Times 24834: L’eau ebb?

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 16 minutes.

Went through this pretty quickly while hanging around in a waiting room. The only real problems were in the SE corner where I almost failed the Turing Test and nearly became unanchored under the dubious influence of Sinn Fein.

 

Across
 1 SCIMITAR. Anagram of ‘armistic{e}’.
 9 O,RANGER,Y.
10 QUARTERS. Two defs.
11 ENDORSES. Anagram of ‘Red noses’.
12 PECULATION. {S}peculation. ‘Blue-sky’ = speculative, not yet practical or profitable.
14 Omitted. Not a sausage!
15 SUB,DUAL.
17 J(UD)OIST. Inserted letters from ‘rUeD’. As the conundrum has it: what’s the difference between a joist and a girder?
21 NOUS. Two defs: the Frog for ‘we’ and one’s common sense. (Unless one is a philosopher, in which case it refers to ‘mind’ and — as Noûs — is the title of a hard-to-publish-in journal.)
22 A,LAN (TURIN)G. The director is Friedrich Christian Anton ‘Fritz’ LANG who was fond of women who mooned and pretty much no-one else. Here we have the ‘stopping’ to signal that the city (Turin) is to be included in something else. As we know, it can cut both ways.
23 INFRA DIG. This is a father (FRA) and the diminutive girl (DI) inserted in IN (Home) and the G from ‘Guard’. As Galspray says (below), FR is the father; then A … wee gal (DI).
All a bit awkward I felt; but it can’t be at all easy to clue. Nice twist on ‘unworthy’ but!
25 AN(CHORE)D. The fag is a CHORE and it fills AND.
26 HAND OVER. D for a ‘Duke’ residing in HANOVER.
27 D,READING.
Down
 2 CO(US)T,EAU. His element was water and he was French.
 3 MO(RIB)UND.
 4 TEEM. Sounds like ‘team’. (Except perhaps to some Geordies?)
 5 ROSE,HIP. The latter, as in ‘… hip, hooray’. And yes, bananas are up to about $12 a kilo — so not even one cheer for that.
 6 MAIDEN AUNT. Anagram of ‘Man United’ and A. (Schalke will have their revenge in the Second Leg!)
 7 HEL(SIN)KI. SIN (offence) in an anagram of ‘like’ after H for ‘hours’. Tidy lift and separate and my COD.
 8 EYE,SIGHT. Hear ‘I’ and ‘cite’.
13 ADAM AND EVE. Two defs; one by allusion to the rhyming slang for ‘believe’ (credit).
15 SENNIGHT. Anagram of ‘sing’ and ‘then’. Short for ‘seven night’, a week. ‘Once …’ signals its archaic nature.
16 BLUE FUNK. Blue{s} and … funk. If you’re in a blue funk, you’re in “chiefly Brit. a state of great fear or panic”. Sorry, I don’t understand your banter Algy!
18 ON RECORD. R for ‘river’ inside ONE CORD.
19 SINN FEIN. First and last of FortunatE and IN, all after S (for ‘small’) and INN (pub, local).
20 LAGGARD. Reverse of DRAG and GAL. The def is one who trails (behind).
24 Omitted. Groan!

 

33 comments on “Times 24834: L’eau ebb?”

  1. Held up a bit by the rationale for peculation – still don’t quite get it. 21 minutes. Didn’t know the film director and not sorry, if mooned means what it might – doubt it somehow. Good to see sennight as an adjective – hopelessly archaic but a delightful word.
    1. I don’t think it is. As the blog says: the “once” means “at one time”, i.e., archaic. And “a week” is just a noun.

      On edit:
      • Blue-sky is now explained more fully, with a link to our current Minister of Education!
      • Fritz’s moon prefs are also explained.
      Sorry to be elliptical.

      Edited at 2011-04-27 07:13 am (UTC)

      1. Another highly-trivial query, mctext. In 23a is it FR + A + DI, or is it FRA + DI? Just want to know for future reference whether FRA can be legitimately clued by “father”.
        1. It’s probably the former and I’m wrong! Will adjust accordingly.
          On edit: it must be. ‘Fra’ is from frate (It.): brother. Surprised Fra Jonathan (Vinyl) didn’t pick me up on that one.

          Edited at 2011-04-27 09:56 am (UTC)

  2. Yeah, I struggled as well. Nearly got there, but had to cheat to get PECULATION, having never heard of it. Good clue though, should have sussed it.
    As an Arfur Daley fan, I enjoyed ADAM AND EVE. And as a much bigger ALAN TURING fan, it was good to see him get a guernsey. Like Jack, I couldn’t parse the wordplay, so just assumed that I had missed all of NTURING’s movies to date. Apparently they’re quite big in Iceland.
  3. My general loss of confidence that set in about a week ago took its toll again this morning and I made very heavy weather of this, running out of time on the commute with three unsolved.

    At 7dn I knew I was looking for a capital city but HELSINKI wouldn’t come to mind despite having all the checkers. I was horrified, having eventually cheated, that I didn’t spot the possibility of EVE to fit ?V? where I had become fixated on IVY as the only possible solution and the whole thing being a saying or reference to a tale I had never heard of. I like to think I would have got there unaided if I’d had the first A checker in place but I couldn’t fathom 12ac which I don’t feel quite so bad about not getting.

    I agonised for ever over ALAN TURING, having thought of him early on because I wasn’t able to decipher the wordplay. Firstly I had LA as the city but decided it was wrong because I couldn’t explain the film director, then I decided the city must be UR and the film director that everybody but me would know of was one A. LANTING.

