Times 24886 – At last, a drug I can take

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 57 minutes

Music: Mozart, Symphonies 40 & 41, Fricsay/VSO

I was not in a proper condition to solve this, being late and tired from golf and traffic, and having to eat dinner while working on it. In optimal conditions I might have managed it in under 40, which is still nothing great.

There are a couple of rather obscure answers for which there is no choice but to work out the cryptic, unless you just happen to know it…and it’s practically certain you won’t know all of them. There are also a few obvious starter clues, some of which I made heavy work of.

Across
1 SCRAPE, double definition. You would think this would be my first in, but it was among the last.
4 MAESTOSO, MAEST[r]O + SO. Unless you’re a musician, you probably had to take the cryptic route on this.
9 BOOTLEG, BOOTLE + G[roup]. Not every answer ending in ‘g’ ends in ‘ing’, even when ‘ing’ is in the literal. Bootle is in Lancashire, on the Mersey, which I vaguely knew.
11 COCOTTE, C/O + COTT[ag]E. Another one where you might need help from the cryptic. This is both a loose woman and cooking pot, but the clue construction demands the first meaning.
12 Omitted, you can bet on it!
13 IBUPROFEN, I(BUP ROF)E + N, that is FOR PUB backwards. We are used to ‘drug’ indicating a single letter, usually ‘e’ or ‘h’, so this one may send solvers off on the wrong track. This useful drug is popular among older golfers; if that doesn’t work, see 19.
14 CHANDIGARH, C(HAND)IGAR + H(aryana). Most solvers will need the crytpic. I had expected the target answer to have nothing to do Haryana, but a little research shows that Chandigarh is in fact associated with Haryana.
16 GARB, GARB[o]. I was disgracefully slow on this chestnut.
19 NIPS, SPIN backwards. These tots are nips of liquor, not nippers.
20 COMMANDEER, sounds like COMMON, DEAR, and in more pronunciations than usual.
22 THEN AGAIN, [a]THENA + GAIN. All I could think of for a long time was ‘thea’ and ‘Thetis’, which are not even close.
23 OCHRE, OCH([se]R[geant])E. I had forgotten what the ‘oche’ is, I just put this in from the definition. We should keep ‘oche’ in mind, it should certainly be useful in constructing a wide variety of answers.
25 BEEFALO, BEE + OLAF backwards. Fortunately, most Norwegian kings are named Olaf.
26 SERRIED, anagram of E[uropean] + RIDERS. I knew how the clue worked, and still couldn’t get it for the longest time.
27 ANT’S EGGS, anagram of GANG SETS. When I saw the first two letters in place, I though there weren’t enough vowels for it to be an anagram.
28 Omitted, hinted at already.
 
Down
1 SUBDEACON, anagram of DOES CUBAN. I admit, I was fooled by the literal.
2 RHONE, [powe]R + HONE. Another elusive one that should not have been that difficult.
3 PALISADE, sounds like PALACE AIDE. A chestnut that was one of the last in.
5 ACCOUTREMENTS, anagram of CARSON MET CUTE, a relatively simple clue.
6 SECURE SE(CUR)E. These ellipsis clues always give me more difficulty than they should.
7 OUT OF DATE, double definition, one jocular. I had the answer, but the joke was too lame for me to see for a while.
8 ODEON, O + D([gr]E[ek])ON. Another one where I wanted to put in the right answer without being able to justify it.
10 GOING FOR A SONG, another double defintion, but one I spotted right away.
15 AT PRESENT, anagram of RENT-A-PET, another simple one.
17 BARTENDER, BART(END)R. I was all over the place with this before seeing the simple answer.
18 ON COURSE, double definition.
21 PARADE, PARAD[is]E. My first in, after a lengthy hunt for an easy one to get started.
22 TABLA, TAB + L + A. I always want to put ‘tabor’ without thinking.
24 Omitted, bring your petard!

