,UP,T – A=are, B=bowled, R=run, UP=ahead, T=time. For once I wasn’t caught out by “are”, the measure of land.
11 FUN,D,ED
12 OPPO,SING – OPPO is a colleague or friend and it’s short for “opposite number” apparently.
14 PENNSYLVANIA – I don’t understand “annually” here. Who had the boot last? Just spotted it P(er) A(nnum).
17 DANSE MACABRE – (A man be scared)*. A dance of death. I know it mainly with reference to the piece by Saint-Saens.
20 JET,TIS,ON – SIT (rev) inside the other two components
22 IMP,ACT – IMP comes from the cross-reference to 6d
25 CIA,BAT,T(aormin)A – BAT=are in
26 BLUE,BELL – A passing bell is rung a moment or two after a death
 
Down
3 SA,FE D,E,POS(1)T – This one took me a while to unravel after solving but it was quite straightforward once I had spotted   It =Sex Appeal=SA
4 PSEUDONYM – (Does my pun)* with Lewis Carroll as an example
5 COP,I.O.U.S
6 S(ent),CAMP
7 AIR – Sounds like Ayr
8 A,P,PEN,DIX – The last component sounds like Dick’s.
13 SHAKESPEARE – (As speaker he)*
15 LUBRICANT – (Until bar c)*  C=Clubs here.
16 BASE(BAL)L – My last one in. LAB(our) is the party to return on this occasion. The Swiss city has two alternative spellings in addition to the French, Italian and Romansh versions of its name.
19 S,C,OT,CH – SCH=school encloses C=about and TO (rev)
21 S(T)ALE

23 comments on “Times 24148”

  1. 8:34 for this – rather a seat-of-the-pants solution, with about 5 wordplays not fully understood. Last in were 9A, 5D and 14A – on 5D I’d hastily guessed at a CUR- beginning and had this in the grid – even when you know it’s wrong, a dud entry can slow you down. The idea of 14A (seen after solving) is that Pennsylvania = PA = per annum, i.e. annually, when the PA is ‘expanded’.
  2. 22 mins here, which makes it not so hard, but I thought clues like 5ac and 13dn gave it good entertainment value.

    At 17ac, I don’t think a “danse macabre” could be described as “gory” – the pictures I have seen are rather genteel, without a trace of blood!

  3. About 35 mins plus what it took me to get 5A, which I note you haven’t blogged so you must have thought it too easy. Oh, well. I couln’t get CO-STAR IL(L) out of my head, thinking it might be some kind of Spanish version of littoral, but I couldn’t get it to fit with appendix no matter how much I tried.

    Also failed to see SA = it, even though I prided myself on seeing A = Are (both in the same crossword!). I was wondering why “It provided food” was “safed” but had in the back of my mind the Coolgardie safe which may have lent itself to a rather unlikely verb formation. (And they do lean. I’ve seen them.)

    So up goes the balloon with COD SHAKESPEARE

  4. I enjoyed this puzzle with some tricky wordplay and misleading definitions – about 30 minutes to solve. I struggled to get started but then got both of the long across clues straight away. I’m sure I’ve seen PA=per annum before and somehow I saw the anagram even though I also think of it as a piece of music rather than a “gory scene”. COPIOUS and CASTAWAY were my last two in as I had a real mental block and failed for ages to see incur=cop and strand=beach.
  5. 27:05 .. with probably ten minutes hunting for CASTAWAY. Like koro, I was fixated on something cognate with ‘littoral’. Too entertaining a clue to be angry with when the penny dropped.

    Q-0, E-7, D-7 .. COD 4d PSEUDONYM

  6. I sense that Jimbo is less than happy with “gory scene” = “danse macabre”. Me too. It means “dance of death”. Not a drop of blood to be seen. It refers to a late-medieval allegory in which characters from various walks of life are depicted dancing towards the grave –all the figures are shown as skeletons.

    I never spotted the wordplay for PENNSYLVANIA at 14ac, so thanks for the explanation guys.

    45 mins for me.

