Times 24425 – Virgin territory, STDs and fat owls…

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 75mins

Mushy brain syndrome persists in Australia, in my mind and in those of its cricketers (what was Ricky thinking?). At almost every step of the solving process I thought I’d never get there, having seemingly intractable clues crossing each other at every corner, but I persevered, hoping to avoid complete ignominy. Some seriously devious and smooth clues in this one, he says, hoping others will agree.

Across
1 AUGUR = A GURU with the second u jumping ahead three places. Augury originally involved interpreting messages brought from the gods by birds. The History Channel tells the story of how the mechanical singing birds developed by Hero(n) of Alexandria later played a role in it. Augurs could disengage the mechanism of the birds they controlled and so the bird would either sing or not when they turned the handle; thereby indicating yes or no to a specific question put to the augur by a paying supplicant. A nice little earner.
4 TUBEROSES = TUBE + ROSES (as in shower roses), fragrant flowers.
9 PUNCTILIO = (UNPOLITIC)*, as in punctilious to a fault. I couldn’t fit violoncello in despite my best procrustean attempts.
10 CAMEO = “came to nothing” (“to” in the sense of “next to”)
11 ATTACH = A.C. (for alternating current) in (THAT)*
12 ADORABLE = BAR reversed in A DOLE.
14 DET (“debt”) + O for old + NATION = DETONATION, “needs” being a link word?
16 DECK, a double definition. Deck the halls and all that.
19 DIRE = DIREctor
20 (NEED MEN OUT)* = DENOUEMENT, all the strings being pulled together (like a marionette doing a back flip?)
22 CHASTITY = C[HAS T]ITY. My last in. I was thinking it was some Midlands town, wasn’t I.
23 SCOTCH, double definition.
26 ACORN = A + CORN. Somewhat incongruously, I can see a mighty oak from where I sit, but no snow decorates its branches. If I want to see snow, I have to look at a Christmas card.
27 REPLETION = REP (as in repertory theatre) + LET I[O]N, being in a state of fullness
28 GRANDADDY = GRAN + DADDY
28 THE + IRe = THEIR

Down
1 (A DUD APPLE)* = APPLAUDED
2 GEN + E.T. = GENET, not Jean but a spotted cat mostly found in Africa, although there is a European one.
3 RETICENT = RE[IT rev.]CENT
4 Deliberately withheld. Ask if you can’t see it.
5 BLOOD (as in young blood) + DON + O.R. = BLOOD DONOR
6 RECORD, a double definition, the second cryptic.
7 SEMIBREVE = SE[VERB I’M rev.]E, or, somewhat paradoxically, a whole note; the longest note now in general use. It’s half a double note or breve. I hope that’s clear. Have I explained my system of musical notation involving six line staves? It’s probably best I don’t at this point.
8 STOKE, double definition, the first referring to Stoke-On-Trent and not Stoke Potters. That map of the UK showing all the industries that we were forced to learn in primary school (in Australia!) comes in handy from time to time. It’s a much simpler map these days, I suppose. Do they still make carpets in Kidderminster?
13 STREET CRED = CT (for court) reversed in (DESERTER)*, with the setters’ favourite nounal anagrind “criminal”.
15 TARRAGON + A = TARRAGONA, a city in Catalonia. New Year’s resolution: make a list of Spanish cities. Tarragon, on the other hand, is my favourite herb. It’s difficult to get hold of the French variety in Australia, because it can only be grown from cuttings and quarantine restrictions forbid imports.
17 KITCHENER = KIT + CHE[N for north]ER, for this army officer with a very recognisable image.
18 TEACHEST = TEA CHEST, the definition being “art master” as in “thou teachest”. Needless to say, this clue meant little to me on the first forty reads, but on the forty-first, the penny dropped. A Remove, as those of you with a good Public School education would know, is a form or division within the school (cue Billy Bunter).
21 ONE inside DTS (for Delirium Tremens) reversed = STONED &lit. “Recurrent” in the cryptic reading is in the sense of Anatomy. turned back so as to run in a reverse direction, as a nerve, artery, branch, etc.. Exceedingly clever and devious. For more than a while I wondered if there was another meaning of S.T.D. relating to chronic alcohol abuse.
22 I’ll leave this one for the gang to the explain, if required.
24 TRIP + E = TRIPE
26 YAPS rev. = SPAY

