Times 24817 – hooly dooly!

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : My online submission in 17:56 comes back with three errors. In fact at this point there is not yet a fully correct online solution. So hopefully I’ll fix typos or see what was up while I was writing this, but there may be a few actual mistakes in there. Not surprising, there were very few entries here when I wasn’t scratching my head. I thought I’d sorted it all out, but that was not to be.

In writing the blog I found the typos, but I still think this was a tough one, and there’s one clue I still can’t parse.

Here goes nothing!

Across
1 PACEMAKER: PEACEMAKER without an E – blessed are the peacemakers…
6 BOB,UP: as in “Bob’s your uncle”
9 ADMIN: M in A,DIN
10 LEVIATHAN: Definition is “autocratic monarch” after Hobbes. I had to read a little bit of Hobbes this year for a class, LEVI is the patriarch, and he’s almost AT HAND
11 KNUCKLE SANDWICH: cryptic definition, and now that I re-look at my grid, I can see all three of my errors because I switched two letters in a crossing answer and it is on my screen as KNUCKLE SANDWICC
13 CICERONE: ICE in CRONE – one of the many in this puzzle that I had to piece together from wordplay, Roman word for a guide
14 ORACLE: (the wicker boat) without the bow, another from wordplay, I guess the idea is that the advice of the Oracle is always right? Edit: read into the comments for vinyl1 explaining “work the oracle”
16 PLINTH: L in PINT,H – the base of furniture, and yet another word I needed to get from wordplay
18 STAR TREK: TRE(e)(plane) in STARK. A largely forgotten show about some astronauts and aliens (nice clue)
21 CONVENIENCE(gents),FOOD: pre-prepared food, another one I had to rely on wordplay for
23 TASMAN SEA: A,S,MAN’S in TEA
25 OVARY: Hmmm, this is not my favorite clue, Emma is Madame Bovary so we lose the top. OVARY can be a part of a plant or a reproductive gland of a woman
26 let’s keep this one hidden
27 SHE,F,FIELD
 
Down
1 P,RANK: nice clue
2 COMPUNCTION: this one from wordplay, I guess it’s M in COP, then UNCTION, but not sure I can relate UNCTION to extreme event? Edit: See first comment by mctext for EXTREME UNCTION explained
3 MONIKER: I in MONK,ER
4 KIL(l),KENNY: Got this from wordplay, and had not heard of Kilkenny Cats. Let’s leave it to Michael Quinion to explain.
5 RE,VEAL
6 BLADDER: L in BADDER
7 BAH: Take the T out of BATH
8 PINCHBECK: (BENCH)* in PICK – a cheap alloy that looks like gold
12 INCORPORATE: (PROCREATION)* – liked this surface
13 CAPACITOR: I in CAP,ACTOR
15 STONE AGE: ONE in STAG, then E (end of dancE)
17 let’s leave this one out of the downs
19 REEL OFF: double definition
20 MISSES: sounds like MRS
22 DRY,AD: a forest nymph
24 SAL: from SAL VOLATILE, smelling salts

55 comments on “Times 24817 – hooly dooly!”

  2. Hmmm, I looked up unction in Chambers and something similar was there, but it wasn’t called extreme unction. Not surprised I didn’t know it.

    I don’t think MISSUS works, since “announced” goes with “the title” and MISSUS wouldn’t work with the “not a hit” definition.

  3. 48 whole minutes, with most of it spent on Mme Ovary and the tree hugging nymph. Still don’t understand the ORACLE clue.
    1. You were talking about “Ferry ‘cross the Mersey” yesterday, mctext, and today we have a Pacemaker!
      I wonder if those devices existed in the 60s; if so I doubt an up-and-coming band would have given themselves a name that would have instantly aged them.
      1. I know you have one Martin as do I. Yes, they had pacemakers in the 60’s…my doctor’s father had one. My pacemaker, replaced last month, even starts the car
        remotely on cold mornings and programs the football and baseball games on the TV… that’s how advanced the technology is. 😉

        Needless to say it was the first clue I solved in a fairly easy puzzle but I was not concentrating that well in the wake of our cat Lester’s passing Monday.
        For those who might have missed the link to my wife’s quilting blog that I posted the other day…

        http://quiltobsession.wordpress.com/

        The cats are featured daily. Also thanks to those who offered their condolences
        when I originally posted Tuesday.

        p.s. I was a DJ in the 60’s before turning to radio and tv news and sports so the songs are very familiar.
        .

