Times 24746

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
This was a slowish but steady solve for me, taking 45 minutes. There’s a fair bit of GK required but I would say there’s nothing too obscure for finding the answers though a couple may need looking up to understand the clues fully. Unless I’ve missed it (perfectly possible) there is no hidden answer and I can’t remember a recent puzzle without one. If anyone requires more explanation on any point please shout and I or one of the regulars will get back to you.

Across
1 P(LAST,I)C – The shoemaker’s LAST followed by I inside Police Constable.
5 PHARAOH – Sounds like “fair O”.
9 EN(TOUr)RAGE
10 ScORER
11 METAMORPHOSIS – Anagram of ‘smarties oomph’.
13 RU(ST)LING
15 SLA(LO)M
17 EX,PECT – Sounds like “pecked”
19 C(HESS,M)AN – Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s deputy at one time. Having been captured and tried he spent many many years in the can at Spandau, Berlin.
22 PUSILLANIMOUS – Anagram of ‘miaul lion’ inside PUSS.
25 REIgNS
26 HEARTSICK – Anagram of ‘his racket’.
27 TUESDAY – The answer was obvious once all the checkers were in place but I had to dig way back in my brain to explain it. It’s a reference to the nursery verse that starts “Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace”.
28 Let’s leave this one out.
 
Down
1 Price,HEW
2 AT TIMES- This was a nice easy one to get me started today.
3 TA,’UNT – The ‘orsy country pursuit being the ‘unt following the Territorial Army.
4 CLA(I)MANT 
5 PIE,RRE – ERR reversed for ‘wander up’.
6 AESC(HY)LUS – Anagram of ‘clauses’ containing the first and last letters of ‘hilarity’. The playwright may be best known for The Oresteia.
7 AERO,SOL – This is OREAD, the mountain nymph, de-tailed and reversed before SOL for ‘sun’.
8 HARd,ASS(M)ENT
12 FREE SPIRIT – I’m not sure that a free spirited person is necessarily irresponsible. I would associate it more with being independently minded. I also have some doubt about the superlative as free everything would be even more generous.
14 LOCk,ALISED – Anagram of ‘ladies’ following hair cut short.
16 S(HI,IT)AKE – The second I is optional apparently. These mushrooms are used in oriental cooking and the theme continues with the Japanese spirit, SAKE, distilled from rice.
18 PAST(1M)E – M1 reversed inside PASTE.
20 Let’s leave this one out too.
21 CAT,HAY – An archaic name for China.
23 OrATES – This is Captain Lawrence Oates. His first memorial in the wastes of the Antarctic read ‘Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, Captain L. E. G. Oates…In March 1912, returning from the Pole, he walked willingly to his death in a blizzard, to try and save his comrades, beset by hardships.’
24 Son,KIN

31 comments on “Times 24746”

  1. While my Classical background helped at 7 and 8 dn, my blind spot with the word ‘pusillanimous’ (I looked it up yet again the other day and promptly forgot its meaning) made the SW slower than it should have been. Ended with the neat 1dn, but my COD to HEARTSICK for the misdirection. Exactly an hour. Kudos to Jack for unravelling TUESDAY!
  2. I am not sure why but i found this tough… i guess Pusilanimous was obvious or almost obvious but i had trouble with the short ones like Phew which it took me an age to see! Rather liked Heartsick which i thought was deceptively neat and Pharaoh too…Thought 28 across was pathetic!
    Nice blogthank you!
  3. More challenging than yesterday’s, and so for me more enjoyable…

    Some unfamiliar vocab, worked out on wordplay alone: 6dn I managed to get the letters in correctly; 22ac I didn’t (got the M and the N the wrong way around!).

    Last ones in were CATHAY and TUESDAY. CoD to HARASSMENT.

    Have a good weekend everyone – see you next week!

    PS Thanks for your comments yesterday, but I think I’ll leave the Mephisto for a bit…being a teeny bit obsessive about just one crossword is enough for me at the mo!

