Times 24,492 Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 25 minutes

Standard fare of average difficulty with no real quibbles. A couple of unusual usages and some well signalled anagrams. The song “Daisy, Daisy” may not be familiar to the younger solver since I recall my grandmother singing it. Likewise Fred and Ginger of whom it was famously said “He gives her class – she gives him sex appeal” as in Roberta(the film in which they dance to Smoke Gets in Your Eyes)

Across
1 INTACT – IN-TACT; (at) home=IN;
4 CONSERVE – CON-SERVE; prisoner=CON(vict);
10 PARTRIDGE – PART-RIDGE;
11 OPPOS – OPPOS(e); short for “opposite numbers”;
12 VULGAR,FRACTION – (for valuing cart)*; 1/2 or 3/4 say; a phrase that surely lends itself to some imaginative cluing;
14 ROUSE – ROU(S)E; S=spades (cards);
16 deliberately omitted – ask if confused;
18 SIDELIGHT – (IS reversed)-DELIGHT; additional information apparently, not a usage I’ve met before;
20 ADEPT – A-DEPT; DEPT=department; small=shortened form of;
21 AROUND,THE,CLOCK – (check out Ronald)*; another rather obvious long anagram;
25 BLIND – two meanings 1=drive very fast (new usage to me) 2=fly in fog;
26 GERMINATE – (tearing me)*; less obvious anagram;
27 EVERYDAY – (rid)E-VERY-DA(is)Y; at this point Jack broke into song about “a bicycle made for two”;
28 REFILL – REF-ILL;
 
Down
1 IMPOVERISH – IMP(OVER)ISH;
2 TYROL – LORY-(parakee)T all reversed;
3 CARCASE – CAR-CASE; geddit?;
5 deliberately omitted – ask if confused;
6 STOUTLY – S(TOUT)LY; hawk=peddle=TOUT; Christopher Sly is a bit part in The Taming of the Shrew;
7 REPROBATE – REP-ROB-ATE;
8 deliberately omitted – ask if confused;
9 EDIFYING – ED-I-F(r)YING;
13 DEATH-KNELL – (the lakeland minus “a”=area)*; subtle anagrinds are not this setters forte;
15 UNDER,FIRE – UN-(FRED reversed)-IRE; that wonderful pair of hoofers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers – Shall We Dance;
17 ANTI-HERO – (on the air)*; a better anagrind;
19 LAUNDRY – sounds like “lawn”=fine linen + reference to tumble dryer;
20 ARCHIVE – ARCH-I’VE;
22 DOGMA – DOG-MA;
23 OKAPI – hidden (bo)OK-A-PI(g-like);
24 ABLE – ELBA reversed;

43 comments on “Times 24,492 Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”

