Times 24,205 Little to tical my fancy

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 25 minutes

A largely straightforward puzzle with one or two little niggles and too many weak cryptic definitions. Nothing particularly stood out for me.

Across
1 TICK – two meanings 1=time, 2=irritating bloodsucking insect;
9 ELEGIST – E-LEGI(S)T; S=son; LEGIT=”allowed” outside “son”; E=drug rather than drugs;
11 UNTWINE – (j)UN-TWIN-E; TWIN=copy; to separate rather than to release;
12 PRACTICAL – CARP reversed + TICAL=sounds like “tickle” = fishing method;
13 IRENE – IRE-(o)NE; IRENE means peaceful; not sure of the role of “past”;
14 ALICE,SPRINGS – ALICE as in the dreamer in Wonderland; SPRINGS=appears;
18 SITTING,ROOMS – (it isn’t)* + GROOMS; to curry with a currycomb is to groom a horse;
21 ABOVE – A-BOV(in)E;
22 NIGHTSPOT – NIGH-TSP-OT; TSP=teaspoon in recipies; OT=Old Testament;
24 MARTINI – M(ART)INI – inspire=take in; reference Simone Martini 1285-1344 Gothic Era artist;
25 MAYFAIR – MAY=spring (month); FAIR=clean as in play fair;
26 TIMBER,LINE – TIM(BERLIN)E; TIME=the eternal enemy;
27 OTIC – (n)OTIC(e);
 
Down
1 THESPIAN – THE-SPI(A)N; SPIN=bias;
2 CLEMATIS – CLE(M)AT-IS; CLEAT=wedge; climbing plant;
5 SQUILLION – S(QUILL)ION; unscientific expression for an undefined large number;
7 NAILED – N-AILED;
8 ELEVEN – (b)EL(l)-EVEN;
15 POTENTIAL – (toilet pan)*;
16 POT,PLANT – POT=cannabis; one of several weak cryptic definitions;
17 ESOTERIC – (puzzl)E-SOT-ERIC;
19 MARMOT – MAR(MO)T; MO=Medical Officer; a burrowing rodent (the woodchuck);
20 POGROM – P-OGR(e)-OM;
23 GAMIN – GAMIN(g); a street urchin;

54 comments on “Times 24,205 Little to tical my fancy”

  1. Nearly twenty minutes for me. For 17dn, I made the quite brilliant observation that (cryptic)* plus lus(H) makes up TRIPTYCH; I wasn’t sure how tritpych gets to man but it was such a clever piece of reasoning that it just had to be right.

    It wasn’t.

    MARTINI also held me up as I’ve never heard of the artist – is the vermouth named after him?

    Obscure information of the day: the marmot is responsible for killing more human beings than any other warm-blooded species. (No, they are not some sort of sabre-toothed giant attack rodent. The bacterial organism Pasturella Pestis originated in the marmot, and when it transferred to humans via black rats it killed half the population of Europe and was known as the Black Death.) This piece of astoundingly useless and irrelevant trivia was brought to you by the QI people, c/o Stephen Fry.

    1. Oh right, one small mistake, and you never hear the last of it… marmots are v. cute, cuddly animals and I think we should let bygones be bygones
  2. 24 mins here. It should have been much quicker but I spent about half that time pondering over rodents and artists in the SW and arrests and releases in the NE. Complete mental block. At 7dn I went through NABBED NICKED NETTED before finally seeing NAILED and at 24 BERNINI BARZINI (no, he’s in “The Godfather”) before MARTINI.

    Not a very distinguished puzzle I thought. I never expected to see 16dn ever again.

  3. 10:28 for this one.

    MARTINI: Signor Martini of Martini & Rossi just had the same surname. Another attempt to get hasty solvers to write TIEPOLO?

    I was trying to make E+(lush,man)* at 17D (where Heyesey’s anagram doesn’t quite work), and also briefly wanted 5D to be something like S(EX-PEN)ION.

    As counsel for the defence: I thought the CDs were OK & would debate the “several” – if you take pot as the drug and cannbis the plant, “pot plant” makes sense and then you’ve got the window-sill reference too. 6D is much the same and borders on a double def. I counted 4 and 10 as double defs, and can’t see any other candidates as CDs.

