Times 24458 – bob, racecar, tan gnat, taco cat!

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : I didn’t get a chance to do this in one sitting, it was three or four short breaks during a rehearsal for a Valentine’s Day show. I suspect there’ll be some fast times, the wordplay is pretty clear, although some of the words are pretty obscure (though as yesterday showed some words that are completely obscure to me are other people’s sexagesimas). I was held up the most by the Texas corner with incorrect initial guesses for 22 and 25 before seeing the correct wordplay. And away we go….

Across
1 SHEFFIELD: E,F,F(females) in SHIELD
6 POSIT: I in POST
9 MOLIERE: LIE in MORE. Had to laugh at this, because I had written a Moliere style piece for the show
10 L,IGNITE: brought back memories of “Zorba the Greek”
11 deliberately omitted
12 CASE IN, POINT: CASEIN, which popped up in a Mephisto recently, is a protein found in milk and cheese
14 BREAST: A (end of MIA) in the port of BREST. Didn’t know the port
15 CELLARET: EL in CLARET
17 AESTIVAL: A FESTIVAL without the F – got this from wordplay
19 ENOSIS: (NOISES)* another guess from wordplay, though it was obvious what the anagram was – the union of Greece and Cyprus
22 BLACK LETTER: LACK,L in BETTER(cured). I think referring to printing presses?
23 deliberately omitted
25 IN PLACE
27 RA,MAD,AN: definition is FAST. RA is the Royal Academy
28 G,HOST
29 SEASCAPES: cryptic definition
 
Down
1 SAMOS: SAMO(an)S
2 ECLIPSE: CLIPS in English literaturE
3 FRENCH,STICK: got this one from the definition
4 EVEN SO: the SO coming from SOcks
5 DULCINEA: haven’t read Don Quixote, but it seemed like the best combination of the letters in CLAUDINE
6 deliberately omitted
7 SP,ICIER: the first part being SLEEP minus LEE
8 THE STATES: THIS minus IS, then ESTATES – interesting wordplay, I was rather taken with “THIS IS MISSING” to indicate TH
13 PALINDROMIC: (PRIM,LAD,COIN)*
14 BRAM,BLING: After Kingsley for AMIS yesterday we get Stoker for BRAM
16 deliberately omitted
18 SHAMPOO: (MOP,HAS)* then O
20 STOOD UP: a double definition for the upcoming Valentine’s Day
21 STERN,A
24 BONUS: ON in BUS
26 A,PT

32 comments on “Times 24458 – bob, racecar, tan gnat, taco cat!”

  1. 18 minutes. Couple of things on BLACK LETTER. Firstly I was trying hard to justify BLOCK LETTER since one of these might actually cure a housing shortage! In its adjectival form, it refers to “the basic standard elements for a particular field of law, which are generally known and free from doubt or dispute” (Wik) and is from a favoured typeface: “an early, ornate, bold style of type, typically resembling Gothic” (Mac OED).
    Happy VD George!
    1. For some strange reason couldn’t get that out of my mind and it held me up for a while. I never did get AESTIVAL. 30-35 minutes. Thanks for the line the other night. Nice guitar. Is it a Gibson?
  2. Very fair, very enjoyable, the best puzzle this week by some distance. While George was held up in Texas, I got seriously delayed in Newcastle thanks to its little cluster of unfamiliar words (DULCINEA, LIGNITE, CELLARET). Trying to squeeze BARIS into 1dn also set me back for a while. But that was typical of the whole puzzle – very satisfying once I’d made sense of it.

    So in the end, something over an hour. In fact, considerably something over an hour.

  3. About 45 minutes with one wrong; one person’s enosis is another’s onesis. I found it all good fun, except for the pair of socks. Christmas all over again.

  4. No solving time from me today as I didn’t get a proper run at it thanks to The Times deciding that my subscription had run out and forcing me to pay up or else.

    Renewal of the annual subscription is supposed to be automatic yet both this year and last it didn’t happen for me. I suppose I should be thankful that unlike last year when the renewal system broke down completely and I had hassle for a fortnight trying to resubscribe, at least this time the process went relatively smoothly.

    Then my printer jammed and I had to find the manual to unjam it. So I lost all my 15 minutes quality solving time before setting out (late) for work and the puzzle was done in dribs and drabs whilst on the move.

    I thought this was definitely a step up in difficulty compared with the past few days and I wonder if it might even count as difficult enough so that I have an easy one to blog tomorrow.

    My first clues solved were all in the SE and I found that corner came together quite easily. I lived through daily reports of the troubles in Cyprus so ENOSIS gave me no trouble at all.

    In the SW I started rather tentatively with BRAMBLING deduced from the wordplay but I didn’t know the bird. STICK went in too but it was ages before I thought of FRENCH.I needed all the checking letters to jog my memory.

    In the end I got stuck in the NW with 15ac unsolved. I’m not sure I knew CELLARET but it may have come to mind had I not been trying to find a word to fit ?E?L?G?T having confidently written SPICING at 7dn. It worked well enough to satisfy me but having found that it should have been SPICIER I can see that works better.

    1. Keep an eye on your bank statement. They did that to me last year and I was debited twice! I must admit that were lightning fast in correcting things when I contacted them.
  5. Suspect this is one for those old timers who really trust their wordplay analysis. Very tough for me (satisfying however) but needed in-solve checks on the following (just to make sure I wasn’t making it even more difficult):
    CASEIN (protein)
    AESTIVAL
    LIGNITE
    CELLARET
    BRAMBLING
    Didn’t know APT meant quick to learn.
    Still don’t understand BLACK LETTER (apart from the print reference). Something to do with Rachman?
    1. I hope I haven’t overlooked someone’s posting rendering this one otiose, but my take on this was
      BETTER=cured including (housing) LACK=shortage L=beginning in London

      Solving it was easy; figuring out the explanation took a lot longer.

