Times 24554: as the 24 is to 22, so is 2 to funky cold 6

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 15 minutes. Thought I was going to be stuck for a while, but the last few rushed out. There were a number that I got from the definition alone and am still trying to sort out the wordplay while writing up the blog (OK, got it – 12 down was the last bit o wordplay I was looking for). An interesting mixture of crossword standards and some odd words, and three unchecked J’s. I haven’t solved the Guardian yet, but I wonder if today will mark three days in a row of the same answer appearing in both dailies, with HAMLET yesterday and MATCHLESS on Tuesday. I’ll write this one up first and then go tackle it. Away we go…

Across
1 MAHARAJA: JAR, A HAM all reversed and then A
9 CRESSIDA: anagram of (SAD CRIES), lucky to dredge this one up on the first go
10 CAMP: A in C, MP and possibly an unintentional reference to David Laws
11 INTERMISSION: IN, TERM, IS, then an anagram of NOIS(y)
13 MAN,(w)AGE
14 STAKE NET: TAKEN in SET – I wrote SEINE NET with a question mark originally, since I missed it in a Mephisto a while ago, but then saw the better option
15 DECIDER: RED,ICED all reversed – really nice clue
16 NO,SHER(r)Y: a word I don’t think I’ll ever use
20 R,AIN TREE: I got this one from wordplay, then looked up the definition in Chambers and it’s rather gross. You get dripped on by cicadas nonstop under this South American tree
22 C,U,RACY: FRESH giving the RACY part
23 EXPLANATIONS: the wordplay is EX PLANTATIONS without the T
25 deliberately ommitted, ask if you can’t find it
26 EXPOSURE: double definition
27 SCREENED: RE in SCENE, then D
 
Down
2 ADAMS ALE: (m)A(i)D then anagram of MEALS
3 ASPIRATIONAL: AS(when) then 1,RATION in PAL
4 deliberately omitted
5 ACTRESS: C(about) in A,TRESS
6 MEDINA: DIN in MEA(n) got this from wordplay, though I’d heard of it
7 FIJI: 1,JIF reversed
8 MA,IN,STAY: a support on a tent or a ship’s mast
12 SHEPHERD’S PIE: I think the wordplay is SHE surrounding (staying) HEP(=in) SHE then an anagram of SPIDER
15 DARKENED: ARK in DENE,D and a deceptive definition
17 ON,CE,OVER: the ON coming from TAKING
18 RACLETTE: LETT in RACE(=people) and one I had to get from wordplay, breathed a sigh of relief to find it’s a soft cheese often served with potatoes, sounds kind of like poutine?
19 JET-TIES: my last in
21 RANG UP: N in RAG, UP – is it close to RAG WEEK? (if it still exists) I’ve seen it as an answer a few times recently
24 POPE: O in P,P(pages), then E

37 comments on “Times 24554: as the 24 is to 22, so is 2 to funky cold 6”

  1. Too tough for me without some assistance. 54 min with half that time trying to make sense out of 14 ac and 19 dn. Do not like the use of de-lighted, although I believe it has been used before. Too cutsie by half. COD to either JETTIES, once the penny went clang (Air bridges are increasingly being referred to a jetties), or to taking the T(ea) out of ex plantations. There will be something is this to perplex just about everyone.
  2. The run of words doubling in the two puzzles ends at two, though JIFFY was used in wordplay.
  3. Still recovering from this brain-fryer. Got all bar six before coming here and getting four more (two of which, DARKENED and NOSHERY I’d already thought about – ugh! – the other two being RAIN TREE and RACLETTE), which gave me some more crossing letters to feel a little better by finishing off “on my own” with JETTIES (nice one) and SCREENED. My cause was not helped by carelessness at 8dn, where I had MAINTAIN for a while, and 22ac, where I put CURATE until the Swiss cheese came to my rescue.

    COD to ONCE OVER.

  4. 15 minutes reveals a misspent youth.
    Needed help to get STAKE NET, RAIN TREE and RACLETTE. Took an age for the penny to drop for DARKENED. Never did get JETTIES.
    I guess a classy puzzle this; a class too far in what has been a bad week for me.
    One consolation is that after PATH my first in was SHEPHERDS PIE, word play and all.
    Well done George and thanks for the smiles.
    1. Thanks. I’m trying to follow up a misspent youth with an even more misspent whatever I’m up to now. I have another blog for the Listener if you want to hear more weekly bad crossword jokes.
  5. A bit like the curate’s egg this one. in fact entering curate early on was almost my downfall until i realised it was curacy the general name for the position. seeing it was Medina menat it couldnt be seine net but had to be stake net…my cod TO jetties. i feel sure we have seen this clue before or perhaps it was in a jumbo. all told 50 minutes….agree that de-lighted is tricky!

