Times 24736 – Grr ratzen fratzen

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 45 mins

After penning 2d in with a flourish while the ink was still warm, I came to a sudden halt. After another 5 minutes, I thought of moving on from the NW corner, which enabled me to return to it some half an hour later with the rest complete. A further 15 minutes saw 1ac, 1d, 4d and finally 9ac fall into place. There were some easy gets in the bottom half, but the tricky constructions and definitions elsewhere more than made up for these. Welcome back to another year of Monady puzzles! Vinyl1 and I shall be the guides to your immediate post-weekend solving pleasure for the forseeable future (somewhere in the second week of February going by recent trends), so settle back, relax and enjoy the show:

Across
1 ANTIPASTI = AN + TIP for “asparagus portion, say” + ASTI for wine. The dastardly definition “Italian eats” defeated me for some time.
6 DOWRY = Do for swindle + WRY for crooked
9 HUNTER for “hound perhaps” with C for cold placed in front = CHUNTER, a Brit. informal word meaning to mutter or grumble, hence beef as verb. This was my last in, never previously having encountered it in a sentence or otherwise. Chunter, chunter, chunter….
10 UXORIAL = bURIAL around a reversal of OX for “old times”. The dd (dastardly definition) here is “of a wife”, from the Latin obviously. I knew the word but thought it was something to do with a Greek column.
11 ENDED = campaigN inside two EDitors for “journalists”. A cunnng twist on a standard device worthy of O’Henry.
13 BUY DEGREES for “acquire qualifications” without its U for University = BY DEGREES. Buying degrees has become fashionable in universities, particularly at MBA level, where everybody expects to be granted distinctions. I would counter “If you wanted a distinction, you should have paid more”.
14 THROW A FIT = THROW for “deliberately lose” + A FIT for a match.
16 I for one inserted in CAN for prison = CAIN, the archetypal murderer.
18 Deliberately omitted. Ask the forum in the event of finding it hard, perhaps.
19 RED SALMON = ALONe for “sole – mostly” around Meal concatenated with REDS for “certain wines”
22 PRACTISES = ACT I for “first part of play” inside PRESS*. The anagrind is “members of … turning”. Hands up those who thought “first part of play” was P?
24 LINE for brand + N for new = LINEN, the question mark indicating the definition by example. Very nice.
25 ERASING = opERA SINGer
26 (BIG PUSH)* = BUSH PIG. Anagrams don’t come much easier than this, although the infinitive form of the anagrind is unusual.
28 A MOA for “bird thought to be extinct” seen in the vicinity of S for Southern = SAMOA. I’m not sure there’s anybody who doesn’t think the Moa has gone the way of the Dodo, but there are people still convinced Moose roam Fiordland, so you never can tell.
29 TIT and HEN with BAR inside = TITHE BARN. Very smooth construction.

Down
1 ANCIENT = fANCIEs for “would like unbound” + NT (New Testament) for “set of books”. The ODE has ancient for old man in an archaic or humorous context.
2 Deliberately omitted. It’ll come to you at the proper time. (The hints are becoming more obscure than the clues!)
3 PUTS DOWN, a double definition, neither dastardly
4 SCRUB, a triple definition
5 IN for home + UN for “a, French” + DATED for “square” = INUNDATED
6 DRONGO = GO for shot after DRONEe. Yes, Drongoes were birds before they were idiots; the Bronzed Drongo being quintessentially Australian.
7 WHITE-VAN MAN = (WITH NAME)* around VAN for front.
8 YELTSIN = (IN STYLE)*. This time I saw it was Boris before I saw he was an incongruous anagram.
12 DARE for risk placed by an inverted MA A LASS for “mother and a girl meeting” = DAR ES SALAAM, a port in Tanzania
15 FORESIGHT sounds like “four cite”.
17 CAR for vehicle + IS with an L at the front and back + E for English = CARLISLE. I’ll leave it to others to comment on the cryptic grammar, but I think the “with” belongs to the “is”, rather than being a concatenation indicator, and the “plates” are nounal, described by learner, rather than verbal.
18 CYPRESS = PRESS for iron underneath or “south of” CountrY
20 NAG for “old woman” inside NOON for “high time” = NONAGON. I’m saying nothing old womanwise.
21 ATTILA = ALIT for landed + TA for (territorial) army (or is it “army prepared”) all inverted.
23 SABOT = TOBiAS inverted. If you don’t know of Tobias Smollett as yet, I suggest you learn, for he occurs regularly. The cryptic reading of the wordplay here is “one Tobias lost, climbing”, having substituted Tobias for “such as Smollett”.
27 PEA = PEAt

