Times 24,618 – Open Season

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Under 15 minutes for a solid puzzle; if I had to sum it up in a word, it might be “workmanlike”, which is not intended as a criticism. A couple of nice &lits, and a nod to the start of the Premiership season, but not one which I think will prove the undoing of anyone who doesn’t follow the English top division avidly.

Across
1 SECOND – double def.
4 CHILLERS – (S)CHILLER’S, a cut-off version of the noted German.
10 PERINATAL – (PARENTAL)* round I(nfant) &lit.
11 CODED – ODE in CD; to my mind it only seems like yesterday that CDs appeared, and already it appears they are obsolescent.
12 EXCLAIM – EX (=spouse no longer) + CLAIM (=right).
13 DREAM ON – DR. + EAMON(n).
14 CREWE – W. in CREE gives the famous railway town.
15 OLYMPICS – (MY LO)rev. + PICS; given the loose definition, I was trying to think of a word that might sum up the era of Cabaret, and only coming up with the ill-fitting OXYMORON, until I realised the events were athletic and from 1936 specifically.
18 COOLIDGE – [COOL + (E.G.)rev] around ID(aho).
20 RUMBA – [M(aiden) in RUB] + A. Whenever you see Polish at the start of a sentence, you usually start to suspect immediately that it’s ‘polish’ rather than ‘Polish’…
23 PLATTER – P(ercolate) + LATTE + R(ight).
25 OTHELLO – OTHE(r) + L.L. + O(ld).
26 ASIAN – lAwSuIt + AN. Definition by example, with a ‘perhaps’ to keep everyone happy.
27 deliberately omitted
28 DONE OVER – ONE in DOVER.
29 ANGERS – (b)ANGERS. What did the Angevins ever do for us, eh?
 
Down
1 SAPIENCE – [S(tate)INPEACE]*, as in homo sapiens.
2 CORACLE – CO. + [RACE round L(ake)].
3 NONPAREIL – double def., the second of which – a 6 point typographic unit – was unfamiliar to me till now, but correctly guessed.
5 HOLIDAY RESORTS – (SITALYORRHODES)* &lit.
6 LOCKE – LOCK + E(uropean).
7 ENDEMIC – END + [IM in C.E.]rev.
8 SIDING – I’D in SING, ‘hymn’ being a verb, of course, and the line being part of the railway.
9 STAMFORD BRIDGE – S(econd) T(e)AM + FOR + D(rawn) + BRIDGE gives the home of the present English champions.
16 PERCHERON – PERCHER (on the basis that a bird which has landed must then be perching…) + ON gives the big strong horse.
17 MAYORESS – YORE inside MASS.
19 ORATION – 0 (as in tennis) + RATION.
21 MALAISE =”MA LAZE”. If you want to be picky – and let’s face it, someone always does with homophones – surely the ‘a’ in “malaise” has to be short and the ‘a’ in “ma” long, and they simply can’t be pronounced the same. On the other hand, the test really has to be whether I even paused when writing this in, and I didn’t.
22 UPLAND – yoU PLAN Detour.
24 TONDO – TO-DO round N(ew); I had a sense of deja vu with this round painting. Having Googled it, I find I had a similar feeling when I blogged puzzle 24,331 and it came up then (though not with the same clue, of course). Funny how some words stick in your mind, while others have to be re-learned on a regular basis.

38 comments on “Times 24,618 – Open Season”

  1. Didn’t quite crack the ten with this one; done by 07:12am. Agree with the “workmanlike” comment; it’s just that. Not sure that 5dn is an &lit — rather I read it as def + anagind (“dotted about”) + fodder (as I have learned to say). 9dn gave me a good laugh as the clue was a pretty good description of Liverpool’s woeful first outing this weekend.
  2. Workmanlike it is then. Stumbled around a bit, but done in 20 min. Momentary panic over the football ground, a subject outside my ken, but spotted the battle from the crossers. NE the hardest bit, especially after slapping in SHOCKERS for 4ac (My knowledge of German literature is right up there with that of the round ball game), but Mr Locke kindly came to the rescue pointing me to the chief librettist of the Choral Symphony. COD to SECOND. Short and sweet.
  3. I took ‘so we’ve heard’ to refer only to ‘idle’ (i.e. ‘laze’ > LAISE), not to the whole word.
  4. I was very much in Darren Fletcher rather than Paul Scholes mode today, grinding it out in just over an hour, with the horse last in and wrong, to boot. Had to guess something before I went to internet aids and found it and plumped for ‘portheron’, where ‘heron’ was (rightly, in a way) the bird and ‘port’ a bit of desperation.