41 comments on “Times 24886 – At last, a drug I can take”

  1. 49 minutes with, as Vinyl says, a lot of fussing with wordplay: esp. for CHANDIGARH and IBUPROFEN. Hadn’t seen “palace aide” before, so it was mildly amusing. But COD to BOOTLE,G for nostalgia. Though it’s not in Lancashire any longer: rather The Metropolitan County of Merseyside.
    Just noticed a minor typo: you need to add a G to the fodder in 27ac.
    Also a question about the parsing of 10dn. I read this as a humorous (or at least punning) cryptic def.

    Edited at 2011-06-27 03:53 am (UTC)

  2. Excellent start to the week, with three nominations for COD at 22ac, 3dn (nothing like a good homophone!) and 21dn. Originally had ‘scrimp’ at 1ac until seeing PALISADE, making these my last two in after finally getting the spelling for the drug, which I have taken, but obviously not often enough. Liked ‘buggy’ as an anagram indicator. 55 minutes.

    Lines from Longfellow’s poem ‘The Saga of King Olaf’ were set to music by Elgar as a part-song which would become arguably the most performed choral society piece in Britain at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

  4. 34 minutes, some of which were spent looking at 7d in disbelief: surely, surely, I thought, ‘date’ couldn’t be part of the solution if ‘date’ is in the clue? I also didn’t like 14ac, in that one could simply have looked up Haryana to find out what the capital is. (Well of course I did; after thinking of Chandragore and God knows what other variants, some of which may even had had the requisite number of letters.) What else: Agree with Mctext about 10d; OCHE was in a fairly recent puzzle, else I wouldn’t have had a clue; 5d is lovely, but how would one meet a buggy?; 4ac: I’m not a musician, but MAESTOSO came to me immediately, or would have, if I knew how to spell; 8d: ODEON is yet another NYT chestnut. Still, it was fun.
  5. Disbelief got the better of me at 7dn. I was so convinced that it couldn’t be OUT OF DATE that I invented ‘out of sale’, despite a total lack of supporting evidence. I wonder if ‘date’ was added to the clue by an over-zealous sub-editor; ‘past its sell-by’ is perfectly acceptable in my book.

    That apart, a fun start to the week. COD to OCHRE for the double deception around colour sergeant and third in line. 50 minutes, with almost 10 of them spent on the 7/16 crossing.

  6. Cannot believe this. I bet the compiler didn’t include ‘date’ in the clue. Also not sure about the link to 6D?
  7. I had ‘likely to fetch’ = GOING FOR, ‘a few notes’ = A SONG, and the whole thing as the second definition. Does that make it a double def or an &LIT?
    Also was in the disbelief club with 7dn, but perhaps that’s another legitimate part of the setter’s armoury, getting us out of our comfort zone?
    Difficult to feel too disagreeable about any of it when you’re solving from beside the pool of a Bali villa.
  8. Only just scraped in under the hour despite looking up the capital of Haryana (never heard of it or its capital) and BEEFALO. I thought ‘buggy’ as an anagrind stank, as did 7dn.
    1. It may have gone unnoticed to those who rightfully complain about the preponderance of cricketing clues, but Chandigarh was a gift to anyone who wastes a lot of time watching international cricket. Thanks setter!
    2. Rather good, I thought, to describe the dis-order caused by a computer virus.
      1. Very common term in modern IT to describe software that doesn’t “look and feel right”, or doesn’t perform as one might expect (think Times Crossword Club). I don’t like to disagree with Jack, but in my opinion it’s a perfect anagrind.
        1. On reflection my comment was harsh. I can see it could work well in the right clue but this one wasn’t a good example.
  9. DNF (!) because I refused to enter OUT OF DATE, surely the lamest clue ever if it’s right. Isn’t there some sort of rule about including the same word in the clue as in the answer?
    Everything else pretty good, and I would have finished in around 24, with the top right corner causing most head scratching. I liked BOOTLEG and (once I saw it) PARADE, but this was a soured experience.
  10. Enjoyed this puzzle, found it challenging but fair, except for 7dn where I too felt that had ‘date’ been left out, the clue would have been better. This was my LOI, as I wasn’t convinced. Only unknown words today were easily gettable from cryptic (MAESTOSO, BEEFALO). Like Ulaca, PALISADE put paid to my first thought: scrimp (hadn’t come across the kettle of fish ref before). The other fishy one was unfamiliar, too: never knew ANTS EGGS were fed to goldfish!

