Times 24234 – I wonder what became of all the Rockers and the Mods?

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: About 50 mins

An amiable romp with some challenging clues (well, they challenged me) and some old favourites; a fitting puzzle for the last Monday in May. I’m not going to speculate on how easy or difficult others may find this, but I haven’t set the bar too high on the completion time front. My last in was CORSLET, which should have been a gimme following the discussion on stays last week.

Across
1 CERE[BR]AL to give an adjectival intellectual. Br is the chemical symbol for the corrosive & toxic Bromine, one of the halogens.
5 A + ACHE + N for AACHEN, an iconic German crossword city, as in “A as in Aachen (4)”
10 ROBIN + GOODFELLOW, a spirit, returning by popular demand. Brick, not as in “thick as a …”, but a generally all round personage of good character.
11 LACK LUST + R(om)E for LACKLUSTRE, or dull. I’m saying nothing.
15 (ALTERED)* = TREADLE, that which requires footwork. Dancing was the anagrind, not the anagrist.
17 BEEHIVE, double definition, the second cryptic. The first of our 60’s themed clues.
18 (m)ATISS[U]E for AT ISSUE or under discussion. Impress in the sense of force into service or is the U just pressed into poor old Matisse?
19 (RARE)* + TUM for ERRATUM, a slip. Novice solvers should take note of corporation = tum (a protruding abdominal region) and the answer itself, a perennial favourite.
22 UNION + JACKS for standards, or flags. Means of raising as plural was a bit devious. Most universities have a Union Debating Society of some kind.
25 (ANY LIMITS IN LIFE)* = INFINITESIMALLY or adverbially not a lot.
27 NA[(empero)R]KED for NARKED or disgruntled.
28 CLOSE + TED for shut up. Cue the Kinks (again):


Where are all the Teddy Boys now?
The Brill Cream boys with D.A.s,
Drainpipes and blue suedes,
Beatniks with long pullovers on,
And coffee bars and Ban the Bomb,
Yeah, where have all the Teddy Boys gone?

Down
1 CORS[(arsena)L]ET for for a piece of upper body protective armour consisting of “two plates connected on the sides via hinges and bronze pins”, worn from ancient Greek times till the sixteenth century and beyond. I hope someone gave it a good wash in all that time. Stays appears in less controversial circumstances than last week.
2 RUB(y) for a difficulty.
3 BAN + GLAD + (HE’S)* for BANGLADESH, the land. Outlaw as noun on surface and verb in the construction.
4 AL[O]ES for succulent plants known for their purgative effects.
6 APE + X for a top.
7 H[ELLEN]IST(or)IC for HELLENISTIC or “of Greece”.
8 NEW + GATE, a prison (or stir) in London past.
9 A[DORA]BLE for charming.
12 CHEMI(st) + N + DEFER for CHEMIN DE FER, a card game similar to baccarat, and not a scientist. N is the abbreviation for a Newton (actually newton; see discussion below), a unit of force roughly equivalent to that required to keep an apple from falling to the ground.
14 HEN + RY[JAM]ES for the novelist, HENRY JAMES. Some distracting, though not unfair, punctuation which novices should beware of. See anonymous comment below about the significance of Rye in the clue. There’s more than meets the eye.
16 (ENTIRE)* + T(rend)Y for ETERNITY, a reference to the 1953 (a good year) film “From Here to Eternity”; based on the novel by James Jones, which ties in nicely with the previous clue.
18 ARRAIGN, meaning to charge but sounding like “a rein”. Means is singular on this occasion. Charge is a noun in the surface and a verb in the answer. The “‘s” is short for “is”.
20 MO(n<-&gtS)EYED for MOSEYED or proceeded in a leisurely fashion. If you had asked me how to spell this before today, I might have struggled.;
23 (m)OUSE + L for another favourite bird of the crossword world.
24 KNEE, double definition, the second cryptic, the first alluding to the Massacre at Wounded Knee, an 1890 confrontation between largely disarmed Sioux and the US Cavalry armed with light artillery, in which more Medals of Honour were awarded than in any other US conflict. Many of the cavalry casualties were thought to be the result of friendly fire.
26 LIT, being both settled (cf. ALIT of last week) and short for literature.

24 comments on “Times 24234 – I wonder what became of all the Rockers and the Mods?”

  1. 16 minutes to get all but the card game, and ten minutes to admit that I didn’t have the foggiest. If only I’d had a misspent youth, I might have known…

    Talking of which, as koro demurely passed over 11a, I’ll be the one to say that virginity may be rather less a lack of lust and rather more a lack of opportunity. Like being guarded day and night by a bunch of eunuchs. For example.

    Still, thanks to the setter for opening the door for some gratuitous Carry On Quoting:

    Bilius: Caesar, there is a messenger here without.
    Caesar: I’m not surprised, if we stay here much longer we’ll all be without.

  2. 24 mins here, but with one mistake.
    I thought that this was going to be very easy, but then found some of the clues quite tricky.
    At 6dn I put in AXED – absolutely no idea why, because it doesn’t make much sense.

    ARRAIGN is when the prisoner is brought to court to plead, as in:

    A certain young lawyer named Rex,
    Was deficient in matters of sex.
    When arraigned for exposure
    He replied with composure
    “De minimis non curat lex”.

    1. The law doesn’t deal in trifles. For those (like me)who lack latinity
  3. I keep forgetting that every song ever recorded is on youtube, so I can let Ray wonder where are they now, in his inimitable fashion. I think he and the rest of the band members have made a loose agreement as to which key they are singing and playing in this time.

