Times 24,528 A Glimpse of Stocking

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 25 minutes

A nice enough puzzle of average difficulty with a couple of pieces of quite tricky wordplay. It contains another nod towards maths following logarithm and mantissa that have appeared recently. Three words that may be unfamiliar in seraglio, felloe and etui the first and third of which will be familiar to bar crossword solvers. Jack gets to sing and those that care about these things can bemoan the political commentary of Conservatism.

Across
1 SQUATTER – two meanings 1=fatter 2=illegal occupier;
9 OPERETTA – O(PER-E)TT-A; intemperate=OTT; article=A; surrounding a=PER and E=key;
10 RELY – R(EL)Y; extremes of rapacity=R(apacit)Y;
11 THE,REAL,THING – THERE-ALTHING;
13 deliberately omitted – seek advice if troubled;
14 ACERBITY – A-CERB-IT-Y;
15 SMUGGER – SMUGG(l)ER;
16 PANTILE – P(ANT)ILE; a tile with an S-shaped cross section;
20 NAPOLEON – N(A-POLE)ON; pas ce soir Josephine;
22 RHOMBI – sounds like ROM-BY; yet another little piece of math – an equilateral parallelogram;
23 CONSERVATISM – (r=right + vast incomes)*; nice clue that Mr Cameron would not approve of;
25 IOTA – A-TO-I (= nine letters) when reversed;
26 RAILHEAD – (LIAR reversed)-HEAD; Waterloo perhaps as we have the famous Corsican present;
27 SERAGLIO – S-E(RA)G-(OIL reversed); a harem;
 
Down
2 QUEENDOM – QUE-END-OM; on Continent “that”=QUE (on edit – see comments); purpose=END; order (of merit)=OM; the UK for example;
3 ANYTHING,GOES – (say one)* surrounds THIN-GG; reference the brilliant Cole Porter 1891-1964, cue Jack;
4 TIGER-EYE – TI-G(E)REY-E; draw=TIE; base of vase=E; dull=GREY; a glaze;
5 ROSEBAY – old PM=Rosebery then change “er”=half of beer into “a”; the rhododendron;
6 FELLOE – sounds like “fellow”=cove; the circular rim of a wheel;
7 ETUI – IE=that’s reversed holds TU=Trades Union; a woman’s sewing case;
8 GARGOYLE – (large)* surrounds GOY(a); ugly device for keeping water off masonry walls;
12 HABIT-FORMING – two meanings (nuns wear habits);
15 SINECURE – lacking confidence=insecure then drop “in” to give S(IN)ECURE;
17 AIRLINER – (h)AIRLINE-R; at ‘eathrow presumably;
18 LIBRETTI – weak cryptic definition;
19 INNARDS – INN(A-RD)S;
21 EARNER – E(ARNE)R; Thomas Arne 1710-1778; spotting cracks is a nice little earner gov’ner;
24 NAIL – two meanings 1=nail down 2=shape finger nail;

30 comments on “Times 24,528 A Glimpse of Stocking”

  1. Nice middle of the road puzzle, 22 mins but some of that spent working out how I had arrived at the solution.. eg operetta, where it seemed REP rather than PER should be involved somehow.. but no unfamiliar words, today
  2. 9:41 – last minute or two spent on 4 and 6, in that order – didn’t know either def for certain but knew the Tiger’s eye gemstone and recalled that felloe meant something, so went with the wordplay when I found it. It seems to be only English that reserves etui for a narrow range of purposes – I can remember buying German playing cards in an “echt-leder etui” and Google confirms a wide range of such products.
  3. Found this tricky and failed on rhombi (threw in rhombs) and tiger-eye (tired eye, deperately, for glaze). 37 minutes. Mis-spelling Rosebery as Roseberry didn’t help. Liked 3 for the thin gg and the old-time memory-chord.
  4. Didnt know Felloe but do know…some neat clues…think it was harder than average. not come across a = PER before so saq operetta but couldnt work out wordplay. COD IOTA or possibly 3 down!

    Good blog thank you!

  5. about an hour before using aids for 6d and more surprisingly 20ac, i too put a lazy rhombs in for 22ac. cod 15d for its very smooth wordplay.
  6. Found this a bit harder than most so far: 34m, most of it spent in the top half. Not helped by getting the wrong half of beer in 5dn, resulting in ROSEARY, whatever that is. Nor by not knowing that TIGER-EYE is also a glaze and not just the gemstone whose surface it imitates. Also forgot the Old World meaning of “squatter” — though the squattocratic incarnations were no doubt equally guilty of illegal occupation. COD, by a landslide, to CONSERVATISM.
  7. 15 minutes, plus 14 for working out the word play for OPERETTA (that a=PER convention again!) and IOTA (got as far as realising that I was the ninth letter, didn’t suss A TO I as the construction) and stressing over TIGER EYE. I know tiger’s eye the stone, and Chambers (I now know) has the glaze reference but without the hyphen. Not detaching dull from glaze didn’t help, and I was in a tiger’s whisker of settling for “tired-eye”, that well known glazed expression when I spotted the grey bit.
    I’ve also learned today that RHOMBI is pronounced rom bye, not rom bee. Why didn’t someone correct me before now?!
    CoD to the advert for C**a Cola at 13 across, for the best use made of the Icelandic parliament since it messed up the economy.
  8. Guessed tiger-eye, thank you ulaca for details. Rosebay (from wordplay) more familiar to me as a willow-herb (non-shrubby) also called fireweed, so checked dic. Under 15 m inc. dic check, spent a mo wondering if 27 had an artist’s name in it. By the way I think the continental “that” is que (qui in blog typo?) to fit the answer.
  9. Thanks, Jim, for the excellent and clear blog. Harder than average I would say – ground to a halt after an hour or so with 6 remaining (9, 20 ac; 5, 6, 7 and 21 dn) – but, then, I’m only, well, average …

    Must remember PER for ‘a’, but will much more probably, given its uncommonness (leading to saliency), remember ALTHING, especially since my daughter insisted on calling our new dwarf hamster after the Icelandic volcano.

