Times 24766 – The blogger gets his very own clue!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 23 minutes

Music: Wagner, Tannhauser Highlights.

I am indeed flattered, but it is a little alarming that the setters follow us so closely. I hope they don’t have any tricks up their sleeves for tomorrow.

I was hoping for a quick solve tonight and got one. Tonight’s puzzle was very straightforward, with no obscure words and only a few tricky clues. There were a few things I had not heard of, but the cryptics were quite helpful for those and they didn’t give as much difficulty as they might have.

Across
1 REPTILIAN, a cross-reference to the lizard meaning of 27, and REPT[on] + I(LIA)N, using AIL backwards. The trickiest clue in the puzzle, in my opinion.
9 ARIOSTO, ARI(O)STO, the obvious Italian poet for seven letters. It helps if you read Orlando Furioso in grad school.
10 PARTLET, PART + LET. An ‘old’ lady in the sense of one from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, as I discovered when I researched this previously unknown word.
11 BURST, BUR(S)T. I never saw the cryptic, just banged it in, but I now see that the reference is to the late Mr. Lancaster.
12 FOOL’S GOLD, double definition. We’ve had a lot of charlies lately, this one seems to have taken the top prize.
13 NUTCASE, TUN backwards + CASE in the legal sense.
15 OLDIE, [s]OLDIE[r]. Evident enough from the crossing letters.
17 URBAN, UR + BAN. Maybe we should ban Ur for a while?
18 Omitted!
19 Omitted!
20 SCEPTRE, anagram of RESPECT.
23 NARRATIVE, EVITA + R + RAN backwards. Most solvers will not trouble with the cryptic.
25 APPLE, A(PP)LE. Touché, setter!
27 MONITOR, MO(NIT)OR. I was thinking as wrote this in that it could also be a lizard, which made 1 across easier for me.
28 ERECTOR, E + RECTOR. I had no idea what muscle this is, but the cryptic is obvious enough.
29 TAXIDERMY, anagram of READY-MIX T[extiles], another clue where few solvers will bother with the cryptic.
 
Down
1 RIP-OFF, RI(P,O)FF. A fiddle is not exactly a rip-off, but it is close enough for crossword puzzle use.
2 PARDONABLE, PAR(DON)ABLE. My last in, because I was sure the story was a ‘fable’, which it turned out not to be at all.
3 ILLUSION, ILL + US + NO.1 backwards.
4 Omitted!
5 NAKEDNESS, anagram of AS KEN’S DEN, not hard if you spot the literal.
6 GIBBET, BIG backwards + BET.
7 Omitted!
8 BOOTLESS, BOOTLE + SS. I did not know Bootle, but is seemed likely. Maybe I had heard of it at some point and forgot it.
14 ADMINISTER, double definition, where ‘apply’ is used in the sense of rub on.
16 DAVENPORT, DAVE(N[ew])PORT. To me, a ‘davenport’ has always been a sofa, so I had to let the cryptic do the work here. We are always learning something new in these puzzles.
17 UNSEALED, UN(SEA)LED. I wasted a lot of time trying to use ‘seas’ instead of ‘sea’.
18 JAPANNED, J[udge’s]A[rbitration] + PANNED, where ‘slated’ means dressed down or derided.
21 TREATY, TREAT + Y. I never liked this construction, where the possessive is not carried over into the solution, but it is often seen.
22 PEARLY, P + EARLY. The Pearly King has appeared quite a bit in these puzzles, although I already knew him as a Royal Doulton figurine.
24 REMIX. R[oyal]E[ngineers] + MIX, where ‘cross’ has the sense of ‘crossbreed’.
26 PHEW, sounds like FEW. This may be one homonym we are able to agree on, I would hope.

47 comments on “Times 24766 – The blogger gets his very own clue!”

  1. With 4 unknown words/meanings (PARTLET, APPLE (Jonathan), BOOTLESS and JAPANNED), this was always going to be a struggle, and so it turned out – as I limped home in 96 minutes.

    Originally had ‘redux’ at 24 (note to setter – try and clue that one day) and ‘forgivable’ (misled too by ‘fable’) didn’t help me in the NW, where I was looking for something at 1ac (my last in) ending in -ion. COD to NAKEDNESS, for holding me up the longest. Never hard, mind.

  2. Like vinyl I was looking for “fable” at 2dn – I suspect that will be a common trap. The NW corner as a whole was a bit of a hold-up at the end.

    PARTLET was a new one on me – it sounded like Chaunticleere’s squeeze Pertelote and might have been an old biddy at a pinch but didn’t seem much help when you’re looking for a garment. But then what else could it be?

