Times 24,803 – no, not Brahms and Liszt

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 25 minutes

An interesting puzzle with lots of “lift and separate” to be seen through plus a couple of tricky wordplays. We have an astronomer and a modern science – wow! No poets or obscure artists – wow again! There’s one very obscure long phrase. I thought I knew my fair share of euphamisms for being drunk but this one was completely new to me.

Across
1 LOTHARIO – (i=one + o=love + harlot)*; JFK perhaps;
9 FLAMENCO – FLAME-NCO; corporal (perhaps)=NCO; passionate dance from Andalucia;
10 BLUB – BULB reversed; old fashioned word for weep;
11 BASKING,SHARK – B(ASKING (for) SH)ARK; large fish or possibly a lothario;
13 MAKE,DO – form=MAKE; party=DO;
14 EYES,LEFT – E-YES-LEFT; very well=YES; European=E; port=LEFT (on board ship);
15 REPUTED – RE-PUT(t)-ED; don’t talk to me about leaving putts short;
16 ODYSSEY – hidden (b)O(l)D(l)Y (a)S(k)S (v)E(r)Y;
20 AIRBORNE – (robins minus “s” + are)*;
22 FIANCE – FI(n=nursing at first)ANCE; “intended” is the definition;
23 WATER,BUFFALO – WATER(BUFF-A)LO(o);
25 VIEW – VIE-W; “conviction” is definition;
26 REGISTER – two meanings 1=new arrival at hotel will 2=make an impression;
27 MALARKEY – MALAR-KEY; cheeky=MALAR; solution=KEY;
 
Down
2 OBLIGATE – OB-LI(GAT)E; gun=GAT (Edward G Robinson films);
3 HUBBLE-BUBBLE – reference Edwin Hubble 1889-1953 brilliant American astronomer; a hookah (that gets fumes out);
4 RAGSTONE – RAGS-TONE; music=RAGS (type of jazz); “rock” is definition;
5 OFFICER – OFF(IC)ER;
6 WANGLE – W-ANGLE; husband’s as well if he’s got any sense;
7 ANNA – hidden (Christi)AN NA(me);
8 ROCKETRY – ROCK(ET-R=visitor finally)Y; film=ROCKY; extraterrestrial=ET; rockets have been around for centuries but the modern science probably started with the American Professor Robert Goddard 1889-1953 an exact contemporary of Hubble;
12 HALF,SEAS,OVER – (hear of slaves)*; “stoned”=drunk is definition; anybody ever come across this obscurity before?;
15 ROADWORK – RO(A)D-WORK; staff=ROD; definition is “in the long run training”;
17 DEFRAYAL – DE(FRAY)AL; DEAL is in Kent close to where the Romans first landed in England;
18 EXCUSE-ME – two meanings;
19 PERFORM – (REP reversed)-FORM; cast=FORM; “stage” is definition;
21 REBATE – (beer)* surrounds AT;
24 TOGO – hidden (s)T(r)O(n)G (b)O(x);

43 comments on “Times 24,803 – no, not Brahms and Liszt”

  1. Quite the puzzle, finally cracked in 1’24” when MALARKEY went in, the key being ‘key’. I didn’t much like the definition for ROADWORK, but otherwise there were some very fine clues. RAGSTONE and the drunken sailor were unknown. Joint CODs to EYES LEFT and REPUTED.
  2. This took me 40 minutes, of which nearly half was spent staring at 27ac before deciding that MALARKEY was the best I could come up with. It seemed at least vaguely possible that “malar” meant something to do with cheeks. Much to my surprise, it did.
    I couldn’t parse 23ac, so thanks for that. RAGSTONE was also new to me.
    I have though come across HALF SEAS OVER before. “Where?” I hear you ask. Where else?

    1. Thanks for the link. It’s a Jumbo which explains why I didn’t see the phrase at that time.
      1. I blogged the Jumbo concerned, so it was fresher in my mind and I solved the anagram with just the first letter.

        Not an easy puzzle by any means, and I was pleased that RAGSTONE turned out to be correct. I was unsure about the plural “rags”, as I thought that the singular was more often used to denote that type of music.

      2. I think this is actually a reasonably well known phrase, Jimbo, albeit old-fashioned. Less clear is why it has come to mean “drunk” or “tipsy”. Chambers suggests it should be read as meaning “half way over or across the sea” and hence ‘half drunk”. Personally, I much prefer the image of a boat that has taken in so much water that it is low in the sea with waves washing across its decks, or that is heeling over in a high wind so that half the deck is awash (cf that other nautical term for being tipsy – “three sheets to/in the wind”.

        Good blog. Enjoyable puzzle.