  4. Unlike some of us – mine came back with one error for the carelessly thrown in MISSUS. I’ll get the hang of this online solving if it kills me. SO far, it’s not going terribly well!
  5. 56 minutes, falling into the ‘missus’ trap. We had CICERONE recently – I remember Falooker talking about that one; SAL from definition, PINCHBECK from wordplay. My company has been trialling supercapacitor buses, so that part of the tricky 13 crossing fell first.

    I thought this was a terrific puzzle: LEVIATHAN, BOB UP and BAH last in. COD to the spirit stuck in the tree.

  6. I also thought this a good puzzle. I don’t understand ORACLE, and I entered SYL as the volatile girl, apparent;y wrong. Being quick since I’ve had livejournal trouble the last few days. Regards to all. About 30 minutes.
  7. 30 minutes, with no major head-scratchers, no complaints, and no CODs. But I had been hoping for enlightenment as to ORACLE; my guess was that it was yet another cricket term of some sort.(Just out of curiosity, I went to Google just now and found there’s a CricketOracle website.) CICERONE was in a fairly recent puzzle, and indeed caused some discussion here, if I recall. Having been burned on a similar letter-substitution clue in a recent jumbo, I looked long and hard at 20d to make damned sure it couldn’t be MISSUS and had to be MISSES.
  8. Vinyl’s already covered this, but just to give the full monty:

    ‘wicker boat away from bow’ = [C]ORACLE (where ‘away from bow’ means detach the rest of the word from the front/first letter)

    ‘One successfully worked’ = [the] ORACLE, as in the expression ‘Ferguson worked the oracle again at Stamford Bridge last night’; ‘work the oracle’ is defined by C as ‘achieve the desired result by manipulation, intrigue, wirepulling, favour, etc; to raise money’.

  9. I’m another who carelessly fell for the missus. 25 minutes with that. Bit of a tester; liked the allusive dimension. Or what might be called the thinking person’s slang. Tasty.
  10. 1hr 18mins of enjoyment for me. Too many clues that made me smile to mention individually except I did like 24d and the reading of “volatile”. Oh, THAT sort of PLANE in 18ac was probably my COD. I have a 1ac so that went in quickly. I’ve also got a defibrillator. Maybe that will show up in a crossword soon. As a pre-Vatican II Catholic I was familiar with the term “extreme unction”. As others have mentioned, we’ve had CICERONE recently so that went in quickly, too. PINCHBECK sounds like it should be a place in the Lake District. Finally, I’m pleased the setter has given me another opportunity to provide you all with another Goon Show quote:
    SEAGOON: It’s the Red BLADDER and his 50,000 balloons! Gad, we’re
    outnumbered 20 to 1!
    ECCLES: 20 to 1? Time for lunch!
    1. Do you mean to say they’ve abolished the rite of extreme unction? Why was I not informed? No more extreme unction, no more ‘Dies Irae’, what next? Mass in the vernacular? I believe–I do hope I’m not making this up; it’s been decades since I read the book– it was Flaubert’s objective description of the administration of the last rites to Emma that got him hauled into court for blasphemy.
      1. I know, Kevin, it’s hard to take, isn’t it. I believe even the King James Bible has been “modernised” to the extent that even 1 Corinthians 13 can sound prosaic! As the link, below, indicates,the term “extreme unction” (a poetic phrase that conjured up fearful images of death when I was at Catholic primary school) was changed to the “Annointing of the Sick”. ‘Dies Irae’, though makes me think of Mozarts magnificent Requiem.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Unction
        Pax vobiscum!
          1. Splendid! Must be very uplifting to sing such wonderful music. Just fired up iTunes and am listening to “Lacrimosa” as I type. Spine-tingling stuff!
      2. You’ve reminded me that I have never read Madame Bovary.
        “Three Tales” was one of our set books in French A-Level. Perhaps they thought M.B. would be a bit much for a bunch of 17-year old boys. I read a good review of a recent translation in the Sydney Morning Herald a few weeks ago so I’ll have to get it when I get back there.
    2. Presumed you watched the overdue airing of the Last Goon Show at the weekend? And Ray as the Red Bladder featured – great foil for Bloodnok!

      I will never EVER tire of listening to Milligna and Co – in my opinion Spike is truly (often misused) a Comic Genius!!

