Times 24784 – Hello sailor

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: 19 minutes

Another Monday morning stroll with a nostalgic air. Lot’s of old favourites, a bit of cricket, an instance of Shakespeare and some pre-agrarian revolution dirt. Without further ado, it’s…

Across
1 BRIG short for Brigadier according to at least Collins and, incidentally, Brigantine
4 LIBATION for drink-offering around ER for ‘er royalness = LIBERATION
9 (NORMAL STEP)* = PALMERSTON, 3rd Viscount thereof, or Pam to his friends, was the last PM of the UK to die in office, proving that you rarely get what you wish for.
10 WIN for earn + G for grand = WING, being “one of the organs of flight of an insect … especially the forelimb of a bat”, to quote Collins. Whether “building” is a second definition or a link word is a punctilio I’ll pass to the panel.
11 GAWAIN = W for with and A for article in GAIN for net.
12 Deliberately omitted. I cite procedural regulation 2b.
14 SMUT = TUM’S reversed. With Leadbelly last week, tum couldn’t be far away.
15 OFF for “temporarily unattracted” next to PUTTING for sport = OFF PUTTING. I’m presuming that’s putting the shot, rather than the sinking activity of golf. The former is a sport, the latter a known risk factor in high blood pressure (Hammond, “The Impact of Golf Performance on Caffeine Intake”)
17 BRICKLAYER, cryptic definition
20 SOYA = OnlY in S.A. Only carnivores call it a “meat substitute”, failing to grasp the concepts involved in tofu.
21 CLEAR-CUT = C for clubs + LEAR for “nonsense writer” + CUT for avoided
23 REDCAP = D for daughter + CA for about inside REP for agent
24 AHOY = A + HOY for “rigged vessel”, a reasonably frequent visitor to our shores.
25 FOOT for pay + RIDGE for bank around Buildings = FOOTBRIDGE
26 PREFERMENT = PRE for before + FERMENT for unrest
27 EIRE sounds like air, or more correctly “airer”.

Down
2 (RADAR I’M)* inside REAL for proper = REAR ADMIRAL
3 GYMNASTIC = (Good CITY MAN’S)*
4 LORENZO = LORE for traditions + Z for unknown in NO for Japanese theatre. That would be The Merchant of Venice, although at the time I was thinking “La Bohème?”. Maybe I need a refresher. Here’s what a Shakespeare course looks like in the Age of Twitter.
5 BUTTER for fat + STROKE for rower around FLY for “to make speed” = BUTTERFLY STROKE
6 (ON A RUDE)* = RONDEAU, not to be confused with a rondo, although AABBA (not to be confused with ABBA) would be a point of similarity.
7 Deliberately omitted. I sing procedural regulation 2b.
8 NIGHT, sounds like knight, mostly.
13 HONE for sharpen + BADGE for device (as in heraldry etc) inside YR for your = HONEY BADGER, or ratel, neither badger nor honey.
16 TE for note + D for duke in STRIVE for struggle = TEST DRIVE, an estate being a station wagon in other parts of the globe.
18 LIFER for prisoner around University Cricket = LUCIFER, an Arsenal striker – while we’re in Flanders Fields…
19 RARE for exceptionally good + BIT for instant (as in “in a bit”) = RAREBIT, gourmet cheese on toast.
21 Cockerel + LAMP for light = CLAMP, which is what it says in the clue, often containing turnips.
22 EMOTE = rEMOTE. E-motes are small electronic particles which float between said device and telly enabling channel changing, or so my grandmother told me.

49 comments on “Times 24784 – Hello sailor”

  1. 25 minutes, a nice beginning to the week (although it’s Sunday afternoon here). Nothing particularly CODworthy or difficult, although I’d never heard of CLAMP in the relevant sense. I’m a carnivore (as someone said, if God wanted us to be vegetarians, why did he make animals out of meat?), but I’d never call soya a meat substitute, because it doesn’t substitute for meat. One niggle: isn’t ‘Eire’ bisyllabic?
    1. You’re correct on a number of fronts. I obviously never hear Eire pronounced . That would make more senese of the clue. I’ll amend that.
  2. Hi Koro, and Kevin. A pleasant walk of a puzzle, I agree. Only difficulty was my last one, CLAMP, where I too didn’t know the def. used by today’s setter, but the wordplay was pretty much a straight shot to the answer. Once I read it correctly, that is. The SMUT clue must be a chestnut, although I don’t remember it specifically. COD to CITE and I SING, as employed by today’s eminent blogger, so thanks for those, koro. Regards to all. Oh, by the way, why is an MP a REDCAP? Over here a REDCAP is a porter in a train station.
    1. = slang for military police.

