Times 24342 – Greetings from the Midlands

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 50 mins

This was blogged in extenuating circumstances, solved online, with a wireless internet “connection” which remained so only when not required to find a site. I’m on a short break in remote Western Australia (i.e. anywhere outside a radius of 100 km of Perth) in a region known as the Midlands, aptly enough given 19dn. I visited a tourist spot, very near Mingenew (a real town) yesterday, where the tourist brochure described the reptiles as being “very cryptic”. I was going to ask their opinion of homophones, but didn’t see any.

It took a while to find the setter’s voice, but once I did it was reasonably plain sailing, until I hit the SE corner, where I ground to a halt, largely due to a dangerous mix of hubris and stupidity. An enjoyable, witty puzzle with not too much in the way of the obscure, except for 19dn of course.

Across
1 PIN=leg + POINT=fielding position. For our non-cricketing readers, point is the position square of the wicket on the off (i.e. non-leg) side. I was once fielding a little too close there when a forcibly struck ball ricocheted off my non-helmeted head and was caught several metres away at cover. I lay on the ground laughing for longer than was deemed appropriate by the departing batsman.
9 A + M.A. + (‘OTTER)< for AMARETTO, which I am reliably informed is an almond liqueur
10 (MAOISM)* = MIMOSA. Mimosa is a whole genus of plants, some of which crumple when touched. Giant Sensitive Plant (Mimosa diplotricha) was introduced into Australia as cattle fodder, before it was realised the sharp, curved prickles and aforementioned ability to shrink to nothing when tongued made it virtually inedible; a great pity because it thrived in the local conditions.
11 (AFRICA)* into which the letters L, I, O & N in sequence are sporadically interjected to yield CALIFORNIA. Other interpretations may be possible. Discuss.
12 ForMALIties. An interesting deconstruction.
13 UNIoN + Time + ENDED for UNINTENDED
16 CENTRAL, a double definition, the second presumably a reference to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. That’s rubbish too. See Peter’s explanation below. Any reference to the Central Committee in the old Soviet Union is oblique at best.
17 SP[RING]Y
20 AN[Tolstoy]ONYMOUS. Words opposite in meaning, like war and peace.
22 PELT, double def.
23 FLE[A MARK]ET
25 TRI[B]AL. I initially penned TRI[P]OS, thinking myself very clever for knowing about pieces of paper thrown from balconies.
26 STILETTO. I’ll call that a double definition with half twist.
27 PO[R]THOLE. Cave as in hole in ground rather than beware
Down
2 IN IT I ATE would indeed be “a restaurant review so curt as to be almost rude”
3 (CUT ITS POOR)* for PROSCIUTTO. This occurred recently (# 24323). Hoorah for clues I can get at first sight.
4 IN + A + Conservative + CURACY = INACCURACY
5 (A BIT OLD)* = TABLOID
6 GAFF, a double def. Pardon mon gaff. C’est un homophone. En anglais “gaffe” habituellement a une derriere feminine (regardez le Times #24336). Merci bien, mcctext. Using gaff to mean house is something I can imagine Dennis Waterman saying in full cockney caricature.
7 (DOESN’T)* = STONED. A cheeky little clue.
8 CO[WAR + turneD + taiL]Y for an &lit. I believe Peter had something to say about using devices such as “finally” in &lits quite recently. Being a sucker for an &lit, I don’t mind; as long as the surface isn’t overly strained.
14 TYPE + SETTER. The cryptic definition referring to the fact that typesetting these days doesn’t require the melting of lead, except in the soldering of certain electronic componentry.
15 NAIL + POLISH
16 Cold + RAY + FISH = CRAYFISH. A fitting clue for a Geraldton based blog; it being home to the lucrative WA cray (actually western rock lobster) fishing industry. I had to google fish = flat plate; they are the plates bolted across a joint to give it added strength, seen on masts and railway lines, for example.
18 GOLF-BALL, a cryptic definition. I tried for a long time to make driver = wood, suggested by the “o” in tripos, but to no avail.
19 WORKS + OP for the largest town in Bassetlaw

…and the rest I leave to your own devices. Ask if perplexed.

26 comments on “Times 24342 – Greetings from the Midlands”

  1. Got through this quickly, 14 mins, aided by the 4 anagrams and guessing some answers only to work out the wordplay later. (Though held up by briefly putting in FISH MARKET at 23ac, influenced, no doubt, by 16dn). And: shouldn’t there be a mention of “gaffe” at 6dn? Another bloody homophone!
    COD to 13ac for its unintended possibility: one presumably gets a loveless marriage if one marries one’s un-intended?
  2. 9:13 for this – one of those puzzles that’s not too hard but has some interesting clues, notably the canny way of getting the FISH in 16D.

    There’s a bit more at 16: if you convert “one” to I, it takes the central position in “commIttee”.

    Little problem with 8D – as kororareka says, the surface works well. My problem is with clues that use words like finally or “at heart” in a contrived definition. Here, “reticent about fighting” is the important part and is crystal clear.

    Edited at 2009-09-28 07:19 am (UTC)

      1. Clue: Important, like position one takes in committee

        Definition: Important
        Wordplay: the rest of the clue is a way of stating that the letter I in committee, being the 5th letter of 9, is CENTRAL in that word. (The letter I and number 1 are interchangeable in cryptics) – either by way of Roman numerals or from both being a vertical line in their simplest form.

        Hope that’s enough …

        1. I’ve always assumed this was justified by the posh use of ONE for the first-person singular personal pronoun.
  3. Given the Darwin reference I did briefly wonder if we had arrived at the themed puzzle threatened by Jimbo especially as I was struggling with some justifications eg the committee thing and the temperamental plant.
    Not too difficult to complete but made the classic error with an early entry of NAIL FINISH (whatever that is) and then forgetting its dubiety. This left me with F?L? at 22ac where I plumped for FELL. So, FELL at the last, ha ha.
    1. If you put a doubtful answer into the grid, I recommend a question mark just outside the grid, next to the doubtful answer.

