Times 24858: Lifts bowler, scratches head

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Time taken: 1hr & 14m

First of all, apologies to Tim for not posting yesterday. 24857 was a great puzzle I thought and I had much to say; but the blog was up a bit late for me to be able to contribute.

Now for today … what a shocker! I have ink all over the page and had to struggle for all but the few easy clues; such as 1ac and 3dn which lulled me into a false sense of security. So, as George would say, off we go … but it’s a far from pleasant story, on my part at least.
 

Across
 1 DIS,OWN. Dis is Dante’s underworld.
 4 NON-ISSUE. Two defs; the first elliptical.
10 PLAIN,TI(V)E. V (for ‘very’) is being worn by the discreet (plain) formal wear (tie). At least, that’s how I accounted for ‘wearing’.
11 F(OX)ED. As in, for book collectors, discoloured with brown spots.
12 TEE,TOTALLER.
14 FOR. Reversal of OF and R for Republican.
15 CASTILE. A former kingdom, now a region of Spain. Allusion to ‘castles in Spain’, daydreams.
17 PLANA,R. The principal strategy is PLAN-A.
19 FLEE,CE. An animal’s coat. If you flee the C of E (CE), you might (be said to) go over to Rome in haste. Though I can think of better places to run to!
21 CHIMER,A. Presumably a chimer is one who chimes (in), agrees.
23 Omitted. That’s half the battle!
24 HAIRPIN BEND. Anagram of ‘rain behind’ including P, for ‘parking’. Nicely hidden fodder; as with ‘under’ in 8dn.
26 BRIAR. My fave for today. Change the last letter of BRIAN (The Life of).
27 RE-ENTRANT. An overcharged tenant might have a ‘rent rant’; then insert the last letter of ‘leasE’. (Of an angle) pointing inward. The opposite of ‘salient’ in geometry.
29 DOGGY BAG. Pun on ‘lab’ for labrador. Also used in ads by an Australian manufacturer of toilet paper.
30 C,OMELY. ’omely = ‘homely’ in common speech.
Down
 1 DIPS,TICK. The ‘shower’ is that which shows.
 2 SHARE. Two meanings.
 3 WON{k}.
 5 OVER,LAP.
 6 IN,FORMATION.
 7 SAX(IF,RAG)E. Chambers has “of a deep shade of light blue” for ‘Saxe’. IF (provided); RAG (cloth). The def is just ‘flower’.
 8 ENDUR,E. Anagram of ‘under’ and the last letter of ‘firE’.
 9 VIS,AGE. The first part = V-1s, doodlebugs.
13 OLIVER HARDY. Straight charade with an implied pause after ‘more’.
16 SOLDERING. The ‘I’ is dropped from ‘soldIering’.
18 BAND,I,TRY. Another straight charade.
20 ERITREA. Anagram of ‘retire’ and A (area).
21 CO,PIER. Our second support for the day — see 12ac — and not a bra to be seen!
22 DAUBE,D. Daube is a stew of meat, typically beef, braised slowly in wine. Might give this a try later in the day. ‘Fancy a dab of daube for dinner darling?’
25 Omitted. As Uncle Yap would say: ‘Ha!’
28 TOO{k}. I’m taking it that ‘on top’ is ‘as well’, ‘in addition’. And that ‘to put’ is an instruction to enter the answer.

 

32 comments on “Times 24858: Lifts bowler, scratches head”

  1. I didn’t have access to a printer, so for the first time I tried solving online. Well, solved I did, and the screen says 1h, 6 min, 24 seconds. I don’t know what that means, since I ‘paused’ twice to deal with household matters, but it did take a bunch of time. And I didn’t enjoy it the way I would have with pen and paper; enjoyed it, yes, but not as much. Since I don’t have the puzzle to refer to, and didn’t make any notes while solving–time being of the essence and all–all I can say is that I was impressed by many of the clues, although there seemed to be a strong strain of punniness. Anyway, tomorrow I take pen in hand.
  2. Phew!

    (When I wrote my reply, your answer became “deleted”. This must be another LJ glitch, cos I sure didn’t delete it!)

    Update: now your original answer appears below my reply. Just in case other readers may be confused as to the order.

    Edited at 2011-05-25 06:42 am (UTC)

  3. An hour and 37 minutes, with two wrong: rather predictably, I expect, 7-Eleven – not convenient for me at all. Having shoved in ‘faded’ at 11, I went for ‘sadiflame’ at 11 (lamé is almost cloth). At least I got the ‘if’ right.

    I didn’t know ‘wonk’, which rather pleased me in a way … the type of virtuous feeling you have when you don’t get a particularly filthy reference that others all pick up on immediately. But WON was obvious enough.

    I also managed the neat trick of getting an answer right for the wrong reason. Thinking there was a homophone at 12 – and with –l-r as checking letters at the end – I entered –ALLER for ‘observant Muslim, say’ (‘Allah’), and the rest, as they say, was history.

