Times 24332 – Another fine mess!

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
7 a.m.: 13:00 for this. At 1D I saw “PI=holy inside something”, and made this into POPISH, thinking it was an offensive version of “catholic”, and hoped the rest worked. On writing up, I got as far as writing “two defs, NOT container and contents” before I saw PA(PI)ST, which is certain to be the right answer. I don’t think the dictionaries will save me with a rare double solution, but will leave checking until my full write-up which should be up in a couple of hours.

9 a.m.: It took a long time to get started with this. At 10, I recalled some word with CIAMENT in it, but could do no better than ?PRONOUNCIAMENTS written by the clue. 18 was my first inked-in answer. The last few were 11, 2, 1A, 3, 13.

No help from the dictionaries with 1A – apart from “Catholic offensively”, like PAPIST, the only other def. I could find was “relating to Alexander Pope” in the OED. My “old word for holy” meaning wasn’t there, so my white headgear stays on.

Across
1 PR(ACT)ICE – I’ll blame my slow solving on act=venture – both noun and verb meanings are similar – to venture is to act, and a venture=enterprise is an act, but both are a specific kind of “act”. When there are gaps between the clue and my understanding, I’m usually put right by the dictionary, but not in this case unless I’m missing something
5 BED=rev. of Deb=Deborah,LAM=hit
10 PRONUNCIAMENTOS – anag. of (uncertain MP soon) – I eventually remembered the Spanish flavour with help from checking letters. It’s an edict, proclamation or manifesto, esp. one from rebels in a Spanish-speaking country.
11 S(A,TIE)TY – tie = restrict or restriction, = limit as noun or verb
12 TRAIPSE – I in rev. of ESPART(o) – grass, from a horticultural corner of the dictionary (espalier is next door)
13 OUT=available,SIDER=”cider”
15 ETHEL – from Bethel, where Jacob had his dream about a ladder
18 LINKS – double def. The word “provides” can function as a link(!) between the two defs, or as part of the second def., though I guess the first was intended.
20 POSE,I,DON – for the second time in a week or so, I took far too long to see lecturer=DON. Poseidon is god of the sea, and earthquakes apparently
23 GAR(D)NER – only just realised exactly which writer is being used here – Erle Stanley Gardner
25 CONCGEAL
26 TEN GREEN BOTTLES = (Lent’s better gone), referring to the song
27 DUN=dull looking (greyish brown),BAR=pub – Dunbar is a port (or at least coastal town) where John Muir, founder of the Sierra club, was born.
28 S(TERN)WAY – sway=ruling power=control – solved with only half the wordplay, thinking that YAW might be a boat, as well as the yawl which I first thought of. Credit to the setter for fooling me with the old “false reversal indicator” trick
 
Down
1 PA(PI)ST, not POPISH (see above)
2 A,BOUT,TURN=shock – as in “I had an awful turn when I realised the answer was PAPIST”
3 T(O.U.P.)EES – tee=a mark aimed at in games like quoits or curling – “hairy bits” is a nice silly def.
4 COCK=male mate,(miser)Y
6 (m)ELE(V.A.T.)E
7 LE=the French,TUP = ram (noun) = butter – crossword def in the style of flower=river, wicked thing=candle
8 M=minutes,ISDEALT=details*
9 SALTIR=trails*,E,S – “running” is the anagram indicator
14 DE(PART)ED – the usual xwd meaning of “late”
16 HOOKE’S LAW = (So, OK, whales)*. I remembered the law as being about elastic – nearly right
17 B(LIGHT=land (verb)ED
19 SANG=warbled,RIA = rev. of air=song. Strictly, not wine but a wine punch
21 IGNITER – I too missed the reverse hidden word in (“ferreting I”) while solving.
22 (i)C(LASS)Y
24 RUN IN=nick=arrest,RUN-IN=disagreement

40 comments on “Times 24332 – Another fine mess!”

  1. Think that 10 across is an obstruse word…took me ages to do the NW corner…not sure about Satiety and Toupees but liked the reference to Oxford University press which i hadnt seen before!

    Liked the other long anagram too

    Looking forward to the blog

  2. 50 minutes, out of time with two incomplete answers.

    On arrival at work the on-line solver did for one and the other followed immediately. But this morning’s disaster was that the one I looked up (21dn) turned out to be a hidden reversal and it’s depressing that I failed to spot it!

