Times 24565

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: 10:50

A reasonably tricky puzzle this, with at least two ‘decoy’ wordplays. Shortish on time this morning, so not many links to related topics.

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed a new link on the right. Peter’s Crossword Bookshop is an Amazon UK ‘affiliate store’ which I intend to keep up-to-date with information about currently available books on (mostly) cryptic crosswords. End of commercial.

Across
1 SH(OUT)Y
4 FIG.,HTING – HTING is thing=affair, with two letters reversed at the start
10 P(USSYF=fussy*)OOTER – Pooter is the diarist in George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody. Some time wasted here trying DIARIST as the outside.
11 TAN – 2 defs, one for an abbreviation of tangent=function. The first “decoy wordplay” as ‘hides’ may cause you to look for words hidden in ‘process’
12 ROADHOG – had* in reversal of (GO=run,OR)
14 THE(ORE=product of mine)M – THEM=’the other side’ is from colloquial usage, not bridge as I briefly thought (in bridge, the opponents are ‘They’)
15 DATA PROTECTION – cryptic def.
17 CIRCUMNAVIGATE – V in (manage circuit)* – V = middle letter of ‘Cape Verde’. And this is an &lit/all-in-one
21 A(QUA=as)RIA
22 GODS=high seating (in a theatre),END
23 KOI=”coy” – a homophone of a word borrowed from Japanese for the second day in a row
24 CAUL(dron)=large pot,IF=despite,LOWER=being smaller
26 L=left,ON=supported by,DONE=socially acceptable,R=Republican – “supported by” seems out of place in an across clue as opposed to a down, but here it’s just a synonym rather than an instruction about how to assemble wordplay components
27 BENDER – 2 defs. The first, “Binge on drinks” is a bit cheeky as it looks as if it should lead to a verb rather than a noun.
 
Down
1 SUP=swallow (a drink),ERADD=dread* – to superadd is “to add over and above” = “apply to be another extra” – today’s new word for me
2 OPS = operations = military activity – O=old,PS=Police Sergeant
3 TOYSHOP – cryptic def. masquerading as a description of a tennis court or maybe a theatre bar
5 INTO THE BAR=’enthusiastic about legal profession’,GAIN=to benefit, which leaves the initial ‘too’ as the only thing left to be the definition
6 Today’s omitted answer – ask if you really can’t spot it with the help of checking letters
7 IN=during,TERRO(r),GATE=opening
8 G(E(uros))NOME – the international banker is usually known as a Gnome of Zurich. The artful def. is “one’s defining sequence”
9 FOR GOOD=always(MEA(t)),SURE
13 ATTRIBUTION = assignment – (tout Britain)*
16 TENDERER – 2 defs – another decoy wordplay here for me, as “I’ll make a bid more” triggered my ‘possible anagram indicator and fodder’ detection system for (a bid more)* despite the phrasing not quite being right, and three of the checking letters supported this false lead.
18 CUR=’someone despicable'(A/C=account),A(ls)O – I wasn’t really aware that Curacao is an island rather than a city.
19 IN=home,DU(L(ovin)G)E – “pamper” (= indulge) as a meaning of ‘pet’ is in Collins.
20 JACK=honour (cards),AL(l)=’entirely diminished’ – ‘menial worker’ was a new definition of ‘jackal’ for me
25 W=wide,AD=publicity

34 comments on “Times 24565”

  1. Found this a smooth run – another sub-twenty (just). Getting the double cross (so to speak) of the long ones early on helped. Thought the three-ltter fish ending in i would dish me but used to have koi carp in a pond and guessed jackal. A touch surprised by go = run – I suppose “Watch him go!” or similar – ?
  2. Fairly swift by my standards but 2 wrong and 2 unsolved, the latter being KOI and JACKAL (cards again)of course. Now, if sup is swallow and the rest is an anagram of dread we get SUPERDAD right? What else? (Note to see PB’s explanation of extra). So this required me to enter ANTI PROTECTION, something to do with the free market lobby?
    1. My explanation of extra is that it’s something added – so “to add over and above” = “apply to be another extra” because if there has already been some addition to cause the use of “over and above” there must be some initial extras already there, and we’re adding an extra extra (sorry, couldn’t resist writing that).

      I lightly pencilled ‘dad’ in ‘superdad’ but decided that “another extra” or similar wasn’t much of a def. when DATA came through as the first word of 15

  3. After yesterday’s smooth ride, today I found it difficult to get out of second gear. Just two penciled in on first run through – both wrong, as it turned out – before 1ac went in first on the second run. The SW proved toughest, with CURACAO last in from the wordplay, after I’d given up on ‘cad’. KOI provided the key to this corner – my knowledge of fish isn’t up to much, but this variety is popular over here as a get-rich feng shui fish. Didn’t know JACKAL in the sense of menial worker, but the –AL put me on the right lines and then the ‘honour’ clinched it. AQUARIA and LONDONER were also cunning clues, which made that corner particularly tricky. Coming to the blog, I note that I got two wrong in the NW, ‘site protection’ (which I was never happy with) rather than DATA PROTECTION and ‘suppress’ for SUPERADD, where I tried to convince myself that ‘swallow’ was close enough to the ‘keep in, repress’ meaning of ‘suppress’, as in ‘swallow the bitterness’. Which is what I’m doing now.