    COD to DIPSTICK a) because it’s a fine flyting kind of word and b) for the highly misleading ‘shower’.

    Thanks to setter and blogger alike.

      1. I was comparing my feigned delight at not knowing what ‘wonk’ meant (a reference to my pleasure at never having been called one, being inclined towards pedantry as I am at times – according to the wife, who is of course biased) with the pleasure to be obtained when all around you are laughing at some dirty joke, which has passed right over your head because of your purity, AKA naivete!
  4. Too tough for the limited time I had this morning but just to say that the lovely “destined for lab” challenges THESIS for my clue of the week.
    Below is the response received from The Times to my query re its email invitation for me to renew my subscription early in order that I might “enjoy uninterrupted service”.
    Dear Mr Wouldham
    Thank you for your email.
    Please continue logging in to The Crossword Club website as normal. The first time log (sic) into the website after your subscription expires, you will be directed to a page where you can renew your subscription.

    If we can be of any assistance in the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact us
    Kind regards

    Phil
    Online Customer Services

    In other words there is yet another cock-up, but it is beneath them to admit it or to apologise for wasting an hour of my life.

  5. Somewhat amazingly, I seem to have them all correct and only after 90 minutes or so. I didn’t understand FOXED (thought it must be UK slang), DOGGY BAG (thought it was a reference to body bags and vivisection), CASTILE (although got as far as castles in the air) or DAUBED (apart from the final D). Another excellent puzzle as a follow up to yesteray’s. COD to FLEECE among many strong contenders.

  6. I felt oh so clever filling in and understanding most of these clues, but I had already thrown in some incorrect ones, eg ANIMINA (AN+I’M IN+A) which, tbh, I thought was a dead cert; FADED; SAD+IF+SARI (?), before I resorted to aids to finish it (well, to fill in all the spaces…!)

    Cod: FLEECE

    Many thanks to McText…definitely needed to see all the explanations today!

  7. Thanks, mctext! You’re a lifesaver. I realised I wasn’t on the setter’s wavelength today and came here for rescue after about an hour and only the bottom half completed (and one wrong in that!). Brilliant blog. Glad I didn’t persevere: too much of this was way beyond me. (But I did enjoy DOGGY BAG: as does Fred, my lab, who regularly receives one from an excellent local restaurant.)
  8. The opposite end of the spectrum to yesterday’s rather staid, bland offering. This is the best puzzle for some time, full of inventiveness, clever word usages and good wordplays. 30 minutes of fun and overjoyed to see the use of salient at 27A. I didn’t get the “lab” reference so thanks McText for that – another exellent blog that befits a high calibre puzzle.
  9. Phew! I had thought it was just me and that in less than a week since my retirement my brain had started to atrophy, so it was a relief to come here and find that everyone else so far has struggled too (No doubt Jimbo is having a lie in and has yet to set out for his stroll in the park!).

    Actually alarm bells didn’t start ringing until I had completed nearly three-quarters of the grid with only PLANAR (which I didn’t know anyway), OVERLAP and SOLDERING missing from the NE,SE and SW.

    But in the NW my only foothold was OLIVER at 13dn and it was not enough to get me started. I see now that I should have solved 1A and 2dn easily and gone with my first thought that WON was the answer to 3dn even though I couldn’t explain ‘policy expert’.

    Incidentally according to Chambers Dictionary of Slang, the author Martin Amis has asserted that ‘wonk’ is backslang for ‘know’, but whatever its origin I never heard of it.

    After an hour I gave up trying to solve unaided but it still took me another 15 minutes or so to complete the grid.

    I am NOT having a good week.

    1. For what it’s worth:

      wonk |wä ng k|
      noun informal derogatory
      a studious or hardworking person: any kid with an interest in science was a wonk.
      • a person who takes an excessive interest in minor details of political policy : he is a policy wonk in tune with a younger generation of voters.
      ORIGIN 1920s: of unknown origin.

  10. 20 mins on the button (well, stopwatch actually!) so am very pleased in light of some of the other comments. Really enjoyed this one. Didn’t know re-entrant as a geometric term (or salient, for that matter) even though I have taught Maths for 18 years!
  11. 19:36 so I suppose OK in comparative terms, but I did not enjoy this one. It felt a bit odd.
  12. First time I’ve done The Times for months. Took over an hour, and didn’t terribly enjoy it. This week’s Azed & EV much more fun
  13. Having read all the above comments I feel lucky to have finished this at all. At the time it felt like wading through treacle. I was surprised to clock off in 44 minutes – it had seemed much longer. Lots of eureka moments and some lovely misdirections. I particularly liked DIPSTICK and DOGGY BAG. I only knew “salient” as part of a fortification. The mathematical context was unknown so RE-ENTRY was very much a shot in the dark from the cryptic. Nice to see these bits of arcane knowledge (though probably commonplace to maths buffs) which make the Times puzzle so rewarding.
    1. After 12 years of mathematics at school and 4 more at university with first class honours all the way, here’s one maths buffs who had no idea of either salient or re-entrant angles. If it was ever taught, I have well and truly forgotten it.