  4. Sorry Jack but I thought this the easiest of the week so far. 15 minutes to solve. There were no real head scratching moments.

    Good to see Alan T appearing again. My memory isn’t what it was but I don’t recall seeing Sinn Fein grace the Times Crossword before. Does this indicate true acceptability to the establishment?

      1. Sinn Fein has been in the Times Crossword before, which is actually the point I think PB is making in that post from 3 years ago. As the second largest political party in N. Ireland and with 5 MPs I think they just about qualify for acceptance 🙂
  5. Up betimes to watch Manchester United lead Schalke 04 a merry dance, which is my excuse for falling two short (the blue clues) in my 90 minutes. Very much a game of two halves, naturally.
  6. 20 minutes. I thought this might be very quick when the first four across clues went in at first sight, and it seemed mostly fairly easy to me but I got bogged down in the ESE. There was some unfamiliar vocabulary but for once nothing I hadn’t heard of. ALAN TURING is becoming a regular visitor.
    I didn’t understand how ANCHORED works so thanks as ever to mctext for the blog.
  7. Probably about 40 minutes overall (several disruptions). Particularly slowed by SW corner (SUBDUAL, SENNIGHT, BLUE FUNK).

    Thanks for the blog, mctext, especially the explanation of the wordplay for ALAN TURING (I was another inventing NTURING as a film director).

  8. Easy one today, not many minutes.. 14 or 15. nice to see St Alan (Turing), for at least the second time in recent weeks.
  9. Wow… this was so far away from being my wavelength that I had to put it away last night and scratch my head over almost every entry this morning. Took me much longer than yesterday, though at the end everything made sense. I think the way in to most of the entries was via the definitions, my usual job of piecing together wordplay yielded very few entries on the first pass.
  10. Time: 33:19, with waning migraine. Cannot Adam and Eve how long it took me to see… you know.

    Thank you, mctext for an particularly fine blog title, plumbing the depths of aquatic punnery and cheering me up no end.

    Nice to be reminded of M. Cousteau. I can still hear him saying “This grouper may be the size of a small family car, but ‘e means me no ‘arm.”

  11. Not easy. About 50 minutes, coming to a complete standstill having got all four four-letter clues straight off the bat. Last in PECULATION; I thought “uninitiated” was very clever. COD to LAGGARD over ANCHORED.
  12. Very slow on this at 34 minutes – probably not firing on all cylinders. HELSINKI’s checkers looked improbable as the last in, and (would you believe it?), I didn’t get “people eating fruit” as the second definition in 13. I was looking desperately for something carpological in the mix, but apart from half a plum (dam) I couldn’t see anything. The obvious city in ALAN TURING evaded me too – I’m very fond of Lanting’s work (or would be if it existed), and having recently lamented the virtual disappearance of Ur, I was perhaps overexcited by seeing it back again.
    Subdual must be a made up word specially to fit awkward sequences in crosswords – it wouldn’t be much good in Scrabble.
    Lots of decent offerings today, CoD either to COUSTEAU or the well-concealed SINN FEIN.
  13. I found this very difficult and seriously thought of abandoning it so that I could get on with my day. I’s years since I’ve stared for so long at a virtually empty grid. However, a few pennies began to slowly drop and I crawled home in 56 minutes. I can’t understand why I found it so hard since all the vocabulary was familiar. Maybe old age is kicking in. My cod ADAM AND EVE. Btw, just like yesterday, my password has been rejected. Second time lucky, I hope.
  15. Definiely on my wavelength today, I zipped through it, all bar one, in (relatively) speedy time. Took me the longest time to fathom PECULATION. Thanks for explanation of the mathematician, hadn’t come across LANG.

    No COD for me today, found it all quite straightforward (think that’s probably a first!)

  16. This does look like one of those curiosities which some find really easy and others much less tractable – it took me twice the time I would normally expect, and clearly others struggled a lot more than usual. “Wavelength” seems to be the primary reason, but any other suggestions out there?
    1. Yes, this one has really divided the troops. Anyway as the day wore on I was glad to find that I’m not alone and possibly even in the majority who found it took longer than their normal solving time.
    2. No idea. Today I seem to have been on the right side of the setter, but I’ve no idea why. The best I can offer is that the part of the puzzle that held me up for 10 minutes (WSW incidentally, not ESE as I said) could very easily have done so for 30: I just happened to know all the relevant stuff. Better lucky than good, as we say in the city.
  17. Add me to the list of slowpokes: 76′, much of the time being spent staring at the SW. I knew SENNIGHT, BLUE FUNK, NOUS, and INFRA DIG, but that didn’t keep me from taking forever to think of them. Did not, on the other hand, know ADAM AND EVE in either sense. I realized on reading the blog that I had never checked 22ac, simply got ALAN TURING from checkers. Waiting for today’s puzzle with some trepidation.
  18. I found it on the tougher side as well, foundering, as vinyl points out, in the SW area where I was held up for a while. My CRS doesn’t extend to ADAM AND EVE, SUBDUAL is uncommon, BLUE FUNK and SENNIGHT are not in my usual vocabulary. My way in was SENNIGHT, only due to its having appeared here before. Nice to see ALAN TURING dropping by, although I didn’t bother with the wordplay which I would never have gotten anyway, so thanks mctext for the explanation. Regards to everyone. To mctext, a fond he’l’eau.
  19. Don’t think so. ‘Not looking forward to’ isn’t strong enough for ‘dreading’.
  20. 11:15 for me, with the unfamiliar SUBDUAL and JUDOIST (particularly the former) slowing me down. A most enjoyable crossword, but I wouldn’t have reckoned it was a doddle.

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