Times 24292 – Not a stinker!

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Time taken to solve: 45 minutes.

After yesterday’s predictions about being due a stinker today I approached this with a degree of apprehension and on failing to solve 1a which should have been easy, I feared for a moment that my worst fears had been realised. But the setter was kind to include a number of multi-word answers so I tackled these first and solved them quite easily and this gave me a foothold in all quarters of the grid. After that I just worked away at it steadily and never felt really stuck at any point. I shall be interested to hear how others fared and how they think it rates for difficulty compared with the puzzles Monday to Thursday .

Across
1 E(veryone),PIC – My very last in despite knowing at first glance that it had to start with “E”. I seem to have a blind spot at the moment for references to pictures. This time “snap”, last time “shot”.
3 PLEBISCITE – Anagram of  best clip + 1 (one) + (greas)E
9 0,POSS,UM – The American marsupial. I think the idea is that “on” = POSS(ible) and “I hesitate to say” = UM. The abbreviation is justified in Collins, but the last bit seems rather long-winded.
11 (a wh)ALE,WIFE – A type of herring. “Other half” meaning wife, husband or partner is a British saying according to COED. I wonder if this may cause some difficulty overseas.
12 COCK(AT,0,0)S
14 SKATE,BOARDER – I’m not completely sure how this works. I assume BOARDER is “the overnight sleeper”. Is SKATE, being a type of fish, the “catch”?
18 OF MICE AND MEN – (Commend a fine)*. By John Steinbeck. Until today I wasn’t aware that it is a novella. Any Izzard fans out there? If so, the very mention of this title should raise smile.
21 EDIT,H – H being the “letter that Eliza (Doolittle) neglected” when first attempting to say “In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen”.
22 MOONSHINE – Two meanings, the second being “nonsense”.
24 BAK(e),LAV,A – Pastry with nuts soaked in honey. I’m not sure why LAV should be specified as “ladies” here. Ladies’, Gents’ or both I’d have thought.
26 W,1,NE T,ASTER
27 (p)ARTY
 
Down
1 EXORCISE – According to the clue this sounds like “exercise” to an inattentive audience. If it does so it’s more the fault of a careless speaker, surely.
4 LIMBO – Two meanings. An uncertain period of waiting, so “up in the air”, and the Caribbean dance which involves leaning backwards close to the ground and passing under a bar.
5 BRASSER1E – BRASS1ERE with the 1 moved down.
6 STEP,TOE AND SON – “Stage” = STEP + (do a sonnet)*. I know this TV programme was popular in Australia but I wonder whether the title is known in the US where it was adapted as “Sanford and Son”.
7 I.R.,IT,IS – “Taxmen” = I(nland) R(evenue) though the name was abolished more than 4 years ago. It is now H.M.R.C (H.M. Revenue and Customs) which I imagine will not be so useful to crossword setters.
8 EN,ERG,Y – The even letters of “keenly” around ERG, the unit of work. “Go” is the definition.
10 S,TATE, OF T,HE ART – Back to the old favourite TATE for “gallery” after our recent excursion to Somerset House.
15 OPIUM WARS – (Arm pious + W)* The 19th century campaigns in which the British Empire twice defeated China. I’m afraid my scant knowledge of the subject came from the Peter Nicholls show “Poppy”.  None of the usual three dictionaries actually lists W as an abbreviation for “women/women’s” but obviously it stands for that in countless acronyms.
16 AMRITSAR – R(uins), ASTIR, MA all reversed. The site of the Golden Temple, very much not a ruin as you can see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amritsar
19 BEN,BOW – Admiral John Benbow (1653-1702). The name is familiar to me with reference to the inn at the start of Treasure Island, and the British folksong.
20 KICK IN – I suppose PC here stands for Politically Correct, a way of thinking that is currently fashionable and therefore “in”. On edit 01/08/09: Re the debate below,  the published solution is KICK IN.
23 OMBRE – A card game hidden and reversed inside “herb mother”.

30 comments on “Times 24292 – Not a stinker!”

  1. I didn’t think it that easy (but then I wouldn’t I hear you say) and found some of it a tad irritating (perhaps as in a hurry this morning) with some imprecise (is that the word?) clueing, eg opossum, kick in, boarder (in skateboarder – happy with skate for catch) and under way (if that is the answer?).

    NW corner was giving real trouble until I got epic which took an unaccountable age.

  2. 19:12 – I found this pretty tough. Only a small group like 1A, 11, 13, 5, 6, 10 fell at first look. After a while, the rest of the top half came in a burst, but the bottom half was a real fight, withy 20 and 24 last in, not helped by an over-optimistic punt on SIGN ON at 20.

    Edited at 2009-07-31 10:01 am (UTC)

  3. I found it tough this morning, but this may have been connected with last night’s Hophead (and this morning’s resulting hop head).
    I thought “kick on” for get going rather than “kick in”. But still no wiser as to the word play. I have never heard of the expression “kick in” except in playgrounds for “beat up”!
    1. COED has “become activated; come into effect” such as “I had a coffee and 10 mins later the caffeine kicked in”
  4. We’ve met this setter before and his/her trademark is a mixture of the clever and the indisciplined. This puzzle has plenty from both sources and accounted for as irritating a 35 minutes as his/her previous efforts.

