Times 24744 — Hill totem

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: right on 30 minutes; but I claim new blogger’s nerves and include two so-caused trips to the small room. So I suspect the puzzle was a bit easier than this time reflects. Enjoyed it but; if only because I knew taking A-level Art would come in handy one day and this is it!
And, I must add, my sincere thanks to Koro for all his help last week. The lemon squash is on its way.

Across
1 AS,PIRATE. Reference to phonetic aspiration (cf the H in ‘Hook’) and to the famous pirate.
5 S(A,MO)AN. Our old friend ‘san’ for hospital.
8 ROT,IS,SERIE. Corruption (rot), is, then a reversal of EIRE[’]S.
9 GULF. double def. with the ‘regarding’ telling us to see it.
10 ASSET-STRIPPING. Upending of TESSA and something she might do in a certain kind of club which, I hasten to add, I have never visited.
11 E(P[I]S)ODE. That is, one (I) in PS, a section added to a letter.
13 GEMS,BO{O}K. Cairngorms are smoky quartz, named after the range where they occur. Oryx gazella.
15 HIMSELF. A once polite (now facetious?) way of referring to He Who Must Be Obeyed. “… poor Brutus, with himself at war, / Forgets the shows of love to other men” (Julius Caesar, I,ii).
18 AS(EP)SIS. EP for record and ASSISI (minus the last letter) for the Umbrian town.
21 GRIST TO THE MILL. Anagram of ‘list right motel’.
22 YELL. L (for large) and LEY (meadow), all reversed.
23 A,D(VENT)URER. The wrapper is (Albrecht) DÜRER, famous, inter alia, for his woodcuts. A nice diversion from the obvious.
24 Let’s leave this one out initially.
25 And this one too.
Down
1 AC,R(E)AGE. E from the first letter of ‘excursionists’ and AC for ‘current’.
2 POTASSIUM. Anagram of ‘soap I must’.
3 RI(SOT,T)O. SOT is the soak/drunkard. T is the last letter of ‘it’. It’s a dish you soak in stock, I’m told.
4 T,{W}RESTLE. T is the last letter of ‘triumphant’.
5 SLEEP,LESS. SLEEP is a reversal of PEEL[’]S, the Prime Minister’s. Hands up those who considered SMOKELESS.
6 MUG(GIN)S. Nothing like a hot mug of gin on a cold day?
7 AL,LEG,R,O. Al is the chap; leg for the on side in cricket; then R{etreat} and O{bserve}.
12 DELFTWARE. This is the state of Delaware with the FT replacing the A.
14 BEST,IRRED. George Best (the footballer) and a sound-alike for ‘erred’.
16 INGRESS. Possessive of the French painter, (Jean Auguste Dominique) INGRES. There will be controversy about this one. My take is: no matter how you prefer to form the possessive of this name, in which the S is silent, the apostrophe-S in the clue is enough to get us the second one in the light.
17 S(KILL)ET. We need to read the clue as though there’s a comma after the ‘inside’.
18 ACT,A,EON. See this page for the story.
19 E(VE)NTER. V and E, the regular letters of ‘view’.
20 I have an urge to leave this one out too.

 

41 comments on “Times 24744 — Hill totem”

  1. 28m with a lengthy pause over GEMSBOK, last in. Having decided a cairngorm was either a type of pea, bee, gem or a particular shade of red, plumped entirely fortuitously for the right one, so a lucky finish.
  2. Terrific puzzle, which took me 90 minutes. Got stuck after putting the right hand side in (bar the antelope, for which I eventually guessed ‘bensbok’), until I took the plunge and put INGRESS in, over which I had been dithering. The clue seems absolutely fine – “Ingres’s painting of Raphael” being the correct grammatical form in my book. My favourite among a fine bunch was ASSET STRIPPER.

    ‘Himself’ is common in Irish English.

  3. Gave up after 50 minutes. I was never going to get GEMSBOK. What good are lists if you can’t remember where you put them? Otherwise a struggle well worth the effort. ADVENTURER was good, although I tried to make my new found meaning of filibuster work for a time, being a firm believer in serendipity; as was RISOTTO & ALLEGRO, but my COD to ASPIRATE. So, I’m a sucker for a pun.
  4. 26 minutes, the last five on gemsbok. Liked 15 for the taking colloquialism and the poetic reference together. (Slightly surprised by the meadow spelling.)
  5. I made slow but steady progress through most of this but eventually ground to a halt after 40 minutes with 13, 14, 19, 20 and 23 unsolved. Eventually I got going again having worked out the Umbrian reference at 18ac and corrected my previous answer, ASEPTIC, and then the remaining answers in the SE fell into place. At 55 minutes I was left with ?E?SBOK and plumped for BENSBOK on the basis that the Cairngorms probably contain a number of “Bens” (They do). I never heard of this particular antelope nor the gemstone.

