Times 24,624

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
If you’re wondering “Where’s Jimbo?”, we have swapped weeks for administrative reasons: and this has resulted in me getting probably the easiest puzzle I’ve blogged, so if he gets a stinker next week, I apologise in advance! About 8 minutes here, so I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about personal bests from lots of people, and sub-5 minute times from the very fast among us. Straightforward doesn’t have to mean dull, of course, though a puzzle like this will never be as compelling a challenge as a real toughie.

Across
1 MONARCHY – C(ommonwealth) in (HARMONY)*.
6 PARODY – ROD in PAY.
9 BEEF – BEE + F(orte).
10 BOTTOM LINE – obviously you reach the bottom of one page and turn over to a new one.
11 CHARITABLE – CHAR + 1 TABLE. “Char” can be noun or verb in describing the proverbial woman who does.
13 TERM – quarTERMasTER Maybe.
14 SUBTRACT – (BUS)rev. + (CART)rev. + (depo)T.
16 UNDONE – double def.
18 WEAPON – (ONEPAW)*.
20 EYE RHYME =”I RIME”; two words which look as if they ought to rhyme but don’t.
22 AFAR – A (R.A.F.)rev.
24 SEYCHELLES =”SAY SHELLS”.
26 LEGISLATOR – (GALLTORIES)*.
28 WATT – W(hile) A(way) T(he) T(ime).
29 SHINTY – T(ime) in SHINY.
30 MONOTONY – M(edical) O(fficer) + “NOT ON” i.e. off, + (dut)Y.
 
Down
2 OPEN HOUSE – U(niversity) in (ONEHOPES)*.
3 AT FIRST – AT FIR + ST(reet).
4 CABOT – A.B. found in COT, as a sleeping baby might be. The explorer will be especially familiar to residents of Bristol and Newfoundland.
5 YET – (gu)Y (d)E (maupassan)T.
6 PROSECUTE – P(ressure) + ROSE + CUTE.
7 RELATED – double def.
8 DONOR – N in DOOR; it is, of course, more blessed to give than receive.
12 BUTTERY – UTTER in BY.
15 AUNT SALLY – cryptic def. Aunt Sally is a traditional fairground pursuit, and in my neck of the woods is a popular pub game.
17 NUMBER TEN – referring to the rugby union stand-off / out-half / fly-half / first five-eighth (delete according to territory) who wears number 10 on his shirt, and the Prime Minister’s residence, currently on loan to Mr Clegg.
19 PORTION – PORTI(a) + ON; I thought this rang a bell, and Portia indeed appeared in this lawyerly context in a Jumbo I blogged last year. That puzzle referred to Acts 20:35 (see 8 down) as well, I see.
21 HALFWIT – (WHATIFL(earner))*.
23 FRESH – (SERF)rev. + H(ospital).
25 HERON – R(ook) and 0 in HEN.
27 TOM – bon (MOT)rev. gives the consort; if you’re still trying to work out who Prince Tom was married to, the queen in question is actually a female cat…

37 comments on “Times 24,624”

  1. I really whistled through this one, partly because I got 1ac and 6ac straight off and worked down from there, unusually for me.. about 8mins.
  2. 4:19 – very easy puzzle, but I liked it. All 4 answers in top and bottom rows end in Y and there are a few other Y’s scattered around, giving 9 answers containing a Y (20A has two). Significance unknown (unintentional pun – glad to see that none of these are clued as the fairly corny “unknown”) …

    Best clue for me was 13 with the double hidden word.

  3. No argument here – very easy 10 minutes that were nonetheless enjoyable. A good beginners puzzle. The chances of next Tuesday being as easy are I would think slim!!
  4. Well I took 22 minutes; so not quite so easy for me. Held up by the middle cluster of downs (8, 12, 15, 17) for want of sufficient GK. E.g., doesn’t the stand-off usually wear #6 (League!)?; donor=blessed?; what’s a buttery? — that sort of thing. But agreed: there were also giveaways I should have seen more quickly.
  5. Yes, nothing much to delay me here though I did slow down a bit on the RH side. 33 minutes. I assumed NUMBER TEN was something to do with soccer or Rugby football so I looked on Wikipedia and left there none the wiser.
  6. agree with ,uch of what has been said already. breezed through this in 20 mins. Actually had never cottoned on to a femalz cat being a queen…but now i know. from Puligny Montrachet i can tell you that the weather is terrible and they are worried about immaturity in this year’s grapes
    Thanks for yesterdays elucidation on angels…very educational!
    1. Surprised you can get your mind round the puzzles with Mont Rachaz and all that delightful Burgundy so close at hand.
      1. Me too. have discovered some wonderful St Aubin wines that qlthough technically are in St Aubin are actually about 100m from Montrachet itself. Dents du chien and En Remilly. Worth a try
  7. All but 4 over my first cup of tea, then plumped for BUTTERY (as opposed to BATTERY, although both have food associations), kicked myself over NUMBER TEN, and then sat for 15 minutes or so pondering TOM and DONOR. Went with both in the end without understanding, so a lucky solve really. Kind of guessed that Queen must be the female version of Tom but still amazed to see it confirmed.
  8. Just wondering who ‘Tom’ the consort is – I assumed it was Tom Thumb, who lived with the Queen of the Fairies, but I’d love to know who the queenly cat was!