    Jack has mentioned, I think, all the worst examples. As an example w=women’s at 15D. Sorry but w=wife. It only means women’s in combination with other letters such as WI=Women’s Institute. There are plenty more. I’d like to particularly hear exactly how skate=catch or IN=PC. The homophone at 1D is awful.

    1. I agree with most of that , Jimbo. One of the irritants for me was OPOSSUM at 9ac where the wordplay seemed absurdly far-fetched and over-convoluted. I guess SKATE=catch because it’s a kind of fish. I (like some others) entered KICK ON at 20dn so the IN=PC question didn’t arise, but I wasn’t any happier about ON=PC! I’m sure now that KICK IN is the right answer but the wordplay remains unsatisfying. Is not the setter having a little joke (quite funny, I thought, but there’s no accounting for taste in these matters)at 1dn? The homophone is indeed “awful” and hence only acceptable to an “inattentive audience”.
      1. I see where you’re coming from M on the homophone but is such licence really acceptable? You have to ask if this is deemed OK then where do we slip to next? Look what has happened to definition by example where today we have “Ladies”=lav. Also skate=catch on the spurious grounds that one of the meanings of skate is fish. On that basis almost any fish you can think of = catch. Mark makes the important point that it is an Editor’s job to exercise some control over this liberty taking and my views on the current Editor are well known enough not to need repeating.
        1. All interesting observations. I wouldn’t dissent strongly from any of them. On 1dn: I take your point, but refer you to Sotira’s comment further down, which puts my view more wittily than I can – to wit, the “bad homophone” joke is fine provided it’s only deployed once in a blue moon. On Def by Ex, I’m prepared, in general, to be a little more lenient than you. I think the setter can get away with it if the example and the more general thing of which it is an example are near enough to being simply different terms for the same idea/object. On that basis, I think “ladies”=LAV is just about OK (though not great) on the grounds that “ladies”, like “gents”, is more or less a synonym for lavatory. (That said, it is several decades since I’ve heard anyone call a toilet or lavatory a “lav” rather than a “loo”, but that’s a different quibble). By contrast, SKATE=”catch” fails my “near synonym” test. As you point out, “skate” is only one of many kinds of fish that might (or might not) be found in a catch and has other meanings wholly unrelated to fish.
  5. 55 mins. Liked the two part-anagrams at 6 and 15 down and was amused by the letter-shift in 5 down. 14 across was simply unfair and I didn’t get it until I had the crossing letters. COD goes to 19 down (BENBOW) for the neat surface leading (eventually) to a straight charade.
  6. 38:55, resorting to the dictionary after 30 mins and finally, after 4 minutes staring at 19dn, to Bradford’s for the unknown and dubiously clued BENBOW.

    I agree with Jimbo’s assessment of the setter – what (s)he needs is an editor who isn’t asleep on the job.  I don’t have time for a full litany of complaints, many of which have been mentioned, but I would single out three particularly irritating clues: 24ac (BAKLAVA) for its combination of definition by example (LAV) with “X to Y” indicating “Y X”; 2dn (IRONCLAD) for its use of “to trade” as an anagram indicator (perhaps on the spurious grounds that “trade” means “exchange”), not to mention its dodgy definition; and 20dn (KICK ON/IN) for having one answer that fits the wordplay and another that fits the definition.

    On a brighter note, I found “for inattentive audience?” (1dn EXORCISE) an ingenious way of indicating a homophone that some are bound to find dubious.

  7. 19:12 here – yay, I beat Pete and Mark for a change, despite numerous disasters of my own on the way:

    20 KICK IT (PC = IT, and to get going might be to die)
    19 NELSON (didn’t make any sense, but at that stage I had 3rd letter T in 26 and could see NET in the wordplay, so 19 had to end in N, right?)
    25 HANDSAW (only briefly, got OMBRE straight away)
    9 OPOSSUM – I put this in, but didn’t understand the wordplay and mistrusted it when I couldn’t get either 1 or 2 down. Even when I did get them and knew it must be right, I still didn’t get the wordplay until I came here.

    I put KICK IN for 20D, but now I’m wondering about that. I think KICK ON fits the wordplay and definition better. ON = PC = acceptable, rather than IN = PC = trendy.

    1. Actually I did it in 19:08 – I checked Pete’s time again and had that in my head when I was typing.
    2. I meant to say in my post that I went for KICK ON on the wordplay grounds that you suggest.  The only trouble is the definition: dictionaries tend to suggest that kicking on is a matter of keeping going, not getting going.  But I think this is a lesser (and more understandable) evil than the tenuous connection between political correctness and trendiness.
      1. The other problem with “kick on” as far as I was concerned was that I had never heard the expression in my life so it didn’t occur to me. Since reading the comments here I find it’s listed at least in Collins but not in COED or Chambers. I shall be very surprised if it turns out to be the answer.