    Apart from that and 28ac STERNWAY where I had been fixated first on STOWAWAY and then on STAIRWAY(both might be flighty,I thought), the other major problem was the anagram at 10ac where I needed every checker in place before working out the correct answer which I have never heard of.

    Other guesses were ETHEL at 15ac and HOOKE’S LAW at 16ac. I feel we are getting far too many clues referring to science these days.

  3. Good job PB is blogging.
    Says much that despite the most egregious cheating I nevertheless felt satisfied to finish. One of those where the preponderance of difficult clues conceals the easier ones, unless lucky enough to stumble across them. Also says much for the puzzle that other than Hooke’s Law there is hardly an obscure word among the answers although I haven’t heard PRONUNCIAMENTOS much down the pub lately.
    Who is this GARDNER person?
  4. Thanks Mike and Jack although I confess to have discounted the creator of Perry Mason on the basis that he wrote legal thrillers rather than “detective books”. Cue debate.
    1. I had that argument here about a year ago, Barry, and can’t remember the outcome but I think there were more people anti than pro my POV which was much the same as yours.
    2. Can’t remember having this precise debate but Wikipedia on both Gardner and Perry Mason make it clear that the style of the characters and novels is “detective” although their environment is legal.
      1. On reflection I wouldn’t argue with today’s clue because it refers to a genre which could easily encompass both detective and legal and I think that’s fair enough, but last time (IIRC) it was Perry Mason himself who was clued as a detective and that’s plain wrong in my opinion.

        1. I don’t know the Perry Mason books, but if he functions as a detective in most of the books, “detective” seems a perfectly fair description. Araucaria: priest or crossword setter? Gilbert White: priest or naturalist? There must be other examples.
          1. I must admit I only know Perry Mason from TV, but my dislike of seeing him clued as a detective rather than a lawyer is that the stories feature at least two regular detectives, Lt Tragg, the police chief and Paul Drake, Perry’s tame Private Investigator who goes sleuthing on his behalf. So in the context of the stories it seems wrong to call Perry a detective when he is distinctly a lawyer.
    3. I think ESG wrote plenty of other detective books even if you don’t count Perry Mason as one. I only wish there were more Perry Mason books in my local libraries.
      1. I considered other books by ESG but thought naahh!. I even went so far as to do a wiki search on “famous detectives in fiction” and blow me if buried among Miss Marple etc was Perry Mason. I remain agnostic. It seems to me that a prerequisite of a “detective book” is a detective.
  5. Logged expecting another quiet day commenting upon a reasonably straightforward 25 minute puzzle and find all sorts of angst.

    I guess PAPIST/POPIST is speed v considered analysis. It’s hardly a difficult clue if one reads it and thinks about it (apart from the word POPIST not existing? Isn’t it “popish” whilst “popery” is the offensive version?). The use of “act” also passed me by. My thought process being use=definition, probably “practice”, yes “price” surrounds “act”

    I’m old enough to know E S Gardner and remember the debate here some time ago about “detective books or law books”. Good to see another science clue and none of those daft old songs.

    2. Er, I think you’re the first to mention POPIST. POPISH and PAPIST are both listed as offensive adjectives, POPERY is the matching noun.

      Edited at 2009-09-16 09:51 am (UTC)

  6. 28 mins today, so I didn’t find this as hard as some and nearly reached my ideal target: PBx2. I’ll admit to being helped along by going for the two long anagrams first and being helped by a certain amount of linguistic knowledge with the first. Now the confession: it wouldn’t have counted because I too missed the reverse inclusive in 21. So I had IGNITOR. My parsing? It’s ROOTING (as in rooting around; not it’s more local meaning; though I did know someone called “The Ferret” once, so called for his prowess in that direction — think drainpipes). You reverse this and add the I that follows “ferreting” to the front (which is the end, because it’s all backwards)! Then how do you get rid of the O? Well, that’s “take part” — remove a bit, a letter in this case. The Lord knows what I was drinking last night!
  7. Sorry to be brief – still mad busy.

    Managed to squeeze in 20 minutes for a coffee and crossword, and just about finished in time.

    An odd mix of extremely good clues and some which felt slightly clunky – took a while to read 26A as a sentence – but a very satisfying solve all round.

    Like vinyl1 I ticked POSEIDON as COD; lovely use of “being able to…”

    Back to work. Humph.