  11. Struggled home in 45 minutes, with question marks beside the ORACLE (thanks for the enlightenment, vinyl) and OVARY with its definition “part”. Apart from that I wasn’t helped by putting POP UP at 6ac, thinking it had something to do with pawning. Overall, highly entertaining, with its CONVENIENCE and STAR TREK but COD to INCORPORATE, which I didn’t believe could possibly be an anagram.
    1. Agreed with the COD. Couldn’t see the anagram myself and you can bet what I pencilled in with just I????R?O???E !!
  12. The day a time of 17:56 indicates a difficult puzzle… Well, no point in speculating. Good bit slower but exactly the same last 3 as Ulaca, with BOB UP getting a chuckle and so my COD. Consoled by knowing “work the oracle” and choosing MISSES.
  13. 12:58, and an entertaining challenge to get the brain moving early (with builders in, I have been up with the lark these last two weeks, which has meant doing the puzzle over breakfast for a change).

    Having got 4 down mostly from knowing The Pogues’ track The Wild Cats of Kilkenny, it struck me that I’d clearly never thought about where the title came from, so thanks for the link, George. It’s a rare week when one doesn’t learn something new from this blog. (I also found myself thinking “Oh my God, they killed Kenny…”, but that’s another story).

    1. I got to thinking about KILKENNY as I was doing the puzzle and wondered whether the South Park people deliberately called the character Kenny to match the word “kill”. Just a thought. Like in “Dr Who” they had a leading character called Donna Noble. I can’t sing Dona Nobis Pacem without thinking of her. Deliberate or just serendipity?
  14. A very slow start and an even slower finish for me, but in between I hit a purple patch and it all started to come together nicely.

    At 45 minutes I still had three unsolved: 6dn, 7dn and 10ac. After finally cracking the wordplay at 10ac (I didn’t know the definition required here) I realised something must be amiss and reviewed my answer at 6ac where as my first one in I had written POP UP. I had been thinking of the wrong uncle, the one where one goes to pop one’s weasel.

    I should have realised this error sooner because although the checker suggested PAH at 7d which fitted the definition, I couldn’t make sense of the wordplay so I didn’t write it in.

    Rather a good puzzle, I thought, but if I had been blogging it I would have been at panic stations with only three answers after 10 minutes and one of those was wrong as it turned out.

  15. MISSIS is given as an alternative spelling to MISSUS so isn’t it the answer as a MISS IS not a hit?
  16. Having finally got round to last Sunday’s jumbo last night, quite tricky, and then had this this morning, I am feeling a bit drained.. well blogged George, this isn’t easy. My solution is all correct but I got one wrong in the jumbo, dammit..

    I had trouble in the NE having put pop up in first but got it sorted eventually.. c25mins though. Some nice clues, unlike George I liked 25ac, v neat.

  17. 26/30 without aids. All my troubles were in the NE corner – KILKENNY, LEVIATHAN, BLADDER and BAH all missing – compounded by a wrong POP UP. Remembered CICERONE from a recent puzzle so got that quickly this time round.

    Does anyone know where to find a printable version of yesterday’s 2nd qualifying puzzle? Is it online in the Times Crossword Club? The cryptic on the homepage and in the iPad Times yesterday was the 6 April 1981 one.

    1. This is still on the Club site. If you’re a member and can’t find it, PM me with an email address and I’ll send it to you.
      mctext
  18. Late start today but a clean 20 minutes, with the tree nymph and Madame Bovary’s contents taking up the last few minutes. I thought there we heffalump traps all over this grid, and was relieved to find I’d got MISSES right (does it really sound the same as Mrs?). Perhaps worth commenting that in the communities I grew up in it was not uncommon for unmarried sisters to be referred to as “the Misses Smith”, so perhaps the soundalike bit of the clue is superfluous!
    Cicerone was a vague inference from somewhere, and likewise I’d heard of the Kilkenny cats without having a clue as to what they were or why they fought, but there was more than a whiff of Southpark here. Or is that how the character got his name?
    CoD to the magic anagram at 12, with a side order of PLINTH just for not being clued by a Snow White song.
  19. 42 minutes, with much scraping the barrel of my meagre general knowledge to find CICERONE, UNCTION (of the extreme variety), LEVIATHAN and the cats of KILKENNY. Held up in the NE corner by putting POP UP for much the same reason as others. Bravely provocative of George to refer to Star Trek as “largely forgotten”.
  20. Back after an absence, and Live Journal playing up. 10:18 for me, but held up for a couple of minutes by carelessly throwing in POP UP at 6ac. LEVIATHAN last in, and COD to 6dn for the surface.
  21. Liked the puzzle. knew it was Cicerone but had to come here to understand the word play so thank you for a good blog. i agree with the comment that if its difficult its 17:56 is amazing! so well done!
    meantime i liked the star trek clue too!
  22. I also liked the Star Trek clue and boggle at the idea that it might be forgotten. Have you not seen Galaxy Quest George, a truly superb film which (among many other things) both parodies and pays homage to it? Even the Wikipedia article is a laugh
  23. What a good crossword! Thank you, setter, and thank you George for the blog, and others, for highlighting the nuances in the wordplay that I had missed (e.g. “work the oracle”, “sal volatile”). Probably about an hour all told but in several mini-sessions (and I’m sure the subconscious was at work when I was not formally focussing on the crossword).