    84 minutes. COD to INTO THE BARGAIN – I’m a sucker for grammatical words such as ‘too’ being used for the definition.

  4. Done in several fits and starts. Equally troubled by SUPERADD/DATA & JACKAL as other contributors have been. Took me a while to get “particular” as in take down ones particulars.

    I had trouble accepting BENDER for what it was and spent some time thinking “on drinks and many” was wordplay sandwiched between two definitions; “many”=D for 500 perhaps, “and”=’N’ at a long stretch, which makes “on”=BEER, hmmm. I guess you can binge on many things, but it’s only a bender if it’s on drinks. COD to THEOREM.

      1. A fair point – “It can be proven ….” would have addressed this point without much damage to the surface reading.
      2. It’s only a conjecture until it’s been proven, unless of course it’s the Renewal Theorem or Green’s Theorem, which had generally accepted but incorrect proofs for a time, or Fermat’s Last Theorem, which had an apochryphal proof until recently (has the hole in that proof been fixed yet?) or the Four Colour Theorem, which was proved by a computer counting on its fingers and toes and which some mathematicians think is still awaiting a definitve proof, or the Hahn-Banach theorem, which appears in many text books with an incorrect proof or…
        1. You’re right. We amateur mathematicians should check what it says in the dictionary – COED’s def includes “proved by a chain of reasoning”.
          1. Fascinating. I think I for one was confusing theorems and theories, which I think I’ve learned are not the same thing. I say “I think” because the main effect of reading this was to give me a headache.
            However I am an “amateur mathematician” only in the loosest sense. So loose in fact that in this sense I’m also an “amateur ballet dancer”.
  5. Rather a slow effort today with only about half the clues solved in my first 24 minute session. There was little flow, so these answers were scattered about in all quarters.

    I managed to fill in most of the gaps in my next 15 minute attempt but then hit the wall with 1dn, 15ac (first word) and 20dn missing. I finally completed it with one guess after 50 minutes in total.

    I have no idea why I took so long to think of DATA at 15ac having already decided that PROTECTION was its second part, but if I’d known the word at 1dn I’m sure the answer would have come to me immediately. I have never heard of SUPERADD (glad to see I’m not alone in this) and only put it in as my very last answer because I couldn’t think of anything else that fitted the wordplay and the checkers. Like Ulaca I wasted time trying to make ‘suppress’ fit this clue.

    The problem at 20dn was due to my own stupity having written COI at 23ac, but I didn’t know the required meaning of JACKAL either.

  6. Approx. 15 minutes, interrupted by a phone call half way through. JACKAL/KOI caused me some trouble, but got there in the end. My first thought for the fish was TAI (a Japanes food fish) although I didn’t like “withdrawing” as a definition of the homophone, but didn’t pencil it in as I wanted 20D to be VASSAL. Eventually though of honour = card and saw JACKAL, although I didn’t know the “menial worker” meaning. Last in though was FIGHTING, which took a further minute to see how it worked after I’d entered it.
  7. Around 24 minutes today, held up in the same places as everyone else, though JACKAL/KOI went in as soon as I gave it some serious thought. FIGHTING took most time, not helped by “knowing” 6d was a hidden but not seeing what it was. I also hazarded SUPERDAD, and only changed it when I realised DATA was a better start to 15 than ANTI, though maybe could have settled for either. Didn’t like shouty – it’s just a horrible word – and a not particularly enthusiastic COD to 9
  8. Much the same story. Entries all over the grid and then systematically working on the missing ones. 25 minutes to solve.

    I couldn’t see the clever parsing of FIGHTING for ages; I’m not keen on THEOREM because not all theorems have been proved; didn’t know SUPERADD or the vassal meaning of JACKAL. Some good misleading stuff overall, best puzzle for quite a while.

