Times 24852: Why did the two chooks cross the M1?

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 14 minutes.

Looks like I scored the dreaded frugal cluer again. So one of those puzzles where you can’t see much to start with but which falls into place quite quickly. The five long (and/or longish) straight anagrams — two 13s, a 12, a 9 and a 7 — really helped … once spotted. No hidden answers today; but three homophones.

 

Across
 1 SACK. Two defs: a container and, if you get the boot, you’re fired. You get the sack. I wanted SOCK as in: the foot goes in the sock; the sock goes in the boot. I preferred this because my local pub as a young chap was called The Boot and the old bloke who was its eternal occupant was known as The Sweaty Sock.
 3 SHOW,JUMPER. ‘Present’ (verb) = SHOW.
 9 TE(NAB)LE. A well-disguised not-homophone.
11 INDULGE. Anagram #1: ‘eluding’.
12 PROPA,GATE. With so many Pseudo-gates after Watergate, it’s about time we had a Proper-gate.
13 RE,EVE. ‘On’ gives us ‘re’; in the matter of, about, concerning … on.
14 ROMAN NUMERAL. Anagram #2: ‘Normal manure’. The nifty def. is ‘I say’.
18 RUPERT BROOKE. PERT BROOK (fresh water) inside RUE.
21 Omitted. Australians never could understand why Ms Lewinsky only wore the one.
22 REC,TANGLE. REC sounds like ‘wreck’ (undo).
24 MA,M,MOTH. Ugly surface but?
25 IRELAND. Two meanings: one is John Ireland, the composer whose long life means that he could have encountered both Offenbach and The Beatles … just about.
26 CHEESED OFF. A cheesy joke.
27 WEAR. On which river lies the city of Sunderland, home of the great Bob Paisley.
Down
 1 SET APART. Reversal of PATES, plus ART.
 2 CON,SOMME.
 4 H(YEN)A. YEN (longing) inside HA{y}.
 5 WHITE MEAT. ITEM inside WHEAT. Slight redolence of def. by example?
 6 UNDERCARRIAGE. Anagram #3: ‘again recurred’.
 7 PULLET. Sounds like ‘pull it’; especially to New Zealanders.
 8 RE(E)FER.
10 BRAIN SURGEONS. Anagram #4: ‘Reasoning rubs’.
15 UNEARTHED. Anagram #5: ‘Tune heard’.
16 ROUG(HAG)E.
17 DEF(END)ER.
19 A,T(OM)IC. Order of Merit.
20 COM(M1)E.
23 Omitted; along with his wife, her lover and two men they met on a bus.

 

45 comments on “Times 24852: Why did the two chooks cross the M1?”

  1. 50 minutes, inexplicably held up by ROUGHAGE. Took a while to get a roll on, but enjoyed the clever anagrams immensely, especially 11ac.
    COD comfortably to “I Say”, which I’m sure will now be revealed as an old chestnut.
  2. Slow to spot one of the anagrams (‘brain surgeons’, appropriately enough) and had ‘prostrate’ for PROPAGATE for a while, so finished in a sedate 66 minutes.

    I was also held up by one of the omitted answers – THONG – as I was working around ‘triad’, a word in more common usage for nefarious Chinese in these parts than ‘tong’, which Google suggests may be more common for ‘Chinese American clandestine Chinese secret societies’.

    … and couldn’t think beyond ‘browned off’ at 26ac for far too long – in fact, until I stopped and thought a bit.

  3. nice time, mctext, as mine was 17 minutes on the dot, held up forever by WEAR and trying to wonder what on earth that last little word could be. RUPERT BROOKE from wordplay. I think I recall hearing that 6 was the maximum for anagrams that the Times would allow in a crossword.
  4. Easyish week so far but found this a real pleasure, witty and imaginative. ‘Gate joke only worked out post-solve. DBE or not WHITE MEAT gets my COD. Thanks setter.
  5. i thought that this was a clever and fairly tough puzzle…also stumped for a while by Roughage. thought defender clever too. can steal mean to cloak in Thong?