  4. 39 minutes. Quite a spelling test for me this morning, but a very enjoyable puzzle. Particularly liked HEARTSICK, SKIN and TUESDAY.
  5. 24 minutes total over two sets of railway tracks.
    One of those where the cluing was essential for the spelling: PUSILLANIMOUS, SHIITAKE, HARASSMENT, SLALOM (not a “U”) and PHARAOH to name a PHEW.
    CoD to TUESDAY for a lovely piece of mischief.
  6. Another middle of the road puzzle, reasonable enough but without being taxing. 20 minutes to solve with a guess of TUESDAY at 27A to finish off. Weird clue in my opinion.

    Agree with Jack about 12D on both counts, particularly the fact that a FREE SPIRIT doesn’t equate with irresponsibility. Chambers says “a person of independent turn of mind”

    We need a toughie!!

  7. 26 minutes, the final four or five on the mushroom which plucked in the end with the aid of a dictionary. Thought miaul was a misprint but apparently not. Yes, a free spirit is independent not (necessarily) irresponsible in outlook. The superlative aspect would have been OK with ‘a most’ – a careless clue. Otherwise a refreshing runabout.
  8. 45 minutes with PHARAOH done with assistance of phone-a-friend. If you asked me tomorrow to spell that word, I probably wouldn’t be able to. Anyway, that gave me PIERRE and a finish of sorts. COD to PUSILLANIMOUS, although RUSTLING was also rather good.
  9. Free spirit must be a fairly recent coinage. It’s not in my Shorter Oxford, but does appear in The Compact Oxford as “an independent or uninhibited person”; and irresponsible can simply mean (though rarely these days) “not responsible”, “not answerable to someone”, i.e. independent (without the implication of reprehensible carelessness).

    So I think I’ve convinced myself, after initial reservations, that the definition is OK.

  10. Finished with help from Bradford’s. Not very good on nymphs (there are alot of them). Did Monday unaided, and
    and made mistakes the other 3 days. Didn’t understand wordplay to 8d.
    I’m slowly improving.
    Regards
    Andrew Kitching
  11. Doh! Sorry Jack, skipped over your 8d explanation somehow.
    By the way, is a scorer usually one of the batsmen?
    1. As a keen cricket scorer myself, I can say that running the scorebook is always best done by a non-player. Although, in my experience, it’s a task often undertaken by the players when no one else volunteers.

      But all that’s immaterial here. The clue is referring to the player actually scoring the runs, as opposed to writing them in a book.

  12. 28 minutes, of which 10 at the end on 27ac. I saw Tuesday quickly but couldn’t see why it might be the answer and spent ages trying to find another word to fit the checkers. The penny dropped eventually. It’s either charmingly original or dodgy, I can’t decide which.
  13. 56:16 – Had a collection of 7 at the top and 5 at the bottom remaining after about 25 minutes, then spent half an hour cracking them. Finished with 5a, 7 & 15.

    It took me an age to unpick the anagram at 26. I liked the cryptic def at 27 – it gets my COD for making me smile/groan once it clicked.

  14. 24:30 .. tricky in parts, but some of that was the ‘wrong sort of difficulty’. ‘Free spirit’ is so at odds with contemporary usage of ‘irresponsibility’ that, John_from_Lancs’ point notwithstanding, it feels all wrong to define one with the other.

    On the plus side, PHARAOH seems to me a particularly good use of the dreaded soundalike device.

  15. 30:43 online so pretty tricky. Didn’t care much for 6dn – one of those where even with all the checkers and fodder if it’s a word you don’t know you still need a slice of luck to get all the letters in the right places.

    I found pharaoh the hardest to spell of the lot.

    Does anyone know what “initially” is doing in the clue for Tuesday?