  6. 51 minutes with an age spent on last two or three: guessed raclette but then with centres or jetties went for the wrong one. Wrote in noshery in disbelief. Feel a bite’s been taken out of my mind: start the day with an ouch.
  7. 15:13 here, with similar struggles to those already reported. Also diverted by ‘seine net’, and wasted time thinking that Marrakesh had eight letters and trying to make a quarter of it into MA or similar – went through alphabet searches on ?E?IMA = “lots of noise”.

    No complaints about “delighted” for me, and a couple of other queries melted away on looking at COED. Only minor gripe is “staying” as a containment indicator. I assume this comes from stay=stop/prevent, but it’s a stretch just too far for me.

    1. We may prove to be in a minority here, but I too enjoyed the DARKENED/de-lighted joke. I don’t share your gripe about “staying” as a containment indicator at 12dn, a possibility which occurred to me fairly quickly on reading the clue(tho I still failed to spot the HEP/”in” link until reading George’s blog!). As you say, two of the commonest meanings of “stay” are “stop/prevent”, and we’ve already accepted, albeit not without some dissent, in earlier blog discussions that “stop” can, rather paradoxically, serve both as a containment and as a filler indicator. So, in logic, it’s hard to deny the same role to “stay”. Perhaps the lesson for the future is: Be Prepared!
  8. Back to my usual solving pattern today. After a difficult start I gained a foothold in the SE corner and all but three or four went in within 35 minutes; I then spent ages trying to unravel the remainder.

    Last in were RAIN TREE, DARKENED (not too cutsie for me, I liked it) and JETTIES. Finally I returned to my unsatisfactory solution at 16ac (I won’t bore you with it) and spotted the appalling word NOSHERY fitted the wordplay better.

    I looked up RACLETTE in Wikipedia to find out if it’s necessarily a Swiss dish which it’s not as it is also popular in parts of France and Belgium. In the accompanying picture it looks absolutely revolting like a sort of congealed fondue.

  9. Sorry if I sounded grumbly. This was an absolute cracker, one to be savoured for its tweaking of the nose. And a polished blog to complement (and compliment?) it.
  10. I enjoyed this one, though I had to finish it standing up on the London Overground between Stratford and Hackney Central. Probably about 20 minutes in total, a lot of them on FIJI (part of the Pacific? – presumably in much the same way that Tenerife is part of the Atlantic). Otherwise some great clues, and a lot of dragging from inmprobale parts of the memory: RACLETTE, MEDINA, RAIN TREE, all ok-ish from wordplay. Liked DARKENED, no problem with de-lighted which made me smile, though left me wodering whether DECIDER could be clued by “Take drink away”.
  11. I became totally becalmed in the SW and had to give it away for a bit; then twigged to the “delighted”, having spent ages going through my list of valleys (dale, dell, vale, wadi,…) all of which seemed to have four letters, and reasoning the boat had to have three (tug,…). Arguing backwards, the valley had to be dene. I’ll add that to my list of four letter valleys and ark to my list of three letter boats. I liked ASPIRATIONAL and INTERMISSION amongst others but COD to DARKENED.

    Since nobody else has asked, in what sense is taking=on?

      1. Thanks for the taking=on explanations everybody. I’ve no idea where this message will appear in the thread.
          1. I was thinking of “I’m hep to your jive” and all those funky saying the swinging swingers of the swinging ’60s were pendulum doing.
          2. I guess hep=hip and in both meaning “fashionable” is counted as enough. I think it’s permissible though maybe not the best of matches.
    2. Think of the phrase in its non-inverted form as “History taking parts two and four of GCSE examination” (over+on+ce) and then invert it.
      1. I can’t see the need for this inversion/re-inversion (or un-inversion/inversion) process. It’s just:

        Taking = ON (drug meaning as explained already)
        parts two and four of GCSE = CE
        history = OVER (the slang sense of “finished”, in COED’s def for “be history” under history)
        examination = the def.

        (If you’re thinking of “taking” as meaning “going next to”, then the translation to “on” or anything else would not appear in the answer, and you’d just get OVER,CE.)

