Times 24754 – So Far, So Good…So What!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 35 minutes elapsed, about 20 spent in actual solving

Music: None, watching golf on TV

I was not able to solve continuously, as I watched a couple of shots in the playoff, and then solved a few clues. I had a hard time getting started, but once I got a few answers in I made steady progress. A few of the cryptics, like
‘aversion’ and ‘washed up’, were too easy for me to get right away, which held me up a bit. ‘Maraschinos’ was more my kind of clue.

There is nothing at all obscure here in the answers, so any difficulty is in the clues. I did get a few of them the wrong way around at first, and needed some letters to set me straight. I nearly made a bad mistake and started to write in ‘wildebeest’, but saw it was wrong almost
immediately.

Across
1 PANELLISTS, PANE(anagram of STILL)S. In the US, we would not so describe jurors, since the word has been worsened by game shows.
7 Omitted, ask if you can’t see.
9 BETHESDA, anagram of S[om]E + BATHED. Not the one in Maryland, nor the one in Central Park, but the original.
10 TALENT, TALE + NT. A clue whose literal meaning is a decomposition rather than a construction, which is entirely allowable and proper.
11 ISOMER, anagram of IS MORE. I saw right away it was an anagram, but that was all I saw for quite a while.
14 COURT MARTIAL, sounds like COURT MARSHALL.
17 SIGHT READING, double definition, where Reading is the team. I mistook the ‘without’ for a surround indicator, and wasted a lot of time on that theory.
20 WASHED UP, double definition, easy, simple, and should have been obvious.
21 BAY RUM, B(AYR)UM. American usage has crept in, I see, spoiling traditional English vernacular.
22 GUINEA, GUIN(EVER)E + A. The African country that supplied the gold for a posh coin.
23 THREATEN, TH(R EAT)EN. Here, ‘taken out’ is used in the sense of taken on the outside, surrounding.
25 TESS, [poe]TESS.
26 HARTEBEEST, sounds like HEARTY + BEES + T[orment]
 
Down
2 AVERSION, A + VERSION.
3 ETH, a letter in Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, and Faroese. I have never heard a girl named ‘Ethel’ addressed as ‘Eth’, but that is apparently what the setter had in mind.
4 LOSER, RESOL[ution] upside down.
5 SLAPPER, S(L)APPER.
6 SATELLITE, S(A TELL)ITE. I am not entirely satisfied with this, because ‘show’ and ‘tell’ are really two different things, but I cannot see any other way to parse the clue.
7 ALL SOULS DAY, anagram of A LASS LOUDLY, and quite a tricky one.
8 LINDEN, NIL backwards followed by DEN. I suspect some careless solvers may have put LINNET, L(INN)ET. However, there is no possible way to make ‘let’ equivalent to ‘tree’.
12 MARASCHINOS, anagram of CHAIRMAN’S + O.S. We have not had this abbreviation for over-size for a long time.
15 MEGADEATH, M(EGAD)EATH. I thought for a long time this was going to be an Irish county I could not remember that was an anagram of ‘huge human’.
16 END USERS, [b]END(US)ERS.
18 TAPSTERS, TA(P[ub])STERS. I was tempted by ‘tipplers’ for a while, but couldn’t make it fit the cryptic.
19 MATURE, MA + T[rade]U[nion] + RE., Lift, clean, and separate!
21 BARGE, double definition, and a tricky one. I saw immediately that ‘lighter’ was a boat, and still couldn’t see it until I had all three crossing letters.
24 Omitted, alas.

43 comments on “Times 24754 – So Far, So Good…So What!”

  1. I had a real struggle with this, there was plenty that was outside of my comfort zone. Relieved to find that when I hit submit I had a correct grid in 26 minutes with my guesses being ETH and LINDEN.

    BAY RUM from wordplay alone, and MEGADEATH, MATURE, and HARTEBEEST from definition – is the latter really pronounced that way?

    1. My reading of phonetics is pretty basic, but according to the OED the first E in HARTEBEESTE seems to be a schwa, so I don’t think the homophone works. I’m sure Jimbo will have a view.
  3. Pleased like George just to finish this one, ’though it took me a bit longer (66 minutes), including 10 or so on the last two, MATURE and TESS, both entered without full wordplay understanding.

    Having been brought up in the area, 17 raised a smile, as Reading Football Club is hardly synonymous with the beautiful game. Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits, perhaps. David Brent’s soliloquy after learning he’s been fired put Reading on the map forever. And Burghfield …

    ‘My world does not end with these four walls. Slough’s a big place, and when I’m finished with Slough, there’s Reading, Aldershot, Bracknell, you know, I’ve got Didcot, Yateley. Winnersh. Taplow, you know? Because I am my own boss, I can – Burghfield – I can wake up one morning and go, “Oh, I don’t feel like working today, can I just stay in bed?”’