        Maybe my explanation of PC = IN is wrong. Can anyone suggest anything better?

        1. I’m sure yours is the correct interpretation, jackkt. The def. is very suspect – as Mark says, ‘kick on’ is really about adding impetus rather than getting going, but the wordplay only seems to fit the ‘on’ option.
  8. 34:02 .. I can’t disagree with Jimbo’s assessment – there were a few penny-drop moments in here of the thoroughly irritating variety. It’s a shame, because when this setter’s good, he’s very, very good.

    Oh look, there’s an old friend at 5 down! Yep, it’s the “supporter” again, the sort of old friend who’s taken to calling round so often you’ve started closing the curtains and pretending to be out.

    Talking of which, the “inattentive audience” trick works fine, so long as it only appears once in a blue moon. Overused, this “okay, it’s not a homophone, but it sorta could be” would quickly start to grate.

    Some champagne moments, too. COD to 21a EDITH which fooled me for ages with its cunning exploitation of ‘correct’. I liked EPIC as well – very pithy.

  9. Sorry, but W=Women’s is standard Times fare. It occurs rather a lot 🙂 Surprised it isn’t more familiar to the regulars …
  10. Yikes! About an hour, and still didn’t understand much of this. I needed all the crossers for SKATEBOARDER, AMRITSAR, and my last two, the crossing KICK IN/ON/BAKLAVA. That last one was really from the def. alone, since I thought the ‘ladies’ was ‘Val’ reversed, despite thinking it should be read as a plural. KICK IN means ‘start up’ over here, so I’m with the IN crowd although I share the skepticism re: ‘trendiness’=’PC’. Jack, no US problem with ‘other half’=’spouse’, pretty common here. Never saw Steptoe and Son but its being the model for US produced Sanford and Son was somewhere in the memory, so it went in quite early. Overall, I share the feeling that a lot of wordplay here did not clearly point you to where you needed to go, i.e. OPOSSUM, UNDER WAY, and those mentioned above. I still don’t get the ‘Scottish crown’ part of BENBOW. However, I do give a bow to EDITH, and ‘judge turning to drink’ as def. for WINE TASTER. Best to all.
    1. I wondered about this too. “Ben” for “Scottish mountain” is familiar usage as in “Ben Nevis” but Collins and Chambers both define it as “mountain peak” which would then fit in with “crown”.
  11. Glad it wasn’t just me who struggled with this. 26:35 spoiling a very rare run of sub-20 minute solves.

    I was a bit dim anyway taking forever to think of what you did to a trigger before firing a gun (cock indeed) and having other similar mental blocks.

    COD limbo

    I across rock as it’s Friday, bluegrass prog rock crossover merchants Epic Moonshine.

    1. Bless you! I think they can go in the rock’n’roll hall of fame along with Mystic Jimjams.
  12. learnt something today about herrings! pleased to finish in around an hour part of whichw as after an epic meal at the french laundry in Napa..so brain was fairly addled. liked the puzzle overall
  13. Count me with the KICK ON group (though I had KICK IT until I saw WINE TASTER). This was another sleep on it effort, and of all the things that held me up forever it was SKATEBOARDER that came in the morning.
  14. Almost a record-breaking number of irritations noted above and absolutely agreed with, jimbo especially; I would add that a brasserie is not a pub. Kick on is what you say to a small girl on a pony that won’t go – so I agree equally valid with kick in.
    1. A brasserie not a pub?
      “Kick on” might be what you say to a pony, but I don’t think you can by extension claim that to “kick on” is to get (something) going any more than you can claim that “giddy up” means to get going.
      I can’t find the phrase “kick on” in my dictionaries, so I’m sticking with Kick in, even if PC = in is dubious: PC = on is more so.
      1. This was another one I looked at twice but yet again Collins comes to the Setter’s rescue by defining “brasserie” first as “a bar in which drinks and often food are served”. So a pub by any other name.

        But I know exactly what you mean.

  15. This was too difficult for us. the first unfinished for a fortnight. The use of shortened words like poss and lav and pic just doesn’t seem right, and I thought an ironclad was a battleship. Otherwise very much agreed with Jimbo’s comments.Failed to get 19 and 20, neither of which deserved the time we spent on them.
    Thanks for the explanations of others
    Mike & Fay
  16. 36 min, and not without some assistance. So not a true stinker, but still a bit rank. More artifice than art in my opinion. Glad to see I picked the right KICK IN for 20 dn. COD: 18 ac OF MICE AND MEN, which I read as a teenager and was greatly affected by.
  17. W used to mean Womens in clothes labelling in days before international sizes were used. W = Womens, WX= Womens Extra, OS = Outsize, XOS = Extra Outsize. Used to be a chain of womens’ clothes shops called Evans Outsize. Don’t think it would do too well today. However, I don’t really think the compiler used this scale as the basis for the clue.

    I had “Turn On” for Boot PC, and still think it’s a better answer. Held me up for a while, though. Enjoyed Limbo.

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