Times 24,857

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Stopped the clock at 20:32 on a tricky, inventive, but very fair puzzle. Definite tip of the hat to today’s setter. The last 5 minutes were spent trying to untangle why 28 across was what it was, before the scales fell from my eyes…

Across
1 FREUDIAN – [Republican in FEUD] + IAN.
5 BOGOTA – [Good Old Testament] in BOA (“stole”).
8 NOH – (HON)rev.; Jessica Mitford wrote Hons and Rebels, an autobiographical account of the early life of the famous / infamous Mitford sisters. Hon. is short for the aristocratic title Honourable, though I believe this is not necessarily the source of the word as they used it amongst themselves. Someone who’s read it more recently might be able to comment (only Nancy M. appears to be represented on my bookshelves…)
9 COME TO PASS – COME TO PA’S addresS.
10 ALL RIGHT – [Left, Right] in ALIGHT.
11 HOOK UP – HOOK (the Captain James who doesn’t play rugby for Wales) + UP (before the judge).
12 TINT – IN in T.T.
14 SUPERVISOR – i.e. I say, that’s a SUPER VISOR you’re wearing over your eyes.
17 CHARTREUSE – another neat charade, i.e. using a table of contents again could be described as “CHART RE-USE”.
20 EARL – [At Residents] in lakELand.
23 CIVICS – CIVIC + Study; the only clue in this puzzle which could be described as a bit loose; C, I, and V are all Roman numerals, of course, but so are X, L, D and M. The suggestion of the clue is “take an unspecified number of some of the letters I, V, X, L, C, D, and M and arrange them so that with an ‘S’ on the end they make a word meaning “citizenship”. On the other hand, did I struggle to spot what was required? No, so I shan’t complain too long or loud.
24 METEORIC – (CORETIME)*.
25 CHARDONNAY – DONNA in CHARY.
26 AGA – sAGA without Son.
27 ATHENE – all thAT HE NEeds. Even for a powerful goddess, Athene was a patroness of many things.
28 GRANDEST – RAND in GuEST. “Money for university” means “replace U with RAND”, and has nothing to do with the University Chest, which is why my original pencilled-in ___CHEST was wide of the mark.
 
Down
1 FANTASTIC – [ANT + ASTI] in F.C.
2 ECHELON – EC (postcode of the City of London) + HE + LONdon.
3 DECEIT – DECember + (TIE)rev.; not sure if this is an original device, where the “present month” is the month in which one gets (Christmas) presents, rather than the current month. If it is, kudos to the setter, if it isn’t, it probably deserved a re-airing.
4 ALMSHOUSE – A Large + [SH in MOUSE].
5 BROTHER – Runs in BOTHER.
6 GLAMORISE – (OGLERSAIM)*.
7 TESTUDO – [ThE without Henry] + [STUDiO without 1]. The Roman infantry tactic is named after the Latin for tortoise. More or less obligatory in any film featuring legions in battle formation (see The Eagle, Gladiator, Asterix etc. etc.)
13 TERMINATE – NA in TERMITE; sodium is Na in the periodic table from its original name Natrium.
15 EASTERNER – ASTERN in E’ER (poetic form of ever).
16 RELUCTANT – [RELiCT with U instead of 1] + ANT. Having spotted this substitution, should have twigged 28 ac more quickly…
18 HAIRCUT – [AIR Circa] in HUT; nice definition in “Crop, possibly”.
19 RESIDUE – United in R.E. SIDE.
21 ACREAGE – ACRE AGE. I only knew this Acre, and not this Acre, but it always looked like the only plausible solution.
22 KENYAN – N.Y. in KEAN. Praise be! A classical actor of a previous age who isn’t the wretched Beerbohm Tree! For this, apart from everything else, the setter has my thanks…

29 comments on “Times 24,857”

  1. All present and correct for the first time in ages! Must have been my sort of puzzle, maybe the numerous boozy refs helped? Unknowns today: KEAN, CHARY, ACRE, RELICT, TESTUDO.

    LOI: RELUCTANT, as didn’t really think it meant indisposed.

