Times 24,522 – Film 2010

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
20:47 here, so either this was fairly challenging or I am still feeling the effects of a late night travelling back from being a guest (or “ringer” as less charitable people would call it) in a friend’s pub quiz team in London. Sadly I didn’t know about Samuel Morse’s career as a painter, or I’d have won us a significant amount of cash in the jackpot round; still, at least I won’t forget that nugget if it ever comes up in a crossword in future.

There was more than one solution here that came entirely from wordplay, but it led me pretty clearly to the correct answer in each case, so no complaints from this party; doubtless we shall see soon enough if everyone agrees…

Across
1 INCUBUS – IN CUB(a) + US.
5 ESCAPER – (h)E (commit)S + CAPER. Caper is one of those words that seems to have been invented mostly for the benefit of film reviewers.
9 GOOD GRIEF – O(ld) in GO (“turn”) + (FRIDGE)*; that little word “My!” is a great diguised definition, and often hard to spot if you’ve not come across it before.
10 RATES – double def.
11 BEETLE CRUSHER – BEE + T(hink) + ([C. RUSH] in LEER). Any solvers with a pair of drainpipes and blue suede beetle crushers lurking in their wardrobe?
13 AGRIMONY – ON(e) in A GRIMY; as is traditional, I’d never heard of this herb; the wiki description hints at a rather racy possible use.
15 WEEPIE – WEE + PIE (as in mag-pie); another film genre.
17 OPPUGN – (POPGUN)* – I didn’t see this immediately, as there didn’t seem to be enough vowels to make another word at first.
19 FOOTBALL – FOOT + (LAB)rev. + L.; appropriate surface for describing the proverbial political football.
22 – deliberately omitted.
25 RATHE – RATHE(r); new one on me – the clue parses as [Mostly fairly] and [prompt in former times] or “blooming early in the season (Old English)” as the dictionary might have it.
26 FORTY-NINE – FOR + (IN in TYNE); if you haven’t come across “banker” as a sly reference to a river (see also “flower”), remember it, because you will see it again.
27 SURGERY – SURGE + R(op)Y; I was barking up slightly the wrong tree before seeing it was “well” as in the verb, rather than the noun.
28 DOS A DOS – DO + (SODAS)rev. = “back to back”: I only knew this in a dancing context, but it seemed a reasonable leap to imagine there being a sofa in which people sat back to back, and it was – research indicates that the definition could also have been “carriage”.
 
Down
1 IAGO – A in I GO.
2 CLOBBER – multiple def.
3 BOGIE – the wheeled wagon, often on the railways, is the “BOGIE“, the popular military tune is “Colonel BOGEY“.
4 SKIPLANE – SKIP,LANE.
5 EFFECT – C in EFFET(e).
6 CORPULENT – COR(n) + PU(d) + LENT.
7 PITCH UP – cryptic def; I immediately thought of the events of 1975 when campaigners denied England victory against Australia (yes, I know England lost the series…but you can prove anything with facts).
8 RESERVEDLY – SERVED in RELY.
12 TAROT CARDS – good cryptic def., “lots” as in “destinies”.
14 MAGDALENE – [ENDGAME+AL(l)]*; this is the Cambridge version, with an ‘E’, rather than the Oxford one.
16 BOTHERED – THERE in BOD.
18 – deliberately omitted.
20 AMERIND – steAMER IN Delaware.
21 LET FLY – double def.
23 NOYES – the question, of course, would be “Was Alfred Noyes a poet?”, to which the right answer is Yes, not No.
24 MESS – ME(al) + S(taff) S(ergeant) &lit.

33 comments on “Times 24,522 – Film 2010”

  1. I enjoyed this one very much – lots of tricky wordplay and interesting answers.

    At the outset I thought it was going to be very hard, but once I got going it went smoothly enough.

    MAGDELENE puzzled me for a while until I realised that – like punting – they do things differently in Cambridge. RATHE was last in from the wordplay, and only once I got TAROT CARDS which took a while to see.