      Across the pond, Ripstein marks are a similar method for competition use, named after one of their former champs. See this discussion.

  4. 50 minutes for me too, koro, but with an error at 6dn where the only thing I could think of was GOOF having wrongly written AMORETTO at 9ac. More attention to the wordplay whilst solving would have avoided this.

  5. Thanks to a rashly confident entry of PROSCIUTTO as PROSCUTTIO, I was left looking for a four letter country _A_U which unsurprisingly I failed to find, so was unable to clock a time.

    I suppose clueing B as “OK grade” is fair, but I would have thought the description fits A* better these days!

    1. I concur that these days, most students seem to expect A’s all the time and definitely see a B as not OK.
  6. This was not difficult but quite entertaining. I liked the laconic restaurant report, The War and Peace clue and the semi &Lit for Typesetter. Black mark for the use of the setters’ favourite wine at 24. It’s not as if there is no choice for A?T? words. It looks as though the other three 4-letter answers gave most trouble, which is not unusual. I toyed with Bali before I got Mali even though I knew it was not a country. I liked the unusual hidden word/charade combination.

    Thanks to Koro for explaining the plate meaning of fish and kudos for being able to post from Mingenew. I did not post last week just because I was in Paris. I did notice, on the plane, that I was just about the only person left who does not take my laptop on holiday with me.

  7. Lovely start to the week, almost as fast as PB and so glad I timed it!
    I enjoyed all the attempts to lead one astray especially 14d, and 1d made me giggle. I suppose I was lucky with the GK again, last in Worksop and stiletto.
  8. Rattled through most of it quite quickly, but got stuck for about 10 minutes on the last 4 in the SE corner – 18, 19, 25 & 27.

    Didn’t understand 8 before coming here, and didn’t know the meaning of MIMOSA, or that plate = fish. And I’ve just realised why Mark = book (Doh!)

    Some good clues. I like 8 (now that I fully get it), but I think my COD is UNINTENDED at 13. Last one in was 18 – I really should have picked up on the driver/round reference quicker.

  9. I cannot say I cared for some of this. Some of the puns were dire, particularly 2. ‘Perhaps’ is a poor anagram indicator in 11. “One growing sensitive” seems awkwardly contrived to mean a sensitive plant. Perhaps times have changed, but when I was a teacher and examiner A & B were good grades. C (equivalent to the old GCE pass) was an OK (ie satisfactory) grade.
    However, it was redeemed by some interesting clues elsewhere, notably 12 (which I didn’t get, having entered PROSCIUTTO wrongly), 16, 20 and 8.
    1. I must say the puns seemed perfectly OK to me, and in any case 2dn isn’t a pun, just a (quite funny) joke, the solution INITIATE being capable of being rendered as “in it I ate” – which would be a very brief restaurant review.

  10. 14.26 Not too bad considering one new word ANTONYMOUS and a failure to get the wordplay for 8 and 16. Was also a bit puzzled by the ‘perhaps’ and the ‘intermittently’ in 11 where I was expecting LO or IN to be in the answer.
    I used to stop overnight sometimes in Worksop in the distant past so it came easily once I got the last letter. PROSCIUTTO caused me pain last time it appeared as I spelt it UI instead of IU so that’s something I have learned in the meantime
  11. I thought this a fun puzzle not hugely difficult but very entertaining. I got all excited about Origin of Species but it was not to be and of course got GOLF BALL straight away. Even the homophone worked for me – wow! About 25 minutes to finish.
  12. Solved in the car (someone else was driving, I hasten to add, but still not recommended) so not sure of the time, but somewhere around my 17 minute par score. Entertaining puzzle.

    I think I’m going to spend all day now puzzling over kororareka’s “cryptic reptiles”. I’d always thought of Australia’s fauna as being largely quite straightforwardly lethal in nature – not cryptic at all. But what do I know?

    2. Sorry for the late reply, but my internet connection finally completely expired last night. The full quote is:

      Much of Coalseam’s animal life can be difficult to observe as mammals are mostly nocturnal and many reptiles can be very cryptic.

      I very much doubt the author had any specific zoological meaning in mind. The brochure includes a photograph of a bobtail blending in very well with its surroundings and I can only presume that this is what was meant, given the context of the quote.

      As for Australia’s toxic inhabitants, it has only relatively recently been discovered that the saliva of many lizards is poisonous, and not simply bacteria laden as was previously thought. So you can add a few more species to the list of things you should avoid stepping on when visiting Australia; if you can manage to distinguish them from rocks, tree branches, a pile of leaves,…

  13. I loved this puzzle. The North West corner was full of jewels. So many great surfaces. Many thanks to the setter for 50 full minutes of enjoyment.
  14. Didn’t get to finish this in one sitting, started late last night and fell asleep with about half finished, bleary-eyed picked it back up this morning and saw PORTHOLE and was off again.

    Didn’t see the wordplay for CALIFORNIA and got WORKSOP from the wordplay.

  15. About 25 minutes, and I found this enjoyable. I had to check the existence of WORKSOP, and in 16 I thought ‘fish’ was the skate, and that ‘ray’ must be a flat plate, so thanks to koro for the explanation. I also didn’t know the ‘house’ def. of GAFF. Apart from that no real problems, and a lot of smoothly written clues, such as 21, 20, 7, 8, but I especially liked the joke at 2D, for its self description as ‘laconic’, which it certainly seems to be. Regards.

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