    Cods: CHARTREUSE, GRANDEST

  2. I found this straightforward and solved left to right, top to bottom, in under 20 minutes. I thought it fair but rather bland.
  3. 18 minutes, but would have been quicker had I not rushed in SUNGLASSES where the supervisor should be. Sometimes when doing it on paper, the wrong letters can be quite distracting even when you know they’re wrong.
    I tried CIVILS first for the other Latin entry, and later for curiosity tried entering doubles of the full range (without the S) into Wordfinder.net. Surprisingly (?), found only seven 5-letter words, so I suppose it works out pretty fairly.
    Chart re-use gets my CoD, not least because it helped with the spelling.
    1. Er…yes. So does the link I’ve attached to the word NOH. Afraid I’m not sure what your point is?
  5. Found this a lot more to my taste than yesterday’s, finishing in 41 minutes with RELUCTANT, as the realisation that ‘indisposed’ can mean more than just ‘ill’ dawned, as it did for Janie. COD to SUPERVISOR – which had me following the ‘sun-’ for ages; also enjoyed the, probably unwitting, reference to Bobby Moore and the Bogota bracelet incident at 5ac. Had to get the liqueur from the wordplay, as I don’t care for any of the genre. ECHELON was in the Concise the other day – another good reason for doing this as a daily hors d’oeuvres – and TESTUDO in immediately thanks to JC & Livy.
  6. 50 minutes with some problems in the SE. Getting a bit tired of clues where the answer is obvious from the definition but the wordplay is utterly obscure. Today’s main example being 8ac.
      1. Well it’s true there’s no problem in the solving. I knew NOH and got the HON reference to the aristocracy but it was the ‘Mitford’ bit I didn’t understand and needed to to look-up when actually the clue didn’t need it in the first place.
  7. I enjoyed this one. I had all but 7dn done in 15 minutes, but then spent fully 12 minutes on that alone. I just couldn’t get past the idea that I needed to take HAL or HY out of a word for workshop. Silly because I know I’ve come across TESTUDO before.
    I thought there were a few clues in this puzzle that flirted interestingly with unfairness without crossing the line:
    – 8ac: you’ve got to know NOH and HON in the Mitford sense, both arguably obscure. However NOH seems to appear here every other week, and if you don’t know that then you’ve got the combination of H_N reversed with the word “aristocrat”. What else can it be?
    – 16dn: RELICT for “widow” is arguably obscure (it’s at least archaic) and the definition for ANT is rather oblique. However with all the crossing letters and the definition you can’t miss.
    – CIVIC is undoubtedly loose, as Tim points out. But as he also points out, the looseness is no impediment to solving.
  8. 14 min today so quite pleased. Enjoyable puzzle. Is it bad form to ask if any of the regulars are doing the Champs? I’m down for the morning session but of course don’t really have a prayer of getting beyond that! Best wishes to all.
    1. I’m down for the morning session as well. See you there. Good luck!
    2. Not bad form at all. I can’t speak for anyone else, of course, but I certainly intend to be there (at least I hope so – I have left my qualification attempt to the last possible moment, so will be doing the final puzzle on June 1st); and based on previous attendance, I imagine several regular contributors will be there as well.
    3. I will be there for the first time. I was quite surprised to qualify and considered not taking up my place, given the fairly high probability of crashing and burning. On balance I felt I ought to give it a whirl.
    4. I’m there for the morning session. Thereafter I shall retire to the pub a beaten man and return to watch the final.
  9. Another puzzle where I was fooled into thinking I would complete it fairly quickly after filling most of the NW corner in 3 minutes, but 5a, 14, 17, 25, 16d (the clue to which I didn’t understand until coming here), 18d and 21d all held me up considerably. 35 minutes in the end. In addition to 16d the clue to NOH baffled me.

    I thought it was a perfectly good puzzle with several features of interest, not bland at all.

  10. 7:20 here, for a nice straightforward Monday puzzle. (Hang on! It’s Tuesday.)
  11. 23:52. Should have been quicker but I hastily threw in glamorous at 6 which made supervisor and earl impossible which in turn made the SE corner utterly intractable until I’d sorted out the mess.

    COD to chartreuse.

  12. How does everyone know an actor called Kean? If I was 150 years old I might have seen him! I have always thought only cruciverbalists would get Tree, but on investigation it seems Oliver Reed was his grandson, so at least some modern connotation. Otherwise no problems or quibbles.
    1. I for one have never heard of him. If ignorance of this sort of thing were an impediment to solving I’d never finish!
  13. Found this uneven going, with the lhs going in very quickly and the right giving lots of problems. Particularly struggled with BOGOTA and ACREAGE, but not sure why in retrospect. 50 mins
  14. 16:05 today for an enjoyable puzzle. I’ll be at champs too – 2nd session as I have to travel from Newcastle. Which pub are we going to?
  15. Surprised to find that online OED gave RELUCTANT as a synonym for ‘indisposed’ (but I didn’t think it could be anything else) and it took a lot of head bashing to come up with TESTUDO. Overall an enjoyable challenge with DECEIT my COD.
  16. A steady slowish solve with no serious hold-ups. Last in DECEIT which is also my COD. Liked idea of December as the “present month”. 25 minutes
  17. Same as falooker, only somewhat less steady, and slower: 37 minutes. I got a number of these (CHARTREUSE, CHARDONNAY, EASTERNER, GRANDEST,TESTUDO) from checkers, only figuring them out later; or in the case of GRANDEST and TESTUDO, never, until Tim explained them. (I came up with Dept. of Ed & Sci. inside ‘grant’, didn’t believe it for a moment, but what the hell. Once again, I fail to get the ‘for’ in a clue.) A fine puzzle, with lots of COD candidates, but I suppose mine would be DECEIT and RELUCTANT.
  18. About 30 minutes, with the last 10 spent trying to figure out why GRANDEST was the answer at 28, a la topicaltim. I was quite pleased with myself for actually figuring it out. I didn’t know of Kean, or the Mitford connection, or relict, or the busybody ant, or TESTUDO, or this definition of gaffer, but they came through okay. COD to CHARTREUSE and honorable mention to the SUPER VISOR. Regards to everyone.
  19. My experience of ‘gaffer’ is the lighting guy (or gal) on a film set where I spend most of my working life so spent some time looking for a word that ended in light. I was bested by the Kenyan in this puzzle but did know ACRE as I had visited the Amazon around the Ecuadorian and Peruvian borders with Brazil.
    TESTUDO oddly enough, I remember from my Grade 10 Latin textbook…and that was some time ago.

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