27 comments on “Times 24425 – Virgin territory, STDs and fat owls…”

  1. 70 minutes with 18dn and 21dn unexplained before I came here. I thought of Bunter as soon as I read “the Remove” but couldn’t really understand why TEACHEST or even TEA CHEST would be the answer. I thought the Fat Owl had a tuck box though I suppose it might have been a tea chest originally. TUBEROSES, PUNCTILIO and TARRAGONA were all unfamiliar though I expect I have met them before and forgotten them.
  2. Finished in about the normal (pedestrian) time but like Jack came here without understanding STONED and TEACHEST. In a great rush this morning so no time to think about either for which, in the latter case, I am eternally grateful. Well done Koro.
  3. Am I missing something here? Google doesn’t seem to suggest any particular association between Billy Bunter and a tea chest.

    Paul S.

    1. The link is between the Remove and the Bunster a.k.a. Fat Owl of the Remove, which pertains to the surface reading only; just as mystifying to me as the cryptic reading. I thought it might be the title of a play, but I was probably thinking of The Removalists”.
      1. Perhaps I should make myself perfectly clear and say that the tea chest is linked to remove with a small “r”; the capital “R” being a complete furphy, just as Billy is.
    2. Plenty of hits on Billy Bunter Tuck Box, though. I don’t really understand what’s going on here. Maybe it’s another of those clues where as Jimbo says the setter got carried away with an idea and it doesn’t really add up.
  4. Not sure what the fuss is about. Did this during the first session’s play in the Test, watching Australia try (in vain) to recover from yesterday’s disaster. Only took me about 20 mins between overs. Yeh, I wondered about TEACHEST, then had a good laugh over the whole thing. (So now I have to give it COD.) My parsing of STONED was a bit simpler. I read STD and the standard abbreviation for “standard” and assumed something recurrent was, well kind of, the standard thing. As in, it happens all the time. So wrong parsing, right answer.
  5. I had no trouble with this, finishing in under 20 minutes apart from 18D TEACHEST, which I then laboured over for another 5 minutes.

    There are two clues here that don’t work for me. The second definition of RECORD is weak in my view but relatively unimportant. TEACHEST I really don’t like. In the end I put in TEA-CHEST based upon “seen in the REMOVE” which is itself weak. Tea-chests are seen during a “removal” or during “a move” not “in the remove”. The equating of “(thou) art master” to “(thou) teachest” is too much of a stretch. Its an unsigned archaic construction which should correctly be “(thou) art a master”. This is one the editor should have knocked on the head as far as I’m concerned.

    The rest of it is standard stuff with nothing particularly worthy of mention.

    1. I am a master = I teach?? Why not?? It seems a perfect match to me.
      But I agree that “the remove” is dodgy
  6. Good start in top left corner, and little delay after that. Wrong initial stab at BLOOD GROUP for 5D, with {group =?= “fellow soldiers”}, but corrected almost immediately, and a pause at the end to explain STONED. As you can probably guess, less troubled than Jimbo by “remove” being used as a noun with the same meaning as move = relocation – for me this is in the same “imagined meanings for xwd purposes” box as {flower = river}.

    The full paradox with semibreve is that a “breve” was a short note (variant of brief/brevis) as opposed to a “long”.