34 comments on “Times 24736 – Grr ratzen fratzen”

  1. 58 minutes for this, with CYPRESS my COD. ‘Ancient’ as a noun (although with a meaning closer to ‘timeless spirit’, I guess – my Hebrew isn’t up to much) appears most famously in the old hymn ‘Immortal Invisible’:

    Immortal invisible God only wise
    In light inaccessible hid from our eyes;
    Most blessed, most glorious, the ancient of days,
    Almighty, victorious, Thy great name we praise.

    BTW, typo at 10, which should be uxOrial.

  2. Indeed, a fair work out on the heavier side of medium, I thought. All in the clewing (some of which had top class surfaces — e.g., 28ac) rather than the lights which were all well-known. A possible exception (for some) will be “chunter”. I’d always assumed this simply meant some kind of incoherent mumble and had to look it up on the big OED: “To mutter, murmur; to grumble, find fault, complain”. So my vocab is slightly enriched. BTW, my favourite example from said authority refers to the Triumph Herald which I remember as having a particularly snarly, nay complaining, engine tone: “The Herald ‘chunters’ straight across the road in front of us” — Autocar 25th Jan, 1968.
  3. Got up to see the cricket and rewarded by one over with a wicket and then rain stopping play, so a satisfactory continuation here I guess in 19 minutes. Some clever surfaces especially 1 across I’d say. Ideally now the players’ll be back on.
  4. 45 minutes on a very dreary day in Sydney – as the cricket watchers will already know. CHUNTER didn’t cause any problems here, it was a pretty common word when I was growing up in Yorkshire. With a very short ‘U’, of course. Last in were DOWRY and YELTSIN; COD to CYPRESS.

    On another note, I did the ST puzzle for the first time yesterday and enjoyed it. Looks as though it’ll be on my to-do list in future.

    1. ‘I did the ST puzzle for the first time yesterday and enjoyed it. Looks as though it’ll be on my to-do list in future.’

      Ditto. Pretty much indistinguishable from a Times daily x-word.

      1. It is worth bearing in mind however, that they are different. Some of the rules are different, eg no ban on living people, as are some of the grids, not to mention the standards of editing. Hitherto, anyway 😉
  6. 30 minutes. I wasted time thinking RED MULLET at 19ac and got tied up at the end trying to sort out the 1s, 2dn, 4dn and 9ac. I knew DRONGO as an idiot but not as a bird.
  7. 15 minute solve with no major hold ups. I am educated by DRONGO as a bird, and I also thought CHUNTER was stretching a definition.
    “Former leader” was a bit of a loose definition for YELTSIN in my opinion, but the cryptic makes it – his way of relaxing with Russia’s favourite home brew certainly did have its own style!
    CoD today to LINEN: economical and precise.
  8. I’m surprised! I came in comfortably under 30 minutes so expected to see some really fast times from the experts. Certainly helped that, for some reason, I knew CHUNTER and DRONGO; Tobias Smollett cropped up somewhere else quite recently too. I enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek ‘relaxing in style’ reference to YELTSIN and this is my COD.

    I get SCRUB = ‘brush’ and SCRUB = ‘to remove’; but I can’t fathom SCRUB = ‘cosmetic’.

