Times 24780: 2/4 alive, twice dead

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 28 minutes.

The time could probably have been shorter, as I let the clock tick on while I made coffee. So I suspect we’ll get some crackers today. One day I’ll get around to online solving — though I share Sotira’s reservations on the subject — but never on a blogging day. That requires treeware!

Sorry I don’t own a 12-string or I’d have changed the user-pic to celebrate Lead Belly’s first (?) appearance here. (He gets a mention here by reference to his appearance in the Indie.)

Across
 1 CHEERS. Two defs. Or three if you want to split ‘so long’ and ‘much appreciated’.
 4 ROSSETTI. Anagram of ‘Sister to’. Perhaps with one eye on the fact that his sister also turned out a pretty good verse or two.
On edit: a more feminish solver might (just) find the whole thing to be an &lit reference to Christina herself!
10 OUT,LINE. Where ‘course’ = LINE (as in, of bricks).
11 S(POT)LIT. The contained is a reversal of TOP (‘best’).
12 DENY. First and last letters of ‘Dodge’, then NY is the City.
13 M(A,QUILL)AGE. Cosmetic, as used by frogs so as to make them look like princes — or princesses.
15 WRIT LARGE. Anagram of ‘water rig’ and L (for ‘lake’).
16 PILAU. Reversal of A LIP (‘sauce’, cheek, impudence) and U, for ‘posh’. Similar clue in a puzzle we can’t mention for a few days yet.
18 LANCE. ‘One’ = ACE and the whole is an &lit.
19 OTHER HALF. R (for ‘Queen’) in an anagram of ‘health of’.
21 PRIVATE EYE. ‘Independent’ is sorta private; the eye is that which observes.
23 Omitted. But 5dn will help.
26 WRINKLE. Two defs. The Mac Oxford has: “a clever innovation, or useful piece of information or advice”. Yes, I had to look this up too!
27 ABSOLVE. A (for one answer) and SOLVE (for the other) around B[eatles]. I’m beginning to think I’m haunted by the bloody Pardoner and his ways!
28 ROAD TEST. Anagram of ‘Sort date’.
29 FRAY,ED. The last two letters are the left-hand couple of the word ‘editors’.
Down
 1 CO(O)ED.
 2 EX,TENSION.
 3 RU,IN. The game which appears in cryptics in packs.
 5 OB,S(C)URE. OB for obit, [he] died.
 6 SPOILSPORT. To baby someone is, roughly, to spoil them. ‘Misery’ is the def., as in party-pooper, wet blanket, etc.
 7 I’ll leave this one out for 24 hours.
 8 IN THE BUFF. N (for ‘new’) slipped in to I (one) and THE (article), then the expert enthusiast the BUFF. The def is ‘Assuming [putting on] nothing’.
 9 R,EP,AIR. What G. Martin used to do a lot of.
14 BLUE,JACKET. A sailor in the Navy.
15 WILLPOWER. W[ith] and an anagram of ‘lower lip’.
17 LEAD,BELLY. The first as in ‘be in charge of’, head. The second being the standard cruciverbalese for stomach. The great Huddie William Ledbetter who called himself by this name, but with a space where I have the comma. So: two words. As G. Harrison once said: “No Lead Belly, no Beatles”.
19 OPENERS. Two defs, both slightly cryptic.
20 HEY,DAY. Both rhyme with ‘way’; also an album by Fairport Convention from their BBC sessions.
22 I,BIZ,A. The wrappers are A-One (first class, ‘capital’) reversed.
24 T,WEE,D. Teachtaí Dála (member of the Irish parliament).
25 USER. Hidden reversed in ‘presumably’.

 

46 comments on “Times 24780: 2/4 alive, twice dead”

  1. I found this a real slog (even my attempts to cheat at the end in the NE ran into roadblocks). MAQUILLAGE was no gimme and SPOILSPORT and SPOTLIT both cracking clues. As was IN THE BUFF, to name one I actually got in that corner.

    Speaking of The Beatles, whom I grew up with, last night I sat down and watched the first of the four shows they did with Ed Sullivan (how he reminds me of Nixon!) in 1964-65. They are available now (corny ads and all) in a 2-disc set from Universal Music.

  2. Got the maquillage/spoilsport crossing only after returning for a fresh look after a couple of hours. I was unsure about mage as a learned man. Isn’t sorcery the defining characteristic?
      2. Brilliant 😉

        (Somehow excised at first attempt when I got the captcha code wrong)

  3. Post-solve COED check for WRINKLE has “clever innovation…” which makes me think the setter looked it up as well as mctext and yours truly. Had BLUECASTLE (sad man on board) hoping that it might be some kind of case, amended after cheat so as to progress. MAQUILLAGE also a cheat. Cooed at COOED so COD.
    Impressive time Alec.
  4. Well done on such a fast bloggers time. Found many clues tricky…enjoyed it!
    Cod to maquillage
  5. Some awkward customers here – quite relieved to get round in 31 minutes. Sorely tempted to commit saquillage but finally guessed right. I’ve always been annoyed at how the artistically and poetically mediocre Dante Gabriel has always lurked as the more attractive and talented character. Christina wrote a few imperishably lovely poems.
  6. 45 minutes without aids but one wrong letter at 13 where I committed SAQUILLAGE. This answer went in whilst I still had several missing in the NE and gave me the checkers I needed to solve OBSCURE and SPOILSPORT so I didn’t go back to re-check it. I’d never heard of the correct word anyway so I’m not sure I would have reached a different conclusion if I’d thought about it for hours. MAGE as “a wise person” would not have been obvious to me.