    For those, like me, who were mystified by tiger-eye, even if they got the answer from the wordplay, it is (was, more properly) an uncommon, unstable, gold-streaky glaze developed by the Rookwood Pottery Company in the US.

    As was the case yesterday, the only other contribution I can make is to point out a typo: QUE for QUI at 2dn.

      1. Originally from India I believe but now found all around the world, including Oz. A large group of plants that includes azaleas they are not liked by some naturalists because they are invasive and they poison the soil in which they stand so best grown in tubs for the ordinary gardener. My azaleas are out in splendid bloom at the moment.
  10. Found this much harder than average, mainly because I had never heard of FELLOE, and it was an unusual enough spelling to me not to leap out from the wordplay. Had all bar 6dn done in about 15 mins, but gave up on that after a further 15 of head scratching. Hats off to all who knew it. I thought, in general, the puzzle required fairly wide knowledge, from Althing, Rosebery, Anything Goes, Tiger-Eye. Perhaps not one for the Under 30s.
    1. For a while (until I got 14ac) I thought 6dn might be FELLER, which turns out to be part of a sewing machine. Luckily I thought sewing machine = {spinning) wheel too much of a stretch so didn’t put it in.
  11. I really struggled with this, because of an unusual (even for me)number of completely unfamiliar terms: Althing, pantile, railhead, tiger-eye and felloe. Added to which Rosebery is not exactly the first PM to spring to mind. I also didn’t see the wordplay for either 9ac (“per” for “a”) or 25ac (“A to I”) until checking here.
    I did eventually manage to finish, although what for me were obscurities needed post-solve checking. So in the end a very useful exercise in getting answers from wordplay alone. Such a contrast to yesterday, which I found unusually easy and would probably have been an opportunity to set a personal best if I hadn’t attempted it with four children in my charge.
  12. 35 minutes for all but three (4, 21 & 6)then ran out of time on 6. In the end I had plumped for TIRED EYE at 4 though I had also considered TIGER EYE.

    I didn’t have time to work out the wordplay on several, for instance ROSEBAY was not helped by thinking the PM had a double R at the end.

  13. Tough for me too, about 40 minutes with “lucky” guesses at the end for operetta, felloe, rosebay and iota. This puzzle wasn’t exactly full of words in everyday use.

    Before George gets in with it here’s the “other” version of Anything Goes:

    How does your Anything Goes go?

  14. Fairly tough puzzle, 33 mins. Did not understand OPERETTA or IOTA till coming here, thanks for that. Favourite clue, SQUATTER.
  15. 16:09 here, with the last two or three minutes looking for alternatives to ROSEBAY, as I thought it was two words, or at least hyphenated. I also wasted time trying BE for the half of beer, and only thought of Rosebery as the PM after giving up with ROBE???

    No problems with the other obscurities, although more time was wasted expecting 26A to end with END.

  16. Didn’t find this too difficult in general except for the completely unknown 4 and 6 which I totally failed to work out from the wordplay either. Also put an S on the end of RHOMB so 3 down today.
    Also thought 23 was COD – Will the same clue this time next year still have a question mark after it?!!
  17. A miserable attempt, failing with both FELLOE and ROSEBAY.

    I must confess to never having heard of Rosebery, but I’m not beating myself up over it – he was after all a Liberal (and half the country hadn’t heard of Nick Clegg until three weeks ago), was only PM for a year (shape of things to come?) and apparently only got the job because Queen Victoria disliked him less than the other leading Liberals.

    I’m sure these puzzles are getting harder.

    1. I’ve just heard somebody claim that Gordon Brown is the worst PM ever. Clearly history lessons aren’t what they used to be. I think this guy’s main claim to fame was that he cleverly married a Rothschild!
  18. What is the text of Clue for which the answer is IOTA?

    A friend of mine sent that alone to me in an email and it read:

    Letter from the west, or nine from the east (4)

    If this is right, I have a query.

    I am uncomfortable with the reading of the clue as I would expect ‘letters’ between ‘nine’ and ‘from’. As the first word ‘letter’ is in the singular, I can only think ‘letter’ is implicit after nine, which doesn’t gel with the number.

    The idea behind the clue is good but I feel it doesn’t come out very well.

    What do others think? Am I being too picky?

    1. The wording of the clue is as you have it

      Yes, I think you’re being too picky. There are two “understood” pieces to the clue. A leading “A” and “letters” after “nine”. I think both would detract from the surface reading of the clue without making it any easier to solve.

  19. About 25 minutes, but went with TIRED-EYE, being unfamiliar with glazes, gems and so forth. I did manage to guess FELLOE, but it’s new to me also. I saw the ‘a’=’PER’ in OPERETTA, and thought it a bit weak, but I didn’t see the cryptic for IOTA til reading Jimbo’s blog. I like it, and I think it’s clever enough for a COD nod. As noted, a very wide range of general knowledge needed today. Nice puzzle. Regards.
  20. I was taught in Geography lessons that:-

    West is not the same as Left
    East is not the same as Right
    North is not the same as Up
    South is not the same as Down

    Was I the only one?

    Paul S.

    1. No, but the crossword is not a geography lesson. It exploits things that are true in our minds and/or language, where we certainly speak of “up North” and “down South”, doubtless based on the normal mapping convention.

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