Times 24714

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
12:22 on the Club timer, which confirms my feeling that this was pretty straightforward. A couple of not especially common words were clued so precisely that I don’t think they’ll undo too many people; and even my horticultural blind spot wasn’t tested by the common or garden plants which popped up today.

Apologies for slightly delayed posting after getting up later than usual, having been late going to bed – I originally planned to blog late last night, but it turns out a man can’t solve, shout “Come on, Swanny”, and watch nervously for signs of rain in Adelaide simultaneously. No cricket clues today, anyway – perhaps that would have been gilding the lily.

Across
1 PASTRY – PANTRY with N(orth) replaced by S(outh).
4 DJELLABA – D(inner)J(acket) + ELLA + B.A. provides the North African cloak. It took me a while to drag this up from the memory banks after initially thinking I must have got 5 down wrong when it left me with the unusual second letter J.
10 ROCK CLIMBER – LIMB in ROCKER.
11 CON – C(old) + ON.
12 DIFFUSE – DI + F(ix) + FUSE.
14 FALSIFY – F(airl)Y around AL’S IF.
15 SCATTERBRAINED – BRA + IN in SCATTERED; perhaps I spoke too soon, and this is a reference to cricket-watchers by a setter who doesn’t like armchair fans šŸ™‚
17 ACROSS THE BOARD – cryptic def.
21 REPUTED – PUT in REED.
22 BESPOKE – i.e. being a spoke = being part of a wheel.
23 CHI – LoCHInver, the visitor being a Greek, it would seem.
24 HONEYSUCKLE – ONE in (LUCKYHES)*.
26 SWEETEST – S(econd) WEE TEST.
27 STRAIT – S(ongbird) TRAIT; nice bit of deception when it turns out to be a nautical sound, and not the one you might hear from a bird.
Ā 
Down
1 PARODIST – O(ld) D(uke) in PARIS + (airpor)T.
2 SIC =”SICK”.
3 RE-COUNT – R(abbl)E COUNT.
5 JOBS FOR THE BOYS – cryptic def.
6 LORELEI – LORE + LEI gives the enchanting mermaid.
7 ARCHIPELAGO – P(ower) in ARCHIE + LAG + O. Possibly a little weak to have “male” indicating that one needs a random man’s name?
8 ANNOYS =”A NOISE”.
9 VICE PRESIDENTS – VICE + [I.D. in PRESENTS]; the “papers” being the sort that a border guard might ask you for.
13 FRANCOPHILE – (INCHAPELFOR)*; a bit of a loose definition, but I guess having it as the more precise “lover of France” wouldn’t actually involve much cryptography.
16 ADHERENT – A ‘D’ + H.E. + RENT.
18 OUTSHOT – OUT (=not in) + S(heep) + HOT (=curried).
19 BISCUIT – something that “takes the biscuit” might also be “the cat’s whiskers”.
20 CROCUS – U(nion) in CROCS.
25 KEA – KEATS without the T.S. of T.S. Eliot (rather than the E of Eliot which I was looking for at first) gives us the New Zealand bird.

39 comments on “Times 24714”

  1. 44 minutes, with one mistake, putting ā€˜mjuliabaā€™ for my cloak. Never heard of Jella as a girlsā€™ name, and a DBA is a bit modern for the Times crossword surely(!), so pleased I had a quick guess and went to confirm I was wrong at a solver rather than wasting time on this. Nice, teasing puzzle: held out the promise of a quick time but kept snagging you back. Last in PARODIST (should be wise to this by now); COD to DIFFUSE, closely followed by 5dn (ā€˜misses outā€, indeed).
  2. 19 minutes. Particularly liked the ā€œmisses outā€ clue, the poetic wordplay for the parrot, and the anagram of FRANCOPHILE. Delayed by trying to spell DJELLABA as it took me a while to recognize the girl as Ella rather than Jill. Iā€™ve always known this garment as a galabeya; but perhaps thatā€™s something different. Iā€™m without my Chambers at present, having lent it to an expectant father who is researching the meanings of childrenā€™s names. Reaching down my Shorter Oxford from the shelf (adjusts surgical support then heave-ho!) I find no reference to djellabas or galabeyas, but my compact Oxford gives djellaba, djellabah and jellaba ā€¦ā€¦ā€¦ but no galabeya. Perhaps Iā€™ve made up the word!
    1. The wiki article also points in the direction of the “Jellabiya”, so it’s not impossible there are more local variants along that linguistic path…
  3. Another straightforward solve in 20 minutes with no hold ups. My only slight query is does “curried” (18D) mean “hot”? Surely “curried” means “cooked in a particular way” (the result of which may or may not be hot depending upon the type of curry and personal taste)
    1. I think you’re being a bit finicky over “curried”, Jimbo. I accept that some curries are milder than others, but the Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines curry (the noun) as “a dish of meat, vegetables, or fish, cooked in a hot, spicy sauce of Indian origin” and curry (the verb) as to “prepare or flavour food with a spicy sauce”. That seems to pretty much cover it. Otherwise, I agree, a fairly straightforward solve, about 40 mins for me. There were some smooth and deceptive surface readings, I thought – e.g. in the clues for PARODIST and JOBS FOR THE BOYS.
  4. 19 minutes here. Seemed an awful lot easier than yesterday’s. Rather liked Archipelago. 17 too easy though isn’t it?
  5. Found this one dead easy today, and managed the whole thing without aids in well under an hour. What a disappointment to find that the only one I didn’t understand was wrong! I put in PARADISO, thinking there must have been some literary duke of that name somewhere, but not really getting the why.