  6. I thought that this was tough!
    some obscure words too
    easier than the day before but harder than Monday/Tuesday
    i wonder what PB will do it in!
  8. I’ve not done The Times for a week or so, what a pleasure to come back to especially compared to the farce going on somewhere else.

    sidey

  9. I couldn’t get on with this one at all. Started it at midnight when tired and had to give up. Mostly completed this morning. Two wrong. Onesis for Enosis and Blank Letter for Black Letter. No excuses. Lots of very nice clues.
  10. Over the hour for me, aestival last in.
    Colonialboy,
    Guitar looks like a left handed Fender Telecaster Custom.
  11. Like jack I put in ‘spicing’ and then got in a horrible tangle with 15, eventually just giving up. 30 mins before being just left with those two though. COD to 12 for the jolt of recognition. I find clues that refer to their own punctuation or are in some other way self-referential give me a strange frisson! For instance in a recent clue I very much liked the use of ‘M’ in ‘Marx’ to denote ‘capital m’ in a clue the answer to which was ‘capitalism’. I think they could be called the ‘lits’ as opposed to the ‘&lits’. Hidden words would be a sub-genre of course..Any seconders?
  12. I found this quite tough with the NE corner giving the problems.

    I am another member of the SPICING club. Also had DULCIANE (seems a perfectly good name), so CELLARET was well nigh impossible.

    It was a puzzle of two halves with many going in on the first run through, but then it became very slow before finally grinding to a halt at 35 minutes.

    Very fair puzzle though. I enjoyed it.

  13. This was one of those puzzles where I filled half the grid in 10 minutes, leading me to think it was another easy one, then really slowing down to a crawl. No trouble with ENOSIS or AESTIVAL, which I’ve come across before, but DULCINEA, MOLIERE, SAMOS, STERNA and BLACK LETTER all gave me trouble for a long time. Initially I was convinced the container in 9 was RE, but in retrospect I don’t think the Times crossword uses prefix meanings in the wordplay.
    Total time was 40 minutes in the end.

    I don’t think I’ve come across a clue in the Times crossword where the outside letters of a two-word phrase are used (2d)

    There were some nice clues, 14a, 1d and 7d in particular.

  14. 27 minutes but I sort of cheated to get Dulcinea and enosis. I have no objection to obscure (to me) words where the wordplay is unambiguous, but when you’re dealing with an anagram and the answer is a foreign word (so the unchecked letters could go pretty much anywhere) I think it’s bordering on the unfair.

    Case in point and black letter went in based on def and checkers as I couldn’t see the wordplay at all.

  15. An about average puzzle, 25 minutes to solve. It’s all very reasonable without ever really stirring the emotions. I have no ticks and no question marks by any clue.
  16. About 40 minutes but my guess of ‘onesis’ is wrong, so stumped today. I enjoyed the rest of this very much. The Mamma Mia clue is just great. Regards.
  17. My variant on *CLAUDINE was DULCINAE, which crossed nicely with the Carolingian sideboard CARELROT at 15A (CARROT=red). Oh well, at least I guessed right on ENOSIS. About 20 mins with two wrong.

    Tom B.

  18. Certainly, the toughest of the week to date. I managed to complete correctly, by dint of a guess here and there. I did not, for example, understand the wordplay of BLACK LETTER until reading George’s blog. As Jimbo says, nothing really stood out, but some nice, quite tricky stuff – e.g SHEFFIELD, EVEN SO, AESTIVAL and MOLIERE. I also liked SEASCAPES, which was new to me, though I suspect that Landseer’s punning possibilities have been exploited in this way before. As the owner of a small lead-lined cabinet-style CELLARET, I was poised to object to the “sideboard” definition used here (mine certainly does not look remotely like that piece of furniture), but the dictionaries seem to validate both “cabinet” and “sideboard”.
  19. Given the easy grid I found several of the answers lurked in the depths of memory. So another tough and enjoyable puzzle romping home at 90 minutes. A couple of the anagrams foxed me for a while – SHAMPOO and NAMELESS. Why is Charlie a SAP; and army = host? Thought SAMOS tautlogical and liked MOLIERE
    2. I remember Charlie being used quite frequently in expressions like “Don’t be such a Charlie” or “He was a proper Charlie.” He’s out of favour now, though, replaced by more earthy terms.
  20. Andrew K
    oh dear! Another bad day for me. Pleased to get a few though. Hope Grauniad sorts itself out for Sunday’s AZED.
  22. Perhaps unfamiliarity with the classic Don Quixote is excusable – I believe it is a tough read, but I’m surprised at the number of you who haven’t come across the rather less rarefied cultural treat, the musical “The Man of La Mancha” (most well-known song “Dream the Impossible Dream”); in that there is a whole number dedicated to Dulcinea – much to the fury of the woman it’s sung at by Don Q. who, as she repeatedly tries to tell him,is actually called Aldonza.
  23. I found Don Quixote to be a surprisingly accessible read, especially considering that it has to be pretty much the earliest novel ever printed. Perhaps not as uproariously funny as it’s sometimes characterized, but the business with Dulcinea is certainly quite amusingly rendered.

    …Robert

Comments are closed.