Times 24,743 A Hint of Bacchanalia

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 20 minutes

An average Times daily with some good surface readings and well constructed clues. Nothing obscure, no literary references, homophones that work, so nothing to rant about. All in all this shouldn’t present too many problems.

Across
1 COLESLAW – COLE’S-LAW; be merry?;
5 POTION – POT-I-ON; drug=cannabis=POT; King Cole’s hangover cure?;
10 ATTENUATE – AT-TEN-U-ATE; rather late (to eat)=AT TEN; too busy being merry presumably;
11 SHAFT – SH(ip)-AFT;
12 STEP – sounds like “steppe”;
13 TRAVELLER – T-RAVELLE(d)-R; T and R from T(empe)R;
15 ALL,WEATHER – A-L(L-W)EATHER; golf club grips that allow some to play in the rain whilst others adjourn to the 19th;
17 BOIL – B-OIL; black=B;
19 ECHO – hidden (sam)E CHO(ices);
20 PENTHOUSES – P(arty)-ENTH(O)USES; Silvio Berlusconi perhaps;
22 CANVASSER – CANVAS-SER(ies); No! We’re not selling anything – just collecting opinions;
24 GRIM – GRIM(e);
26 ERODE – ER-OD(d)E; cut uneven=OD(d); clogs=fills; before=ERE;
27 LANDOWNER – LAN(e)-DOWNER;
28 SATURN – SA-TU-R(elax)-N; workers (when not on strike)=Trade Union=TU; nursing home=sanatorium=SAN;
29 PYRENEES – PYRE-(SEEN from the east=reversed); range is the definition;
 
Down
1 CLAM – CALM with internal letters switched;
2 LET,IT,ALL,HANG,OUT – (laugh a little not)*; Cole’s Law again;
3 SYNOPSES – S-(PONY reversed)-SE(a)-S; tailless sea=SE; horse=PONY; ship=SS;
4 AWAIT – A-WI(A=answer)T;
6 OYSTER – (story + e=English)*; Gordon Brown perhaps;
7 IN,ALL,CONSCIENCE – I(NA)LL-CON-SCIENCE; poorly=ILL; sodium=NA; do=cheat=CON;
8 NATURALIST – (tail + Saturn)*;
9 DECADENT – DEC(AD)ENT; promotion=advertisement=AD; it’s King Cole again;
14 WATERCRESS – (stews rare + c=speed of light=constant)*; rabbit food;
16 THESSALY – THE(LASS reversed)Y; part of northern Greece;
18 FOXGLOVE – FOX-G-LOVE;
21 CAREER – CAR-E(mployment)-ER;
23 RANGY – RANG-(awa)Y; report to the headmaster if you tried to fit randy in here;
25 IRIS – I-RIS(k); it’s all in the eye;

30 comments on “Times 24,743 A Hint of Bacchanalia”

  1. Straightforward, though for some reason I found the correct parsing of 27ac tricky (kept inserting ‘down’ in ‘lane’, leaving a spare ‘r’). Thank you, jimbo, for showing me the correct way! Would ‘grim[e]’ (a noun) work better than ‘grim[y]’ in 24ac?
  2. Took me a bit longer: 27 minutes and probably a lot more scribbling on the page. Like yesterday, held up most by some of the shorter answers (like SHAFT, last in). Also wondered how to get the U into 10ac: then noticed that the indicator is just “at” for “next to”. Sometimes it’s the simple things, eh?
    Nice themed blog: mental pictures of the mythic King tight as a clam/oyster? But would one really need a dip if one had the coleslaw? Surely it might accompany many other types of grub? (Expected a complaint here?)
  3. 67 minutes for this one, which might have been quicker but for numerous interruptions. The SE was the last to fall, with last in RANGY earning my COD. At 1ac I thought of Cole at once, but COLESLAW didn’t seem the type of thing to go with a dip; something like celery seemed more likely. Thanks to Jim for lowdown on 24-28 ac.

    11ac raised a smile, reminding me of The Hangover’s SHAFT-related scene.

  4. 20 minutes for me, although it felt easier. A number of clues (1dn CLAM for instance) took far longer than they should have. Otherwise I’d agree, pretty straightforward average Times fare.
    The vague definition in 18dn (“that grows wild”) raised an eyebrow but I think Biddlecombe’s Argument From Pragmatism applies.
  5. All over the place on this one – about 55 minutes on and off. Found it much trickier than yesterday’s. Went down every blind alley, grabbed every red herring, clutched at every wild goose … finally got the thing. Why we do this …
    1. With joekobi on this one. DNF after an hour being stuck in the NW and feeling sulky until John from Lancs brought us cheer. 3 moans :- 1ac coleslaw (as per others), 7dn in all conscience (means honestly not certainly?) and 3dn synopses (means summary rather than review?). Hope tommorrow brings better things.
  6. 13:35 here. A bit messy as I wrote in ATENUATED at 10ac before realizing it looked wrong. Also but LEGGY in at 23dn at first, so lots of scribble but got there in the end.
  7. Resisted the temptations of RANDY but didn’t do much better with RODDY, thinking length=ROD and a thing with members might – at a stretch – be described as roddy. Eventually sorted it out for an average-ish 32 minutes solve.
  8. Made heavy weather of this after putting the first two in immediately (COLESLAW with dip?) but grinding slowly through the rest almost to the end of the Overground bit of my journey, so about 30 minutes total. Essayed LENS for 25 on a kind of cryptic definition, which slowed the solution of LANDOWNER, but otherwise, just slow.
    No particular CoD.
  9. 35 minutes; so more difficult than yesterday for me. Got held up by FOXGLOVEs, LANDOWNERs, SYNOPSES, general DECADENTs and yes RANGY (sic). A lively puzzle in which I particularly liked GRIM & ERODE but COD to OYSTER.
  10. 33 minutes. Disappointed that I couldn’t finish in under the half-hour, but liked the way the anagram was presented in 2 and the definition of RANGY. Also enjoyed the concise but tricky ERODE. I’ve probably been reading too many spy novels, but this is one of those puzzles where the setter seems to be trying to tell me a story. A traveller, a naturalist, out in all weather looking for foxgloves in Thessaly, meets a rangy, decadent landowner who serves him a potion of boiled clams and oysters with watercress and coleslaw, etc. I’ll end there before things get too grim.
  11. Pity you ended the story there, John, just before the good bit where they let it all hang out in the penthouse.

