Times 24509 – Peas and Corn

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: 32 minutes

With a run of bad solving experiences last week, I was quite pleased to draw this relatively gentle one from the hat. The two straightforward long anagrams were particularly welcome. I shan’t brag about my relatively fast time as I note our Sunday blogger, Neil Talbott (aka talbinho), could have finished 10 crosswords and still had time for a cup of tea whilst waiting for me to finish. And so to the business at hand. Well constructed clues and smooth surfaces throughout, I thought.

Across
1 J[AC for account]OB. My old testament knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond Alan Bennett’s Take a Pew. Fortunately that was enough for this clue.
4 ON=acceptable (as in “That’s just not on!”) + S[LAUGH]T = ONSLAUGHT or offensive.
9 YOUTH CLUB = (TO BUY LUNCH – N for new)* with anagrind “is unusual”
10 TIM the man + O.R. for Other Ranks = TIMOR the island. “Attracting” is used as a concatenation indicator. The ellipsis is a distraction here (and generally), joining two adjacent clues with related surfaces.
11 T.A. for Territorial Army, T.T. for time trials Tourist Trophy (see Peter’s comment below), O for round and a final O for circuit = TATTOO as in Edinburgh Military … The “to” means “next to” as in “ear to the wall”, “nose to the grindstone”. etc. That took longer to explain than it did to solve and write in.
12 DISOWNED = DI[SOWN]ED.
14 CORN ON THE COB. Cob being a horse. A double definition, one being tichy (tongue in cheek) as Uncle Yap would say.
17 O for old, BRACE for couple all around (CASTLE)* = OBSTACLE RACE.
20 COERCION = COOKER + CITRON. I shudder every time it looks like I have to know what a Cox’s Orange Pippin is but invariably an apple turns out to be a cooker. Fortunately also, citron pressé (pronounced citron press in Australia) is a favourite of mine.
21 A R.M. for Royal Marine + OUR for people’s = ARMOUR
23 RETRO = PORTER reversed.
24 EARLY BIRD = (BY RAIL)* + RD all placed after JUNE
25 BLACK EYES = B for billions LACK EYES. I wrote this in thinking it was a species, like the peas, but a mouse turns out to be slang for, well, the result of a close encounter with a door.
26 LOTUS = LOT as in an auction + US. There’s that “to” again.

Down
1 JOYSTICK = JOY’S TICK
2 COUNTERS, a double definition as in ripostes and gaming chips. My last in. I’m hopeless at double definitions.
3 (YORK HOBO + CORK BOY)* with new as the anagrind = BY HOOK OR BY CROOK. “And” by itself is enough to indicate concatenation of the two pieces of anagram fodder, so some might see “connected” as padding, but I don’t mind it at all. You have to cut the surface some slack, and this is a good one.
4 OSLO = SMALL inside OO. Some classic cartoon iconography in those glasses.
6 (ALMONER’S ORATORY)* = ASTRONOMER ROYAL. Relatively easy with a few crossing letters; particularly the Y.
7 GEMINI = (E.G.)reversed on MINI, our favourite car (apart from estate). Sign = zodiac sign has finally become a conditioned response for me, after years of falling foul to such devices.
8 TIRADE = TIRE for bore (the verb) around AD, being the alternate letters of paddy. “Getting in” as in “I’ll just get the milk in.”, indicating bringing inside rather than the “getting into trouble”, insertion connotation.
13 STATIONERY sounds like stationary or still. I had no idea what a treasury tag was, and can’t say I’ve ever seen one in action (or inaction if you read the reviews) but the only real worry here was remembering which word had the “a” and which the “e” and that “are”. I finally decided the “are” belonged to the treasury tags, as in “treasury tags, for instance, are”. A neat sidestep of plurality problems.
15 PARODIST = PA[ROD I]ST. “He sends up” is a nice bit of lift and separatage, but it immediately sent me down the unjustifiable satirist line. Rod is slang for pistol, it says here (nothing to do with Rod & Gun Magazine or Rodd & Gunn, natty gent outfitters), and “put down” is simply the instruction to write it in, rather than to invert or move a letter down.
16 Deliberately omitted. Ask for assistance if you need it. Hint: It’s not Staffa
18 SCARAB = SCAR + A.B. for sailor
19 BERTH + A = BERTHA. She gave me more trouble than she deserved, in the end, but everything is obvious in hindsight.
22 Deliberately omitted as I’m flagging. Hint: it’s a flower; no, a real flower