    Around an hour of fun!

    well done-very concise blog too..many thanks

    1. A good question. Chambers has “to snatch” as one meaning of “to steal”, which implies some sort of grabbing hold of. There’s also the “gaining possession of” meaning as in stealing yards and marches.
  6. I thought this was a really great cvrossword: on of the most enjoyable for some time. Excellent anagrams and wordplay. 11 and 14ac are gems. Well done to the compiler! 12m 30s.
  7. Took me 49 minutes to get everything but four or so in the NE, and I lost track of how long it took to get them; an hour, anyway, all told. As all too often, once something got in my head I couldn’t get it out, making me waste all kinds of time: I thought ‘catch’ in 9ac was ‘rub’, ‘party’ in 2d was ‘do’, ‘heads up’ in 1d was ‘alert’, so tried to figure out how ‘red alert’ could work, that sort of thing. My first in was RUPERT BROOKE, which told me it was going to be rough sledding. A number of lovely clues (although I did not like PROPAGATE), but my COD to 11ac.
    1. Definition by example. Chicken is an example of white meat. Not too bad in this case; in others, it can make things very difficult.

      Edited at 2011-05-18 07:26 am (UTC)

        1. Maybe we need to update the “Notation” section of “About this blog” to include some of the usual abbreviations??
  10. Enjoyable but stalled for a long time over ROUGHAGE (last in). COD to PROPAGATE. Thanks setter and mctext for a good start to the day.
  11. I’m on the road so solving online today. 19 minutes for this, but with a typo in a crossing letter so two errors. I’m really CHEESER OFF.
    Still, it was a very enjoyable puzzle I thought. The DBE raised an eyebrow but “I say” raised a laugh so we’ll call that even.
    Unknowns today were TONG and IRELAND. No, not the country, even I’ve heard of that.
    Last in WEAR, which also took me ages to see. I thought Sunderland was going to be NE.
  12. Another very slow start for me. I got to 21ac before writing anything in. I finished in 35 minutes with COMMIE and MAMMOTH the last in after a previous hold-up in the NW where thinking of the wrong type of spread gave rise to problems. My first thought had been MARGARINE and then MARMALADE. SACK/SOCK wasted more time.

    I liked PROPAGATE but not the DBE and I think generally I favour the shorter clues.

  13. When I looked at this on my iPad over breakfast I only got “set apart”. Pen and paper solve in the office was much more successful, but needed aids to get the last three: tenable, propagate and roughage. Big tick to Roman numeral. Commie had lodged in my brain since it appeared a few weeks ago.

    DBEs don’t come much more oblique than “it’s clear” for consomme.

    1. Hmmm … “clear” in the clue is not an example of the answer (consommé). So maybe we need a new category: definition by vague allusion?
  14. Very easy puzzle with all those well signposted anagrams and simple links such as water to brook. About 15 minutes to solve.

    Obviously not keen on the DBE. “I say” has a limited number of translations. Once it clearly wasn’t iodine what was left? Interesting that the setter chose to signal DBE only when it suited the wordplay.

  15. All present and correct in a pretty decent time…or so I thought, until I came here and realised it is SACK! Oh well, maybe I can finish tomorrow’s correctly…

    COD: ROMAN NUMERAL; LOI: COMMIE

    Thought 18ac particularly appropriate for me today, as my son’s sitting his Eng GCSE (war poets) this afternoon! Fingers crossed.

  16. Not much to say except thank you, mctext, for an amusing blog. I did like PROPAGATE, so that’s my COD. Time was around 93mins. Got held up by TENABLE, ROUGHAGE and, to my shame, DEFENDER. Took me a while, too, for the penny to drop with “scorer” in 25ac. “D’Oh!”
  17. A very fine crossword in some ways.. just look at those elegant surface readings, those economical clues.. whoever set this is very good at it!

    On the minus side, heavily art/literature biased once again: science score only 0.5/10 for ATOMIC.

