Times 24826 – The Bush Doctor is late!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 19 minutes

Music: Dvorak, New World Symphony,Fricsay

Another Monday special for you speed demons out there. I was only slowed down by having the flip the LP with one to go. There is nothing really difficult here at all, unless lame jokes give you trouble. No science, no literature, and only a little bit of music, and one plant which I had to guess from the cryptic.

After some of my previous blogs, I hesitate to say that a puzzle is suitable for beginners, but you have to start somewhere.

Across
1 ACROSTIC, anagram of C[haracters} + &nbsp ACTORS + I[n] C[harge]. I believe this type of puzzle is more popular in the US, but I never cared for them. Oops, sorry about that.
9 ON CAMERA, or ON CAME R.A, for his cameo, I suppose.
10 FOREGO, or FOR EGO. A word that is not widely used, and that is often confused with ‘forgo’.
11 RUBBER BAND, double definition, one jocular.
12 Omitted, this is one you can look up.
13 UNIMPAIRED, UN(1 M)PAIRED. Cryptic not needed for me.
16 SKETCHY, SK(ETCH)Y. Not a deceptive clue, since ‘etch’ and ‘sketch’ go together, especially if you owned an Etch-A-Sketch in back in the day.
17 PRELACY, P(REL[igions])ACY. A word out of the Puritan pamphleteers.
20 MURPHY’S LAW, another lame jest.
22 Omitted, you’ll have to look down for this one.
23 WASHINGTON, double definition
25 KLAXON, K[ing] LAX ON. I wanted ‘king’ to be ‘R’ or ‘GR’, and ‘about’ to be a reversal indicator, so I was very annoyed to find how easy this should have been.
26 ANGELICA, anagram of A GLANCE + 1. Like most plants, I had not heard of it, but there can’t be any doubt. I will look it up anyway…..
27 UNEVENLY, double definition, another one that should not have given trouble but did.
 
Down
2 COOKBOOK, C + O + OK + B + O + OK. Most solvers will not bother with this overly elaborate cryptic when the literal hands it to you.
3 OVER THE TOP, double definition. Since we use OTT so much, this should not surprise anyone.
4 THOROUGHLY, THO’ ROUGHLY.
5 CON BRIO, C[ountry] + ON + B(R)IO. The only mildly obscure bit in this puzzle.
6 Omitted….you can’t spot it?
7 REPAIR, double definition. They could at least have used the golf tournament meaning, that would have been fun They did not re-pair this past weekend at the Malaysian Open.
8 CANDIDLY, CAN + D[ay] + IDLY.
14 PERIWINKLE, double definition. You may or may not have heard of the plant, but it should be pretty evident with the crossing letters.
15 ILLITERATE, I’LL ITERATE. All you need is a iterator, which a Java programmer can create whenever one is needed.
16 SOMEWHAT, anagram of HOW TEAMS.
18 CHARCOAL, CHAR + C + O[n} + A + L. Note the versatility of ‘char’ in these puzzles, where a fish can clean your house on a daily basis. The C++ or Java meaning of ‘char’ is never used…..but it could be.
19 PLATEAU, PLATE + AU. Obvious unless you expect ‘gold’ to be ‘or’, and the answer to be a food.
21 RESIGN, RE-SIGN. The root meaning of ‘subscribe’ is the one called for here.
24 NAIF, F(I)AN upside down.

51 comments on “Times 24826 – The Bush Doctor is late!”

  1. Personal best of 7:48, still only good enough for 4th on the leaderboard when I got done. Actually I needed to piece COOKBOOK together from the wordplay and was then smacking myself on the head. Only knew one of the PERIWINKLES, but when it wasn’t some form of PERENNIAL, what else could it be?

    Acrostics are reasonably popular here, there’s usually one in a weekend edition of the New York Times (not sure if it’s Saturday or Sunday) and you can find them in a few airline magazines. I occasionally teach a class on word puzzles, and I start them off with acrostics and US-style crosswords as a build-up to cryptics. Acrostics are much easier to set than fully checked grids.

  2. Hi vinyl, and George as well. Nice chance to check in early. Congrats on the PB, George. I agree this was an easy one, about 15 minutes, top to bottom, left to right, ending with CHARCOAL. Nice start to the week. If there’s a COD, I’ll nominate PLATEAU for the nice surface, but it’s possible there’s no real COD due to the basic level of this puzzle. But, even though less than rigorous, PLATEAU is very nice anyway, and MURPHYS LAW is entertaining. Regards to all.
  3. 17’ — and not a lot to say about it really. Except that I’m sure we’ve seen MURPHY SLAW before. And: 13ac and 27ac are oddly paired?

    Now a bit off topic: I think I’ve worked out why some of us don’t like on-line solving. There was a neuro-something chap on the radio who said that his research had shown that reading black letters on a white screen tends to cause the CNS to release Noradrenaline; while reading black letters on a white page leads to the release of Serotonin. So we get stressed by screen-reading but relaxed by the lo-tech variety.

