Times 24360 – Getting hold of a baronet, I……

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 25 minutes

Music: None, I was watching the golf playoff in Las Vegas. Congratulations to the first Scottish winner on the US PGA tour in quite a while – Martin Laird.

Not terribly difficult, although due to a few beers at dinner and solving while watching golf, it was a little hard to tell. My approach was unusually wild for me; for example, I put in ‘laureateship’ without bothering with the cryptic, and only one checking letter. Didn’t get into any trouble with wrong answers, so I must have been lucky.

This should probably be categorized as a good, moderate, straightforward puzzle that requires little obscure knowledge. Fast times are possible, and many beginners will be able to finish eventually. As usual, the easy answers are not blogged, anyone with questions should just ask.

Across
1 DISEMBARRASS, DISEMBAR[k] + R + ASS. Straightforward construction, if you don’t wrongly conclude that ‘free’ is an anagram indicator.
8 DIPTERA, DI + PT + ERA. Almost the same clue as in the puzzle #2 from the finals at Cheltenham, but that one clued ‘DI’ as ‘busy’.
12 SINATRA, anagram of STAR IN A. An &lit, but he was really a star worldwide.
14 PIPE DREAM. PIP+ anagram of REMADE. Quite a nice speaker, popular in the late nineties, but still in production.
16 BARTHOLDI. BART + HOLD + I. My last in, this gave me a lot of trouble. I hestitated between ‘B.A.’ and ‘baronet’ before seeing how it works.
23 CAESURA, anagram of A SAUCER. The ‘ae’ part is not the first thing you think of when given these letters.
24 HEAVIER, HEA(V + I.E.)R. It took me a minute to see where the ‘ie’ came from.
25 PRITHEE, P[opula]R + I[t](THE)E[m], a rather elaborate construction leading to very direct literal.
26 LAUREATESHIP. Anagram of AS A RULE THE + I[s] P]erformed]. As mentioned, just thrown in from the literal.
 
Down
2 STIR FRY. STIR ( = ‘jug’ = ‘gaol’) + FR + Y. We see ‘the’ in Spanish often enough, but seldom do we see ‘and’.
4 ANDES. S + EDNA upside down. There is an endless supply of women’s names available for such clues.
5 REPINED. RE+ PINE + D. Simple, unless you think ‘about’ is a construction instruction rather than part of the answer. Deal, of course, refers to cheap pine boards for inexpensive shelving.
6 SHEATHE, SHE + (EH + TA upside down). This is the first time I’ve ever seen Haggard explicitly mentioned in a reference to the most popular novel in the crossword world.
7 DAYTONA BEACH. DAY TO NAB EACH. Cute!.
17 RUM BABA. RUMBA + BA(kery). I at first supposed ‘couple’ refered to BA + BA, then I saw it.
18 HARRIER, double definition. Hard for me because I only know the fighter plane. I had TERRIER but then decided it must be wrong – and it is.
19 BLEMISH, B + [F]LEMISH.
20 COUGH UP, C(OUGH[t])UP. A bit tricky, even with the crossing letters. I was trying to make ‘clump up’ and ‘chump up’ work for a while.
22 LORNA, LORN + A. The word ‘lorn’ is a fossilized Verner’s Law verb form. The principle parts were leosan, leas, luron, loren. Nowadays, we have regularized to ‘lose, lost’.

36 comments on “Times 24360 – Getting hold of a baronet, I……”

  1. Actually, I’d rate it at the trickier end of the spectrum, enjoyable with some nice unusual vocabulary. Definitely not the standard Monday fare.

  2. Like you, I began cavalierly in the bottom half until I got to JAM TART er RUM BALL er RUM BABA and thought I’d better slow down and read the clues more carefully, which I did with aplomb. I found the top half to be much trickier than the lower. Wasn’t helped by misreading the book as a look at 6, which gets my COD for it’s “what cheers up”. Also liked PIPE DREAM & ANDES.

    In the end I spent way to long on ?a? = time and didn’t know BARTHOLDI; apologies to our French & US readers. Couldn’t see b?r? being any kind of title in my cognisance and I was right. Must go to more garden parties.

  3. 5:48 – doubtless helped by the near repeat at 9 – I guess this is evidence that the finals puzzles are devised separately from the normal sequence, though presumably with some attention to the daily puzzles in the week or two just before the finals – I don’t remember any repeats the other way round. 1, 8 and 12 needed a second look, as did 2, 4, 15, 16, 19, 26. Much of the rest went straight in from helpful defs.

    For those asking “Who are these people?”, here are famous works by Bartholdi and Duchamp.

  4. There’s an R missing at 12ac, Vinyl. SINATRA was my last in and I really kicked myself for not spotting it earlier.

    I didn’t get the explanation of 6dn. I eventually decided it was HEAT inside SHE, “heat” being “what cheers up” for some reason. I’m wasn’t convinced by this as apart from anything else there was no containment indicator.

    Never heard of DAYTONA BEACH, nor CAESURA. Worked out DUCHAMP and BARTHOLDI as names I have heard of though I couldn’t have told you what they did.

    Not sure that “free” is an adequate definition of DISEMBARRASS without there being some other indication in the clue of what one is being freed of.

    This took me over an hour, btw.