    Sorry, forgot to say: solving time 6:54

    Edited at 2010-01-04 10:58 am (UTC)

  7. 15:41 here. Like almost everyone else, I spent a few minutes at the end puzzling over 18D, but eventually saw how it worked, and quite liked it. I put STONED in without seeing how it worked though, until I came here. The rest of it was fairly straightforward.
  8. This was plain sailing, taking 20 minutes apart from 16,17 and 18, then a few minutes before I saw DECK and KITCHENER, and several more minutes before I slung in TEA-CHEST without fully understanding the clue. 27 minutes in all. Like dorsetjimbo I didn’t like it particularly, though I thought the clue for RECORD was OK.
  9. Same problems as everyone else. One trick that I have found, which may be worth passing on to beginners, is that if you are staring at an, apparently impossible checked letter pattern, such as in 18D, the answer will almost always be a compound word. So if you split the answer into (3,4) teachest readily pops out.

    Apart from teachest and stoned I did not understand the wordplay for augur. Therein lay my downfall. I misspelt the answer as the homophonic carpenter’s boring tool.

    I was brought up in Stoke, surrounded by coal-fired bottle ovens. Sadly today’s clue is somewhat anachronistic. Present-day Stoke is home to pottery museums rather than potteries.

    1. – or (3,5) even (in the sarky Anne Robinson sense of “even”). Compound words are one source of strange-looking patterns (or answers you wouldn’t expect from the pattern), but not the only one – foreign words and others spelled in unexpected ways can be tricky too – like “augur”. I’ve had trouble in the past seeing that ?E?G?E and ?A?S?R were waiting to become LEAGUE and CAESAR for example.
      1. Thanks for the correction, which gives me the opportunity to mention Cyclops’s brilliant Christmas special in Private Eye themed on stupid answers to Anne Robinson’s questions. If you value those laugh out loud moments in solving crosswords, you have to be prepared to fall off your chair and wet yourself when you realise that the answer to 52a “What ‘R’ is Hillary Clinton’s middle name? (11)” is Rottweiller. The answer to “What item of clothing is awarded to a sportsman representing his country? (9)” is Jockstrap.
        1. Rottweiller is probably a misspelling but the blogger on fifteensquared charitably suggests that it reflects Hillary’s misspelling of her own name.
  11. 25 minutes, and then there was TEACHEST.

    I’m ok with the ‘tea chest’ and ‘remove’ bit, but I find the ‘teachest’ and ‘art master’ bit unsatisfactory.

    Still, it was the best time this year.

    Got off to a good start with eight solved cold on the first run through.

  12. I took about an hour, but didn’t get TEACHEST. After reading the blog and comments, I don’t blame myself either. Other than that, much tougher than usual for me. STREET CRED was clever. Better luck tomorrow for me, regards to all of you.
  13. Only half completed today. Felt like I was wading through treacle. Guessing FINALE as 23 across didn’t help solve the southeast corner. Disappointed DENOUEMENT didn’t jump into my mind even though I was looking for anagrams. Enjoyed STREET CRED and AUGUR (post explanation here)
  14. Oh, dear. 21 minutes for all but TEACHEST, which I never did solve.

    I’ve resolved not to criticise clues that defeat me – it’s like failing to climb Everest and then declaring it to be a bit rubbish as mountains go. So I shan’t do that. Mind you, I think it was Mark Twain who described resolutions as cheques drawn on a bank where we have no account, so I don’t know how long this one will hold up.

    Not a promising start to the new year here: two regular puzzles, two DNFs.

  16. No trouble with this crossword… except for one clue!
    I hate entering an answer mainly because nothing else will fit and not being clear on why it might be right or wrong. All I could see was a vague connection between tea-chests and removals. Having read the comments above I am still of the opinion that the clue is highly unsatisfactory. I don’t think it is technically correct, either, because I don’t see the link between “art master” and “teachest” as being strictly accurate. “thou teachest” might just suffice.
  17. I don’t think there is a Bunter or owl of the Remove connection, I think Remove refers to furniture removal/house moving, when goods used to be packed in tea chests.

    Mark

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