    1. Not sure what gets released when I do these things, but for me the difference is to be found in three factors: 1) can’t do anagrams in my head, 2) letters going off in all directions or none at all 3) fat fingers.
    2. You would come up with that on the day that I finally manage a fast (sub-ten) time online! Do you happen to recall the name of the boffin, or the radio show? I’m interested in this stuff.
      1. Sorry, I’ve only just seen your post. As for the radio program: I was listening with half an ear while driving a work car. So I’m not even sure what the station was. Possibly our local ABC. Sorry not to be of more help.
  4. 14’30”, rather to my surprise, as my first one in was PRELACY. (Good thing I knew my Puritans, since ‘pacy’ was new to me.) Vinyl pretty much said it all, although I will say that ‘murphy’=potato is one that I only knew from doing these puzzles. 6d, without the ‘Cane, possibly’, could have been a NY Times clue.
    1. ‘Pacy’ is a term often used to describe a fast bowler in cricket, which is probably why it’s less familiar to you than to us loyal subjects of Her Majesty.
      Cricket must be the bane of U.S. crossword solvers. I have a similar problem with music, religion, botany, literature, history, geography, languages, philosophy, food, art, science, popular culture and general knowledge. But I’m red-hot when it comes to cricket.
          1. And I only got REPAIR today because of cricket, via Francis Thompson’s beautifully evocative “At Lord’s”.
            Not one of KP’s faves, I’m guessing.
            1. Just thinking of who would admit to being ignorant at everything else but claim to be brilliant at cricket. Also see Lara, B; Hick, G.
            2. Despite coming from the white rose county, I’m another fan of At Lords.

              When Edmund Akenhead retired as Times crossword editor, Roy Dean (the doyen of the Times Crossword Championship in fact as well as in name) gave a speech in tribute to him at the Championship final that year (the Championships were always held in London in those days – and will be again this year :-), where he borrowed Francis Thompson’s lines. I can’t remember the whole thing, but the final line was:
              “Oh my Akenhead in London long ago!”

  5. 30 mins with one wrong – the one too easy to bother blogging as so often – making me one cross stick. (Well, we needed another awful joke, no?)
  6. Well, MURPHYS LAW made me laugh. Vinyl must have solved it during the sad movement.
    1. I know it. That’s the one where t’ little boy pushes his bike up to t’ top of hill and all his Hovises fall out onto t’ cobblestones.
  7. 23 minutes for all but 17 and 18 but took another 6 to crack them. Still, anything under 30 is a good day for me. Very unusually at the end of the solving my printed copy had no workings in the margins and only two (?)s at the edges of the grid to remind me to go back and decipher the wordplay later.

    Incidentally ‘forgo’ meaning to do without something can also be spelt ‘forego’

    The saga of printing in grey using Firefox 4.0 has moved on to a new stage following a helpful tip posted in the Club forum and I’ll repeat it here in case anyone who’s interested hasn’t see it there. What you have to do is click Print Grey, then when the printing dialogue box appears, cancel the print and click Print Grey again and this time it works. Or nearly does, for me. Now, although the grid is lightly shaded to save black ink it’s now of a pink hue like the pages of the Financial Times. I know I can reset to print in grayscale but that wasn’t necessary using previous versions of Firefox. Anyway I’m pleased to be back to the slightly smaller grid and slightly larger font for the clues than IE delivered whilst I was using it to avoid heavy black in Firefox.

  8. 23 minutes here, after the odd clueless hold-up, such as writing ‘in camera’ at first. Good sound but slightly plain fare. Slightly surprised by ‘forego’: surely archaic? I quite like the bad joke in 20.
  9. I think “puzzle involving leading characters” is the definition – the extra C is not needed in the anagram.
    1. I would have to agree. I quite like acrostic puzzles, and they generally involve the author of the quotation spelled out in the initials of the answers. So ‘Puzzle involving leading characters’ is undoubtedly the definition. Besides, as you say, there are too many Cs otherwise. It’s just (ACTORS + IC)*.
  10. 5 minutes, some of them just loving the bad puns (surely a tautology – there’s no such thing as a good pun. “A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself.” – Doug Larson). Enjoyed the way this one exploited the flexibility of English, particularly with RUBBER BAND, which really should be how bridge players are termed, and the salad.
    I don’t particularly care if MURPHY’s Law has been in before; it made me laugh out loud, and is easily my CoD.
    I did think some of the others were particularly undemanding: WASHINGTON, PERIWINKLE and ACNE were right out of Crosswords for Dummies, but COOKBOOK exploited a neat device, and I also appreciated on came RA and K lax on. Good, cheerful fun.
  11. Comfortably under 30 minutes but without truly understanding wordplay for REPAIR. I spent far too long trying to find an alternative and I still can’t see a double definition – even after repairing here for guidance. Maybe I should have resorted to aids but could I have repaired to aids?

    Otherwise a gentle and enjoyable start to the week.