    1. That sounds like a railway station announcement! I can do that, too, even though it’s been years since I lived in the U.K. At Tunbridge Wells Central, the announcement went something like: “The rear six coaches will stop at all stations to Hastings: Frant, Wadhurst, Stonegate, Etchingham, Robertsbridge, Mountfield Halt, Battle, West St Leonards, St Leonards Warrior Square and Hastings”.
      Who said this blog was about crosswords?!
      1. As I worked in Bracknell for many years and travelled in by train via Richmond for the last 10 or so, a lot of those names were all too familiar: stopping at … Sunningdale, Ascot, Bracknell, Wokingham, Winnersh, Winnersh Triangle, Earley and Reading. I used to start the Times puzzle at Sunningdale and hope to have it finished by the time we reached Bracknell (I was helped when they inserted an extra station at Martin’s Heron between Ascot and Bracknell). On a good day, I’d have it finished before the train pulled out of Ascot.
        1. Presumably you were reading the paper when passing through my home village. The stop before Sunningdale.
          1. Longcross? Or Virginia Water? I’d have been either reading the paper or (particularly in later years when I travelled abominably early to avoid the awful schoolchildren who got on at Sunningdale) having a quick zizz.
  4. Vinyl, you obviously missed out on The Glums, a (?)60’s radio show featuring Ron and Eth. To be honest you haven’t missed much, except for the justification of the name!
    1. I remember The Glums, that’s how I was able to get ETH: Dick Bentley, June Whitfield and Jimmy Edwards. According to Wikipedia, though, it finished in 1960
  5. Finished just on the hour but I struggled with some of it and it was a scrappy solve that never flowed.

    I disagree there are no obscurities as I think ETH qualifies (the letter, not the name though I note that caused problems in some quarters ). Collins even lists it as an alternative to the (presumably better known) EDH (!) though the Oxfords have them the other way round.

    I knew BETHESDA from the fountain in Central Park but not the biblical reference, never heard of BAY RUM and ISOMER was a distant memory from schooldays that I needed to check to be sure of it.

    I don’t like clues such as 4dn where one is expected to remove a chunk of meaningless letters.

    What with mistresses, slappers, bums and spanking going on I wonder if I detect the setting hand of an old friend of this forum?

  6. 26 minutes for most of the puzzle, bar the 19dn/25ac intersection, which took another five. I never get the “academic” clues.

    But this was a good puzzle I thought and I like Vinyl’s ref to the Megadeth album (though theirs has a space after the ellipsis). The Wik entry has a sentence that could be straight out of Spinal Tap:

    “Two months after lead guitarist Dave Mustaine was fired from Metallica due to drinking, drug use, violent behavior and personality conflicts with James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich and former bassist Ron McGovney…”.

    And .. how many Bethesdas? There must be one in Pennsylvania?? I was once visiting Bethlehem PA and kept seeing signs to Nazareth. I knew it meant something and that I should go there. Two days later, on the plane flying out of the US, I found a card in my wallet that was a free invitation to the Martin guitar factory. It came with my 7-28L. Bugger!

    The standard pronunciation for 26ac is: |ˈhärt(ə)ˌbēst| — so either “hart” or “hartuh”. Over to you Jim ….

    Edited at 2011-01-24 10:12 am (UTC)

  8. I loved the Glums. Not sure I would now – less choosy then. 34 minutes, held up for some reason on mature. Neat clues, nothing outstanding: a good run for the money.
  9. 50+ years on and I finally learn that it was “Yes, Eth” and not “Yes, Eff” (which was how I used to hear it)! Overall an enjoyable, not too taxing, Monday morning outing completed in about 30 minutes. Supplemented by so many having memories of The Glums; clearly there are quite a lot of ‘silver surfers’ amongst us.
  10. I finally committed to MATURE without understanding the wordplay.
    Regarding A SHOW = A TELL it works in the manner of poker playing – as a noun TELL is the tic or trait that an opponent picks up on when you are bluffing (or not bluffing). A giveaway.

    In any case my first completion for a couple if days and in a very reasonable time for me.

