Times 24,558 – mental block

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
A very unusual solve which suggests I should find my own icon with a dunce’s cap or similar – about 15 minutes for all bar the last one and a half solutions. Then 10 minutes being utterly flummoxed by 3 down before the scales fell from my eyes. In the circumstances I can hardly say other than I thought it a beautifully cunning clue…

That aside, a pleasant and straightforward puzzle (by which I mean I doubt too many people spent quite as long in an individual cul-de-sac like mine).

Across
1 WINE VAULT – cryptic def. – as soon as I saw “Graves”, I thought “I bet that’s actually Graves, so the first word will be WINE, but, tellingly, it took me an age to come up with VAULT, which was the final key to 3 down.
6 POWER – POW + E.R.
9 RENEW – RENÉ + W(ife) – Descartes if you want a highbrow example, Artois if you want lowbrow. Magritte if you want a famous Belgian.
10 SYNERGISM – (MYSINGERS)*.
11 SKY BLUE =”SKYE BLUE”.
12 REACHED – EACH in a RED.
13 OVERESTIMATION – (MOVIESTARINOTE)*, and it’s inaccurate on the high side, rather than wildly so.
17 CONSTITUTIONAL – double def.; I assume the phrase was originally “a constitutional walk”, and the noun was dropped over time.
21 ABYSMAL – bABY’S MALady.
23 CAPTAIN – APT in CAIN, the first (and most regularly cited here) murderer; lift and separate to reveal a rank which is only military in the UK, but is also a police rank in the US, apparently the rough equivalent of Detective Inspector. Often depicted on TV as the authority figure trying to keep a maverick cop in line and warning him about the consequences of failing to do this one by the book.
25 ATTENTION – (TENT + I) in (NATO)*.
26 ALLOT – A (TOLL)rev.
27 DUMMY – double def.; for those who’ve never played contract bridge, only three of the four players participate in any one hand – the fourth lays down his cards for his partner to play, and this is the “dummy hand”.
28 LAYPERSON – [R(ook)ONEPLAYS]*.
 
Down
1 WORKSHOP – H(ard) in WORKSOP. One should always be wary of pigeonholing British places as definitively “North”, “South” or “Midlands” in my experience; I’ve known Geordies who regarded Yorkshire as suspiciously southern, and Londoners who thought The North started at about Banbury. And that’s without even beginning to consider the view from Scotland…
2 NINNY – INN in N.Y.; Washington Irving first applied the nickname Gotham to New York. The original, of course, is a second Nottinghamshire town in the space of two clues…
3 VOWELLESS – as I say, I couldn’t get away from thinking this meant “owing nothing”, so I was trying to find a synonym for “debt-free” and failing; and why the “Aye”? Clearly some sort of &lit. involved that I also couldn’t see. It was only when I finally got the V of VAULT in 1 across that I realised that IOU and Aye could be rearranged as AEIOUY. D’oh!
4 UNSWEPT – (PUT)* round N-S-W-E; one is never sure how many compass points “quarters” might indicate in this usage, but here it’s the full set.
5 TANGRAM – cryptic def.; I seem to recall this Chinese puzzle from my childhood, having a brief moment of wild popularity (see also: Rubik’s cube, Top Trumps etc.).
6 PARMA – PA – R(iver) – MA; achieved by a process of swift elimination via MARDA, MAPRA and the like.
7 WEIGH DOWN =”WAY” DOWN; “fashion statement” = “sounds like a synonym of fashion” adds an allusive quality to a fairly simple clue.
8 REMEDY – final letters of decipheR cluE froM thE crossworD todaY.
14 ECOSYSTEM – E(uropean) COSY STEM.
15 TAILPLANE =”TALE PLAIN” .
16 PLANKTON – PLANK + (NOT)rev; the name comes from the Greek for “wandering”, and refers to the fact that these are creatures whose whereabouts are determined by the currents.
18 ILL WILL – i.e. I’LL WILL (vb).
19 UNCANNY – U + (C in NANNY).
20 CANARD – AN in CARD.
22 MONEY – ONE in MY gives the ready money.
24 ATLAS – double def.