    2. I tend to think of cosmetic (n) as something you put on rather than something you use to take off. While I was solving, it worked for me as a double definition, a scrub being exactly what you use to remove the paint and polyfilla. Perhaps I should bow to a better understanding of cosmetics than I have!
  9. 27 minutes. Enjoyed this puzzle very much, particularly as WHITE VAN MAN raised a smile instead of my blood pressure. First met DRONGO as an Australian term of abuse in the Barry McKenzie strip cartoon that used to appear regularly in Private Eye. Share the reservations about the description of peat as a fertilizer.
  10. 20 minutes for this one with no real hold ups

    I share the reservation about peat – a soil conditioner that helps with water retention and adds acidity. It can store nutrients but is not one itself. Didn’t realise DRONGO was a bird – like others remembered the word from Private Eye

    Some good surface readings here and a fun puzzle. For newer solvers the key to 1A is the phrase “asparagus portion say” which heavily suggests TIP and enables you to de-construct the wordplay. Remove the “say” and it becomes harder because “asp” or “gus” etc then come into play

  11. Didn’t find this one hard. In my case the asparagus portion brought to mind was a spear, but once “Italian eats” started to look like the def. it wasn’t hard. And I chunter regularly enough. Just under 20mins.
  12. DRONGO was no problem, but got CHUNTER and UXORIAL from the cryptic, and by the time I’d convinced myself that I’d spelled DAR ES SALAAM correctly I was in at 13 minutes exactly.
  13. I took a punt on ANCIENT for 1d from the definition as soon as I had the initial A but failed to see the cryptic until coming here. Otherwise this was a steady solve and came in at 24 minutes, which is quite good for me. I have very strong reservations about “old woman” being defined as NAG. I spent some time trying to fit NAN into the answer. As an old woman I know which one I would prefer!
    1. The old woman in the nagging sense is actually a man, according to my COD: a fussy or timid man.
  14. I (somewhat surprisingly, maybe) didn’t find this one too difficult, and finished it all bar one: kept staring at the crossers for ANCIENT for the longest time before giving up. Even when I used a solver, I couldn’t work out the clue, so thanks for the explanation.

    No unfamiliar vocab today: knew DRONGO from travels with my ornithologist father, UXORIAL from Latin A-level, and Mr Smollett from, well, you guys and a recent puzzle! Best wishes for 2011 to all! J

  15. Finished in a very respectable (for me) 32 minutes, but then took another 10 minutes to justify all the answers I’d put in without full understanding of the wordplay. 1dn, for instance, took a long time to figure out even after removing NT to leave ANCIE.
    Thanks for the blog, with very thorough explanations.
  17. Beaten by 1D today. I just couldn’t see it, I’m afraid. Overall it was a challenge, because I hadn’t heard of the DRONGO (either the bird or the birdbrain), CHUNTER, TITHE BARN (although I vaguely recall it appearing here before) or the WHITE-VAN MAN. Yet, I plowed my way through those eventually from the wordplay, only to be thrown for a loss by the ANCIENT. I agree that ‘Italian eats’ is a nifty definition. Regards to all.
  18. Oops, beaten by 9ac today (I even thought of C+HUNTER, but as I’d never heard of it, I put in COUNTER, the verb, instead, and didn’t bother correcting it because at that stage there were other clues like 1ac for which I didn’t understand the wordplay) and with WHITE-CAR MAN for 7dn — I should have known better. Apart from those mistakes, I completed everything else in 57 minutes, with the NE corner being last in, DRONGO gotten only from the wordplay. WHITE-VAN MAN should have been familiar to me after the time I described to my sister-in-law, who lives in London, how I was tailgated by a literal white van on a drive through side streets to Hampton Court, proceeding very slowly and carefully because I was driving a rental car and not accustomed to right-hand drive.

    Now, of course, I do understand the wordplay for 1ac, and yes, “Italian eats” is brilliant.

    As for 2dn and “the hints are becoming more obscure than the clues”: upon reflection you will see that the word is also hidden in the hint (if I am allowed to say that).

    1. Crikey, you’re right! I mean… of course… these things don’t just happen by chance you know.
  19. First time on this blog. Nice to know there’s a flourishing site for xwd comments.

    Amused by all today’s comments about not having heard of CHUNTER – must be from lots of overseas (ie not in UK) solvers!

  20. 11:24 for me. I see that the OED supports “driver of delivery vehicle” for WHITE-VAN MAN, but most of the white vans round our way are driven by workmen of various kinds – though now I come to think of it there’s one that drops off the packages after my wife has been indulging in a little retail therapy.
  21. Drongo no problems here in Oz – I think there was even a racehorse once named the same.

    I guessed at chunter, but not in my Shorter OED. Sounds a lot like chunder, another famous Bazza McKenzie reference!

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