    Anyway, 35 minutes for me. I thought as I was doing it that this was Jimbo’s sort of puzzle, with a lot of the answers coming from deft wordplay. The SW was the trickiest corner for me; must try to remember SAN for nursing home.

  12. I’ve been logged out of LJ at work and can’t remember my password. It’s so long since I needed it.

    This one flowed quite nicely but I got held up at the end, mainly in the SE corner so my solving time was 50 minutes. ATTENUATE, FOXGLOVE and RANGY were the last in. Spent far too long trying to make RANDY work.

  13. You know how I hate to quibble, but I too don’t care for the coleslaw clue. Seems to me it can only ‘accompany’ a dip as part of a fairly generous salad/buffet spread. I prefer coleslaw to dips – you have a better idea of what it’s made of, and you don’t dip your half-eaten breadstick or celery in it.
    1. I thought this clue was a bit like the railway/station one we had last week. Not all stations are railway stations, and it’s possible to serve dips without coleslaw, but in each case they tend to go together and the question mark puts us on notice that we are looking for something a little tenuous.
  14. 26:47 online – still not got the hang of online solving yet.

    Nothing much to add to the above. One area of solving technique where I still need to imporve was demonstrated by 27. I had ??NDOWNER but because of where downer came from couldn’t get past sundowner. I need to teach my subconscious to do a mental search for other ways of pronouncing a set of letters as I’ve been slowed down by this sort of thing before. It was only by running through a set of possibilities for road that I got to lane and then the penny dropped. xxxxowner not xxxdowner. Grrr.

    Oh and Jack, your password is ********

    1. Thanks. When I got home I checked and found it is the first one I tried this morning so I must have mistyped it. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
  15. 17minutes.Like vinyl1 I spent a good time staring at 9. I thought of DECADENT but couldn’t justify it as I was only considering a 4 letter word inside another one. Eventually the penny dropped.Quite keen on the clams and oysters after some coleslaw but , as Jimbo says, the watercress should only be used to fatten up the rabbit.
  16. 16 minutes, though now with the online version I have to take a minute or so at the end to see if all the letters are what I think I’ve typed (according to the crossword club I average about 1.5 mistakes per crossword). Liked the clue for DECADENT, and kicking myself for getting caught up on it for a while
  17. The usual hour plus some breaks plus two minutes for me (plus a long time laughing while reading the blog so far — funny that Jack has the same password as I do!). I got stuck near the end with COLESLAW, SYNOPSES and RANGY left to do. With the R,N, and Y the latter could only be RANDY, RANGY, RONNY or RUNNY, and “called away at the end” could be DY, but eventually I did understand the wordplay (not that it was hard) and finished correctly. So do I have to see the headmaster?
    1. It depends on how you viewed “members at length” but we will take your word for it that nothing untoward crossed your mind.
  18. About 25 minutes, ending with FOXGLOVE and the clever SHAFT. I thought the ‘passion’ part of FOXGLOVE would be something indicating anger, not love, and the ‘puzzle’ bit held me up as well. I was really misled by the ‘stem to stern’ aspect of SHAFT, trying out moving the first letter of varioous things to the back until I finally realized what was going on. It gets my COD for leading me around by the nose. I agree that there’s a lack of any real connection between ‘dip’ and COLESLAW, which over here is pretty much always 2 words besides. Regards.
  19. Wasn’t quite on the setter’s wavelength today, and was stumped on several on the RHS. Checking the blog, I realise I was sooooo close to getting lots of them (ie read the wordplay correctly, just couldn’t get the vocab!). Thanks, as ever, for clear explanations.
  20. 11:32 for me. I’m relieved to see I wasn’t the only one who was unsure about the “dip” element of 1ac, but my knowledge of foodie matters is so tenuous that I’m quite happy to defer to anyone who reckons it’s OK.
  21. Caught it today, not sure about Gordon Brown though.

    “Little oysters, little oysters, but answer there came none,
    Which was scarcely odd because they’d eaten every one.

    The fifty year old yesterday included this in its blog!

    “The time has come,” the Walrus said,
    –“To talk of many things:
    Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax –
    –Of cabbages – and KINGS –
    And why the sea is boiling hot –
    –And whether pigs have wings.”

    50 minutes, very pleased.

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