    I’m a bit surprised at the problems expressed above with WRINKLE but maybe it’s a generation thing.

  7. Not a good day for me, what with HAYDAY, BLUEBASKET and the aforementioned SAQUILLAGE. I was pretty clueless about WRINKLE and IN THE BUFF too. Just not with it. Once you’ve invented one word, others just seem to follow, tumbling out in aphasiatic torrent. I thought it was tricky to say the least. COD to ROSSETTI amongst a host of exquisite surfaces.
    1. Just noticed I have another wrong: ‘bluecasket’ – put in smugly having avoided the trap set by ‘bluebasket’ …
  8. For the 4th time in 6 puzzles I have been knocked back by typos doing the puzzle on-line. I reckon lack of touch-typing skills coupled with an erratic mouse has been my undoing. Not particularly tough (about 35 min}, but no push-over either. No COD, because of too many contenders. Back to pen and paper tomorrow.
  9. I made heavy weather of this, never quite getting onto the setters wavelength and so struggling for 30 minutes, particularly in the east.

    I’m sure LEAD BELLY is two words as expressed by the man himself. I don’t recall him appearing before. I had no problem with WRINKLE, one of the few I saw straight away. I used the dictionary to check first for saquillage and then MAQUILLAGE (which I feel I should have known but couldn’t put my finger on).

    Lots of good clues and well blogged Alec, not an easy one by any measure.

    1. Thanks Jim. It’s a very rare day when I go for the walk in the park while you suffer the heavy weather! Though I suspect it’s just a case of blogger’s nerve — only the one left! — concentrating the mind.
  10. I thought 28 minutes felt a bit slow, with a lot of time spent in the NE quadrant. I’m somewhat relieved to find out others had a rough time too!
    I was a bit wary of slit=rent in 11: I can see how it goes by a sort of Chambers Thesaurus comparison, but surely a slit has more of the surgical or secretive precision, and a tear is rather more rugged and careless? It didn’t really work for me.
    I went for ROSSETTI (once I had the crossing letters and remembered how to spell) without realising it was an anagram. I too know more of her poetry than his anyway.
    Generous cluing, I thought, at 1ac where there certainly could be three ways to the answer, and at 29 where “left couple of editors” was both kind and confusing at the same time.
    CoD to the all-in-one LANCE
    1. …or possibly ‘to’ returns in ‘split’ – whatever, I can’t see where ‘available’ fits in. Any ideas?
  11. It seems to be a wavelength thing, as Jimbo says. I agree with mctext in finding most of this enjoyable and ingenious puzzle quite easy, but the NE corner proved tough, and held me up for 10-15 minutes, with MAQUILLAGE and SPOILSPORT the last to go in. About 45 mins in the end. I thought the definition for SPOILSPORT was very elegantly disguised and is my COD with MAQUILLAGE a close second. TULSA raised a chortle as well as a naughty lady.

  12. Too tough for me. Another who committed SAQUILLAGE. SE corner hampered by ignorance of LEADBELLY; even if I’d worked it out (I was nearly there but frustration and a need to get on with other things brought me here), I suspect 27ac, 29ac and 25dn would still have been beyond me. Thank you mctext for an excellent, enlightening blog; and well done setter – too tough for me, but fair.
  13. 32 minutes. I’m glad others found it tough because it was a bit of a grind for me. I didn’t know BLUEJACKET, LEAD BELLY or TD and there were a number of things that just seemed a bit of a stretch: “independent” for “private”, OB for “he died”, that definition of WRINKLE. Some nice stuff too though to be fair: “left couple of editors” was neat, as was the misdirection in 6dn SPOILSPORT.
    Like others I initially put in SAQUILLAGE but changed my mind at the very last moment.
    I failed to parse LANCE so thanks to mctext for that in particular and for another entertaining blog.
    1. Independent, as in an independent school, is supported by ODE, which has ‘not supported by public funds’.
  14. I’m afraid I’m a BLUEBASKET case. That clue, and the crossing WRINKLE (another unknown for me with this meaning) took up a big chunk of the 34 minutes I spent on this.

    Some ingenious stuff, though.

