Times 24830 – Could have been worse, but not by much…

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
My time taken to solve this was off the scale for the third consecutive day. I made a good start in the NE corner but quickly ground to a halt and after that it was like a war of attrition as I battled away gradually solving the clues one by one as they came into my sights. I have only one quibble (at 26ac) but I may have overlooked something that makes it all right and at worst it’s just a loose definition. Generally a toughie of a puzzle of a very high standard. There were very few gifts today.

Across
1 F,OPS
3 P(E)ACEMAKER- A pacemaker is an early leader in a race or competition.
9 I’M,PAST,0 – This is paint applied thickly so that it is raised from the surface.
11 Deliberately omitted. Just find seven consecutive letters in the clue and mix them up.
12 SHA(MAN,IS)M – Belief in the world of good and evil spirits.
13 RATIOn
14 FOOLHARDIEST – Anagram of I (one) and A LOT OF HERDS. ‘Originally’ is the anagrind.
18 QUARTER-FINAL – QUARTER for ‘region’ and FINAL for ‘settled’ as in ‘That’s final/That’s settled’.
21 sTRUCK – ‘Van’ as in the foremost part of something.
22 BATTLEAXE – Anagram of A (area) and TEXTABLE. ‘Not normally’ is the anagrind.
24 T(U,B,B)IER – TIER as in one who ties clued by ‘drawer’.
25 ROYALTY – Double definition. After yesterday’s debacle I was quick to spot that money was on the table here.
26 SEX,AGE,S(I’M)A – SA is ‘sex appeal’ otherwise known as ‘it’, and that’s how it’s clued here. I’m not sure I like the definition. Sexagesima is the second Sunday before Lent so it’s only ‘one day before Lent’ in the sense that it’s ‘A’ day before Lent, but so are many other days, Palm Sunday Septuagesima for example. Seems a bit loose unless I’m missing something.
27 COaxED – A straightforward definition but I didn’t happen to know it can mean a schoolgirl, only that it is a type of school.
 
Down
1 FAIL-SAFE – Anagram of Fine LIFE AS A. ‘Vagrant’ is the anagrind.
2 POP,PA,DOM – I liked the definition ‘starter to snap’ and the wordplay ‘upset youth on bike’ for MOD reversed. I’m glad today’s setter hasn’t clued them as hooligans.
4 E CO,LIe – I love the surface-reading of this one.
5 CO(L,U)MBINE – A fictional character in Commedia dell’Arte who dresses as a servant girl.
6 MIST,RUST(FULL)Y- I spent more time parsing this clue than any other. Having worked it out I can’t see what was difficult about it. I distracted myself thinking of films called MISTY (there are several but none of them famous enough to make the Times crossword) and I wasn’t completely sure about FULL meaning ‘drunk’ which turns out to be used mainly in Australia, NZ and Scotland, at least according to one of my dictionaries.
7 KNOT,fraughT,Y – A granny knot is a mis-tied reef knot that’s liable to slip.
8 RETRO,D
10 Son,WAS (H) BUCKLING
15 RARE, BIRD,Stirring – BIRD and ‘porridge’ are slang terms for a prison sentence.
16 IN,TAG,LIO – OIL reversed provides the ending. This is etching on gemstones.
17 BLUE-EYED – Anagram of E (European) and BY EU LED referencing the expression ‘blue-eyed boy’ meaning someone who’s treated with special favour.
19 Deliberately omitted but I’ll mention that ‘shell-like’ is slang for ‘ear’.
20 OUTBOX – ‘ In flower’ = OUT. The rest is obvious, I think.
23 THRU,M –  Ends of threads left over in weaving.

43 comments on “Times 24830 – Could have been worse, but not by much…”

  1. What an excellent puzzle, the best for quite some time. And congratulations Jack on a first class blog.

    I’m with you on 26A where “one day” is being used as shorthand for “one of the days” and for me that’s a bit of a stretch. However the cryptic left do doubt, particularly with the “X” from 20D

    Some of the definitions are an absolute delight (extreme form of rash for example) and that combined with good wrodplay (as in POPPADOM) made for 35 minutes of real pleasure. Thank you setter.