  5. DUCHAMP straight in (recent exhibition) and DISEMBARRASS thereafter although I am with Jack on “free”. Only figured out the EH TA in SHEATHE and the BACON clue (easy?) as I was composing this and looking at those clues again I have to disagree with vinyl1 that this was in any way straightforward, but then it took me hours to figure out the Nietzschian answer from Saturday’s daily, so what do I know? Didn’t know DAYTONA BEACH, DIPTERA or CAESURA. Never got past TERRIER so couldn’t get BARTHOLDI even after consulting an alpha list of sculptors. Still don’t see the I at the end?
    Tough work for me.
        1. It’s a symbol used in physics. Why I was chosen, I have no idea – c for the speed of light (also used occasionally in xwds) is equally baffling.
          2. Good questions regarding the symbols.

            ‘I’ is possibly from “current intensity” or “electron-flow impetus” or something similar.

            ‘c’ is somewhat uncertain; with some sources suggesting it is from c=celeritas [latin=speed] although more likely it is from c=constant [an adaption of Webber’s constant].

            AV.

  6. stalled a couple of times and needed a little help to finish, but thought this was really entertaining. had a real blonde moment with 3d couldnt see it for ages even after having written it in – im not sure i have come across plastic as an anagrind before, so this has to be my cod.
  7. Too much culture by far – wordplay produced “who he?” twice – and I agree more challenging than many of late. Half an hour, last in 1a, 6d and 12a, agree worldwide.
  8. This was a mixture of very easy and obscure. I loved what cheers up in Sheathe, which was my next to last in. Then I got Disembarrass, which needed all the checking letters. Duchamp did not ring a bell although, checking up on him, his Nude Descending a Staircase, and Fountain are familiar to me. Likewise Bartholdi, which only occurred to me as a feasible name because of Felix Mendelssohn Bartoldy.

    There were probably too many individual letter indicators in this puzzle: primarily, commencing, close, oddly, extremely, initially, first couple.

    Solvers who pay their 90p to do the paper version of this crossword got their usual extra clue today. The last time we had Harrier was the Saturday before last so it is included in the solution at the bottom of the page.

    1. How does disembarrass = free? I think the answer is that it is the opposite of the verb “to embarrass” in its less common, and slightly archaic sense, of “to hamper, impede”. So “to disembarrass” means “to free oneself (of a burden, nuisance or difficulty of some kind)” (see COED).
  11. Enjoyable and generally straightforward puzzle, but with some difficulties. I made goodish progress but then got bogged down in the NE corner where REPINED, DIPTERA and SHEATHE took a long time to come, so solving time was around 50 mins in the end. Didn’t get the wordplay of SHEATHE until coming here. (Instruction to self: write out 100 times TA can = cheers.) DAYTONA BEACH was neat and chuckle-worthy.

  12. 25:12 .. Last in DAYTONA BEACH, for which I needed all the checking letters. I was quite sure it was in California.

    Peter’s time seems stupendous to me for this puzzle.

  13. Stared forever at B-R-HOLDI wondering how to get a title out of those first four letters, figured it was just a name and put in BERTHOLDI
  14. I made a bit of a mess of this. First mistake was to enter DIPTERA in the light for 12; it was some time before I spotted this error. Then I guessed wrongly that there might be a bird called a TERRIER, for 18, so that stopped me getting 16, for which I entered BARSTILLI. Once I consulted Bradford’s for sculptors I was able to rectify my errors. No problems elsewhere apart from understanding how the Y was indicated in 2. Having seen the blog, that seems pretty obscure, though the answer as a whole was obvious once F from TRAFFIC appeared.
  15. Can someone please explain SHEATHE again?! I did the whole puzzle, including this word, but I still can’t see why!
    Ta in advance.
    Nico.
    1. The definition (natch) is “cover”, which is made up of SHE (novel by R Haggard) plus reversal of EH (interjection meaning “What?”)and TA (informal for “thank you”, as also is “cheers (or as the OECD puts it a way of “expressing gratitude or acknowledgement”).
  16. 9.45 Hadn’t heard of BARTHOLDI but got the last part. Just a bit of hestation because BERTHOLDI sounded more familiar but one doesn’t come across Bert in titled circles (I believe) – Bertie , of course!
    I was also helped by DIPTERA which was one of the first in and I had a double-take moment thinking “did I do this puzzle last week?”
    Last in was 26 which took me longer than it should have. HARRIER unfamiliar as a dog but no problem once the H appeared
  17. I found particularly the top of this quite tough going. I eventually worked out DIS… at 1A from wordplay and found “free” a bit loose as a definition. Didn’t remember DUCHAMP (or BARTHOLDI – which I guessed – for that matter). Nor had I heard of the beach but can’t complain given some of the obscure UK places that crop up occasionally. I liked DIPTERA.

    Barry if you remember I (current) = V (voltage)/R (resistance) you’ll have three scientific symbols to fall back on!

  18. 32 min here, and with some assistance required, so not your Monday walk in the park. No resonance whatever for BATHOLDI, although I MUST have heard of him. I tips me lid to those who got it from the word play alone. I had no time for SINATRA I’m afraid, but I do love this clue so COD. Overall an excellent tight puzzle.

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