    COD to MAYORESS for reminding me not to be so chauvinistic.

  5. Slow today, held up by two wrong turns: SHOCKERS at 4ac and a careless POSTNATAL at 10ac. NONPAREIL as a typeface was new to me as well. There’s a handsome moth called the Clifden Nonpareil, but at 16 letters we can safely assume it will never appear in the Times crossword.
  6. 45 minutes. A steady solve working from the bottom up until I ground to a halt with only CREWE and STAMFORD in the NW and that quarter became a hard slog.My last in was NONPAREIL a word I only know because Scot Joplin wrote a rag of that title.

    I was pleased to have learned from previous problems in a couple of places, STAMFORD BRIDGE as a soccer stadium was new to me last time it came up and TONDO and PERCHERON I’ve also learned quite recently.

    Not sure about PLATTER = ‘main dish’ but I don’t have the approved dictionaries to hand at the moment.

  7. After a successful unaided run both here and in the other place found this a bit of a grind, eventually coming to a halt in NE corner. Decided SIDING must be right having discarded it earlier not imagining hymn as a verb. This gave me CODED having spent an age trying to put EP or LP around ODE despite being surrounded by 500 or so CDs. Must try to retain the names of philosophers (I am better at football grounds).
    Guesses for PERCHERON, TONDO & SAPIENCE and no idea that NONPAREIL was a kind of type. Still, the kind of challenge I enjoy when time allows, but back to earth with a bump today.
    1. This held me up for a while, too (I thought of ‘song’). Thinking it was the sort of word Milton must have used in his Paradise Lost, given there was such a lot of this kind of thing going on, I checked, and voila:

      “And touch’d their golden harps, and hymning praised
      God and his works.” (Bk VII: 258)

      2. And there’s this neat infinitive from Pope’s take on Gulliver (1727):

        “To hymn harmonious Houyhnhnm through the nose …”.

  8. Another steady sub-20min romp today. I think 21dn is OK since as ulaca says, the “we’ve heard” can refer to the “idle” only not the whole thing. Slightly held up trying unsuccessfully to fit “antenatal” to the 10ac clue
  9. 7:58 – the horse, French town and typeface were all old friends. Also pondered SHOCKERS for a while, and enjoyed the appearance of DREAM ON.

    I think 5D counts as a “semi-&lit” – although it consists of def and wordplay in the usual way, it’s possible to read the whole clue as an alternative definition.

    With Jerry on 21D, though I know there are some people who dislike homophones for non-words like LAISE and therefore won’t be any happier with this reading than with “ma laze”.

  10. 16 minutes, so bang on average, even if the last half (SW and NE) was done in the few minutes between Leytonstone and Stratford.
    OTHELLO was not my first go at 25: Orlando also fits the cryptic rather well, and arguably drama allows for something that’s a play with music or even an epic poem. MALAISE put paid to that – I’m with those who see the soundalike as only relating to laze.
    The S on the end of CHILLERS put me off identifying the Ode to Joy writer, and I ended up putting it in without full comprehension.
    A PLATTER is most definitely a main course, especially in eateries like Harvester if not Quaglino’s. Sometimes it’s enough for two.
    CODED I didn’t spot straight away, as I was too busy with TAPE=recording and V=verse. Call me old-fashioned.
    CoD to ASIAN for not being a chestnut.
  11. Side-tracked by Orlando for Othello for a time (which works) but got there in 20 minutes. Pleasant puzzle: I always relish the register spread of the Times – dream on and done over to sapience. Bit worried to see Chelsea so prominent already.
    1. Indeed. At least Liverpool are likely to remain ‘second team’ on Merseyside – unless Tranmere get taken over by Arabs.
      1. At least we’re able to criticise when things go wrong (see above). PM me for the stakes you’ll accept on Everton taking a higher spot on the ladder by season’s end. And … I grew up across the road from Tranmere’s ground but never bothered crossing the road!
        1. My father was manager of the National Provincial Bank in Mount Rd, Higher Tranmere and banker to Tranmere Rovers (not a busy job :-).. the only bank he was at that got robbed, in 44 years
  12. One should always check. Quaglino’s serves a “seafood plateau”, also described in the small print as a platter, in small and large sizes – the latter, presumably, a main course. I wonder if they’ll give me a free one for advertising?
  13. Nothing much to get the blood racing here, as others have said a good steady reliable sort of puzzle. 25 minutes to laise through.