    1. I can only see one poet and one composer, unless you count the word “painting” in 1dn. So only 1/10 for art(s)/literature?
      1. I need to explain the scoring system better: you get one point for a word clearly in one camp or the other. 1 point examples would be Brooke, Ireland, weak interaction, neutron etc. You get 1/2 point for a word that is arts or science based but is being used in an ordinary speech sense. Examples might be painting, gravity, atomic… on that basi,s this crossword gets 0.5/10 for science, and 2.5/10 for the arts: 1pt each for the poet and the composer, and 1/2 pt for REEVE which is suspiciously Chaucerian.

        I will concede that scoring is more art than science :-))

        1. By the same token, UNDERCARRIAGE is suspiciously technological and BRAIN SURGEONS suspicioulsy medical?
  18. Where have all the comments gone? Some hours ago there were eleven, including mine, and now we seem to be down to three!
  19. I struggled home in 46 minutes. Not easy for me. Thanks to Jimbo for mentioning the Wear yesterday. A continuation of the prescience begun last week when Times 24848 foretold the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest with AZERI. Well crafted crossword with COD to RUPERT GROOKE ahead of ROMAN NUMERAL.
  20. Log into LJ before you access the blog. It seems to stop these very irritating gliches
  22. 50:58 with 1 wrong. I invented the word FORMIE for 20d having completely failed to spot COMMIE. Seems so obvious now.

    I liked 14 once I eventually worked out the anagram. I was expecting some kind of speaker, and was debating whether there was some sort of orator in the senate known as a ROMAN RULEMAN. Just generally slow on the uptake today.

    1. Albeit I had WEIR for 27a…water…weir…what the heck. Another example of being British as opposed to knowing about Britain being a plus. Loved that I got RUPERT BROOKE right off the mark. Having just watched the most excellent film The King’s Speech yet again I was reminded that readers at the BBC were required to wear evening dress, something I had heard in my early days as a broadcast journalist. The change in my avatar was prompted by this but also is in deference to my hero Dave Perry.
      3. If you like films, I have another blog you know. I’m attempting to watch all the films on the IMDb’s Top 250 list in a year, and write a short blog for each. I’m down to 105 (although the blog’s a little behind) and The King’s Speech is currently at 112. So I have a copy, but haven’t watched it yet. If you or indeed anyone else is interested, it’s at http://dave250.blogspot.com/ – all comments welcome. If I get a few people following it, it might inspire me to keep it more up to date!
  23. Had little trouble with this until I reached the SE corner, where my brain went to sleep. Went back to it later and saw 17 and 25, which enabled me to limp home.
    Must have been around 40 minutes in all.

    Nice clues (apart from the ungainly 24)with the nuance of some definitions neatly masked by the surfaces.

  24. Can someone explain the omitted at 23 down, I had chief, but the reference seems to suggest thief, from the film? Thanks.
  25. Pleased with sub 20 minutes today, except I couldn’t decide on the final letter – C for ICELAND or R for IRELAND. Never heard of John Ireland.

    Liked the clue for ROMAN NUMERAL.

  26. This took me 35 minutes, so not a walk in the park, but it seemed like it should have been quicker. My last entry was RUPERT BROOKE. I didn’t mind the definition by example, since there are only a very limited number of WHITE MEAT possibilities, unlike say, ‘dog’. Overall, fun stuff. I agree on the COD to ROMAN NUMERAL. Didn’t know where Sunderland is or what it’s on, so by definition only, but I got the cheesy reference. Regards to everyone.
  27. 31 minutes. Was hoping for a personal best, but stuck on TENABLE/CONSOMME for five minutes. The ending _O_M_ just had to be a word of foreign origin.

    Since switching from the Times site to the crossword club, I have found that often the last clue or two does not print out. Fortunately the nice short clues here meant that that did not happen this time.

  28. Very enjoyable. Great pdm (penny-drop moment) for ‘I say’, and I liked the ‘propergate’ scandal too.
  29. 10:44 for me – I should have been a lot faster but made terribly heavy weather of ROMAN NUMERAL, BRAIN SURGEONS, WHITE MEAT (I kept seeing WHITE HEAT) and ROUGHAGE. I felt old and tired at the end of it, but it was a nice puzzle.

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