  1. A bit unfair to her. As someone else said: she did everything Astaire did but backwards and in high heels.
    Took 22 minutes on this, held up by the 6/11 intersection which I couldn’t quite work out. Didn’t see “hawk” as a verb … sadly. But the big anagrams helped.
  2. We’ll call it 8:20 – I stopped the clock at 7:53 after fixing up what I thought were all the missing answers. But I’d left 20A blank – the worst mistake possible in a competition context. Filled in instantly when I noticed. Two minor corrections to the blog: misplaced bracket in 23, and the fact that “Roberta” is the name of a Fred and Ginger movie – I thought a phrase like “as in Roberta Doe’s comment” had been left incomplete.
    1. A phrase had indeed been omitted – now entered and I’ve corrected the bracket. Thanks Peter.
  3. 15 minutes for me, with a couple of chuckle points for EVERYDAY and CARCASE. Slowed by assuming the middle three of 21 would be AND, baltantly there at the end of Ronald. Last in NE corner, because I thought EASE could be anything before getting OPPOS.
  4. Everyday I have the blues (Yeah, but does Jack know that BB King lyric). Very for pretty is one to add to my lexicon but would never have figured Daisy for the cyclist even though I know the song. (Slight typo in blog for this?) Guessed the parrot and hats off to anyone knowing that BLIND can mean very fast.
  5. Easy one this, c12 mins which is about as fast as I get.. but nothing to criticise
  6. Thought it was going well till after about 15 m the NE corner was obstinately blank. Took another 10 m to think of Sly after which it fell in place quite quickly, no exact time. Bottom half seemed easier than top, liked the mild deception of 23, the animal is not pig-like.
    1. 14:22 here, top half straight in one after the other almost, then a struggle to finish the bottom half! Took far too long on both the GERMINATE and DEATH-KNELL anagrams, and had to write them out in a circle to solve them in the end – rarely fails, but eats up valuable seconds.
  7. Not a good day for me. Eventually put EVERYMAN at 27, wondering what the cyclist was about. I must have been thinking Opperman rather than Daisy. I also thought vulgar fractions had numerators in excess of their denominators, but it turns out they’re just improper.
        1. Don’t know who invented it, but I’m sure that this use of “vulgar” goes back to the time when “vulgar” simply meant “in common use”. (In particular, “vulgar fractions” were more commonly used than decimal fractions/notation. The various OED citations suggest that the pejorative meaning of “vulgar” developed much later.
    1. I’ve found this idea from Basil Cottle, a linguist and historian, in a review reviewing of a former OED supplement which gave the same etymology as others – short for “opposite number”. I’m sceptical about “oppo-me-thumb”, as this is based on a nursery rhyme character, and nursery rhyme seems not to be a common source of rhyming slang material – as a random example, “Snow (White)” isn’t rhyming slang for anything.
  9. I found this quite a grind with some unusual definitions and tricky allusions. No problem with Fred and Ginger but I got everyday without understanding the Daisy bit. I finished with stoutly because I was trying to use Christopher Fry the playwright rather than Chistopher Sly the character.
  11. Late on parade today as the blog was not open when I looked and I’ve since had a very busy morning.

    Fortuntately this puzzle didn’t require too much brain power and I finished in 35 minutes with one query re blind/fast which I see also caught others out. I assume it’s in the books? I haven’t had a chance to look.

    I know only the first bit of Daisy Bell which doesn’t make any reference to her being pretty or otherwise but having looked up the whole lyric I see she’s referred to several times as “beautiful” so I guess that covers it unless someone thinks there’s a difference.

      1. Of course it is! And I had worked it out and satisfied myself earlier, then when I came to comment I promptly forgot and reverted to my original train of thought. It HAS been a very hectic morning at work!
        1. I meant to confirm that blind=drive like Lewis Hamilton is indeed in Chambers
  12. 15 minutes. Is it normal for “un” to clue “one” without a Frenchicator (15d)?

    Didn’t know Sly and had forgotten lawn but neither held me up. Hadn’t come across beggar as a noun before either, except when used with belief.

    Fun puzzle overall.

    1. You’ll find “un” in Chambers Penfold as dialect for both “one” and “him”. Standard Mephisto fare certainly and used before in the daily puzzle.
    2. I’ve been brushing up on Timesey stuff and and the Frenchificator is not required here as you can use the northernified ‘un as in Good’un.
      That’s what Tim Moorey says, anyhoo.
  13. Not a great deal to say about this. A steady 30 minutes with neither a surge nor a long pause. Last in was the EVERYDAY LAUNDRY crossing.

    Based on the records I’ve been keeping this year, I note we have just passed the milestone of 2000 distinct words or phrases in the Times Monday-Saturday crosswords this year. I reckon that only just over 50 of these have been duplicated. I don’t think there has been a ‘three times’ appearance yet. I don’t claim 100% accuracy as I expect I have some typing errors in my records (especially where hyphens are concerned).

    1. That pretty much matches a previous analysis for a whole year – of 8000-odd words, about 10% were used twice in the same year (2.5% in your quarter), and about 1% were used three times or more.
      1. My first reaction was that you couldn’t simply multiply the 2.5% duplication figure by 4 to get 10% duplication by the year end on the basis that 50 per 2000 per quarter only extrapolates to 200 per 8000 by the year end, still 2.5%. However then I realised that with every new crossword we will be matching potential duplicates against the number of words year to date which is increasing all the time, so by the time 31 December comes each word in the grid will fighting against over 8000 potential duplicates. It will be interesting to see what the final figure is. 10% is probably a good bet.
        1. I’m glad to see someone else has taken over the mantle of counting the words. I’ve run out of fingers and toes. In case you’re wondering the counts for 2009 were:

          Occurence Frequency Proportion Cum.Freq. Cum. prop
          1 7300 0.8946 7300 0.8946
          2 745 0.0913 8045 0.9859
          3 106 0.0130 8151 0.9989
          4 7 0.0009 8158 0.9998
          5 1 0.0001 8159 0.9999
          6 1 0.0001 8160 1.0000

          I’ll bet you can’t guess which word was repeated 6 times. No, not EVEN close. The greengrocer’s favourite was second and ANORAK among the also rans. I took that as a clear message to hang up my abacus.

  14. About 25 minutes here, and I thought on the less difficult side, until I arrived here and found that my variation of CARPACE at 3D, a shortened version of ‘carapace’, is wrong, and that the Brits had already created a CARCASE variation of ‘carcass’. Well, I didn’t know that, which was too bad since I thought my invention was fairly reasonable and fit the wordplay. I also wasn’t familiar with ‘Christopher’ as ‘sly’, and I couldn’t recall enough of the lyrics to the bicycle song in 27 to be confused about whether Daisy was beautiful. Lastly, I’ll echo Penrod’s questioning of the absence of a ‘Frenchicator’ to signal ‘un’=’one’; I don’t recall seeing that before. Overall, I thought the surfaces in this puzzle were very/pretty smooth and well put together. Regards to all.
    1. It may be new, but one=>UN can be justified in informal British English – best known example is probably “the pink ‘un” = the FT or some other newspaper on pink paper.
  15. A puzzle of slightly above average difficulty, I thought. Add me to the group for whom BLIND, in the sense of “to drive fast”, was new. Like lennyco, I wasted some minutes at 6dn assuming the Christopher in question was Fry not Sly. No really outstanding clues, but I liked EVERYDAY (27ac) with its allusion to “Daisy, Daisy” (like Jimbo I’m old enough to have had it sung to me as a child).
  16. 90 minutes of enjoyable but brain-intensive solving. Completed the bottom half fairly quickly, but struggled at the top, making the breakthrough eventually when getting CARCASE at 3dn, having toyed with CARNAGE and even CORTEGE. Not helped by my miserable mathematical knowledge, which held me up on 12ac for far too long. Can’t recall having come across BEGGAR in a verbal sense apart from in the fixed phrase with ‘belief’, and OPPOS meaning friends was new to me. Thereagain, I had to look up ASBO when reading the Telegraph online this morning, so I guess I’m just getting out of touch with the old country.
  17. This one was much more to my liking than yesterday’s and I was disappointed to come up one short. Couldn’t think of anything plausible to fit S?O?T?Y at 6 down. Surmised there was likely to be a Christopher Sly but couldn’t think of a ?O?T word for hawk. OneLook gave the answer immediately. Pity, because this would have been the 12th of this year’s 70 Monday-Saturday puzzles that I had completed without aids – a tiny percentage I know compared to you guys who can’t remember when you last had to look in a reference book to complete the puzzle!

    Thanks for explaining the wordplay for EVERYDAY and UNDER FIRE – they mystified me. Enjoyed CARCASE, EDIFYING and IN ANY CASE.

    1. Sounds like “E’s”, and means “reduce number of” in relation to something like troubles or pains, I thought. But COED has “reduce in value or amount” in relation to the prices of things like shares.
      2. I took the surface meaning to be simply “reduce”, and “number of letters read out” to stand for “Es”. This seems to fit quite neatly with the meaning of ease = reduce = make something less in degree.
  19. as you all say relatively routine. Guessed at Blind and was correct. some nice long anagrams which i like!

    been waiitng a reply from the on line editor in chief to whom i complained about the missing clue in saturdays on line puzzle…and that the previous week the Jumbo wasnt changed from the week before and do you know they dont even have the wit to have an automated reply with
    “thank you for your e-mail i will reply shortly”
    pathetic

    1. If response speed is the same as for my e-mail sent on Sunday, you should get an answer from a human within 24 hours of sending your message.

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