  2. I’m in your camp, Jack. Very tough, particularly the lower half, after a reasonably quickly completed top half. Putting TIME for porridge at 15d didn’t help my cause. Last in was OUTBOX, and I had no idea what the “cap in ring” was about for some 10 minutes after that; thinking it somehow went with INBOX. THRUM was a complete unknown. Some cracking clues for the second day running but COD to SWASHBUCKLING, but really, you could take your pick.
  3. All quiet on the blog today, which is perhaps as it should be.

    I spent more than an hour on this last night, in the grip of a slight fever which ran a little hotter at the realisation that I had bitten off more than my febrile brain could easily chew. I wish I’d left it for the weekend when I could have better enjoyed the wonderfully elliptical thinking behind so much of this puzzle.

    Tremendous effort, jackkt. Thank you. You’ve said it all (including on 26a).

  4. NOW I understand outbox! Thank you, jackt! In mistrustfully, I’ve lived in Sydney for most of the past 20 years but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of “full” meaning drunk, despite it obviously being in dictionaries. I shall have to ask some true=blue Aussies!
    1. Agreed Martin that it’s rarely used now. But growing up in Australia in the 60’s and 70’s, “full” was the term most commonly used for drunk.
    2. More common as part of a metaphor? “Full as a boot” was common slang when I started drinking in Oz in the 1980s.
  5. A terrific puzzle: everything that’s good about the Times Crossword. 11m 40s of sheer pleasure. Spoilt for choice for a COD, so thanks to the setter, and jackkt for an excellent blog
  6. I found this quite a slog, though mainly in a nice way.. some fine clues but also some that I thought pushed the boundaries a little too far. Still not sure I follow the wordplay for 5dn.
    1. Its CO(L-U)MBINE; left=L; posh=U; which “swell”=make bigger marry=COMBINE
  8. I did this in the aftermath of a drink fuelled 60th birthday party – which has to be my excuse for the time it took me to get started. After 10 minutes I had only E-COLI, OTITIS and INTAGLIO. All at opposite corners of the grid and standing in splendid isolation! After a reviving cuppa I made painfully slow progress and put down the pen after 65 minutes hard slog. 1 mistake – the spelling of SEXAGESIMA – which I meant to look up but forgot. I sort of recognised the word but didn’t bother to parse the cryptic – hence the duff spelling. I saw the SEX but assumed incorrectly that it was the “congress” part of the clue. I had E rather than A as the last letter. I’m not too worried about the slow time since I felt a great sense of achievement in finishing at all! I would have seriously hated having to blog this. Congratulations and thanks to jackkt for his splendid blog.
    1. Forgive me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick but SEX is the congress part of the clue, no?
      2. You’re right. I’m getting my congress mixed up with my sex appeal. A naughty clue all round!
  9. Hmmmm… E-COLI made me smile, and squatter mislead me for a while. But mods rode scooters, with Esso tiger tails and lots of wing-mirrors; we rockers were the ones on motorbikes. (Though “starter to snap” was a very clever definition.) All in all, not my sort of puzzle; if I want the B Mephisto I’ll buy the Sunday paper.
    1. Motor scooters, mopeds, motorbikes all qualify as motorcycles which generically can be classified as bikes.
      1. I knew a mod who had the side-panels of his scooter kicked in for expressing such an opinion!
        1. Oh dear! I hope that mindless violence is not a consideration in determining the meaning of words.
  10. Well, it’s a starter (initial item on menu before main course is tackled) and to eat it one snaps it into pieces before dipping it something delicious.
  11. I got the wordplay, but what’s the definition and how is it related to “starter to snap”.
    Barbara
  12. Massive failure. Didn’t get OUTBOX, SEXAGESIMA, COED or THRUM.
    Tiny error in your excellent blog, Jackkt. Palm Sunday is not before Lent. I have painful memories of it always being the longest Mass of the year, the only consolation being that the Easter Bunny was only a week away.
    1. Thanks for that. I had a lot to deal with this morning and wrote without full consideration. I’ve amended to another example but of course it didn’t have to be a day in the church calendar to illustrate my point.
  14. I was so glad this wasn’t a weekend puzzle, and that Jack’s excellent blog came out before I had to go to bed, so I could find out how e.g. 20d and 6d worked.This was a wonderfully tough puzzle; took me 65′ to get all but 2d and 14ac, and seemingly forever to get them. I can’t understand why 14 was so resistant–mainly because I persisted in taking ‘extreme’ to refer to the outer letters of ‘rash’. And I actually thought of POPPADOM early on and didn’t see why it worked. As it was, I typed in PAPPADOM.
  15. Fell adrift with a guess at thrim: didn’t see thru (which don’t like but accept exists). 44 enjoyable minutes but not exquisitely so: not in the Times top rank for me. Speaking of ranks, I’d have thought someone who ties is a tyer but no doubt the other spelling’s OK, rather than the other way of looking at it (drawer=rank=tier).
    1. Just to confirm ‘tier’ and ‘tyer’ are both correct.