    COD 1a CHEERS – just very nicely done

  15. 55:43 after quite a struggle. Nobody’s yet mentioned the fact that this was a pangram. I find that these tend to throw up some unusual vocab, and this was no exception. MAQUILLAGE was new to me – I only got it because I was looking for a Q.
    Some pretty devious wordplay in there, so Well Blogged mctext!
    1. Although I’ve just noticed that I had one wrong, because I misspelt HEYDAY as HAYDAY. Oops!
      1. If it’s any consolation, I remember doing the same thing many years ago. (But I added it to my list of difficult words and haven’t made the same mistake since :-).
  16. We managed to finish this in just over an hour, but failed to explain some of our answers fully. So special thanks for the blog today.

    Please forgive our ignorance… in 18ac, what do you mean by &lit?

    2. “and literally…” A clue whose wordplay (aka subsidiary part of the clue) constitutes the definition, such as 18ac, which has no definition apart from itself taken literally.
    3. All-in-ones (as they are also known) are often indicated by a question mark or an exclamation mark. In this instance, the full parsing of ‘Large one knight carried?’ would be L + N in ACE, where N is the abbreviation for knight used when recording chess moves.
  17. … this was. I alternated between ‘stretching a point’ and ‘never-eard-of-it’, plus ‘I hate this grid’ (not enough help from each quarter to the next).
  18. 16.10 but with the saquilligeous mistake. Was pretty pleased with this answer at the time but now feel I should have been able to work out the right answer – laziness. Great to see PRIVATE EYE and LEADBELLY today.
    COD to SPOILSPORT which was a nice concise elegant clue.
  19. Started well but found it a bit of a slog to finish and had to look up BLUEJACKET, which I’d never heard of. The BLUE part was obvious but then I stalled. Without that “K” I don’t think I would have got WRINKLE since I’d never heard of the term as a “clever innovation”. It’s amazing the new things you learn from this crossword! I put ROSSETTI from the surface reading alone, thinking of Christina. But in retropect she doesn’t really fit the clue – it has to be her brother. Staggered home in 40minutes.
  20. Very nice to see him here (does Keith Richards do crosswords?). Got 7d quickly because of a truly awful popular song from my tweens – “only 24 hours from 7d”. Ugh. Actually I kind of enjoyed this puzzle.
    1. Apart from Leadbelly, I made a musical connection with Tulsa as well, but not with the ridiculous Gene Pitney song (24 hours from…You could be ANYWHERE!) but with “Tulsa Time”. I think that is a Chuck Berry song but I first heard it on Eric Clapton’s album “Just One Night”. The reason it has stayed in my memory is because of the wonderful keyboard intro by the sublime Chris Stainton, a man who would be the heart and soul of any eclectic rock band I would put together.
  21. Should really have finished this correctly, having put in SAQUILLAGE and then spotted that this was a pangram apparently missing the M. Spent ages trying to put an M into the last few in the NW.
  22. Did this off and on when taking breaks from decorating. Fortunately my decorating is proving more successful as I gave up on the crossword with 4 clues missing.
    Louise
  23. Regards all. I found this tough, having to put it down and return to finish, so maybe 40 minutes all told. Like most commenters, I was held up in the NE and with the BLUEJACKET/WRINKLE crossing. I avoided the ‘saquillage’ trap, but I certainly was tempted by it, and sympathize with those who went there. I doubt that the more PC sensitive US papers would allow a clue like TULSA; conditioned as I am by living here, it startled me when I saw it. But putting that aside, it’s a pretty clever clue, as is CHEERS and the all-in-one LANCE. Well done, setter. Best to everyone.
  24. After a half-hour, I had about half-finished; then went out to dinner, which rendered me sufficiently unfit to do more than pick at the rest. This morning after breakfast, I looked at the remaining 5 clues (6, 11, 14, 22, 26) and got them in 3 minutes, in some cases (like SPOILSPORT) just from the checking letters, without reference to the clue. I actually knew ‘maquillage’, so once I finally gave up ‘sage’, at least I wasn’t tempted to put in ‘saquillage’. I didn’t care for 1d, as I’ve never used, or seen used, ‘coed’ as a noun meaning ‘coed school’.
  25. Didn’t get to this until two short breaks during the day, but had a lot of fun with it – MAQUILLAGE has beaten me before, so got through it, for some reason it was the WRINKLE/IBIZA crossing that stumped me for the longest. Thanks for explaining OBSCURE which was my last in from the checking letters.
  26. 11:24 for me, with MAQUILLAGE holding me up at the end. (A useful tip for beginners is that there’s a U coming from a crossing answer, try putting Q in front of it. If only I’d remembered that myself, I’d have been a couple of minutes faster!)

    I hadn’t realised that LEAD BELLY was properly two words, so had no difficulty with 17dn.

  27. Clearly some of the people on this message board don’t know their Dad’s Army. Captain Mainwaring quite often tells the platoon about some wrinkle he has discovered.
  28. Well, it seems I wasn’t alone in initially trying to make SAQUILLAGE fit. I’ve not seen others comment on it, but MAGE was used very recently. And like others I put HAY instead of HEY and tried to make BASKET fit i.s.o. JACKET. Learnt something new in the use of BLUE so the evening wasn’t wasted! COD was definitely 8d. “Assuming nothing” indeed! Made oi larf it did.

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