  3. 22 minutes for most of the puzzle; then had to go out with the doctor, the muscle and the open waters all looking vacant. So I’m marking the SW as the most difficult corner; even though I did have to look up PARTLET and “Repton” ex post facto. (The gate is not to blame … indeed!)
    Why is it (re 5dn) that proper names tend to lead to anagrams?
    And a missed chance re the Mersey ports (8dn): the possibility of Devonport in 16dn which, as everyone will know, is the famous port at the mouth of the Mersey!
  4. Sailed along on this in a rare 15 minutes. Clueless about the Jonathan but it had to be. A little surprised that a vista is narrow. Enjoyable start to the working week, and I see a pangram minus Z and Q. Now for the urban jumps.
  5. 48 long minutes, thanks to being consistently wrong on every guess, and being too inflexible to drop the guesses when they were clearly taking me nowhere: I thought ‘story’ in 2d would be ‘tale’, that ‘cross’ in 24d would be X, that ‘originally slated’ in 18d meant an anagram of ‘slated’, could only think of ‘Hair’ for a musical,… I also knew ‘davenport’ only as a sofa, and would never have thought of Repton.
    This is the second puzzle in a row where Charlie=fool. As a Kevin, I’m worried about when my day will come.
    2. Chariots of Fire – Harold Abrahams – “I challenge in the name of Repton and Caius!”
      1. I’d forgotten that one, but I’ll always remember Patrick Magee as Lord Cadogan snorting the immortal line, ‘In my day it was king first and God after’.
  6. Oh, yes, and I couldn’t get past ‘singlet’ and ‘doublet’ for 47 of those 48 minutes.
  7. 30 minutes for most of it with several going in on trust (PARTLET, ARIOSTO, APPLE, NARRATIVE, REPTILIAN) but I got stuck in the SW corner (glad I wasn’t the only one, mctext) and wasn’t in the mood to turn a 30 minute solve into 60 minutes so I gave up and used aids to get the doctor and the muscle. Having found the answers both should have been easily solvable so I admit the setter beat me fairly today, but at least after the grid was complete I was able to explain all the clues before coming here.
  8. This was a bit like Friday’s for me: it felt at times like I might not finish at all but then I did in 20 minutes.
    I was also waylaid a bit by looking for “fable”. PARTLET, DAVENPORT, JAPANNED and the APPLE were unknown.
    The NE caused me the most trouble though, with a number of intersecting clues that I found tricky for no reason I can see now.
  9. Fairly straighforward 20mins or so, including one trip to the dictionary to check the existence of partlet, today’s new word..
    Bootle is an awful place, and possibly not totally coincidentally, the safest Labour seat in the whole of the UK.
  10. Was pleased to get a completion within the bounds of my morning commute after DNF-ing two short and one short last Thursday and Friday.

    1ac went in with no clue of the wordplay (even after 4 years at The House, some minor public schools evade my knowledge), and 9, 10, 16 & 18d went in based on wordplay alone. Someone will need to explain APPLE for me as well.

      1. Fortunately the wordplay was obvious enough. I was simply curious about the blogger’s enthusiasm for the clue.
  11. 17 minutes, so spot on average for me. PARTLET and ARIOSTO were both unknown to me; Repton is better known to me as a hymn tune, apparently because Parry’s tune was first used for this purpose in the Repton School Hymn Book. I suspect not knowing Ariosto is a gap in my learning – I didn’t know Orlando Furioso either – is it any good?
    BOOTLESS from Julius Caesar, of course.
    I was, of course, schoolboy curious about the erector muscle: apparently one lot sorts out the spine, another does hairs.
    CoD today to NARRATIVE, because I admire any clue that runs so smoothly in reverse gear. OLDIE raised the best smile.
  12. 28 minutes. Enjoyed this one very much. Thought my Lancastrian knowledge might be of use till I realized I had been led up the garden path at 11. Liked the “new arrangement of tracks” definition for REMIX and the “barely recognizable” for NAKEDNESS. By the way, DAVENPORT has always meant Beer at Home to me!
  13. Oh dear, here comes a whinge. Apparently I made 1 mistake but after checking here I really do not see it. I believe I nailed the omissions and I didn’t commit any typos. Has anyone else had this?
    1. Pretty well all of us, at some time or another Olivia (though not today if that’s what you meant). In my case, whenever I have managed to track the error down, it has always been my fault. Many claim it’s the computer, or the website, but I rather doubt that. We are often quick to transfer responsibility.
  14. Much the same experience as others. Expecting an easyish Monday work-out, I was a little alarmed that no solution suggested itself until JUMPS at 18ac, my first in. That break-through having been made, the whole RH side fell fairly quickly, as is often the case. The LH side proved more of a challenge, with the NW corner causing greatest difficulty. REPTILIAN and RIP OFF were the last in. The former involved very clever wordplay, though expecting those not native to the UK (and, I suspect, many who are) to have heard of Repton was perhaps a tad unfair. (No offence intended to Old Reptonians!) ARIOSTO was very nice, I thought, though I dare say there will be some grumbles from the Dorset area about the appearance of yet another obscure poet.
  15. Agreeable start to the week, coming in at about 30 minutes. PARTLET went in (last) on wordplay only. My personal COD was 23: NARRATIVE was the ‘obvious’ answer but it took a little while to see the wordplay – I kept trying to find a ‘musical monarch’.
  16. I really found this too easy (despite the difficult wordplay to 1 ac and the unfamiliar answer at 10), finishing in 18 minutes without trying for a fast time. I prefer something that’ll occupy me for at least 25-30 minutes. However, I see that not all found it so easy so perhaps I was in tune with the setter.
  17. It seems no-one reads Chaucer any more, or they wouldn’t have had the problems with Dame “Partlet”, favourite hen of Chanticleer the rooster in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. She also appears in Shakespeare and seems to be the origin of the hen in hen-pecked husbands!
  18. 23:51 .. another who ground to a halt in the SW. Eight minutes or so to get the SCEPTRE / TREATY / ERECTOR trio.

