Times 24,319

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
12 minutes today, so significantly easier than recent puzzles on my watch, in my opinion at least. Perfectly respectable without being anything special (he said, trying not to damn with faint praise…)

Across
1 PRINCEDOMS – PRI[N]CE + DOMS; the monkish part of the clue will be familiar to listeners of Radio 4’s “Thought for the Day”, which is regularly thought by Dom Anthony Sutch.
6 SPUD – (DUPES) rev.; I knew a “Spud” Murphy at school, and wondered if it was still a current nickname, since scare stories in the press would have me think kids today barely realise where chips come from, let alone what the potatoes are called.
9 ESCAPEMENT – CAPE MEN in E(nglish) ST(reet) gives this part of your watch (assuming it isn’t digital).
10 BOOM – BOO + M(ps), as has been the vogue this summer in the UK.
12 MOUNTAIN LION – (INAMOONLIT+TUNA)*.
15 PROCREATE – PRO + CREATE. Outside the world of Tiger Woods and the other very top players, being a golf “pro” is almost always analogous with being the coach in residence at a particular course.
17 EVENS – Dame Edith EVANS with the A changed to E. If you are old enough to remember the actress, I’ll bet the word “handbag” crossed your mind. If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, a recording is here.
18 RENAL – (butche)R + (LANE)rev.
19 SPECTACLE – (ACCEPTS + LE)*.
20 IMPOVERISHED – OVER in IMPISH ED; note as always to non-cricketers to watch out for “over” = “deliveries”.
24 IFOR – Welsh name pronounced IVOR; I = current in physics notation, V = following, as found in the annotation of texts, “q.v.” etc, F = following OR = Other Ranks. having originally attempted to justify IVOR, I think I’ll go with jackkt’s reading, which simply didn’t occur to me – d’oh!
25 ILLUMINATE – ILL + U + MATE round IN: more cricketing terms for the uninitiated, I’m afraid, with “IN” = batting.
26 GIFT – GT (Gran Turismo) = posh car; “out of condition” = put around IF.
27 TARANTELLA – T(he) + ARAN + (William) TELL + A.
 
Down
1 PHEW – sounds like FEW.
2 INCH – double def., move slowly + Scottish island.
3 CUPBOARD LOVE – crytic def., with the meaning of press = “cupboard” to deceive those unaware of this regularly used device.
4 DEMON – “DE MON” = French for “of mine”, assuming the spirit is masculine, of course, just to keep my old French teacher onside.
5 MANGANESE – nicely worked clue this: one of the components of steel is managnese, which is shortened to its chemical symbol Mn; which is, of course “Man” dropping the “a”.
7 PROVIDENCE – PROVINCE round ED(rev), which is the capital of Rhode Island.
8 DIMINISHED – DI + MINI + SHED.
11 ANAESTHETIST – cryptic def.
13 UPBRAIDING – UP (= “at university” in Oxbridge slang) + BRAIDING.
14 SOUNDPROOF – SOUND (reliable) + PROOF (evidence).
16 AUSTRALIA – U.S. AL (Capone) in ATRIA; “in different places” indicating that they’re dropped in separately.
21 SCUBA – S(old) + CUBA.
22 BAIL – double def. A rail is a component of a showjumping fence. Oh dear, oh dear. See below for the definition of BAIL which never occurred to me, along with the jumping reference. Reminder to self, If you think the justification for a solution is weak, it may be pilot error, and not the fault of the clue; there again, plenty of people seem to have jumped (sorry – no pun intended) to more than one wrong conclusion, so it wasn’t just this blogger who was tripped up…
23 HERA – HE R(oyal)A(cademician) gives the Greek goddess.

30 comments on “Times 24,319”

  1. About 40 mins for me. Just generally slow. I had BAIL at 22d. Random House (courtesy of dictionary.com) has:

    bail 2. British, Australian. a bar, framework, partition, or the like, for confining or separating cows, horses, etc., in a stable.

    Otherwise a standard fare puzzle.