  9. 45 minutes. I like this compiler’s economy of style. TAN made me smile, and I look forward to similar clues for cos, sin and cosh.
  10. I found this entertaining with some interesting new words and usages. My favourite was the succinct clue to Tan. Like many others, I finished with koi and jackal being reduced to going through the alphabet to get koi.
  11. All but three done after 15 minutes. Another couple to write out all the letters to get the anagram at 17ac, followed by complete failure on JACKAL/KOI, having VASSAL/SHI as my nearest guess like vinyl1 (albeit without obscure Chinese fish knowledge) but knowing it wasn’t quite right. I might have thought of KOI eventually, but would probably have spelled it COI, and I didn’t know this meaning of “jackal”. “Honour” as a picture card indicator should come to mind more readily.
    SUPERADD was new but easy enough from wordplay, although I too considered SUPERDAD. Maybe we’ll get that on Sunday.
    I agree with mctext’s comment about THEOREM – “it’s been proved” as a definition seems unsatisfactory. Would “it might be proved” have spoiled the clue?
  12. A very good set of clues. I wrote ticks against 4, 11 and 17 in particular. A slowish time at 38 minutes. Much of the time I was working on inspired guesses from what I took to be the definitions, particularly with the longer entries. I had no idea for 20 at first. VASSAL didn’t really fit the definition, but I almost entered it, contemplating SHI for 23, but then KOI came to me, so I entered JACKAL with no great conviction.
  13. About 25 minutes, but 2 wrong: the same road taken by ulaca, with SUPPRESS and SITE PROTECTION instead of SUPERADD(??) and DATA…. Oops. I can’t fault myself very much having never seen SUPERADD. Now that I see it, it still doesn’t look much like a real word. Nice puzzle overall. I thought CIRCUMNAVIGATE the best of the bunch. Regards.
  14. 5:55, at a very uneven speed.  Last in were 26ac (LONDONER) and 20dn (JACKAL).  I didn’t know that CURACAO (18dn) was anything other than a drink, or – like everyone else, it seems – that a JACKAL was a minion.

    I should declare an unfair advantage with SUPERADD (1dn).

    Clue of the Day: 17ac (CIRCUMNAVIGATE).

    1. Well done (he says through slightly gritted teeth …). Time to make that Times championship final again – I can think of someone else who had 3 “wilderness years” after his first one.

      I just checked the OED in the hope of finding a less esoteric use of ‘superadd’. The best I could find was: 1857 DICKENS Dorrit II. xv, Here Mrs. General stopped, and added internally..‘Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism’. ‘Mr. Dorrit’, she superadded aloud, ‘is ever most obliging’.

      Judging from the citations, philospophy and religion seem to accout for most usages, such as: a1769 JOHNSON in Boswell 26 Oct. 1769, A man who is converted from Protestantism to Popery..parts with nothing: he is only superadding to what he already had.

      1. Thanks, Peter.  What trips me up (and indeed slows me down) is usually ignorance, so I’m very much at the mercy of the puzzles’ content.  I’d have squeaked into the final last time round if I’d known either FINGAL or FARTHINGALE (for which I gave the less promising guess FARTHINBARE).

        Sorry to have missed the recent Sloggers & Betters, by the way – I hope to be there next time, whenever that is.

  15. Agree with Jimbo that this was the best puzzle for a while with lots of entertaining/clever stuff.

    Failed though – at 23 I took “fish withdrawing” to mean reversal of a fish so it had to be IDE reversed right? Edi sounds vaguely plausible for a stretch of water in Iceland. That left the menial as -a-eal which, not surprisingly, stumped me. It didn’t help that honour card didn’t occur to me (today’s lesson learned) so I was playing around with CH, OBE etc. Bah.

    Something like 25 minutes to get that far.

  16. 20 minutes through bleary eyes this morning. Two cryptic definitions intersecting each other again… SUPERADD and JACKAL from wordplay, GENOME and PUSSYFOOTER from definition. Last in was FIGHTING and after finally getting it, I’d call that one a crafty COD.
  17. 19:17 here. I made incredibly heavy weather of this, and came within an ace of putting in DATE PROTECTION, assuming the answer was something to with sell-by dates in shops! (I kicked myself once I’d spotted the correct answer, as it’s a very good clue.)

    I suspect I’ve seen it before, but I’m uneasy about “despite” = IF in 24A (or “despite being smaller” = IF LOWER). Can you give me an example of a sentence in which the two are interchangeable?

    1. “Despite being” is a verbatim definition of “if” from the COD and ODE. The ODE example is “she was honest, if a little brutal.”
      1. Thanks, Roger. I hadn’t thought of that.

        I’m afraid that, cheapskate that I am, I haven’t bought a new copy of the COD since the 6th edition (edited by John Sykes) in 1976, and that doesn’t include that definition (or anything similar as far as I can see).

        Perhaps I should rush out and buy the ODE, but Ealing library gives me access to the (online) OED, so I tend to rely on that. However, it doesn’t include “despite being” verbatim, and I can’t spot a comparable citation.

  18. Not that it would matter if “despite being” didn’t appear verbatim in any dictionary definition, of course.

    Might DATE PROTECTION be a pre-emptive antidote to GHB or Rohypnol?

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