    Richard

    1. Sorry, obviously didn’t explain clearly enough – just as “tom” can mean any male cat, as in “ginger tom” “queen” is the female equivalent.
  9. Is 1ac a sort of &lit? Or would that depend on one’s politics? Anyway I found this one of several rather delightful clues, along with 14, 20 (my CoD) and 25. I played rugby all through school, hated it, and didn’t pay attention, so couldn’t see why 17 = No.10. But now I know about SHINTY, rugby doesn’t seem half so bad.
    1. Sort of &lit: yes – although there’s a definition (“a rule”) and separate wordplay (“it has … Commonwealth”), the whole clue can be read as a definition too, with “as a rule” meaning “usually”.
  10. No time to solve or post last week because I was in Washington DC on a work trip.

    I found this one plain sailing except for the 12/14 combo which I couldn’t crack at all. Maddening… talk about hitting the proverbial brick wall! Am I the only ex-student to have never heard of the word BUTTERY meaning a place where students buy refreshments? Made a careless mistake at 30 too, writing MONOTINY not MONOTONY – d’oh!

    Lots of fun clues I thought – BEEF brought a smile to my lips as did many others.

    (I see from the bulletin board that we’ll all be getting a one-month extension to our crossword club subscriptions to celebrate the launch of the new website.)

    1. Buttery: I can’t remember whether you’ve named your alma mater (is that University College London in the avatar background?), but both the use of “college” in this definition and “at some universities,” in the Collins one suggest that butteries may be mostly for Oxbridge students.
      1. “Buttery” was certainly the name for the bar/tuck shop at my Oxford college – but I suspect it is not a common usage outside Oxbridge (unless perhaps imported by Ivy League US colleges?)
      2. No, I was in Saint Peter’s Square in the Vatican… and not Oxbridge but Bristol (Chemistry BSc) and Nottingham (Inorganic Chemistry PhD).

        I’m almost up-to-date with last week’s Times cryptics and have just finished with Friday’s (24621). That was a real toughie!

  12. A nice, quick 13 minute solve with some decent, straightforward clues. NE gave most resistance, with DONOR being last in, though a close contender for my CoD. The real CoD was 1ac, despite it looking desperately ugly in print, with harmo-
    ny but not Common-wealth, which would have made its 3 lines as tidy as its pretty surface reading.
  13. I thought I was on for a quick time but got held up by first EYE RYHME and then SHINTY (both of which I didn’t “know” – ‘though of course the former is eminently understandable), and had to settle for 40 minutes with the latter unsolved. CAme back to the puzzle a while later and got it immediately from the wordplay. Liked DONOR best for the cheeky Biblical allusion.
  14. 18 minutes, of which precisely half was spent getting all the answers and the other half trying to find an alternative for the patently non-existent SHINTY. Then the tube arrived at my stop and I just bunged it in, fully expecting to kick myself when I found out what the correct answer was here.
    So in a way an equal PB. And in another (more important) way, not.
    Considering it was such an easy puzzle there was quite a lot I didn’t understand properly before coming here: The Merchant of Venice (along with The Tempest) is in a Shakespeare blind spot I’ve been meaning to correct for years. Queen in the feline sense was also new. I didn’t know that it was more blessed to give than receive (better, yes, more blessed, no) and I had absolutely no idea about the stand-off in 17dn. So thanks for all those.
  15. 14:25. Got to 10 minutes with only 4 left to fill but struggled with subtract (for no good reason), buttery (I’m with Daniel above), eye rhyme and donor, for which I toyed with Denar, thinking this might be a well known “way” in Eastern Europe created by putting N inside dear (what a relative such as an aunt might call you if she thinks you’re blessed).

    Much more fun than yesterday’s puzzle.

  16. Yes, as others have said, a relatively easy offering. About 20 minutes, but I didn’t know SHINTY, BUTTERY or the rugby references sprinkled in NUMBER TEN, or would have been quicker at the end. While done quickly, I thought it was a good puzzle, and I was entertained. Regards.
  17. 6.55 Also found this very easy apart from BUTTERY which I didn’t know , and needed this to get last in, SUBTRACT, otherwise I must have had the rest done in about 5 minutes.
  18. Yes, an easy one by any measure. Around 25 mins for me. I would have been much faster if I hadn’t dithered for ages over my last entry, SHINTY, a game I’d never heard of, but the required wordplay was fairly obvious and once you had the checking letters there wasn’t much else it could be. Even though not a hugely tough challenge, this was a fun puzzle. I particularly liked BEEF and CABOT.

  19. 17 min, after a fast start. Only 8 dn and (Doh) 13 ac left after 10 min. DONOR a very tentative last in. Vaguely aware of the aphorism. Is it biblical? No outstanding COD, but an overall enjoyable outing.
    1. Is it biblical? Yes – Acts 20:35 which Tim mentioned when noting that both the Shakespeare and Bible references matched a previous puzzle.
    1. I wuz at Hoxfudd a few years back, but aint never done heard of a buttery m’lud.

      We had the hall for food and the bar for beer (and baked potatoes or toasties if all the rich food was too much).

      That said it was a fairly easy get from the word play.

  21. Refused to accept I’d finished till I’d worked out why Donor was right so 17 minutes instead of a couple less. Glad I confirmed it though. This was a very good easier crossword.
  22. Indeed a (mostly) easy puzzle which I breezed through except for the last three or four entries. When I checked the blog I was horrified to find I had forgotten to complete 27 or think over 29 (for which I had a tentative SHINEY). So two wrong in the end, but otherwise quite enjoyable. COD to 13.

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