      New, but eventually gettable, words – honey badger, brig (as in ship rather than the jail of one) and hoy for another type of ship – slowed me to 52 minutes. I didn’t find this the romp that others so far seem to have done.

    2. Kevin, a Redcap is, in the British Military, a Military Policeman. One of the roles of the MP, as in the U.S. military, is to sweep up drunken soldiers off the streets.
  3. I know the American usage from Cary Grant in North by Northwest. On a Hollywood theme, congratulations to The King’s Speech, fully deserving of its awards. Rush, you were robbed!

    (Perhaps someone with the tools would be so good as to delete the errant comment above.)

    1. I don’t know what’s happening with your posts today ulaca, but they have been “screened”. LiveJournal has taken a strong dislike to some of the content, possibly the external link, or perhaps they are no Geoffrey Rush fans, or maybe your post has been flagged as a spoiler. No idea. Anyway, I’ve done as you requested.
  4. 30 minutes with no real problems other than to query 13dn which in my view contains a DBE and therefore requires some indication of this. None of the usual sources even mentions poultry, nor does the article on Wikipedia which contains a long list of creatures that the honey-badger eats (including human corpses on rare occasions in India). I admit ‘birds’ covers it but I still cry fowl!

    1. I was going to say in the blog that it was named for its penchant for duck à l’orange and honey chicken teriyaki, but I couldn’t amend the Wiki article in time.
      1. That would be definition by example, using the specific to clue the general. So, using dog in the clue to get pomeranian as an answer is OK (arguments about whether pomeranians are in fact dogs aside) but using pomeranian in the clue for an answer of dog is a DBE sin, definitely below egregious, unless said DBE is accompanied by a mea culpa of say, say, or perhaps, or for example.
  5. Crept under a quarter of an hour for the first time for some time. As with last Monday’s, a gentle wake-up call. Liked the honey badger, for no other reason than the pleasure of making the acquaintance of the wonderfully-named creature. Instantly one or two people I know move into the space.
  6. 50 minutes with cheats on the two low down 4-letters, which I couldn’t get from the crossers in the allotted time. ‘Hoy’ either new or unremembered, as was ‘lucifer’, despite recently seeing Jeff Bridges strike a few to light the roll-ups made for him by his resourceful 14-year-old employee.
  7. 18 minutes, distracted by an abusive neighbour – do others find their solving slows down when feeling aggrieved?
    HONEY BADGER from cryptic, as I’d heard of it but had no idea what it looked like or fed on, and certainly didn’t know it as a predator on poultry – surely that’s a fox? I thought BRICKLAYER was very nearly not a cryptic clue, and could have been guessed by a complete neophyte wondering what all the cryptic fuss was about.
    EIRE only sounds like airer if you pronounce it the English way, which I suppose is OK.
    CoD today to 18 for the misdirection of “cricket match”, especially given the resonance of the astonishing tie achieved (or conceded, depending on your view point) by England yesterday
  8. Yes, I am pretty sure I saw smut = tums rev. only last week.. but I’ve never been able to work out how to search this archive.

    For the record, few humans indeed are carnivores and if they were they would be quite sick. Omnivores, is what we are designed to be..

    Gentle 15mins today; my local zoo (Port Lympne) has honey badgers in stock

      1. Thank you Jack; I am in Qatar this week, and believe it or not, google (inc. Google UK) will only operate here with “safesearch = strict” and this filters out the word smut!!
        I have been quite shocked at how much of the www is unavailable here.
        1. Found this by Googling “times for the times” tums. Something similar to today’s clue appears at 1 down.
  9. 19 minutes, so just on the easy side of average for me.
    I wondered about WING as an organ, but I suppose if that’s what it says in Collins that’s what it says in Collins.
    HOY and HONEY BADGER were new to me, and once again one of my Shakespeare blind spots delayed me. I must get round to reading The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest. And did I know No? No.
  10. 34 minutes. I’d always assumed that REDCAPs were so called because of their berets; my father used to tell me tales of dodging them when he’d gone AWOL for the weekend during WWII.

    Welsh RAREBIT gives me a tenuous link to a letter in today’s Times that has had me chuckling all morning, and which I must share with you. It refers to a transliteration of the Welsh National Anthem that enables non-Welsh speakers to sing along with confidence, unnoticed in the crowd. I’ve been distracted from the business of solving by singing it to myself and almost choking on my cup of tea; here it is on Wikipedia.