    Lots of good clues but my COD goes to 21ac: the oxymoronic (not quite the right word) conjunction of the ‘gents’ with ‘food’ made me squirm … an unusual reaction when doing the crossword.

  24. Phew, that was hard work, but I got there. In something over two hours. Cheated just a tiny bit for DRYAD, which led to OVARY.
    Not sure I can justify doing one of these every day at this rate. Not when the gutters need cleaning.
  25. Steady 30 minute solve. Liked most of it and appreciated some of the well disguised references. Didn’t like OVARY, my last in and guessed from checkers. Awful clue in my opinion.
  26. I think I was on the right wavelength today with a steady 23 minute solve. No real problems, although I didn’t think of Hobbes for the LEVIATHAN reference and needed all the checkers. (By the time I came to him in philosophy I’d lost the will to live) I’m always excited to see Trek references in the Times. The first time one appeared, I think in the late 70s or early 80s, I was so enraptured that I wrote to the paper to tell them so. (Not printed, of course) In the 70’s Trek fans paid my expenses for a trip stateside as the UK’s Star Trek fan representative! We actually thought the show would be forgotten in 10 years. I assume George’s comment was tongue in cheek – today it seems everyone is a Star Trek fan. Except me – I’ve moved on to Buffy and Battlestar Galactica.
    1. Yes, the comment was a little deliberate prodding, I was expecting full-scale hate mail. Looking forward to blogging a clue with a Dr. Who reference to give it a similar treatment and see what happens.

      For what it’s worth Blakes 7 > Red Dwarf > Dr. Who > Star Trek and all associated

      1. I was going to say the warring tribes of cats in your Kilkenny reference reminded me of the Cat’s origins and Lister’s god status in Red Dwarf. With you on Blakes 7.
    1. There’s only a few famous Emmas is crosswordland. The 2 fictional ones are Emma, the Jane Austen title character, and Emma Bovary from the French novel “Madame Bovary”. The historical one is Emma Hamilton, Nelson’s bit on the side. With these puzzles you live and learn but most of us started knowing little and picked things up along the way. Good luck.
  28. 10:22 for me – at the end of a tiring day, otherwise I’d have been rather quicker (CONVENIENCE FOOD and MISSES held me up at the end for no good reason). Nice puzzle.
  29. A bit more than an hour and one mistake (LEVIATHON?), but I’m surprised I got even that close. CICERONE, TASMAN SEA, KILKENNY and PINCHBECK only from wordplay and many others were pure guesses, at least when I filled them in, although in some cases I did eventually manage to work out a justification. Actually quite enjoyable: hard but fair.

    If I haven’t contributed to the blog for a while, there were two reasons, one pleasant (a week in Andalusia and Gibraltar, where in 1954 the royal family “made friends with the apes”, as the plaque said) and one not so (several puzzles I simply couldn’t finish, including the ones I took to Spain to solve there).

  30. Back from a few days holiday with unexpectedly difficult internet access.
    Just wanted to check in at this late hour to say thanks for the blog, especially useful today because this puzzle had an unusual number of clues that I couldn’t parse: ORACLE, STAR TREK (I’m surprised at the lack of complaints – and not just from the south-west – about the unindicated DBE here), COMPUNCTION, KILKENNY, SAL. PINCHBECK also unknown.
    With all that, all correct in 34 minutes.
    I read 2dn as “event” = “function” with its extreme (“f”) covered by COMP. With this firm grasp of the wrong end of the stick I thought it a dreadful clue!
  31. I thought the definition was “is not a hit”, which makes the answer, unambiguously, MISSES.

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