        1. I think I’ve unwittingly played the role of the plant in the audience! Thanks for putting me – if no one else – straight, and for the protocol re the ‘going next to’ type use of ‘on’.
          1. No problem – there’s some kind of exception to my rule in clues like “Bear letters needed for father” = PANDA (P and A making PA). (My instant invention for illustrative , not a Times clue, in case anyone wants to grumble about it).
  12. Rarely in this half-term week I got a little time to myself to look at this before 8pm today. It continued what has been a very tough week for me and I had to give up with 5 unsolved: STAKE NET, RAIN TREE, DARKENED, JETTIES and (inexplicably) EXPOSURE. I think I’m just being extra dim this week but I didn’t help myself by writing ASPIRATIONAL with an N that looked like a W, which made 20ac impossible. Hey ho.
  13. Obsessed with my toolbox? For too long fixed on ROUTER(S) for 19dn – despite the reference to ‘plane’, not ‘planes’! Never got to JETTIES even with all crossing letters. Thanks for enlightenment.
  14. darkened, rain tree, jetties and stake net all proved beyond this solver. the earliest reference to raclette in the oed is from andre simon’s dictionary of gastronomy ‘the name given in the valais canton of switzerland to the local fondue’. cod 19d jetties terrific but beyond me.
  15. Much the same experience as others – a mix of the not too difficult and very tricky. SHEPHERD’S PIE was my last in, and I didn’t get the HEP/in bit of the wordplay until coming here. Thanks, George. I did rightly assume that “staying” was probably a container indicator (see comment above in reply to Peter B), but that still didn’t point me to HEP. I didn’t go for SEINE NET, as it happens, but did flirt for a while with SHARK NET, something I was very reassured to know was in place off the beaches of South Africa when I lived there for a year or two. This temporarily made the search for a solution to 12dn even more fraught than it needed to be. I liked NOSHERY at 16dn. Was I alone in assuming at first that the Spanish vino referred to was Rioja and as a result spending some fruitless minutes trying to think of a synonym for “restaurant” that included the letters IOJA?
  16. 27:15 .. and pretty glad to finish at all.

    George’s description of a raclette is about right – half-melted cheese with a bunch of cold cuts and raw veg – which doesn’t explain why, at least in French Alpine ski resorts, it can be stupendously expensive (years later I’m still smarting from getting landed with the bill for a four-person raclette that actually cost more than the car I was driving at the time – I went back to my hotel room and wept).

    COD DARKENED, where the penny dropped with a resounding clang. Last in STAKE NET, after much temptation to throw in a wrong answer.

  17. I enjoyed your blog George. Looking at your respective times you might be able to claim a “Peter-beater,” but after yesterday’s revelation perhaps this is a phrase we won’t hear any longer on the rare occasions it applies!

    I made a good fist of this one – for me – but was beaten in the end by RAIN TREE, RACLETTE, JETTIES and DARKENED. Thought of airbridges but hadn’t heard of jetties or raclette. Thinking of a racecourse for “course” didn’t occur to me even though a colleague of mine announced this morning that he’s going to the Derby on Saturday.

      1. I didn’t read yesterdays, circumstances kept me from solving it until after I’d done this one, so I didn’t read what Peter wrote…

        I’ll own up, I believe it was I who coined “Peter-beater” and the double meaning was entirely intentional. Sorry Peter. A google search of the blog showed I used it in comments about a year ago around a year ago but I think it predates that.

        Anyway, if you’re announcing it, aren’t you just peter beating anyway?

  18. This was a class puzzle and I got stuck with the four in the SW that gave most people trouble. I eventually got Rain Tree after realising that the course was Aintree not entrée and this led the way to darkened and exposure leaving me with only the plane connection. I thought plane trees were much more likely than aeroplanes even though, deep down, I knew that in that case it would have said “plane perhaps”. So I never did get the jet ties.

  19. could you guys still include the answer instead of leaving it out please? for us newbies some are still tough to find. Thanks!
    2. This issue has been discussed many times. Some reasons for not providing all the answers are in the information in the “About this blog” link at the top of the page, but there’s another reason: the fact that if all the answers are provided, you don’t have to do any work at all. If you get 28 answers and have to work out one or two with the help of checking letters, that gives you a fairly gentle little bit of real solving to do. Both omitted answers today are familiar words or phrases, and in the case of 4D I’d be surprised if there was anything else to fit A?? T?E?E. The omitted answers are very often ones where the clue types are easy ones like hidden words, and nearly always familiar words – answers like today’s RACLETTE are never omitted.

      As we always say, if you’re prepared to say which of the omitted answers is causing you grief, you will normally get the answer and an explanation pretty quickly.

  20. Thanks. I did get them yesterday but don’t always and its just frustrating when I am unable to work it out even after knowing the answer. Anyway, will try harder!

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