    If anybody doubts the capacity of The Times Crossword Club to cause utter confusion give yourself a treat and spend 5 minutes reading the recent blog to Mephisto 2606. Don’t worry about the crossword itself, just read the introduction and the related comments. Have you ever seen anything like it?

  14. This took me 45 minutes, of which 30 were spent staring at three clues (PERCHERON, RUMBA, MAYORESS) in the SW. I was held up trying to make PRIORESS or perhaps PRYORESS fit 17dn – the latter close to working (and with the right idea for “long ago”) but plainly missing an E. I struggled to some sort of finish eventually but like ulaca put a slightly desperate PORTHERON in for 16dn. As I’ve never come across either PERCHER or PERCHERON before this was always going to be a difficult clue for me.
    Hey ho.
  15. I did this amidst many distractions over several hours, but at one point thought I’d never finish, with the NE empty and showing no sign of filling, plus the dreaded SAPIENCE and PERCHERON still to do. Eventually it all fell into place, sapience via sapiens (as Tim suggested) and percheron via the cryptic and some vague equine memory. I read the definition in 23ac as “after main course”, so thought of cheese platter, but on reflection that’s probably wrong. COD to TONDO, after Michelangelo’s famous Doni Tondo whose nude male figures in the background were so “ambiguous” that the commissioner rejected it as unsuitable (at least that’s what our Uffizi guide told us).
  16. A lightning fast 32 minutes here (possibly a PB), 12 minutes of that becalmed in the SE corner, where 29ac / 17d / 25ac / 21d / 16d finally fell in that order. 25ac held me up for far too long, because I couldn’t get NO drama out of my head. 9d went in with very little understanding of the wordplay, beyond an S at the start, and an obvious from the checking letters BRIDGE at the end, though nice and clear when I checked after.

    COD 10ac, which I thought was a very well done &lit.

  17. I completed about 2/3 of the grid in 20 minutes, then came to a full stop. I was rescued from the doldrums by getting 1ac, which I should have seen far earlier, and the rest flowed fairly smoothly from there, with another pause before I finally entered PERCHERON, which rang a faint bell. 30 minutes in all.

    I did note a query against the homophone in 21 because I tend to observe the French pronunciation of words of French origin, but “so we’ve heard” allows for a multitude of sounds (if not sins) and actually Chambers gives exactly the same sound for both, so the setters on pretty solid ground.

  18. John Franklin Bardin wrote a bizarre but good thriller called “The Deadly Percheron”.

    Steve W

  19. Well impressed by the anonymous 4.32!!
    As with many I found this a fairly “standard” puzzle and my time of 11.50 reflects this.
    A bit of delay by making the ORLANDO mistake as I didn’t click on the ‘alternative brief’ wordplay.
    Wasn’t aware of PERINATAL until today. Also slowed up by having DETONATOR in my mind for 27 for a while
  20. Must have been in the right mental place at the right time today. A new personal best and a first ever foray into sub five minute territory (4:32) – even after having to correct a couple of slips of the pen.
    A few old friends, like 27A and 16D, certainly helped. But luck/inspiration was most immediate on the geographics clues.
    1. Well done – looks like the cue to start entering championships if you’re not already doing so …
  21. Fairly long time because of many interruptions, but while solving everything but the SE corner came very quickly. Also had DETONATOR (but quickly corrected) and ORLANDO, which does fit the wordplay, or nearly so, eventually corrected by finding MALAISE. Last in was PERCHERON after having all the crossing letters, a word not unknown but residing in the dustiest corners of my mind.
  22. No sleep, splitting headache, stuck at the mechanics, couldn’t figure out 16, wrote in PORPHYRIN and giggled a lot.
  23. I thought it might be some kind of heron that liked hanging around in ports. Port = dock = land? Not really.

    Nice horse, that percheron. It sounds like Boxer in Animal Farm.

  24. I thought this was a good puzzle. Took me 30 minutes, finishing in the SE with PERCHERON. I smiled at several clues, including OTHELLO, OLYMPICS, and the clever hidden UPLAND. Regards.
  25. been on an extended break.I liked this puzzle and breezed through much of it. not much to say except i really liked the erinatal clue and thought it was very clever so well done to the setter and well done to the bloggers. I cant help feel we are in for a toughie tomorrow or the next day!

    Thought stanford bridge was very laboured and very easy…

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