  2. Kurihan has more or less summed up my solve, except that I thought it was going to be easy at the outset, almost completing the top half in 10 minutes, and then finding there was a sting in the bottom. Excellent puzzle. Well done, setter.

    A minor point at GOOD GRIEF, Tim. I think the first O is the old, fixed in GO; so it’s G[O]O + (FRIDGE)*.

  3. 13:48 here, so I don’t think it’s just the late night. My best quiz-night ringer contribution was an answer to “We call it a bishop, the French call it the fool. What do the Russians call it?”. Some dimly-remembered stuff about chess prompted me to say “I’m not sure about this, but take a punt on ‘elephant’ “. Gasps of amazement and the odd free pint when this turned out to be right.

    Back at the puzzle, only two acrosses went in on first look – 10 and 28. Followed by 6 downs – 1 4 5 14 20 24. I knew the strange words from other puzzles, so they weren’t too much of a problem. Solving the anagram at 22 was, annoyingly – I had to write out the letters, and the deleted ones show that I needed the help of four checkers.

    I was puzzled by truck = bogie, but under bogie COED has “chiefly Northern English – a low truck on four small wheels”. Better, it also has “a railway bogie” under (as it were!) ‘truck’.

    1. Your quiz nights are obviously much more highbrow than ours. The only things I can recall impressing the “kids” with are knowing that “MG” stood for “Morris Garages” and recognising Cream’s “White Room”.
  4. 25 minutes for this. I raced through 75% of it but then got bogged down in SE corner where both FOOTBALL clued as “controversial issue”
    BOTHERED and DOS-A-DOS unaccountably gave me problems. Used the old trick of walking away for a few moments, came back and finished it off. Strange how often that works.

    The overall standard of clue is high which led to an enjoyable solve. And no, I don’t own a pair of beetle-crushers.

  5. Tough, tantalising, (finally) most enjoyable. 41 minutes. Throwing in ‘funny bone’ for ‘number’ with 3 agreeing letters didn’t help. ‘Dos-a-dos’ new to me. Not too keen on ‘caper’ for ‘crime’ – I think when a really narrow segment of meaning is used for a word that has a far better-known area or areas of definition, as in art=address, or here, it seems to run against the ideal setting spirit in some way. I know, I know – it’s in the dictionary.
  6. 19 minutes today, with the last in being the splendidly deviously clued TAROT CARDS, having toyed with variations on the class theme to mean the herd deck on the Titanic. I also thought this was going to be a doddle: anything where 1A and 1D go straight in bodes well. I as glad of the wordplay so that I could spell MAUDLIN right, and I liked the rather daring use of FOOTBALL. Strange to have CLOBBER after its very recent appearance in 24518 as wordplay: perhaps someone out there plans to get us educated.
  7. A mere 2 hours for this one, but dead proud that I only needed to cheat on the last in, 13ac AGRIMONY, which I didn’t know and whose wordplay defeated my addled brain. So many good clues here, with my COD going to CORPULENT and honourable mentions to CLOBBER and GOOD GRIEF.

    Didn’t know RATHE – another cunning clue – AMERIND, BEETLE CRUSHER and DOS-A-DOS (though I’ve performed many a “dozydoe” in blissful ignorance of its lineage), but they were all gettable from the wordplay, and was needlessly held up by TAROT CARDS.

    My Tom Moorey arrived ash-free from the UK yesterday, so expect blistering times once I’ve digested it.

  8. 17 minutes, BEETLE CRUNCHER was new to me and I got it from checking letters, my last one in. AGRIMONY, RATHE, DOS-A-DOS, BOGIE from wordplay. Crafty puzzle, especially liked the wordplay for CORPULENT
  9. Top half flyer, slowed in SE, ground to halt with TAROT CARDS and AGRIMONY in SW (in-solve check on RATHE; not great a current vocab let alone archaic). Confident guess for OPPUGN, DOS-A-DOS and BOGIE. Still bewildered by LET FLY (From!). COD to FOOTBALL for the definition.
    1. LET FLY: poetic phrasing of a one-directional wordplay def: Normally they’d say {def from wordplay} – “Allowed to run away from attack” (and now I wonder why they didn’t), but sometimes they change the order, as in “From Croydon, Barry”.
  10. No network, no email and no internet at work until after lunch hence my lateness on parade.