35 comments on “Times 24509 – Peas and Corn”

  1. A very quick one here, about 12 minutes. First in TATTOO, last PARODIST. The one I didn’t understand until coming here was DISOWNED, so thanks Koro. About 2/3 of these went in at the first reading, so I think it’s an easy offering today. As vinyl says, a newcomer should have a good chance to get through this one completely. By the way, I don’t know what ‘Treasury tags’ are either, but got it from ‘still spoken of’. Regards.
  2. 58 minutes (fast by my standards and I was up half the night watching Westwood get pipped by Mickelson). Last in COERCION; thanks to Koro for the cryptic of that one.

    Car = estate and apple = cooker squirreled away for later.

    1. I had squirreled them away along with a host of others but I forgot
      where I put them as usual. I get the puzzle after 7pm here in Toronto
      so I too was diverted by The Masters tournament. I had SATIRIST
      for a while not looking where I was going.
  3. 35 minutes, the last 5 of which were spent pondering 21 where I concluded that nothing suitable would fit into ?R?I?R so I reviewed the checkers and realised my error at 15dn where I had bunged in SATIRIST without understanding the wordplay. Once I had changed this to PARODIST, ARMOUR came to me immeditely.

    I didn’t know ROD = gun and imagined it probably referred to a rifle until I looked it up and found it is a pistol.

  4. 19 minutes — which is odd because I felt utterly lousy this morning; and would have been quicker if I hadn’t been staring at ?A?O?I?T at 15dn for the last 2 or 3 of them. The puzzle is now duly stored away in the /Nursery folder should I ever be invited back to the Minjup Shire Over-80s Joy Club to explain how cryptics work. (Unlikely after the last fiasco!)
    vinyl: the “stationery”/”stationary” conflation is understandable as the words are historically connected. In medieval universities, only the seller of paper and mss for copying was allowed to stay within the walls overnight. He was duly called the stationarius.
  5. Here for explanations for COERCION & PARODIST. Held up in NW corner having got OSLO and SUBSIDENCE on first read through became obsessed with 4ac “offensive” being something to do with OBSCENITY.
    Oh well!
  6. 30 minutes – like a fool, put in priest for 21 with just the r and took some time to retrack. Didn’t see the why of coercion and armour at all, just finally put them there. Thought Woods did all right considering.
  7. 7:18 for this – a mixture of some interesting clues like 1A, 9, 20, and some old ideas like the 16D charade and the cliché collection in 11A – where races=TT has to be “Tourist Trophy”, the famous races on the Isle of Man. “time trials” is ingenious but not listed in British dictionaries.

    Grid oddity: 8 B’s, four checked, so 12 answers have a B somewhere.

    1. Well, there’s a lesson in epistemology right there. All these years I’ve been confidently writing in TT thinking it meant contre-le-montre and now you tell me I’ve been madly waving the wrong end of the stick around and shouting “I’ve got the wrong end of the stick!”. All I can think of is that I must have been influenced by yesterday’s Paris-Roubaix, which you could have been forgiven for thinking was a TT.
  8. SATIRIST was very tempting, I thought, even though it had nothing to do with the wordplay, and even when I got it right, stared at ?R?O?R for what seemed like an eternity. Also not helped by trying to split 6d as 9,6 rather than 10,5: after BLOOD YMARY I just don’t know who to trust any more! Fun clues today CORN ON THE COB and BLACK EYES, and I also liked the neatness of JACOB. Definitely one of those where full understanding of answers that felt right came with later consideration, giving a kind of double pleasure. 14 minutes
  9. There are lots of words today that pop up regularly just because they happen to fit well into grids: tattoo, scarab, Oslo, iris, Gemini, Hebrides. On the other hand I spent too long staring at the checked letters for coercion trying to make something out of cider and citric. As Koro suggests, cooker and eater should be the first words you think of when the clue is apple.