    1. “Pot plant” makes sense, but I thought that clue had been retired and put out to grass (geddit!?) years ago.
      1. Quite. I found the whole thing a bit boring and predictable so can’t get too worked up about it. I mean “might gas be expected soon?” for IN THE PIPELINE, “is a model in an advantageous position” for SITTING PRETTY. Not exactly top of the pops is it.
        1. I see what you’re getting at, Jimbo, but I think you’re being a bit harsh. Both IN THE PIPELINE and SITTING PRETTY seem to me quite amusing. Likewise SQUILLION. But I guess there’s no accounting for individual taste!

          I respectfully suggest your reading of 13ac is wrong. As far as I know, IRENE does not mean “peaceful”, though IRENIC (also spelled EIRENIC), which presumably derives from the same root, does. I think the reference is to Irene, the personification of peace in classical mythology. The definition then becomes “peaceful girl past”. Somewhat contrived, I admit.

          1. Thanks for that, you could well be correct. That at least explains the “past”. At the back of Chambers is a list of names with their meaning/derivation. For IRENE it just says “peace”. The Oxford Names Companion gives more detail and mentions your minor goddess.
              1. Mike’s explanation sounds too contrived to me.  It’s common for names to be clued with a nod to their etymology, so the definition here could just be “peaceful girl”, with “past” as a position indicator for the charade.  (Compare: after ecstasy, the laundry.)
                1. I originally thought it was something to do with the Furies = Erinyes, but I can’t make that work either. I suspect Jimbo is correct: Irene is a girl’s name that derives from a word for “peace,” so Irene is a peaceful girl – theoretically, at least back in the days when people were given names that described them a la Genesis.
                2. I think you’re probably right and that the setter intended “past” as the position indicator for “one blowing top” in the wordplay, leaving “peaceful girl” = IRENE as the definition. Also somewhat contrived, but a bit less so than my explanation!
  4. 25 minutes for me too, Jimbo. Some of the old confidence is coming back!

    UNTWINE at 11a was my last in and I only got it after going through the alphabet letter by letter.

  5. There have been some quite grumpy comments so far but I enjoyed this puzzle as a rare quick solve. I was held up in the top half by not seeing Alice Springs for a long time. Am I missing anything cryptic in “town, far, far away”? It always strikes me as a bit patronising to describe somewhere as remote or far away. If you live in Alice Springs it is probably the centre of the universe.

    In my hurry, I entered nightclub at 22 but it was soon corrected by the checkers. I saved the clematis till last because I don’t like plant clues. It was not helped by my having elogist at 9.

    Like Jack, I struggled with untwine, which I don’t think is a very close synonym for “release”, and had to be got from the wordplay.

    1. I think it’s fair enough to suppose that for geographical purposes, the Times and its puzzle are “somewhere in Britain”. From that point of view, Alice Springs is about as far away as you can get without leaving the planet.

      Edited at 2009-04-21 11:28 am (UTC)

      1. It’s an interesting idea that The Times crossword has a geographic location. I don’t think I quite buy it. Most of our fellow solvers don’t buy The Times either. For them the crossword is located in cyberspace. I think the far, far away just assists the gloss of a dreamer being mentally far away. What threw me slightly was the repetition. In my experience repetition, intensification or use of synonyms (far, far away; very far away, distant and far away) always indicate some sort of wordplay. Here, the repetition just emphasises the parochial mindset of the clue.
        1. There’s a good argument to be made that this notion is becoming obsolescent given the number of online solvers, who could be anywhere. Clearly, the crossword editor(s) at the Times haven’t accepted the argument yet, but then, maybe nobody has made it yet.

          It’s easy for me to sit here and say “since the Times is ultimately a British paper, all references to location etc. have to be considered as if you were in Britain.” I *AM* in Britain, so that’s just dandy for me, and it wouldn’t occur to me to questrion clues like this. Now that you have done, I can see your point, but I’m not sure I agree with you quite enough to start saying it should change.

        2. In contexts where other papers might be meant by “The Times”, the names used to clearly identify this one always seem to be “London Times” or “Times of London”. So a geographical location seems clearly established. And compared to cricket, rhyming slang and all the rest, thinking of London or Britain as the location seems a small issue for solvers from overseas.
  6. 30:21.  My slowest time for donkey’s years.  After about 13 minutes I had just 11ac (UNT…E) and 7dn (N…ED) to go, and I couldn’t get NABBED, NICKED, ACHED and TAPE out of my head; eventually NAILED suggested itself, but even then (like Jack) I had to go through the alphabet to get UNTWINE.  Otherwise, I found this fairly straightforward, though I was thrown by the use of “drugs” to clue E in 9ac (ELEGIST) and didn’t know that the measuring device on an upside-down bottle of spirits was called an OPTIC (4dn).