    I was pleased to have worked out ACTAEON correctly from the wordplay as I didn’t know the character.

  6. Stutterd through in 29 min, but had to finally go for assistance for GEMSBOK. On the credit side, this included a lengthy pause sorting out an issue with the decorators. Really enjoyed this one, with lots of echoes of previous encounters. Apropos of nothing, my espreso machine has blown up, so I have just brewed a desperation nightcap of espresso ground coffee in a plunger with a slug of cognac and sweetened with blackstrap molasses. Not bad at all! Very licquorice.
  7. 15 minutes for everything except BENSBOK (me too – same reasoning. I had GEMSBOK somewhere, but couldn’t square it with the Cairngorms, which I took either to mean some sort of Scottish word or the collection of Bens they probably aren’t. As one does when ones’s vocab is not sufficient, one regards this as an unfair clue.
    Rest of it smashing, with some delightful clues, the best of which for me was ASPIRATE.
  8. I made this one bang on average difficulty, just over 15mins, except add another five for gemsbok. I was handicapped here, first by assuming Cairngorms obviously was a mountain range, and second by never actually having heard of a gemsbok. Eventually out of curiosity I looked up cairngorm in the dictionary, when all became clear.
    Some very pretty clues here. 24ac has a very slick surface, for example, as does COD 10ac. Thanks, setter
  9. 25 minutes for this with, like most, GEMSBOK causing most difficulty and solved eventually by looking cairngorm up in the dictionary. An awful clue in my opinion. First a dreadful unsigned definition by example and then a very obscure answer.

    I thought “commercial activity” was far too broad a definition at 10A. It doesn’t really assist in the solving of the clue. ASSET STRIPPING, made famous by the likes of Shanghai Jim Slater, is a specialist activity associated with take overs. I hadn’t heard of ACTAEON, so another obscurity.

    Some of the rest of it was good stuff but overall not my cup of tea

  10. Really enjoyed this puzzle, finishing all but one in a quickish time. The 18s went in on wordplay alone, I didn’t get the ref to the woodcutter, and I’m sure I don’t need to say which one I left blank (although I had correctly got the k as the last letter!). COD to ACREAGE.
  11. Took me an hour, but well worth the effort; I must have ticked half a dozen clues as being real crackers. Have you ever thought that without the fertile planes of The Times crossword on which to graze, innumerable species of antelope would simply become extinct?
    1. My Comment of the Year so far, John. It’s a lovely idea, that if The Times were to forget these creatures they’d simply cease to exist, as fairies die when children stop believing. Now I’m going to spend all day thinking about trees falling soundlessly in forests and all that mullarkey. Thank you (I think).
  12. I thought this was generally fairly straightforward and a good puzzle , marred by 2 clues.

    I agree with dorsetjimbo about GEMSBOK. When I was a kid we went on holiday to Scotland and came back with a small dirk with what was supposed to be a cairngorm on the hilt (but was probably just yellow coloured glass). So I knew the word but it is a horrible D by E which took a while to work out as a possibility, and then I had to check the animal in the dictionary.

    Also I didn’t like GULF much.

  13. 52 minutes, with an unscheduled interruption to chase a large Sydney cockroach around my living room. It’s now hiding behind a dresser and it’s the size of a BENSBOK, which unfortunately was my last in.
  14. 15:16 – no trouble with gemsbok, having grown up with Scottish jewellery. Thanks for the clarification of 7d – got it but couldn’t see the “alleg” at all. Loved Delftware and Aspirate.
  15. A totally over-the-top reminder of how bad things used to be with the Times crossword when anyone without a classical education and encyclopaedic knowledge of English literature was wasting their time even attempting it. I’m not sure why I should have known the obscure Shakespeare quote, the hunter, the gemstone, Umbrian towns or even the antelope.
    I also inwardly groan whenever a boy or girl’s name is required by the wordplay – with thousands of possibilities (Tessa!) it always strikes me as being a weak cop out for when more imaginative wordplay is beyond the setter. Let’s hope tomorrow’s is more like yesterday’s when answers were at least do-able without complete familiarity with all the words and that the setter has adopted a more contemporary selection of references.
    1. For me one of the key delights of our fine crossword is the occasional necessity to trawl one’s memory for bits of arcana that one has picked up along the way; if ‘Anonymous’ finds this unpalatable then perhaps he or she might prefer something a little more pedestrian. I thought this was a jolly decent puzzle even if ‘gemsbock’ was a bit dodgy.
      1. Thank you for the advice but I have no intention of moving away from “your” crossword if that is OK. My point is that fortunately the style and content of today’s puzzle is the exception rather than the rule these days.
  16. Much the same experience as Jimbo’s, though it took me another 20 mins beyond his time to complete the puzzle. GEMSBOK last in. Spent a long time trying to verify the existence of an obscure antelope called a BENSBOK, on the same reasoning as mentioned by others and because I was unable to see how “cairngorms” could=GEMS. In the end resorted to the dictionary. Some very good stuff: e.g. ASPIRATE, DELFTWARE and ADVENTURER. I agree the definition for ASSET-STRIPPING was a bit vague but it raised a chuckle. I also thought the Waggle-Dagger reference was unusually good. Elsewhere in today’s Times, whether by accident or design, Libby Purves actually quotes the “… poor Brutus, with himself at war” … line in her review of the current production of Julius Caesar at the Roundhouse.
  17. 10:15 online. Dithered for a minute over BEN or GEM but picked right. No point in agonising as both options seemed equally plausible.
    Helped by knowing Actaeon from Titian’s ‘Diana and Actaeon'(Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh) recently on loan at our humble McManus Galleries in Dundee.
    Re Anonymous above I actually like the variety of puzzles we get and if sometimes the science, music, literature , IT, sport etc. references are not to one’s taste/right up your alley (delete as appropriate) then all the better.
  18. Add me to the list of BENSBOK spotters, scuppering my time of 21:37.