    I too kept trying to fit JILL into 4ac before getting the DJ bit. Liked the misdirection (if that’s the correct term) of ‘misses’ in 5dn, and ‘sound’ in 27ac.

    Thanks for blog, good clear explanations.

    CoD to KEA for the penny-dropping moment when I realised where it came from. J

  6. 10:55 while watching the Test Match – glad it was such an easy one so I could pay proper attention to cricket.
  7. 25 minutes today which is my best time for a while yet it didnā€™t seem to be a particularly easy puzzle whilst solving. It helped that several of the long answers went in early but I was rather alarmed to find a J checker as the second letter in 4ac!

    I was also thrown by the appearance of R?-????? at 3dn. The trend these days is towards phasing out hyphens but as far as I’m concerned this word never had one in the first place. No doubt the dictionaries confirm it can be either.

    KEA at 25 also delayed me as I didn’t remember the word (if indeed I ever knew it) and I couldnā€™t get the wordplay for a while.

    The answer at 23 was obvious but the “European” reference gave me pause for thought.

    1. I too worried about the hyphen in 3dn, but both Collins and Chambers give “recount” as meaning “narrate” and “re-count” meaning “count again”, so the setter has got it right as usual.
      1. I’d agree one cannot fault the setter on this point but having now checked the usual sources I find that the Oxfords (COED and SOED) have only RECOUNT for the “electoral process”, my Chambers has both but with RE-COUNT only as an alternative to RECOUNT. Collins, as you say, only has the hyphen. This suggests to me that without the hyphen is probably the norm these days so our eyebrows were justifiably raised, if only for a moment or two.
  8. 21 min today, after not having had time to sit down to a cryptic for about a week, so it was nice to come back to a fairly gentle canter. My partner used to have a 4ac that he wore as a dressinggown until it fell apart, which made that one easier for me than it might have been!
  9. Difficult to get started but once underway things fell into place fairly quickly. Some of the clues seemed a bit laboured, though maybe I was just making hard work of them. I thought 5d was neat. 40 minutes.

    I wondered if some of the more experienced solvers ā€“ or anyone else ā€“ would share how they get started on a crossword. Is it best to read through all the clues in one go, to find the ones that can be put in at first sight, or do people read until they solve their first clue and focus on the crossing clues before moving on?

  10. 12:44 online, very straightforward indeed.

    Some fun definitions along the way such as “one takes off”.

  12. 12 minutes. It would have been sub-10 if it weren’t for DJELLABA, which had to be constructed carefully from wordplay. I was at least half expecting to find the answer was DJELLAMA or DJELSABA.
  13. 22 minutes. At least I could finish this without aids, which was not the case yesterday. I should have got 1ac immediately, but didn’t see it until near the end.
    I dislike clues such as 7dn, where over half an 11-letter word is clued as ‘male’ to indicate one of hundreds of men’s names. It wasn’t hard to solve once I had C, E and O, but there are better ways of clueing.
  14. 31:46 – Infinitely more approachable than yesterday’s for someone of my standard.

    Overall a straightforward solve, but I would take slight issue with Tim that the less common words were precisely clued. I’ve not heard of a DJELLABA, and I wouldn’t say it was a common word, and it certainly wasn’t clued precisely enough to make it guessable with any degree of certainty. A girl’s name to fit -L-A could equally have been ELSA, ALMA, OLGA or ILSA, and the degree could have been either MA or BA.

    Having said that, I did manage to guess the right answer, thus undermining my argument somewhat. But I was quite surprised to get it right. I was less impressed to see I’d entered ACROSS HTE BOARD by mistake and therefore registered 2 wrong.