    Looking at the grid, it’s a nice selection of words, ABOVE being the only real exception.  A few of the clues had poor surface readings (12ac for PRACTICAL, 13ac for IRENE, 22ac for NIGHTSPOT, 27ac for OTIC, 1dn for THESPIAN), but I only had quibbles with two of them, and for the same reason:

    6dn. Is a model in an advantageous position? = SITTING PRETTY
    10dn. Might gas be expected soon? = IN THE PIPELINE

    In neither clue does the first part refer to the answer.  You can see this by deleting the definition: “Is a model?”, “Might gas be?”.  6dn could easily have been rectified by adding “thus” after “model”.  The same trick would work for 10dn, but I’d prefer something else (e.g. “Where gas might be …”).

    Clues of the Day: 24ac (MARTINI) and 5dn (SQUILLION).

    1. I wonder whether these changes would have made the clues OK for Jimbo? “thus” seems one of those “sore thumb” words to me, but they could also have used something like “How a model is …”. Didn’t know about an optic? More time in pubs required!
      1. That sounds like a Ximenes clue!  I have no interest in optics in that sense, as I doubt they’re much use for serving beer – though I have just come back from a two-week trip to Scotland, so they have been staring me in the face more than they usually do.
        1. Peter makes a sound point about padding the clues to improve them. These clues are just not my cup of tea and I don’t think any amount of rehashing would turn them into something a bit more exciting
  7. 23 mins, probably 10 at the end trying to figure out the SW corner. I enjoyed this one, 15D probably edges it as my COD, just ahead of 5D.

    Tom B.

  8. 17:25 .. Perhaps some clues didn’t wholly convince, but I enjoyed the puzzle well enough. SQUILLION’s fun, and I really liked THESPIAN when the penny dropped.

    A look at the map and Alice Springs does seem to be about as far from anywhere else (nearest city 1500km) as it’s possible to get. Even in ‘nearby’ Darwin, I imagine if you punch ‘Alice Springs’ into your Satnav a voice says “‘struth, mate, you sure?”

  9. Half an hour, with the only problems being of my own making, where I stubbornly misread 21ac as ‘Overheard’… COD 14ac.
  10. After about half an hour I was left with some embarrassing gaps, mainly in the SW corner, but also OPTIC (eventually checked Collins and there was the chiefly British answer. Trust me, Australian pubs are best avoided so I can’t report on their use here) and NAILED (it’s always nicked on The Bill). Eventually read the clue again at 15D and stopped trying to fit some derivative of PATINATION to “Possible cracking”, and the end followed almost immediately. I liked 15 and 18, for its curries.

    As for Alice, I’m almost convinced that it is a book or film quotation and the obvious candidate is Neville Shute’s “A Town Like Alice”, since most of the action takes place a long way from the town itself. Then again, if my recent track record is anything to go by, I could be just dead wrong about that. I’ve searched the net in vain.

  11. I have ASTI as the answer also.
    I guess because: “IT” (Italian) “‘S A” (abbreviated speech) in reverse
    1. I’m about to reply to this in the 24204 article. Please keep the comments about each puzzle in its own report, especially when it’s only a day or so old.

      Edited at 2009-04-21 12:19 pm (UTC)

  12. I didn’t do very well on this one after what seemed like a very encouraging start. I still had 7 left to do at 30 minutes. I had the right ideas on many of the final 7 but couldn’t work them through properly.

    I kicked myself over taking so long to get ALICE SPRINGS as I was there last year seeing one of my daughters who was spending her gap year working in a school in the town. It is indeed a long way from anywhere (even Uluru is some 250 miles away), but it is an interesting place for a visit and the scenery around is dramatic in places.

  13. 25 min, which seems pretty average. Not inspiring, and with OTIC/OPTIC and SITTING PRETTY/SITTING ROOM get an odd feeling of being in something of a rut. 15 dn – POTENTIAL – was a well observed anagram, and gets my COD vote.
  14. 10 minutes, another possible PB (yikes). I was amused by some of the timeliness of the clues, as I sit typing, there’s an annual reading of the holocaust names, the POT belonged yesterday, after IT we get MARTINI. One that was on my wavelength, I guess.
    1. Great time, George, well done. Perhaps you should arrange a gig in Cheltenham later this year?