    If you didn’t know the beastie or the gemstone, you were pretty much stuffed here and the clue might indeed be a tad unfair. But I’ve argued for a bit of a QI factor in The Time before so I can hardly complain when my level of General Ignorance undoes me.

    Generally, I thought this a first rate puzzle.

    COD – ADVENTURER (but it could have been any of several).

  19. Well, I had a good day: started with 5, 10 and both 18 to get LR and top-down links with only four answers; 1ac most amusing; on 6, it has often been pointed out that the only essentials for a drinking vessel are a hole in the top and not in the bottom. Now all I want is spit-roasted 13 with 3.
  20. I also went for BENSBOK, pretty sure it was wrong but I couldn’t remember GEMSBOK, and wouldn’t have known that a cairngorm could be a gem anyway. Still, I know it now so hopefully it’ll come up in Azed next week with a bit of luck.

    Jimbo’s comment (“I hadn’t heard of ACTAEON, so another obscurity”) deserves a response though. I knew Actaeon and put it in straight away. Nice of them to put in an easy one here and there to get us started…

    Just kidding 😉

  21. I dithered between BENSBOK and GEMSBOK and finally had to google for the right one. Otherwise I found this puzzle well within the range of what I would think of as reasonable general knowledge. There are not many characters called Brutus apart from the Shakespeare one, and ACTAEON is familiar from literature, mythology and art. This was a good way to start a very wet morning – 27 enjoyable minutes.
  22. DNF. A slow start, then completely stopped by 13ac and, yes, 24ac (even after mctext’s great hint). Walking the dog did no good. GEMSBOK beyond me; a cheat has finally solved 24ac for me – I’m feeling rather stupid …
  23. I had a DNF neing stumped by two of the easier clues in Gulf and Muggins. took 60 minutes otherwise. agree that some of the clues were stupendous like Adventurer Aspirate and asepsis. agree with most of the comments about Gemsbok but also vauguely remember this coming up in a Jumbo or the times in the last couple of years.
    Lets hope the scale of difficulty doesnt grow for thursday and Friday
    well blogged too!
  24. I am another who had to look up ‘cairngorm’ to finish this off. Also held up by confidently putting in ASEPTIC and having to struggle before seeing it was ASEPSIS. Beyond joining the general quibbling about the double obscurity of GEMSBOK, I liked the rest of this. I got ACTAEON right away by remembering the earlier puzzle vinyl1 refers to, and read the end of it as the UK spelling of AEON. COD’s to ASPIRATE and DELFTWARE. Regards to all. I’m off to dig out of another dumping of snow here in the Hudson Valley.
  25. 10:44 for me, a few minutes of it spent on GEMSBOK: I was reasonably sure it was an antelope but I wasn’t convinced that cairngorm was precious enough to count as a GEM so I had to work through the alphabet to convince myself there wasn’t another possibility.

    Like vallaw, I also spent far too long glaring at ALLEG!

    ACTAEON really and truly isn’t that obscure, unless of course you’ve been living on the planet Zog for the last few years and missed the campaign to save the well-known painting by Titian.

  26. I’m commenting a day late, because I only just gave up and looked up ACTAEON (which I had acutally filled in correctly!); the story from Greek mythology was familiar to me, but not the names of the actors. Still DNF, because like some others, I had BENSBOK rather than GEMSBOK, thinking of Ben Nevis et al (which seem not to be in the Cairngorms). I must say that I agree with dorsetjimbo’s criticism — the Times puzzle does not have to be easy, but the daily cryptic should be solvable without encyclopedic knowledge, and there was no way to do 13ac without knowing either the obscure antelope or the obscure gem.
    1. Ben is the Scottish word for a high mountain or a mountain peak – definitely one to watch out for in crosswords, notwithstanding this clue.

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