  3. Bit more gristly than yesterday. Some mean-spirited clueing today I thought: bay for bark, fiend for buff, long run…
    Guessed MALAR must be something to do with cheek and couldn’t quite believe in HALF SEAS OVER but nowhere else to go.
    ANNA – Yes and No, saw the hidden but what about the rest?
  4. Tough going. Well over an hour in multiple sessions and needed aids to complete. Coming here for rescue when I decided to check HALF SEAS OVER in Google and amazed to find that it existed and meant ‘stoned’! Remainder then fell into place. Enjoyable challenge (including 15dn which I liked). Thanks, jimbo, for the blog and full parsing. Too many candidates for COD to choose one.
      1. The penny still won’t drop with ‘roadwork’. Can you help? I understand the ‘rod’ bit, I thought that must be the answer, but I just don’t get the rest of it.
        1. I guess you have the wordplay but, like me, you are unfamiliar with the definition. I know ‘roadworks’ of course but I didn’t know that ROADWORK in the singular is what runners preparing (for example) for the London Marathon do.
  5. I took ages to get started on this one and had only eight answers at the end of my first 25 minute session. Another 30 minutes brought all but two, 17dn and 27ac, and I must have taken at least another 15 to polish these off. I hadn’t expected to finish this without resort to aids but I did at least achieve this in the end.

    I have met HALF SEAS OVER before (it was in this puzzle last April http://community.livejournal.com/times_xwd_times/536900.html ) but it did not come readily to mind and I needed most of the checkers to dredge it up from somewhere.

    Didn’t know the meaning of ROADWORK required today.

    MALARKEY was the last in without understanding the cheeky part of the wordplay.

  6. Clever stuff. A bit solemn for my taste, though I do appreciate the tightly constructed, concise clues. HALF-SEAS-OVER is in Brewer and Chambers, though it’s not the term for tipsy that immediately springs to mind.

    Gats used to feature regularly in crosswords, along with emus and Ra. I always think of the Groucho Marx line (in Monkey Business?) ” We kept the Gat, but we had to drown the gittens.”

    50 minutes, after making rapid progress then hastily writing in INSOLENT instead of MALARKEY, which took a while to sort out.

  7. A bit over 20 minutes, allowing for a phone call. Having the break may have helped as this felt like the kind of puzzle where you could stare at a clue for ages without understanding – just about all the SW corner, in this case.

    HALF SEAS OVER emerged from the gloopy pit of memory when I had a determined stab at untangling the anagram (as opposed to the intuitive/lucky glance) and started with HALF. It must be out there in Treasure Island territory, or Hornblower. I gather from googling that it’s also a jazz/country-rock fusion band from New York.

    ANNA I left ’til last: I was initially disturbed by the number of names it could be, and was glad to realise it was just a hidden answer. Unusual to have two other, spaced out hiddens in the same grid.

    CoD comfortably to AIRBORNE, a lovely &lit, once I’d worked out that the letter to drop was the S and not the E.

  8. 34 minutes, again stuck in the SW — simply unable to see the pair at 15, such was the disguise: a positive trait which ran through a good deal of the clues.

    At 7dn, we could have had “Yes and yes”. “Yes, it’s not entirely a Christian name” and “Yes, it is a Christian name”. Depends on whether one agrees with a negative proposition with “yes” or with “no”. One research article I know* suggests there may be a cross-Atlantic difference here.

    * See: Jefferson, Gail (2002) ‘Is “no” an acknowledgment token? Comparing American and British uses of (+)/(-) tokens’, Journal of Pragmatics 34: 1345-1383.

  9. I had to check HALF SEAS OVER and threw in MALARKEY without knowing why. COD to FIANCE and RAGSTONE for the lift and separate.
    Tough but ultimately satisfying for me.
  10. 45 minutes to get all but MALARKEY and then another several hours to get that. I liked it from TOGO to woe (see aforementioned MALARKEY). The only thing not familiar about HALF SEAS OVER was the definition “when getting free”, until I realised that was the anagrind and not “being stoned”. Lots of contenders for COD today: FIANCE, MALARKEY, AIRBORNE… but it’s EXCUSE ME which gets pulled from the envelope.
    1. If you have time, could you please explain EXCUSE-ME. I’m feeling a little thick on that one.
      1. An excuse-me is a type of dance, where a loose singleton can tap a couple on the shoulder and replace one or other of them. “Excuse me” is also said to attract the attention of somebody blocking your path, say.
        1. Thanks Koro. A may-I-cut-in? sort of thing when it comes to dance.Not familiar with that here in Canada. Of course
          ‘excuse me’ in the other usage. Or, ‘je m’excuse’ or ‘pardon’ in our other official language.
          1. Other dances to watch out for are the Paul Jones where you are obliged to seek out a new partner each time the music stops, giving preference to those not already dancing. The taxi dance where the women form a line and the men take them on one circuit of the dance floor before putting them at the back of the line and taking the lady at the front of the line for a circuit. The lady’s excuse-me (obvious variation).
  11. Half seas over – an expression, I seem to recall, refering to the type of drunkeness which results from drinking only navy rum straight from the bottle, no chaser.
  12. Loads of gaps all over the place today, and even the ones I did get (correctly) had question marks besides them (eg, HALF…, ANNA, EXCUSE ME etc). Definitely not my type of puzzle!