    Q-0 E-6 D-7 COD 20A POSEIDON

  8. A day much like yesterday, when I was left with four crossing clues and no idea. Today it was 3, 13, 9 and 10. Had to look up SALTIRES and found it was a word, along with alternative spelling SALTIERS, so that didn’t help with 13, although I was reasonably sure it was a SIDER of some description. Eventually decided on a spelling of 10 and TOUPEES was last in. COD to POSEIDON.

    Peter at 4d, you have cock = male. My online clue definitely has “mate”. I thought this could be a typo in the clue at the time, but conceded cock = mate was probably UK slang, which dictionary.com confirms.

    1. male/mate: I was solving the online version too – just some problem with my eyes and/or brain, probably as I tried to explain COCKY, seen from Arrogant = ??C?Y. (Print version is the same.)
  9. Whilst I can see why OUTSIDER is the answer, it would never have occurred to me in 40 years, because CIDER is not a SPIRIT.
    1. True, but it is a drink, and “for the audience” can apply to the drink, but not to the spirit. Spirit is there as part of the def (“free spirit”).
    2. A-ha! Easy to get thrown by this one.

      “Free spirit” is the def; wordplay is OUT (available) and the homonym CIDER (drink “for the audience”).

  10. After two sittings, bad brain day could not make anything out of 3 down. Grrrr…. Did like 20 across though, and the nice bit of hiddenation at 21
  11. Well, at least I finished without aids, which is better than yesterday (where I still have four unsolved in the NE corner), but it took me 45 minutes. PRONUNCIAMENTOS eventually took shape when I had enough checked letters. TOUPEES and STERNWAY were the last to go in, though OUP should have occurred to me earlier.
    Several quibbles en route. I didn’t like ‘venture’ for act. Not particularly keen on ‘free spirit’ for outsider. Re 18, A link can connect one to a another part of the same website. ‘Warbled’ seems over-specific for SANG, and “smashing types etc” doesn’t convince me as a definition for 26.
  13. About the only problem I did not have was with pronunciamentos because I knew it as a relatively popular 15-letter answer. Other than that I had to make use of the dictionary and I still got one wrong. At 9, for crosses, I had bastards. I’m going to stand on the naughty step now.
  14. i found this very difficult. just about ok on lower half, but serial cheating to finish. i think wine as a definition for sangria is just lazy.
    2. Pi, mockingly short for “pious”. Not much used now, I think, but in common usage by my parents’ generation (b.1918)as a word to described people who prided themselves on their religiosity, and liked to make a show of their superior piety. “Offensively” I thought applied more strongly to PAPIST = Catholic than to PI but was nicely ambiguous in regard to both.
  17. About 35 minutes, but with 1 wrong, 9D, where as my last entry I tried CAPTURES, because I couldn’t think of anything else. The SALTIRE cross, I believe, actually appeared in this puzzle within reasonable memory, but my brain couldn’t recall it. My first entry was PRONUNCIAMENTOS, which went in straight off, can’t explain why. Maybe we Americans are closer to Central and South America, whence pronunciamentos often arise. I also thought 1D was ‘offensively holy’ inside ‘past’ for PAPIST. I don’t find PAPIST particularly offensive, and I’m a Catholic, (at least, officially). Didn’t know the grass in 12A, nor the song in 26, nor Hooke and his Law. I really liked the hidden, when I found it, so I nominate IGNITER as COD. I also liked 3, 17 and 6. Regards to all.
  18. 35 min, but with some cheating towards the end. 10 ac was a problem. Pronouncements came to mind immediately, and although it didn’t fit, the checking letters kept hinting at a related word. Eventually had to look it up. Had never heard of PRONUNCIAMENTOS so was not impressed. Then had to look up STERNWAY at the end, and with all the checking letters in … DOH!. 27 dn IGNITER irritated me considerable – until I got the answer – and is my COD, just pipping POSEIDON. Spring has sprung with a vengeance down here in little old NZ. Beautiful.
  19. 18.35. Most problems by trying to write in PRONOUNCIATIONS(sic) and a while to work out what it should be – new word. Like others STERNWAY was last in and another new word. Also had 22 worked out as GL as outer parts of girl so thought GLOSSY or GLITZY. GARDNER not a problem as although I am old enough to remember the TV series I don’t really hold the distinction between lawyer/detective in my head
    Maybe last post for a week as off to Lanzarote for some relaxation, might pick up an internet cafe somewhere.

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