  2. Of to a rollicking start, then fell apart. GIFT eluded me for ages, then lead to a head banging episode. IFOR I did not get. Considered it as a possibliity, but could not find a single reference to it anywhere, so for the first time in a long time could not finish. COD: GIFT – Grrrrr…
  3. And as an add on I had also entered WALL without qualms. I cannot see anything which would differentiate between WALL, RAIL and BAIL.
    1. Ross, like you, I was a WALL man and agree that all three answers could be justified (q.v.my further comment below). But BAIL is clearly the best answer because – to quote Chambers – it specifically means (among other things)”a pole separating horses in a stable”, which cannot be said of either WALL or RAIL.
      1. Hmmm. This use of bail is new to me. From my childhood down on the farm, the bail was a bar dropped behind a cow due to be milked in a byre to stop it backing out. It also acted as an anchor for the bail robe which was secured to the bar, and restricted the near side hind leg to stop the cow kicking the bucket or indeed the milker. Hence the expression: bailed up.
        1. I’d never met “bail” in this sense before either, knowing only the cricket and legal meanings. But the stable context is clearly justified by the dictionaries, making it the best (if perhaps not the only)answer.
  4. Correction (thanks to Paul S and Koro): BAIL, and not RAIL, is surely the intended answer at 22nd. However, a clue to which there are at least two other possible, if much less satisfactory answers, is perhaps less than satisfactory itself.
  5. 10 mins but with WALL instead of BAIL. Now I know the alternative meaning of BAIL, it is clearly a better solution than WALL, which did worry me a bit when I opted for it.
  6. It’s some time since I broke the 30 minute barrier so completing this one in 25 minutes was a welcome achievement. I wasn’t sure about RAIL. I know the fence in show-jumping but didn’t get the connection with “stable”. I had second thoughts about IVOR at 24 and changed it to IFOR. Isn’t this an alternative Welsh spelling?
      1. You beat me to the punch, Jack! I too switched to IFOR at 24ac having initially entered IVOR. Apart from anything else, it is difficult to see how to get “following” from V – q.v. is an abbreviation for quod vide, literally “which see”, and is the standard way of directing a reader to another part of a book or text. I think RAIL is almost certainly the intended answer at 22dn, but I entered WALL, which I would be prepared at a pinch to defend on appeal. A wall could divide a stable, and almost any showjumping course includes a wall.

        The puzzle as a whole was, as Tim says, fairly straightforward (just over 30 mins for me), with one or two absurdly easy clues (e.g. ANAESTHETIST at 11dn which barely qualifies as cryptic, and SCUBA at 21dn where both definition and wordplay are glaringly obvious). These went in so quickly I had the momentary illusion of what it must feel like to be Peter B! But some good, better disguised stuff elsewhere. I liked ESCAPEMENT and GIFT and at 9 and 26ac. And PHEW was fun (if hardly difficult) at 1ac. (Cue complaint from Jimbo that “phew” doesn’t sound like “few” where he comes from? But perhaps even the great homophone-phobe would allow this one).

  7. Knocked 1 hour off recent par time, so happier, but had RAIL (I am sure BAIL is right) and had no idea why MANGANESE.
    Like others had IVOR but changed to IFOR although my reasoning was wrong ie found IF in Chambers which has something to do with electronics (current!). Have since noted that IVOR is eschewed in a couple of Welsh Names sites so one wonders about Novello, Allchurch and Emmanuel.

    For all you non-scientists out there Chambers has IF as an abbrev. for Intermediate Frequency which is defined as:-
    The output carrier frequency of a frequency changer in a superheterodyne receiver, adjusted to coincide with the frequency band of the intermediate amplifier.

    So now you know.

  8. 15:10 with one mistake. 22d is surely BAIL, but I had RAIL, on the grounds that, certainly in N America, a train can jump the rails. Bail is better, and surely intended.

    First in PHEW, last MANGANESE.

    I didn’t get the wordplay for GIFT, so thanks, Tim.

    Thank heavens Penfold alerted everyone to the coded messages in the unchecked letters, or we wouldn’t have known that the Americans are planning to invade Fiji (USA – Nadi).

  9. I have BAIL for 22 down. It is a bar to separate horses in a stable, and you can ‘jump bail’.

    Paul S.