    1. Repair in the sense of resort, both verbs, is probably a bit archaic, familiar enough to those of us that sing from Hymns Ancient and Modern. From “When Morning Gilds the Skies”: “Alike at work and prayer, to Jesus I repair”. So yes, repairing here for guidance is a precise usage.
      1. Thanks, z8b8d8k! Your explanation has struck some distant chords in my memory.
      2. Thanks for that. I didn’t know this meaning of “resort”. However I was perfectly happy with my interpretation of “repair” as an invented term for “to put back into pairs”, i.e. re-sort. Wrong, but it did the job!
  13. Much gentler than some of last week’s offerings, which I am currently working my way through. 26 minutes. “State capital” must be a contender for the easiest Times crossword clue of all time, but most of the others were ok, with some nice moments of levity.
  14. I am writing on behalf of a friend, John Halpern a.k.a. Paul (Guardian cryptic crossword setter). I help look after his online profile, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and the like. John has just started out writing a regular blog; he writes once a week. Its all about wordplay and an insight into his world/his mind. I see that you have a great blog about crosswords, and that you have guest bloggers.

    I wondered if you would be interested in using some of Johns content, or linking to his blog.

    You can see his blog here:
    http://crypticcrosswordplanet.wordpress.com/

    You can also see his Twitter profile here:
    http://twitter.com/crypticpaul

    My name is Alex by the way. You are welcome to contact John directly at [email protected], or contact both of us via the blog.

    Look forward to hearing from you soon,
    Best regards,

    Alex
    (for and on behalf of John)

    1. Hi Alex,

      I know John from numerous crossword get-togethers (usually in pubs). I’ll add the blog to our list of “Other Crossword Sites”.

      Regards,
      Andy

  15. My fastest ever time for the Times – exactly 10 mins. All today’s cryptics seem to be designed for today’s weather – all solved in very fast times to allow me to enjoy the afternoon sun.
  16. 25:42 – a leisurely canter through today. I was held up for a couple of minutes at the end by 21/26. My mind goes blank when any kind of plant is required, but as soon as 21 clicked, I realized an anagram was required which made it somewhat easier.

    I’ve taken the liberty of unscreening a couple of anonymous comments, Jonathan, I hope that’s OK. One of them points out a slight mistake in your parsing of 1a. Are all anonymous comments screened now, does anybody know? When did this start happening?

    1. I hadn’t noticed this before, so it must be very recent. There were a couple of comments screened in a previous Saturday blog, but as they were in Cyrillic script and seemed to be adverts for holiday rentals, I deleted them!

      I’ll have a look to see if there’s a default setting somewhere that’s changed. LJ have been having a lot of trouble lately with DDOS attacks, so that could be the reason if they’ve made the change.

  17. Must have been in a similar mood to vinyl. 25 minutes. I did rather like the construction of TOSH, though, which gets my COD, ahead of RUBBER BAND and KLAXON.
  18. Here we go again! Live Journal is getting very adept at losing comments.

    A leisurely 20 minutes but a very uninteresting puzzle, I thought, with some very obvious clues at 1, 3, 6, 16, 22 (where ‘although’ jars in the cryptic), and 24. 23, another obvious answer, was a very poor double definition. Given such easy clues, I should have completed it more quickly, but was having a snack at the time, so not always on task.

  19. 9:59, limping through the bottom half (for no good reason) after finishing the top half pretty quickly.  PRELACY (17ac) and ANGELICA (26ac) were unfamiliar, but I was surprised to find CON BRIO (5dn) knocking about in the back of my head.  Congratulations to George on a fine PB!

    Not many candidates for Clue of the Day, but I’d go for the solid 7dn (REPAIR).

  20. 11:25 here, with a phone call in the middle, so I also found it pretty easy (possibly sub-10 without the interruption).

    Last one in for me was PRELACY, a word I’d not come across, although easy enough to construct and relate back to prelate.

  21. A leisurely hour or so (well, just over an hour), but I agree that there was nothing particularly inspiring in this puzzle, even if it took me ages to see some things (such as RESIGN, my last in after staring at it for what was some people’s total solving time).
  23. there are more of us than you think. if it weren’t for wordplay i would not get anything!;-) oh and i’m not one of the above mentioned.

    ak

  25. 6:14 for me – but I made desperately heavy weather of several clues, so I suspect the real speed merchants would have produced some cracking times.
  26. Hello there, Andy. Perhaps I could ask you to restore me revived RTC3 blog while you’re about it now that it’s settled into a fairly regular Sunday posting.
    1. Done. I’ve moved it to the “Other Crossword Sites” header as it’s no longer a solving blog as such.
  27. Along with several others i too scored a PB not only cracking the 10 minute barrier but also notching up a sub-8min time. Out in the sun; nerves keyed up prior to an audition for the Weakest Link might have helped. I know i know don’t scoff.
    1. Great stuff, Alan. If you can knock that much off your previous PB, I suspect you still have further to go.

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