54 comments on “Times 24,558 – mental block”

  1. Similar problems to Tim, thinking of wine cave, chais, cellar but not the obvious vault. I also had dress down at 7 making the NE impenetrable. Realising it had to be something else set off a chain reaction giving me synergism, tangram, wine vault, vowelless and weigh down. The clue for vowelless was very clever. The Aye at the end had me looking for a word meaning forever.
  2. 25 m of delight without a single groan, took ages to see the wine at 1a till realised it was Worksop (again) and that Gotham is NY. Fine anagrams especially 13, and some neat misleads. I have two tangram sets, one I made as a child, the other incomplete but ivory. COD 3d.
  3. This filled all of my lunch hour and then some more, so a good test. Very enjoyable too, with my COD to SKY-BLUE which was typical of the whole puzzle for its deceptiveness. The enjoyment was slightly marred at the end, though, by TANGRAM, one of those either-you-know-it-or-you-don’t words. I seem to remember having a similar grumble last week. Must be turning into a whingeing Pom.
    1. I’m with you on TANGRAM. I got there in the end by pure guesswork and because the only other word that would fit, as far as I could see, was TANTRUM, which didn’t seem to make much sense. I surmised that a tangram might be an obscure form of anagram known only to Peter B! Any clue whose solution relies entirely on obscure general knowledge (obscure at least for those who don’t have the knowledge) and is inaccessible via an alternative cryptic or wordplay route is unsatisfactory. The definition offered, if you know what a tangram is, barely qualifies as cyptic, I would have thought. But otherwise, an enjoyable puzzle. Like some others, I spotted the “graves”=WINE link fairly quickly but then spent an unconscionable time trying to think of a synonym for cellar that would fit the second part of the solution.
      1. I must confess to being quite surprised by the number of people who didn’t know what ‘tangram’ means. For what it’s worth, I knew the word but that didn’t make the clue easy enough to solve on first look.
        1. Well, that’s interesting. Perhaps the clue definition was a bit more cryptic than I gave it credit for.
  4. 10:00 – also struggled to find the word to follow WINE, and had DRESS DOWN pretty confidently at 7D until understanding 12A, where CHE (Guevara) as a possible left-winger is another potential source of confusion. Enjoyed the two versions of ‘Gotham’ in the same clue (follow Tim’s link if you don’t get “wise man”), and of course 3D. The ‘constitutional’=walk in 17 is almost as old a Times favourite as ‘corporation’=tum, but the clue was still nicely done.
  5. We seem to be in a run of pleasant but relatively easy puzzles of which this yet another example. 20 minutes to solve.

    I guess the only talking point is the 1A, 3D pair where like Tim I immediately translated “graves” as the wine and wrote “vault” above the grid. I then confirmed the “wine” using WORKSOP and the very easy NINNY. The moment I read 3D I was suspicious “why not an IOU?” and “why Aye rather than yes?” Had to be the vowels. Confirmed that with the give-away RENEW.

    All good fun but I’m starting to need a real cracker

  6. Dumb question but why EACH in REACHED? My wild guess was it was ACHE (as in a bit of a head) in RED.
    Struggled slowly through yesterday’s easy one so was happy to race through botom half in no time but then had to cheat to get VOWELLESS to open up the rest (was thinking down the vowell route but doubted the Y). Took an age to see why REMEDY and guessed that APT was clever.
    Another disappointing performance.
    1. Came to = def.
      “a head” = EACH
      when imprisoned by left-winger = in RED
        1. Sorry to pull the rug from under your feet there. (I said the same as Tim, but added a warning about wordplay structures with multiple possibilites like RE(ACHE)D and R(EACH)ED.
  7. 11:14 here. Off to a bad start thinking 1A might be an anagram of “graves etc”, but got the two 14-letter answers straight away and worked out from the middle off them. I thought 3D was a good original clue – I also didn’t twig it until I’d got 1A though.
  8. I’m with Jimbo & fmks. A very pleasant 35 minutes. And with Tim on the VAULT/VOWELLESS being the major sticking point. I thought a wine vault was a leap over the bench of your barbecue table with a glass of sangria in hand.
  9. 90 minutes of serious enjoyment with four pukka homophones. What more can a solver want? The setter deserves credit for sending me down nearly every blind alley he put in: the relatively tricky (‘shade above us when it’s sunny’ – I was trying to dredge up my knowledge of parasols – and ‘put out about’ – I was working around ‘upset’) as well as the easy, my missed anagrind of the day being at 13ac. It was that sort of puzzle where the ingenuity of the majority of the clues made me, at any rate, stumble over the more straightforward ones, as I struggled to acclimatise to the lower altitude.