  15. A confidence boosting 25:13 today, my second fastest time ever. Might have been even quicker if I hadn’t tried to squeeze Dr Findlay in at 14ac.
  16. A straightforward enough 40 minutes, with the last 10 minutes of those staring at 14ac, 16d and 22ac.
  17. 20 minutes today, but like David ch I seem to be having issues recently with 1ac’s: for the last few, the NW has proved fairly dense. I doubt it’s much to do with the clues (PASTRY wasn’t difficult!) but some sort of blockage. Perhaps it will go away, like tinnitus, if I don’t think about it!
    Decent set of clues today, and thanks to Tim for correct parsing of 25. I could’t work out what the E of Eliot had to do with anything. Spent a little while trying justify and fit ECDYSIAST for 1dn, as “one takes off”, which only added to my woes in NW. HONEYSUCKLE worried me, as does any shrub – I usually don’t expect to have heard of it, and was relieved to find eventually that it was something I knew.
    Cod split between the elegant DJELLABA and the simple and amusing ANNOYS. Best wishes to all.
  18. Completed without aids and with, it turns out, full understanding of the wordplay, just before Australia’s last wicket fell. So able to get to bed at a reasonable time (UK) with a real feeling of satisfaction. It’s pleasing, from time to time, to meet a less challenging test.
  19. A straightforward solve today taking about half an hour in several bites. Liked SIC, ANNOYS and JOBS FOR THE BOYS the best. One slip up ā€“ thought the Kiwi parrot was spelt KIA not KEA. Couldnā€™t suss the wordplay but moved on. I wonder if todayā€™s setter set another recent one given the recurrence of LORE in an answer…
  20. I agree with Jimbo re curry and hot
    sub 30 minutes early this morning while waiting to disembark a BA plane going or rather not going to Amsterdam.

    The only thing that was tricy was Dj Ella BA but what else could it have been

    rather liked the long clues and in particular the scatterbrained one!

    Jobs for the Boys gets the vote as my COD

  21. 19″, lightning-fast for me. I used to have a djellaba, which may have helped, especially as I didn’t know DJ=dinner jacket. I’m glad I’m not the only one with reservations about 18.
  22. 20 mins today. Nearly as easy as it ever gets for me. I was grateful for the fast solve beause I was due to play carols at a Xmas lunch and was trying to squeeze the crossword in before I had to leave. Enjoyably straightforward but with some clever misdirections. I especially liked 27a and 5d.
  23. 5:35 online, probably my quickest cryptic that way so far. Minor grumble about what felt like a chestnutty clue for a stock answer at 17 – I think this clue needs putting away for a couple of years, and maybe the answer too. In the context of a harder puzzle I’d have minded much less, but here it was “fish in a barrel” material.
  24. 12:18 so similar to you Tim. I knew the word DJELLABA but didn’t have a clue what it meant and didn’t get the DJ hint but once the J went in I was forced down that line.
    A mixture of some easy (like 17) and some not so easy clues. Last in was FALSIFY.
  25. About 30 minutes, ending with DJELLABA which had to be constructed from wordplay. The rest was fairly straightforward, and would have been quicker but I was watching American football. Regards.
  26. 22 min, but had to cheat for the unheard of DJELLABA. Never had a chance, even though the construction was fairly obvious. MA or BA is a tossup then even if you are familiar with the DJ abbreviation (Not here, possibly because I have only once been forced into one), then you have ELLA ELSA ALMA ALVA ILSA OLGA …

    Nonetheless most enjoyable. COD to KEA, just because it is my favourite bird, amusing and Machiavelian.

  27. I’m not quite comfortable about “weight” meaning “count” at 5. Is it a boxing thing?

    But I happen to have a DJELLABA, and very comfortable it is too.

  28. …and just as I posted, I saw that it’s “carry weight” = count. I’ll go and put on my dunce’s hat and my djellaba and call it a night.
  29. Good grief, is the UK teeming with DJELLABAS? They seem to be familiar to (almost) everyone, but I have never come across one (at least not by name) and this was the one word I had to cheat to get. Since I couldn’t see anything but JOBS FOR THE BOYS for 5dn, I had no idea how to get a J as the second letter of 4ac. I was thinking it would be something Spanish, perhaps beginning AJILL…, but that didn’t fit the wordplay. Apart from that, I took one hour plus a few minutes later on in the day to get all the other clues. Didn’t understand BISCUIT until I read the blog, but that’s the bees’ knees!
    1. No djellaba for me, though happy with the construction. Also missed the “carries weight” wordplay. All up a good one. Well done Poms for winning the series and retaining the ashes. We have some work to do!

      … and I thought I knew CSNY pretty well!!!

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