    Here’s the only song I know that has pusillanimous in the lyrics, courtesy of the Rutles:
    Another Day

  16. This took me 56 minutes, the last 28 to get about 5 words in the lower half, ‘localised’ being the last in; in retrospect, I don’t see why that took so long. ‘Tuesday’ was second to last, largely because I was looking for a G (‘grace initially’) for such a long time. Once again, I’m grateful to the blogger for explaining why an answer I got correct was correct (‘plastic’); until today I’d never noticed that I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what a cobbler’s last is, only knowing that he should stick to it.
  17. This was a bit of a spelling challenge. I was pleased to manage PHARAOH and AESCHYLUS without problem but my printed copy of this puzzle is covered with my efforts to spell PUSILLANIMOUS. I knew the word vaguely – too vaguely it seems. I meant to check it before coming here but forgot. I ended up with an “A” where the second “I” should have been and invented a new kind of mushroom called SHIATAKE. Otherwise an enjoyable 37 minutes.
  18. About 30 minutes, held up for a time by the spelling of PHARAOH (last entry) and the fact that the Frenchman was merely PIERRE. I was looking for something trickier. I didn’t really recognize the double ‘i’ spelling of SHIITAKE either, but the wordplay made it unavoidable. Also had to slog through AESCHYLUS and PUSILLANIMOUS with the aid of the checking letters. I liked TUESDAY. Regards to everyone.
  19. I’m quite new to cryptics, but I’ve made it my mission to be good at them. This is the first Times crossword I have completed with no help (Except checking the spelling of PUSILLANIMOUS, as never having actually heard anyone say it, I was a bit unsure which way round all the letters went)! I’m so happy. And to my surprise, no one has been banging on about how easy it was. Finally feel like I’m getting better.
    1. Well, as no one else has said ‘congratulations’, I will. Well done. It’s a very big deal, the first time you crack one completely unaided. Brava!
    3. Sorry I missed your posting. Yes indeed, congrats are in order! I hope you will stick around and I look forward to hearing about your continued progress.
  20. Late to get round to the crossword today and I’m definitely slower in the evening. Pleased to ‘finish’ in about 45 minutes but needed to confirm the spelling of SHIITAKE (would have been easier if I hadn’t thought that ‘sake’ was spelt ‘saki’). Number of contenders for COD: but my vote goes to 13ac. Sadly rustling is also a contemporary British, as well as a Wild West, phenomenon.
  21. 9:39 for me. I found this a lot easier than yesterday’s and would have posted quite a decent time but for the foodie SHIITAKE. (I thought I’d seen it spelled SHITAKE, but that doesn’t seem to be confirmed by any of the dictionaries I have access to.)
    1. The single I is given as an alternative in Collins as referred to in my blog but I didn’t name the source. A problem with foodie stuff is that one is likely to find so many incorrect spellings on restaurant menus and any of these may stick in one’s mind as a possible alternative e.g. omlette.
      1. Thanks for giving your source for “shitake”. My 1986 edition of Collins (from the days when they used to sponsor the Times Crossword Championship and gave copies away as additional prizes) doesn’t include the word with either spelling, and the (online) OED only has “shiitake” (with not a single citation for “shitake”).

        I’d noted the Japanese spelling that hydrochoos mentioned (I went to Japanese evening classes for a few years so I can read hiragana and some kanji), so I suspect “shitake” is a (non-Japanese) restaurateur’s aberration. I certainly take your point about menus as my first encounter with “tandoori” cooking had it spelled “tandouri”, which has confused the hell out of me ever since!

  22. No real time today, as I did the puzzle in several pieces, just finishing a day late with OATES (based on wordplay, as I’ve never heard of him) and SHIITAKE, of which the HI and IT were clear from the wordplay, and the SAKE as the strong drink was a pleasant and suitable discovery. By the way, in Japanese this mushroom is called しいたけ (for those who have hiragana installed on their computers; for those who haven’t this is written in the Japanese syllabic alphabet and reads shi-i-ta-ke); so that’s where the second I comes from. This can also be written in kanji, or Chinese characters, but there are two “spellings” which I will spare you, as they say nothing about the pronunciation.

    My CODs today to EXPECT, which made me chuckle, and TUESDAY — living in Germany, I often wonder if I could sell these puzzles to anyone whose native language isn’t English, but clues like this make that seem very unlikely.

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