    Last in VOWELESS, if one excepts TANGRAM, which I had to use aids to get.

  10. For Orcadians, the Mainland is the main island in the group, on which the capital Kirkwall is situated, and ‘doon south’ refers to (the rest of) Scotland. The locals speak one of the most distinctive of all British accents. Sounds more Welsh than Scottish.
    1. Another POV difference: I’m sure I’ve seen a T-shirt with a map of the Shetlands shwoing the British ‘mainland’ reduced to a tiny inset in the bottom left corner, reversing the norm where the islands are shown at reduced scale. But can’t find an image of this on the web.
  11. Found this straightforward and just wish I could leap the relatively low hurdles instead of stepping cautiously over them. 23 minutes. Last to be understood: 8 down and 21 across, the two most obvious. Re 3, I never know: is Y a vowel or can it be both?
    1. Y can be both. Best test: if you can sing it, it’s a vowel – you can sing the Y in by, but not the Y in yet.
  12. Yet another occurrence of a quick solve (for me – about 20 minutes) that ground to a halt with one impenetrable clue. 5dn is one of those clues that have sparked debate here before and like richnorth I didn’t know TANGRAM so was never going to get it.
    I didn’t know the bridge meaning of DUMMY either but with that one there were two chances to win.
    Bizarrely I didn’t see the wordplay in 12 because my brain somehow managed to combine the two Es into one so I wasted a bit of time trying to work out how “CH” could mean “head” before giving up and moving on.
  13. Fairly straightforward today apart from 5dn which actually prevented me finishing the puzzle until I could access a reference book. At the end of my first session (30 minutes) I had all but REACHED, WEIGH DOWN, POWER and 5dn in place. 4 minutes into the next session I had cracked all but TANGRAM which I didn’t know anyway. So yet again I was stumped by a cryptic definition of an unknown word with no other way into it.

    Prior to that I lost time considering DRESS DOWN at 7dn which led to further problems in the NE corner.

    [I wrote this ready for posting before the blog was up. Some of the points have now already been made]

  14. Easy run today at 11 minutes, even on the Central Line. I am amongst those for whom TANGRAM is no problem, but readily concede that there’s no way to an answer if the word is not known. I thought ECOSYSTEM and SKY BLUE were decent clues in a rather bland collection.
  15. “Mental Block” is an apposite title for this. I struggled fr 45 minutes before finishing, albeit aidlessly.

    Also had DRESS DOWN for 7 which I didn’t query for ages and, like others, couldn’t solve WINE VAULT. Looking back, all now seems clear and comparatively simple. Must be the setter’s fault: well done setter!

  16. I struggled with this one, foxed by some of the cryptic defs. Should really have got CONSTITUTIONAL and ALLOT but by then my brain was numb.

    PLANKTON appeared as a down clue in the 30th May Sunday Times clued as “Drifters in the sea not about to join piece of wood”

  17. I seem to remember from reading historical novels that a vowel was an IOU at the gaming table. Any other Georgette Heyer fans out there? BTW I owe my love of both GH and the Times Crossword to my, long dead, parents.
  18. 19 minutes. Made a mess of the NW corner by writing WINE CELL and then stopping when the black square where the R was supposed to go appeared ‘neath my hand. Got vowelless before twigging vault.

    Didn’t see the wordplay for money before coming here and I’m not sure how plane is a homophone for a synonym of clearly when the latter is an adverb and plain is an adjective.