    🙁

  13. The only word I didn’t know here was MALAR, as pertaining to the cheek. MALARKEY was my last in – the only word that fitted the checkers. I seem to have known the phrase HALF SEAS OVER all my life. Maybe my parents used it when talking of certain family members. Or maybe it was in the lyrics of sea shanties or in the seafaring adventure stories I used to read. A very enjoyable 35 minutes.
  14. Really liked this one. 27 minutes, last in malarkey. Mixture of reasonably compliant (top half) and troublesome. Somehow I recalled half seas over, from childhood reading I should imagine, a wonderful phrase.
  15. DNF by a mile. Thought this was very difficult. 14/28 without aids, my worst performance this year since the Saturday puzzle on 1 January!

    Thanks for filling in all my gaps Jimbo. Maximum respect to anyone who completed this without aids.

  16. 22 minutes online. Really enjoyed this. A lot of the wordplay seemed to lead me in the wrong direction. ROADWORK a good example. No , never heard 12d before and last in was MALARKEY.
  17. struggled to a conclusion
    got malarkey but didnt understand word play. thought the rest was quite tricky. also had roadwork without fully understanding the wordplay. Ragstone had me stumped for some time!
    well dont setter and well done Jimbo…around 1 hour
  18. Thought this was a good, challenging puzzle. Just under an hour across a couple of sessions. Failed to get ragstone, even after using a cheat (which gave me rubstone). Had never heard of malar or half seas over, but managed to get them with the crossing letters.
  19. 16 minutes, thought I was in for a quick time, but the bottom half was stubbornly resistant. , WATER BUFFALO and DEFRAYAL from definition, HALF SEAS OVER and RAGSTONE from wordplay alone
  20. Quite tricky – just over the hour, not helped by putting in FANDANGO for 9ac from the checkers.
    Since we haven’t had any of the entertaining links such as john-from-lancs so often provides, I thought I would add the following one for 18dn, where the ladies’ EXCUSE_ME appears about halfway through.
  21. I still haven’t replaced the battery in my watch, and if the puzzles continue at this level, I may never do so. But I have a rough idea of how long it took, judging by the increased length of my beard. MALARKEY was the penultimate one in–I had come as close as ‘molar’, but close doesn’t count– which finally forced me to give up ‘-up’ (as in knees-up) for the dance. I still had to run through the alphabet to get EXCUSE-ME, a term I’d never heard before.
  22. Rather like yesterday. Off at a brisk pace, then the law of diminishing returns took over. Finally had to cheat for RAGSTONE after stuck for ages in the NW. 33 min. HALF SEAS OVER was common currency in my youth, but not sure if still used. COD to the economical MALARKEY. Nice puzzle, thanks setter.
  23. ABout 35 minutes, ending with MALARKEY. I didn’t know malar, HUBBLE BUBBLE or HALF SEAS OVER. I didn’t see buff=fiend while solving either, so some toil involved in the bottom half. The top went in pretty quickly. I thought this was a very good quality puzzle, concise clues and believable surfaces. Well done to the setter. Best to all.
  24. I think you have 1ac slightly wrong, dj. Like you I thought it was (1 0 harlot)* and I thought this was sloppy clueing, for how on this interpretation can you justify the ‘in’? Then I realised that it’s actually 1 in (0 harlot)*.
  25. This felt like a hard one for a beginner like me – the “lift and separate” clues are particularly tough. I’m realising it’s partly a confidence issue; even though I had parts of many clues I gave in too easily and didn’t pursue the line of thought hard enough.
    Still, I learned lots from this one – thanks to jimbo and all for the parsing.
    1. Lift and separate” is something which comes as second nature with experience. If I can offer any helpful thoughts, I would say that whenever you see two words which appear to belong together, consider whether they have a meaning which is useful for solving. If not (or if the meanings lead nowhere) try separating the words and consider them individually.

      For example, in this puzzle “rock music”, “science film” and “theatre stage” superficially seem to belong together but don’t yield any useful meaning, and so they are immediate candidates for the “lift and separate” treatment.

      On the other hand, other phrases could actually have useful meanings – “military command” (eg halt, eyes left, attention, at ease, etc), “golf shot” (putt, pitch, drive, chip, draw, fade and (from my personal repertoire) slice, hook, shank) – so in those cases I would probably exhaust the meanings before considering the words separately.

      That’s just a personal view – others may have a different approach.

  26. Had to resort to aids for HALF SEAS OVER, ROADWORK and MALARKEY. Still don’t understand EXCUSE-ME. Over an hour having tried to figure ’em out before getting outside help.
  27. 11:43 for me. An enjoyable puzzle with some interesting clues (but no unfamiliar words or phrases).

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