    1. And your link made me chuckle, too! At least the Welsh don’t bang on, like the Scots, about some medieval battle!
      1. The Cambrians have their Men of Harlech: ‘Be they knights, or hynds or yeomen, they shall bite the ground.’

        Sang it on Saturday (together with the magnificent ‘Land of Our Fathers’) at the Saint David’s Society ball here in Hong Kong before heading down to Wan Chai to watch said Saxons thump the Gauls.

        1. It is indeed a magnificent anthem. I can only imagine what it must be like to wear the Welsh jersey and stand in a packed Millennium Stadium (Doesn’t quite have the same ring as Cardiff Arms Park, does it!) as the home supporters belt it out. Spine tingling stuff! Just as long as you don’t have an “ABY” t-shirt…”Anyone but England!
          1. One of my ambitions is to attend the Wales-England game in Cardiff, sing both anthems, then cheer England to victory.
    2. The version I once knew in the 50s began “My hen laid a haddock on top of a tree”! Am now off to a pre-St-David’s-Day do to sing the real thing…
    3. How fitting – on the subject of redcaps and miming the Welsh National anthem, who can ever forget John Redwood?
    1. Indeed, but then the world would have been deprived of my e-mote witticism and definitely the poorer for that. And note the “possibly” in 8ac, excusing the DBE.
        1. At a special session of the Wit & Repartee sub-committee, a unanimous vote of thanks was passed in favour of kororareka’s efforts. Furthermore and notwithstanding the heretofore….cont. p94
          1. Accepted with thanks. I’d move on to item 7 on the agenda: Koro reads from his collection of Christmas cracker jokes, but my chair has actually started to melt in the heat here in Perth, and it’s 10pm at night! Seriously, the gas lift lubrication grease has liquified and is dripping all over the floor. Nurse!
            1. Thanks, again, kororareka. W&R is the grease that lubricates the world and you have given me a good chuckle to start the day! Now onto Item 8, Any Other Business…
  12. After an exhausting weekend with our grandson, it was lovely to start the week with an easy , but enjoyable, puzzle; a super blog , thank you koro….; and the ever entertaining comments.
  13. I have to say that I dislike this sort of puzzle – anachronistic and hence ageist in the contrary sense to normal.
  14. 16.19 online. Fairly steady progress until WING which took a few minutes to work out – well I just guessed it really as I would never have connected wing with organ – but when you have eliminated the impossible…
    Loved the link to the Welsh Anthem – brought a smile after another depressing result at Murrayfield yesterday , afraid that I have to agree about the relative anthems.
  15. 22 minutes – so a good time for me. My only hesitation was with WING which I’ve never thought of as an organ. Since we’re on anthems and it’s been a rugby weekend, I must say that I think the Italian anthem is the greatest. I always thought it was by Verdi but I checked during Saturday’s match and it isn’t. I was afraid it would inspire them too much!
  17. Pretty decent time for me at 11:10. Some nice straightforward clues here and everything went in fairly easily; put a question mark against ‘wing’ but quite happy now with the answer thanks to the blog.
  18. 15 minutes, almost on the nose. Will admit to needing the wordplay to get PALMERSTON, LORENZO and HONEY BADGER, so I was relieved to find that I had a correct entry.

    Didn’t help myself much by originally putting SKI JUMPING in at 15

  19. Very easy stroll in the park wondering what a HONEY BADGER might be and then discovering it appeared to eat damn near everything except poultry and, wisely, SOYA. I even got DBE estate at 16D without wincing – must be getting soft in my old age. And I’m definitely off putting, had two ring out today.
  20. Just popped in to check ‘redcap’, which I wasn’t sure about. I made quite good time today, but was held up by putting in ‘toe-curling’ for 15A! I had the ‘u’ from rondeau, and it seemed to fit (loosely) because I expect curling gives you cold feet. I wonder if anyone else went down the same path?
  21. Having solved 8 down (night) while presuming 11a was ‘knight’ I spent a half hour
    getting the remainder of the puzzle solved and another 20 minutes sorting ‘Gawain’ once I’d resolved ‘gymnastic’ …EI-RE / airer? Kind of lame as were most attempts at humour at the Oscars last night.

  22. 5:49 for me – but I had so many hang-ups along the way that I suspect the fast brigade would be clocking in at 4 minutes or under. Another easy start to the week.

Comments are closed.