      Tom B.

  15. Ten minutes, then another ten for martini and marmot. Martini the painter obscure, the drink was what did It for me.
  16. Martini ,as a painter, I don’t know.Can’t recall seeing him in the National or other galleries but I am sure I heve seen the clue before. Similar problems to soem of you with nicked, nabbed, nailed. Didn’t get it until the stubborn 11 ‘untwined’ itself – I was reduced to unta.. unte.. unth etc. sod’s law it was a untw.. 18 minutes
  17. Same experience that many are reporting: about 30 minutes, the last to go in were UNTWINE, NAILED and MARTINI. Some of the rest was pedestrian it seemed, but there are a few sparklers in the mix, such as THESPIAN and ESOTERIC. Not much more to say today, except to ask if anyone else experienced any error messages when trying to access the Times website? It rejected my password, so I changed it (to the same password) which it then accepted. Regards all.
    1. Kevin – for nearly an hour last night I couldn’t log in through any browser. Cache/cookie clearing etc didn’t help. Eventually, for the heck of it, I rebooted my PC and the problem was solved, but that may just have been a coincidence. I can’t think why rebooting would make a difference, unless it’s something DNS related. It may have been a site problem that got fixed.
      1. My login problems occurred between 9PM and 10:15 PM EDT in the US, which is either 5 or 6 hours behind London, I forget which.
        1. I’m in eastern Canada, Kevin, and it was around that time. Site fault, I suspect.
          1. I was having similar bizarre problems at stupid o’clock this morning, which would be about the same time as your late nights. That would seem to confirm it was trouble at the Times end.
            1. Kept getting a proxy server error for an hour or so middayish in New Zealand (1 am+ GMT), even after reboot, and trying a different computer networked to the same router.
  18. 21 minutes for me – struggled with the top left corner, but always struggle with plant names… Gamin was a guess – but a good one!

    Oli

  19. Why 24a not Pertini with pert being little? Had this before 19d but after 20d and 10d!

    1. “Italian painter finding little to inspire his work? (7)” answer: PERTINI.

      It’s the sort of answer that, a few years ago when I was inexperienced at the crossword, I’d be tempted to put in because “pert = little” without really understanding the rest of it. Nowadays, I am never satisfied with such answers unless I can solve the wordplay.

      Assuming that there is/was an Italian painter of that name, I wouldn’t like this as a clue. Little for pert is fine; where does the “in I” come from? One could argue that a painter draws his inspiration from himself, and he might do, but he might not. A man saying “there’s not very much in I,” even allowing for his bad English, could not be held to have demonstrated he can find no inspiration for his work. Just because it’s not in him, it could be in someone or something else.

      I won’t make so bold as to say that it flat-out does not work, but I don’t like it.

  20. I’m in Sydney and Alice Springs is still far far away (2000km). In fact it’s far far away unless you’re in Alice Springs.

    At the time of the 2000 Sydney Olympics one question fielded by the tourism people was from an American lady who wanted to go to the Olympics in the morning and visit Alice Springs and Ayers Rock in the afternoon. The reply may have been along the lines you suggest.

  21. I mainly agree with previous comments; not a particularly difficult one, but could be worse. I did dislike 12a, however – as a few have recently, it seemed to take the homophone idea a bit far. Borderline, perhaps (other than my pet peeve against partial homophones).
    1. 6D was SITTING PRETTY, which is “in an advantageous position”, and possibly what a model is doing. Technical aspects discussed above …
  24. There are 4 “easies” not in the blog. At least one of them has been explained but here they are together:

    3a Good reasoning from a stable mind? (5,5)
    HORSE SENSE. Is this really the sense that horses have or people that know about horses? HM Elizabeth II might be one of these – still riding at the age of 93! Top effort ma’am.

    4d Sort of nerve shown by bar assistant (5)
    OPTIC. From which you can purchase your carefully measured spirit of choice.

    6d Is a model in an advantageous position? (7,6)
    SITTING PRETTY. Depends on the model and the eye of the beholder?

    10d Might gas be expected soon? (2,3,8)
    IN THE PIPELINE. Handy but not doing much for our carbon footprints?

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