  11. 16 minutes here, so moderately easy in spite of a couple of unknowns (ETH, BAY RUM) and a number where I was only confident of the answer from wordplay: BETHESDA, MEGADEATH, LINDEN, MARASCHINOS.
    Last in was MATURE, which took quite a long time to see for some reason.
    About 9 months after discovering this blog I’ve finally worked out how to add a picture!
      1. It’s Romanée-Conti. A vineyard I would very much like to know a lot better. Unfortunately I’m not a billionnaire just yet!
  12. 21 minutes in two sessions split at Stratford. Top left easy, bottom right stalled.
    I tried MELODRAMA for the human tragedy, for no good reason, until nothing else worked. Also spent time trying to justify MATURE, which turned it into the last entry.
    Is “slapping” really equivalent to “spanking”?
    No enthusiastic CoD today, but I quite liked COURT MARTIAL.
  13. 14:40 here. I remembered Ron and Eth from The Glums, and I was born in 1963. There was a TV version of it in the 70’s, starring Ian Lavender as Ron and Patricia Brake as Eth. Took a while to get 16D as I thought of BINGES for drinking sessions and couldn’t shake it. Also struggled to see the wordplay for MATURE.
  14. Some of your comments tell me that some of you make heavy weather of simple synonyms! And the clock on the wall tells me it’s time I scooted back to work!
    1. ‘show’ for ‘tell’ goes beyond what you’d call synonyms when I taught semantics. But in The Times, clearly any substitutability is fair game (‘it shows’ = ‘it tells’, for instance).
      And as for the 26 supposed homonymy, as a Scot I’m used to being very liberal about anglicisations.
  15. Does anyone remember Ron helping Eth and Father Glum with a crossword? I think his answer to 1ac was ‘flobagob.’
    One of us remembers Bay Rum from the barber’s shelf in ca 1954. Has anyone used it since then?
    About an hour with some assists, so tricky for a Monday.
  16. Another Glums fan here who had no trouble finding Eth.. I tend to think of the Glums as one of the very first comedy shows (from 1948 on) that would still be thought funny today. A quick listen on Youtube confirms that mostly it is indeed still very funny..

    Not hard today, 12mins or so

  17. I thought there were some very good clues with smooth surfaces and deceptive wordplay. In several cases I wasted time misinterpreting the wordplay, which turned out to be simpler than I first thought (eg 11, which looked like a double definition, especially with the -r ending in place).

    I agree that the homophone in 26 doesn’t really work.

  18. I thought this relatively straightforward – about 20 minutes to solve. Did no more than groan at the homophone but did wonder about Reading=football team.

    Remember the Glums very well, used to listen whilst cuddling the girl friend – happy days!

  19. A near miss: we camped with kids once, down the road a bit, between Monthelie and Meursault. A bit cheaper there.
    1. Indeed. Monthelie and Meursault may not be DRC, but you wouldn’t have to twist my arm much.
  20. Did not time this accurately as I was doing the puzzle on papaer whilst sitting waiting to be called for Jury Service in Reading (head starts on 1A, 14A and 17A then!). I am happy with the “football team” wordplay – it seems to me just like any other definition when you just have to pick from a (long) list.

    Probably around 20 mins with the last few trying to be definitive about ETH.

  21. The trouble with being on holiday is that you can’t guarantee access to the crossword in time to make any meaningful comment. Finally managed to print this out at 7pm! I didn’t find anything too obscure. Like others here, I remembered ETH from “Ron and Eth”, and HARTEBEEST from Flanders and Swann. I’d never heard of MARASCHINO as a cocktail – I always thought it was a kind of cherry. A slowish but steady solve at 34 minutes.
  22. 6:55 for me – slightly disappointing as I slowed badly after a very fast start.

    I remember both the Radio and TV versions of The Glums. (My wife was Patricia Brake’s health visitor so we had a particular interest in the latter.) I saw Flanders and Swann at the Fortune Theatre in the late 1950s, so there were plenty of memories evoked by today’s puzzle.

  23. Listened to The Glums in Toronto in my teens along with The Shadow, Amos ‘n’ Andy, The Lone Ranger etc. Loved radio so much that I ended up being a broadcast journalist for a good chunk of my working life turning to acting and voice acting after that.
  24. I remember a comment on the old website from someone who boarded a train at Southampton and normally had the crossword completed by Southampton Parkway. On a bad day, he said, it took until Clapham Junction to finish. On a a very bad day he didn’t finish it until he reached Victoria/Waterloo; and on an extremely bad day he had to finish it at lunchtime!
  25. Only Glums I know is Les Mis. Oh well, apart from that 35 mins, so quite happy.

    Minor quibble with vinyl – “tapster” and not the plural. Cheers to all.

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