    1. Plain is one of those adjectives that moonlights as an adverb (even though ‘plainly’ is there to do the job). The best-known adverbial meaning is the one in statements like “that’s just plain wrong”. When I saw this I thought – “Hang on? – surely an adverb describes a verb, and ‘wrong’ is not a verb”. Well that’s wrong – an adverb “modifies the meaning of an adjective, verb, or other adverb”, ODE tells me. It also tells me about a more obviously adverbial meaning, as in “I’ve finished with you, I tell you plain.”
      1. Adjectives used that way seem to give a different flavour to things, often for calculated effect. Hemmingway was apparently giving to insisting that he didn’t write well, he wrote good.
        1. For some time now adjectives have been doing double duty in this way – guiltily, as an English teacher, I rather like it. When Andy Murray says “I played defensive,” the word is the stronger for the direct adjectival touch behind the adverb it’s become. Mind you it would be wonderful to hear him say “I played downright vicious,” but it aint gonna happen.
          1. I’ve always taken such sports-speak to be the result of American-English influence, following the pattern established by “I played real good today”. For non-native speakers of English (the raft of European players on the ATP tour, for instance), it’s also so much easier having to learn just one form of the lexical item.

            I’m running a book on how many “massives” will emanate from the England camp before they stagger out of the World Cup. Becks alone is odds-on for a ton.


  19. 21:00 .. Like Tim and Jim, one glance at ‘Graves’ was all I needed – to go straight up the garden path. Had I bothered with the rest of the clue, I might have surmised that DEAD POETS didn’t quite work but I pencilled it in with happy abandon.

    I knew the word TANGRAM, but didn’t know what one was so spent a while trying to explain the wordplay with cut tangents and gawd knows what else.

  20. About 30 minutes but I’m in the group that didn’t know TANGRAM. I guessed TONTRIM, hoping it was a very obscure offshoot of the tonsure haircut favored by medieval monks, and that the definition was ‘square cut’. Yikes. Other than that, VOWELLESS and SKY BLUE were wonderful clues, and I am also impressed that vinyl knows where Lee Westwood is from. Now I do too. Regards to all.
    1. Well I’m in the group that find it a bit depressing to know where Lee Westwood is from.
    2. Kevin.. TONTRIM – genius! That gets my vote for “wrong but ought to be right” answer and explanation of the month.
      1. Some of my earlier efforts ended in -REM, the rock group, but I couldn’t make a ‘puzzles’ out of ‘T?NS’. After that, TONTRIM actually sounded good.
    3. In a similar vein I considered TENTRIM but ten as the square of 3.162278 seemed just a little unsatisfactory.
  21. Coincidentally, today’s Times also contained the obituary of Martin Gardner who wrote a number of celebrated articles on tangrams for Scientific American.
    1. I think you’ve fallen foul of the dreaded Arial font demon. That’s tum with an em. Just in case that doesn’t solve your confusion: corporation as in too, too solid flesh; tum as in yummy, yummy, yummy, I’ve got love in my tummy.
      1. The demon exists in other fonts too. One of my favourite misreadings was overheard on the northern end of the Piccadilly line in the late 1980s. One Sunday a family with magnificent Yorkshire accents got on the train. Not knowing the station names from years of subterranean commuting, one of them misinterpreted the Gill Sans on the line map and said “Oh look – Amos Grove!”.
      2. It seems my problem isn’t a large entity that is gradually becoming separate and distinct from its owner but my eyesight. And I even had the magnification on when I read this last night on the laptop at home.
  23. Pleasing puzzle, 35 mins. Favourite clues VOWELLESS, REACHED, POWER. Like others TANGRAM was my last answer, had been looking for TRIM (cut) as the last four letters for quite a while.
  24. Couldn’t get the top left corner (hippy corner) out before falling asleep last night, saw VOWELLESS this morning and got the rest of it. Couple of cryptic definitions overlapping makes it tricky for me.
    1. May just ask why the top left hand corner is known as ‘hippy corner’?

      (For what it’s worth, I crashed and burned quite horribly on this puzzle. Right now, the heady days of actually completing on of the darn things are a distant memory – I thank the Lord for this wonderful website, for putting me out of my daily misery!!)

      1. In the US, where George lives, the NW is apparently where the hippies live.
  25. Began successfully with 1a and first glass of wine. Finished bottle still not understanding 5a – square cut?, and 7d weigh = fashion statement. Explanations gratefully received. Perhaps I should start second bottle?
    Mike & Fay
    1. At last a question I can answer….

      DEFINITELY start the second bottle!!

      1. Many thanks John from Lancs. All now clear despite demolishing coincidentally a Rasteau Cotes de Rhone.
        Mike & Fay

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