  10. 1d Rightly or wrongly I’ve always pronounced “Phew ” as pew . What is the general feeling on this?
    1. Always been “few” in my household, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned since finding this group, it’s that the land of Homophonia is a contentious place…
      1. In my 67 years so far on the planet, I have to say that I’ve never ever heard “phew” pronounced as “pew”. But, as Tim says, the “when-is-a-homophone-not-a-homphone” business is a territory where fools rush in but angels etc …
  11. I raced through this and then came to a grinding halt on BAIL. First I decided it had to be WALL, but that seemed really weak (I mean a wall can be jumped, but usually clues have a twist in them). I never thought of BAIL but RAIL seemed like something dividing horses and trains can jump the rails (but only in the plural so I still wasn’t convinced) and horses can jump rails (but again I think they are normally plural aren’t they).

    These short clues with multiple answers really are hard since the crossword intuition doesn’t work. For instance, I was held up for a moment on MANGANESE since I couldn’t see any word that fitted the checkers, then I saw it and had a doh moment on the Mn thing since I’d already seen the “man less a” but couldn’t see how to fit MN into the answer.

  13. Didn’t record a time but as I fell into both the IVOR and WALL traps that’s academic anyway. As has been said, some ridiculously easy clues (add renal and evens to those already mentioned) but other tricky areas, notably the NW corner for me.

    FAO George when he pops in, I checked out Jessica Defino on Sunday. Unfortunately they were running way ahead of time on that stage so I only caught the last 10 minutes. Nice little song about becoming famous by killing someone important and I liked her “flying V” ukelele.

  14. 12 minutes but one mistake – IVOR as you might guess although if this was a competition puzzle I would be approaching the bench to claim an alternative correct answer, as a drowning man clutches the straw. Also went through WALL and RAIL before fortunately stumbling over the BAIL.
    As I expect to be at Cheltenham in October I decided to get into that mode as of today which means checking every answer ,so that worked pretty well, eh?
  15. 20 minutes here and the same quibbles as everybody else. PHEW was my first in and it works for me but as noted above not for everybody (no surprise there). I raced through the top but dithered around over IVOR/IFOR plumping for IFOR as the better alternative. Then ended up going through WALL/RAIL/BAIL and plumped for rail before using a dictionary at which point I switched to BAIL – nasty little clue.
  16. 15:40 here, with RAIL in at 22D, but I changed it to BAIL a few minutes later as I wasn’t happy with it. At Cheltenham I would have moved on the next puzzle while chewing it over at the back of my mind, so probably would have lost little time in fixing it. No problem with IFOR, as I lived in Wales for a while and thought of Ifor Williams Trailers immediately.

    Re SPUD – I went to King Edward VI School in Southampton, and we were all nicknamed “Spud” by the pupils of other schools in the area.

  17. I thought this was a good crossword, straightforward but with tricky bits.
    Neither Ivor nor wall nor rail worked for me as credible answers, and F=following is approaching cliche status now. So I don’t think it had any technical shortcomings.
    I *really* liked manganese, which at a stroke has helped to reinforce that knowledge of the periodic table should be de rigeur among my fellow solvers, a journey of discovery for many of them I reckon 🙂
  18. About 35 minutes but at the end resorted to aids to sort among IFOR/IVOR and BAIL/WALL/RAIL, and also for CUPBOARD LOVE, never heard of it. Must be a UK-ism. PHEW sounds like ‘few’ to me, no problem. Some easy stuff yes, but some real tricky ones also. Regards everybody.
  19. I got it even more wrong – had TAFF (current for the river, ff for following and TA for members of the forces). Still seems not too far adrift to me – which then led to MEANINGFUL for 14 down, cue carnage in the bottom left hand corner. Oh well, I’d never have got BAIL.
    1. Thank you for making me laugh. I love the idea of “crossword carnage”. I think we’ve all been there.
  20. I also had RAIL not BAIL – while BAIL is incontestably the intended and only permissible answer, I fancy, it was a pity perhaps that we were directed to the stable rather than the cricket field where in any case I cannot help thinking of the 1975 Lords streaker “jumping bail”
  21. 6:56 for this on a train today – the stable meaning of BAIL was new to me to, but avoided thinking of the alternatives.

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