    COD to SCEPTRE for hiding an anagram so well in plain sight.

  19. Looks like last week we had one that I sped through that held many up, and today there’s one that had me scratching my head and most people found a breeze. Relieved when I hit the submit to see this one come back as a correct (20:21 including a short phone call) since there was a lot of guesswork here.

    ARIOSTO, BOOTLESS, PARTLET and PEARLY from cryptic alone, and didn’t see the wordplay for BURST.

  20. 9:43 online. Last in was PARTLET which I had to guess at. Like Vinyl I had Fable in my mind for 2. I needed all the checking letters to get MONITOR which led me to 1a which I got on definition only , don’t think I would have made the Repton connection. Some clues , like 22, has a bit of a familiar feel and when I see ‘musical’ in a clue I always think Evita now.Got 18 with the helpful J start and the definition otherwise might have struggled with this one.
  21. 5:55 online with all clues solved correctly but (yet another) typing mistake. I tend not to check all the grid as I am trying to time myself solving all the clues. For prize puzzles where I solve offline I do check (and Submit without leaderboard)
  22. 35 minutes with at least 5 fruitlessly pondering exactly what else PARTLET could be. As it was for others, Repton was a complete unknown but not a major hold up, and I learnt a VISTA was not in fact a broad expansive view. COD to APPLE, which made me laugh. Jonathans were a particular favourite of mine, but seem to have all but vanished from the shelves.
    1. I think they often turn up as Sainsbury’s ‘basic’ apples – cheap, but the juiciness varies
  23. I was rubbish today – 35 minutes.

    The bottom half went in fairly easily (apart from unsealed where I wanted waters to be spa) but I struggled with the top half. I didn’t know the poet and I couldn’t get past fable or tale for the story in 2d and was convined that 1d would be something like doo-wop or bee-bop (sic).

    Maybe I wore my brain out completing Saturday’s Listener puzzle over the weekend.

  24. The Times crossword is like the Cabinet in that the same few public schools always appear there; these days, a state school or two ought to be included. So how about, from fiction, Bash Street, and from Somerset, the memorable Sexey’s School?
  25. happy to finish as i thought it was above average difficulty for a monday (in my estimation anyway). several answers were just guesses as with others. one thing i am finding from doing this crossword regularly is that i am picking up a lot of what i call “non-knowledge”. so i know that ariosto was an italian poet without knowing a single work by him, chino is a kind of fabric without being able to recognize it if i saw it etc. in a way it’s worse than useless knowledge!
  26. 16:45 here. I got REPTILIAN without seeing how it worked. I thought I’d vaguely heard of PARTLET before – perhaps vallaw’s explanation provides the source. Knowing there’s an apple called Jonathan was probably from past crosswords, as I’m sure I’ve never eaten one.
    1. I was going to add – if some one asked me what Repton was out of the blue I’d have probably confused it with Rampton, a completely different sort of institution!
  28. 7:52 for me, not helped by a slow start and a slow finish, with the NW corner (where I hadn’t come across PARTLET meaning “old woman’s garment” before) doing the damage.

    Usual gripe (the same one as Anonymous’s immediately above): real Pearly Kings and Queens are from Sarf London.

    1. Beg to differ on origin of Pearlies. Original Costermongers operated around the main London Markets not just those South of the River.
      Pearlies as such originated in North London at Somer Town NW1 Henry Croft, an orphan at Somer Town is generally credited with the formation.

Comments are closed.