    Michael H

    1. On the “gory” danse macabre, maybe we need to forget the “gore” associations of “gory”. In COED it’s “involving or showing violence and bloodshed”. “bloodshed” in turn is defined as “the killing or wounding of people” with no actual blood required, so I think “gory” is justifiable as a description of the “dance of death”, which certainly involves the killing of people.
  7. I took longer than I felt I should have done – 38 minutes. In several cases I entered answers without fully understanding the wordplay, (and not at all in the case of 14a – thanks for Peter’s explanation). Liked “are in” for BAT and also particularly liked 11 (with its ambiguous tense of “put”),12, 26(nice indication of BELL) and 2.
  8. A rare one where I was completely on the setters wavelength, after 11 minutes I had all but 16 in and getting nowhere with LIB and RAVE reversed in, finally saw BASEBALL (a sport I used to think was pretty silly but now like a lot), all done in 13 minutes.

    Some really good clues here, the clues for ABRUPT and CIABATTA really tickled me

  9. At 29 minutes, this must have been one of my fastest times ever, however I didn’t understand the wordplay for several along the way, and some failed even a post-solve review. A happy trip here cleared up the rest.

    I wanted to take two ‘a’s out of chaplaincy in 18d to make the anagram, no matter how obviously this wouldn’t work. Call me stubborn…

    Amongst many good clues, COD 14ac, even if I didn’t understand it until I came here.

  10. Completed at a trot in 20 minutes, and like others I had a few where I didn’t fully understand the wordplay (PA, safe deposit and copious). Last in were teethe, impact and scotch.

    Did anyone else think there were rather a lot of Ps in the top half (8 I think)?

    COD jettison.

    1. Can’t say I noticed the Ps, penfold, but I did think there were a lot of As. 17 if I have counted correctly.
  11. A pleasant end to the week at 26:05.

    Last in was PENNSYLAVANIA on the grounds that it couldn’t be anything else by that point. I didn’t understand the wordplay until I came here.

    Nothing too difficult. I liked 5a and 20a.

  12. Nice try, Peter, but I still don’t think “gory” fits the bill. No violence or bloodshed is implied by “the dance of death”, which is simply a comment on the inevitability of death for all humankind. Here is the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: “DANCE OF DEATH: a medieval allegorical representation in which a personified Death leads people to the grave, designed to emphasize the equality of all before death”.

    Michael H

  13. 21 min, with a number going in without being understood at the time. Held up at the end by not being able to see “Shakespeare”, even with the anagram fodder and all the checking letters! Probably a mental block from school days. COD 14Ac, the last one to be understood – sneaky!
  14. Hi everybody. Took me about 40 minutes, longer than usual. Like others, I didn’t understand PENNSYLVANIA until coming here, and I realize that ‘are in’ is supposed to mean ‘bat’, but I have no idea why, and am suspicious there’s cricket involved. I didn’t know ‘oppo’=’friend’ either. My last in were the crossing FUNDED and AVENUE, though I can’t really explain why they took so long to spot, and they seem rather straightforward in retrospect. After being clued in on the wordplay, 14 is a good choice for COD, along with ABRUPT. Regards til next week.
    1. I expect this has been been posted here before but here’s an explanation of the In/Out rules of cricket, Kevin.

      You have two sides, one out in the field and one in.
      Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out.

      When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out.

      Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

      When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in.

      There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out.

      When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.

    2. And the batter that is in has as inning, the side that is in has an innings, but those that are out do not have outings, except in social cricket.
  15. Have not had much success most of this week caused mainly by family illness meaning reserves of mental and physical energy have been critically low. Still averaging about ten clues per day and with half term next week I’ll hopefully have a bit more time as I don’t have to go to work.

    As for this one, was very pleased with myself for remembering agents=CIA (from that BBC4 programme in November) which gave me 25a. Although still struggling with some answers (there’s a proper word for that isn’t there?) this was another puzzle when I understood all the clues which is becoming more common.

    Does 17a refer to Jonathan Creek which uses Danse Macabre as the theme tune or are television references avoided?

    1. I very much doubt it could be a reference to JC, Iain, but you’re right about the theme music. I was intending to refer to it when writing the blog but it slipped my mind when the time came. However, references to TV programmes do appear from time to time. Only this week we had Blackadder.
    2. TV programmes are certainly allowed and particularly ones I’ve never heard of. Everybody has a huge laugh when my knowledge of popular culture is once again exposed. The last one I recall was something called Neighbours. To further my education I then inadvisedly watched an episode. My therapist is hopeful that I will eventually recover. Good to see you persevering and progressing.

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