    The spelling of stationary/ery has troubled me ever since I was a child learning the bit of the highway code that warns against crossing the road behind a stationary vehicle. I could never understand why a vanload of envelopes should be particularly dangerous.

  10. A gentle stroll, indeed, lasting 25 minutes over drinks. I was held up at the end for several minutes because, like jackkt, I entered SATIRIST for 15, for no other reason than it fitted the definition, making 21 impossible.

    A nice start to the week, though I could have done without the ‘glasses’ in 4d. Just a personal thing. I thought this particular conceit had died a death, killed off by Waterloo’s quirky parody of the theme in a Listener puzzle a few years back.

  11. 17 minutes, not finding the y in 6d as useful as Koro suggested as I was looking for something like ceremonial MAYOR. Lotus, armour and parodist last in.
  13. Nice gentle 20 minute start to the week after a frustrating round of golf. A fun puzzle I thought, nothing difficult but a lot very pleasing clues. Off now to practice my putting.
  14. 9:55 here, 3 minutes of which was spent staring blankly at C-E-C-O- at 20ac until the penny dropped. I fell for SATIRIST too, and struggled to see ARMOUR, otherwise it could have been a fair time. A pleasant start to the week
  15. A straightforward start to the week. Completed it quarter by quarter: NW, SE, NE then SW. Made hard work of my last two – the crossing pair COERCION and BERTHA. Couldn’t get CORIOLIS (force) or C???CI(tr)US out of my head. Learnt “mouse = slang for black eye” in the Times puzzle a few months ago but it took me a long time to remember it and get BLACK EYES from B???K ????.

    Liked STATIONERY and the construction of COERCION

  16. If it helps, I was told years ago that a cAr can be stationary while a lEtter is a piece if stationery,
    1. I was hoping someone would come up with a mnemonic at some point. Now all I have to do is remember the mnemonic next time the need arises; a task which I often find more difficult than remembering the spelling.
  17. Fell into the MAYOR trap as well (resolved when I saw LOTUS), and this fell into place pretty well. Didn’t see wordplay for COERCION, so well done there.
  18. A nice start with the lovely 3 and 6, last in two pairs, 15/21 and wretched Bertha after 23 ‘s penny dropped. I hate retro as a word. About 20 mins but not timed accurately.
  19. Having been a teacher in a previous life, treasury tags were familiar from invigilating exams (used to hold the loose leaves of paper together). Still frustratingly held up over TIMOR (I forgot the Other Ranks thing), COERCION and GEMINI. In retrospect, hard to think why.
  20. Meant to ask – is everyone but me really OK with ‘the people’s’ = ‘our’? (21) I can just about see it, though not frantically patrician in outlook… I suppose thinking of the species it’s got to be all right. Still feels iffy.
  21. Does anyone know what the fate of the Times crossword club will be when the “New Improved” Times online is dumped on us?

    1. I have enquired and received this response:

      Thank you for your email.

      At present, plans for the Crossword Club are as follows:

      From launch, the Crossword Club will not be incorporated in to the new website. This means that you will continue to use the current url to access the Club and log on using your current logon credentials. Club members will not be subject to any variations on the current price structure for Crossword Club access as a result of the launch of the new website.

      As you are aware, your Club subscription, whilst seperate to any other Times subscription, will entitle you to access the new site until January 31st. After that date your Crossword Club membership should continue as normal. We are refining and updating the new service before it launches, and any changes to Club subscriptions will be announced in due time.

      Kind regards,

      1. Also, my sub happens to run out on 31st January and I’m still not clear whether that’s relevant to continued free access to the newspaper until that date or just a coincidence.

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