    In holiday spirit, perhaps everybody should weave a quotation or two into their entries today.

  4. Forgot to stop the clock while dealing with courier delivery. Probably 35-40 min. Quite enjoyed this one. COD: 50-50 between CHEMIN DE FER and HENRY JAMES.
  5. 33 minutes with no real problems though I looked at CORSLET without its other E twice before writing it in. BANGLADESH was my last solved. Having only the B and D in place at one point I had thought of BRIGAND— which led me to expect “outlaw” to be the definition even after other checking letters had ruled out my first thought.
  6. Yes, found this tricky, especially NW corner for some reason (as the clues don’t seem that difficult). Thanks kororareka for tip for new solvers at TUM. N for Newton something I did not know.

    The last one in ironically was CEREBRAL.

  7. This was well-crafted and enjoyable, not difficult but it yielded its secrets slowly. The two relatively rare words, Corslet and Ousel (it may be a crossword friend but there’s a first time for all of us) had clear wordplay. I only knew Corslet as Corselet, a rather matronly combined bra and corset that often features in the mail order ads at the back of newspapers. Confusion over its spelling led me to put in the intersecting Lacklustre last, so I ended with a smile.

    I have only ever heard mosey used in cowboy films although Chambers does not suggest that it is an American word. It joins my list of words that are their own antonyms. It is defined as “to move along slowly” or “to hurry”.

  8. 14 dn – Henry James lived at Lamb House in Rye, Sussex from 1897 until his death in 1916
    1. Thankyou for that astute observation. I had assumed Rye was just part of the construction. Some clever work there by the setter as well.
      1. My parents-in-law used to live at Peasmarsh, near Rye, and visits to Lamb House (now owned by the National Trust) were favourite summer outings. There is a summerhouse in the garden, as I recall, where the great man is said to have penned his (for some tastes) rather mannered prose. So the reference to Rye was an instant give-away – the sort of lucky break one would hope for (but seldom get, I imagine) under competition conditions, if one were fast enough to qualify for competitions, that is.

        An enjoyable and easyish(but no pushover)puzzle – about 40 mins for me. LACKLUSTRE at 11ac made me laugh, as did MOSEYED at 20dn.

  9. An easy but fun 20 minute stroll down memory lane as my teenage years in the 1950s were evoked by Teddy Boys (the vast majority of whom were an entirely peaceful but important social development of those post war years), beehive air dos and strangely Aachen which I visited in 1959 on a hitch-hiking trip around the near continent (bold stuff in those days).
  10. Quickly got the long 10 which helped a lot.Wasn’t sure about 7 until kororareka’s explanation. Quite a few answers came quite easily and only held up for a bit by NW corner, specifically BANGLADESH which also had me thinking outlaw as the definition. Then got LACKLUSTRE which was funny if not entirely accurate as pointed out above.
    Last to go in was 1d as I could only think of circlet at first , however a brisk 7.37 today.
  11. 8:03 – not trivial, as several long answers were clued in fairly complicated ways – 7 12 and 14 down all completed without full wordplay understanding.

    My understanding is that Chemin de Fer is one form of baccarat – calling a game “baccarat” is nearly as unhelpful as calling it “whist”.

    Edited at 2009-05-25 10:15 am (UTC)

    1. My understanding of card games, particularly those in which money can change hands, is inadequate by most standards. My eyes glazed over as I read Wiki’s account of the finer points of Chemin de Fer, so I apologise for the lack of detail. I tend to be attracted to those games where you can win by losing all the tricks.
  12. about 40 mins without any aids – first one for a while. chemin de fer was james bond’s favourite card game. i too would have struggled to have spelt moseyed prior to today. enjoyed it a lot, partly because i finished it i suspect.
  13. Nice straightforward Monday – did not bother to time but quickish. COD 24d. Damon Runyon’s people moseyed around a bit.
  14. I thought this was an excellent puzzle, with some very nice clues. I thought I’d be finished in 20-25 minutes, but I was slow to complete the NE corner and 14 – DUMAS kept jumping at me from _ _M _ S, and I tried to think of the name of Dumas pere’s less well-known son. As usual, I was slow to spot the hidden HERA, which was my penultimate solve, followed by NEWGATE (lovely deception in “Stir in capital once”). 30 minutes in all.
    Clues that stood out for me from a very good bunch were 3, 5, 8, 12, 22, 24.
  15. Back in the land of reliable internet, and I make a boner on the first day by putting in CIRCLET, not making the CORSET connection at all. D’oh!
  16. @ kororareka; N is the abbreviation for a Newton, a unit of force roughly equivalent to that required to keep an apple from falling to the ground. The unit is more correctly called a newton (as in a watt or a joule). Of course “Newton” is fine as a deception in the clue!
    ERRATUM is good, in that it can be both a printed erratum slip & the slip or error it corrects.
    COD? Some pretty fine clues here; perhaps 22ac & 15ac (for its sly used of altered as anagrind, as you put it!).
    Quotation? Well, how about Arthur Askey:
    To be a good bee one must contrive,
    For bees in a beehive must behive.
    2. Thanks for the small n newton correction. It’s been a long time since I had to think of such things.

      Bizarrely, I was only thinking this morning, way after the event, that in reply to vinyl’s comment above on alternate ways to clue “beehive”, I could have pointed out that the setter had also missed the obvious homophone, and now I see Arthur beat me to it by a good 40 years or so.

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