      With ref to ‘drawer’ = ‘rank’ (also as raised by the Anons above) there may be a case to be made but I’d suggest that ‘drawer’ doesn’t have this meaning unless qualified by ‘top’ or ‘bottom’ or maybe ‘middle’.

  16. Very good puzzle – SEXAGESIMA was in Mephisto a few weeks ago, so that got me started on the bottom half. Last in FOOLHARDIEST which I got from banging against the checking letters.
  17. The last two weeks seem to have been filled with fascinating but very tough puzzles. Mostly we have got close to finishing, but today was Armageddon.Some great clues e.g. IMPASTO, but still non the wiser with why rare birds = exceptional cases, why cap in ring is outbox, or what thrim has to do with per metre. I assume 19d is ot + fish, but what fish, please tell.
    Kind regards
    Mike & Fay
    1. ‘Rare birds’ is simply an expression used to mean things that are not common e.g. exceptional cases.

      If you outbox somebody you beat them in the boxing ring. Cap is a synonym for beat.

      19d is OTITIS from (p)OT(s) (w)IT(h) (f)IS(h). It’s a disease or condition of the ear or ‘shell-like’ (see blog).

      23d is THRUM and as explained in the blog comes from THRU (through) clued by ‘per’ and followed by M for ‘metre’.

      1. I assumed that ‘rare bird(s)’ is simply a calque on Latin ‘rara avis’; I’d actually never come across the expression in English. And sure enough Wikipedia cites Juvenal: rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno (a rare bird in the land, very like a black swan).
        1. Like you, I’ve never heard “rara avis” in English but guessed that it probably existed. Thanks for the full quotation. Did Juvenal satires for A level but didn’t recognise the quote.
          1. Rare Bird was a prog rock band formed in 1969, who released about 5 albums (on Charisma I think). Their only hit was Sympathy.
  18. 19:45 for me, again not helped by taking ages to spot that I’d typed EATIO (also ITITIS, but that didn’t hold me up apart from a moment spent correcting it on my final check-through). A very fine puzzle.
  19. The (online) OED has citations for “rare bird” dating from 1553 (or 1532 of you’re prepared to accept “byrd rare”) to 2004, so the English form has been around for some time and is still going strong.
  20. Great puzzle (albeit my time matched jackkt’s); great blog and entertaining comments. But a bit of a surprise to come here to check on later comments and find that I had not blogged earlier! Yes, it was my oversight (not LJ); yet another ‘senior moment’ …
  21. Needed aids for the last 6 clues. Very tough. Will stop now because it’s Saturday.
  22. Another Good Friday stunner. Limped home in a couple of stints either side of dinner in Macau. Didn’t see wordplay for THRUM and OTITIS and ballsed up the hollowed stone by inventing a game called ‘rag’. Well done, Jack.
  23. Very late comment from me after an extremely busy family weekend that barely gave me time for the puzzles, let alone the blog.
    Just wanted to thank you jackkt for the excellent blog, which I needed. I found this very tough. Done between cooking for and running after hordes of kids so no time, but as I was outboxed by OUTBOX this is academic.

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