      Rob

  14. just a slight quibble: to my way of thinking “soldering” = “attaching heatedly” rather than “getting heatedly attached”. but i’m not sure why i’m complaining as it is one of the one’s i got. couldn’t finish even with aids, so thanks for a nice blog as i think i would have struggled to make sense of the answers otherwise.

    ak

  15. 58 minutes.
    If this had come up a couple of days ago I don’t think I’d have sent in my form for the championships. I found it extremely difficult, but also very rewarding. I struggled with a lot of the clues but invariably my response on getting the right answer was a pleasurable aha! Too many to name a favourite.
    FOXED, CASTILE, RE-ENTRANT and SAXIFRAGE were all unknown and went in without certainty, so I was slightly surprised to find I didn’t have any errors. FOXED in particular required a big leap of faith to rely on wordplay rather than definition (generally the best course when in doubt I find) and avoid putting in FADED.
    This left me with S_XIFRAGE. If (like me) you don’t know the colour or the flower you have to just pick a vowel, which irritated me a bit but I’m happy to forgive it in the context. Particularly as I picked the right one!
    Thanks to the setter and thanks and congratulations to mctext for unravelling it all.
  16. Where is everyone? I was looking forward to the comments. At 52 minutes I thought this was pretty good Dis and very nearly DNF. A frustrating combo of fairly obvious and (to me) impenetrable. A prolonged wrestle with the SE corner trying to fit some word for father into 18d, ending up feeling very stupid. Then went back to re-engage with 1d and 10a which took ages and had to be done the hard way – slogging through the alphabet. I’d forgotten (if I ever knew) the booksellers’ term for 11a – I took off-colour to mean drunk as in Georgette Heyer. Oh well. Profound thanks to Mctext.
  17. I enjoyed this and didn’t find it unduly hard, 25mins or so. Once again, some quite elegant clues and one can only wonder at those who didn’t enjoy them.

    I hadn’t come across wonk before and am still not sure why a wonk is supposedly policy related. So what if there are policy wonks? There are motorcycle couriers but they are still couriers, not motorcycles, if you see what I mean

    1. You have a point but I suspect this is by far the most common usage of the word in the UK at least. In fact I’m not sure I’ve ever heard the word “wonk” detached from the word “policy”. I suppose it’s a kind of DBE, rather as “motorcycle messenger” might serve as a definition for “courier”.
    2. For what it’s worth, I (and I suspect many other Americans) first heard the term ‘wonk’ in the phrase ‘policy wonk’, and first heard ‘policy wonk’ in the years of the Clinton administration (the succeeding bunch notably lacking in policy wonks). I was surprised to see McText’s definition dating it to the 20s.
  18. The foregoing comments only appeared after I posted above for some reason. Anyway belated thanks all.
    1. The disappesaring comments along with rejection of correct passwords is a current LJ quirk. If you log into LJ before you access this blog the thing works correctly
  19. I’m in the camp that needed aids to finish (for DIPSTICK), after well over an hour on my own. After the struggle, my hat’s off to the setter; this is a very good puzzle. COD’s to DIPSTICK, even though it stumped me, the lab, and the non-salient rent rant. Thanks mctext, and to the settter as well. Olivia: lately LJ has been doing that to all of us, and I think the solution is to log in before you post. Good Luck, and regards to everyone.
  20. 18:56 for me for a most enjoyable puzzle full of clever ideas. My compliments to the setter.
  21. …For the first time in a very long time, thanks to CASTILE and SOLDERING (and thanks to mctext and your new avatar) but it was a thoroughly enjoyable crossword. I felt very smug in knowing WON(K) and SAXIFRAGE and also was thoroughly amused at FLEECE and DOGGYBAG. The latter reminded me of a joke where a man is angry at being overcharged for a vet’s examination of what turns out to be a dead parrot. Part of the examination involved the vet’s dog and cat having a look. The vet then charged the man for a cat-scan and a lab report! I’m sure you’re glad you bothered to read this! Both of those answers match THESIS for wit.
  22. I thonght ‘wonk’ derived from ‘know’ backwards – because a wonk knows his subject backwards.
  23. I know it’s the way things are done here, but may I make a big plea on behalf of numbskulls by asking that EVERY answer is explained, rather than omitting the odd one. I can see that 23a is ATE – crossword-speak for WORRIED, and the even letters of BATTLE. 25d is ELATE (hidden in feEL A TEar). It would really help novices and plonkers alike…

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