    This started well and I had all but four clues solved in 30 minutes but I took another 10 to polish these off. Most of the difficulty was in the lower half where there were a number of words that were unfamiliar to me. These were OPPUGN, RATHE, NOYES, DOS-A-DOS and AMERIND. In the top half I didn’t know AGRIMONY. In view of all this, and after the disasters of the last two or three puzzles that came in over the hour I was quite pleased to finish this correctly in 40 minutes without reference to outside sources.

    I also wondered about CAPER = crime but the only dictionary I had to hand (Longmans) lists it and says it is a chiefly US meaning.

  11. Is it not the headings of Staff Sergeant Expecting Meal all reversed (heads over)? Still &lit.
    1. I think so – didn’t notice before (“expecting” as a ‘goes next to’ indicator seems a bit weak).
  12. First of all thanks to the setter for saluting my birthday in the 9-letter acrosses today: “Good grief” being how Dangermouse habitually responds to whatever Penfold says or does and forty-nine being precisely how old I am today. If the intention is to continue the theme with the 9-letter downs then for 6: you cheeky bastard and for 14: good guess but it was actually Leeds Polytechnic.

    Secondly thanks to the setter for a terrific puzzle. Standout clues were the great anagram spot at 22, good grief, mess and my COD tarot cards

    Oh, 27 minutes for anyone who’s counting. Not bad for a man of my years.

  13. 20 mins for me. Quite tough, I thought, not helped by chucking in EFFETE rather than EFFECT. In hindsight I made a meal of the whole thing, as it was challenging, but not as hard as I made it for myself. I am always caught out by hidden answers which run from one line onto another, and AMERIND was no exception. I assume/hope compilers deliberately write such clues with this in mind.
    1. I didn’t see that Amerind was a hidden until I read the blog. I convinced myself that if you were aboard a steamer you were “a mer” as the French would have it, and tacked on ‘in D(elaware)’. I guess D isn’t even the correct abbr. for Delaware either.
      1. The correct abbreviation for Delaware is “Which bridge should we take to get out of here?”
  14. From past experience I was expecting to find lots of comments about how easy this puzzle was because I found it very hard going, so I’m glad to hear others found it tough. As so often I managed to make life unnecessarily difficult for myself by:
    – trying for ages to find an anagram for “global warming” for 22ac
    – searching stubbornly for some sort of steerage class at 12dn
    – failing to get 1dn for ages (if you can’t get the gimmes…)
    Lots of unfamiliar words, including many of those already mentioned, and I don’t remember the name Alfred Noyes coming up in the three years of an English Literature degree.
    However botany didn’t get me today and I managed to finish in an hour, so definite progress.
  15. It was a reasonable assumption, on seeing the word plant at 13 that my run of 17 all-correct solves was coming to an end. I found this quite a quick solve only slowing down at the end to get tarot cards and to guess rathe. Then, on to the plant and my best guess was agromine. The wordplay, if you must know, is “restricted growth in a mine.” Oh well, it’s back to the gardening catalogue for me and I did try so hard to remember all the plant names when my wife frogmarched me round the garden centre last week-end.
  16. I have lurked here for ages and thought it about time I actually showed my face!

    I thought this quite tricky and needed a couple of cheats to get in under 30 minutes (tarot cards & beetle crusher).

    I do admire the spirit of the exchanges here and look forward to joining in more frequently. I generally do the puzzle during the many tedious tele-conferences that I have to endure at work.

    2. All delurkers welcome. The difficulty some people have had with 12 shows the power of the unexpected meaning (deck = pack) when worked into a convincing surface meaning.
  17. I wasn’t entirely convinced by MY, which I equate with my goodness, my my and sundry other expressions expressing surprise or approbation, being the definition for GOOD GRIEF which for me expresses horror or disbelief. Probably sour grapes because it took me ages to get it.

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