    Knew the Indian town (though not through cricket…!), but didn’t know its connection to Haryana (but this wasn’t necessary). Again, easily solvable from cryptic.

    All in all a good start to the week.

  11. 13 minutes. A gentle but very pleasant puzzle I thought.
    I parsed 7dn as “from” = OUT OF, “fruit” = DATE, rather than a DD. Still odd to have the same word in definition and answer.
    I parsed 10n like galspray. Lovely clue.
    CHANDIGARH and BEEFALO were unknown. BEEFALO looked made up but it had to be.
    I quite liked “buggy” as an anagrind but it was awkward in the clue. As kevingregg says, a buggy isn’t really something you meet.

  13. I would have to concur with all those who suggest that this was a typo or a post setter addition. I wonder whether the clue ending up on two lines had anything to do with it. i.e. the editor upon seeing it ending “sell-by” thought “ah, they have forgotten to copy over the next line.” and added the “date” without thinking.

    An interesting general point was mentioned above though about the ability of setters to occasionally break the unwritten rules just in order to keep the solver on their toes. I guess there would need to be a further sub-set of rules governing this to prevent mass confusion, however as a concept it is not ridiculous.

    1. Is the clue really any better without the word “date” at the end? “Past its sell-by” is inelegant and the word “date” is so heavily implied that removing it makes little difference.
      “Past its sell-by date” works as quite a good cryptic definition for outmoded or old-fashioned, which is what OUT OF DATE means. The only objection therefore is that the word “date” appears in both clue and answer, but it is performing slightly different functions.
      I still think it’s an odd clue but not quite as terrible as all that.
  15. Pleased with myself for finishing this in 26 minutes. Hardy har har – stupidly used the US spelling for 5d so the end of 14a was a mess. Tomorrow is another day. Trying out a new pic – Dutchess County Fair.
  16. I couldn’t believe “date” was the fruit in 7 down for the reasons most of you didn’t like it, and with the link to 6 down in the clue I thought the answer was “out of gage” because one of the definitions of gage is a security and another a shortened form of greengage, so if something is out of gage it is therefore secure. If the link to 6 down was to throw solvers off the scent of the horrible date = date then it got me.
  17. Solved while organising a Lower Sixth group to start creating a magazine, and thinking of what to say for my own retiring speech, over 90 minutes so I’ll forgive myself two irritating errors, ibuprofin and Chandigore.Re out of date, I don’t see why a homonym shouldn’t count as a different word. Seemed not too tough though didn’t know beefalo.
  18. Should have found an alternative phrase to “sell by date” if this was to be the anwser. The “date”s in the clue and solution are the same, only the cryptic suggestion is a homonym. The shame, the shame…
    1. …perhaps:

      “…from fruit that’s past its shelf-life?”

      could have been better?

    2. Not sure I agree with this, Anonymous. The “date” in “past its sell-by date” is a specific day. The “date” in OUT OF DATE refers to a broader period of time. My trousers may be out of date but they didn’t become so on a specific day!
  19. 50:30 – Being the keen follower of cricket that I am certainly seems to pay dividends with the Times crossword, and it is probably through this that I knew Chandigarh. Struggled with a lot of the others though.

    I thought 7d was quite dreadful, and disbelief made it one of my last in.

  20. What a weird puzzle! Some very easy. Some ridiculously obscure such as 14A CHA…. One ludicrous – you guessed it 7D. Like many my last in – couldn’t believe but it had to be. Some very good. 25 minutes after exhausting 18 holes in broiling heat.
  21. I do think the repeated word syndrome infecting 7d must be a mistake, pace those who are drawing fine distinctions between date, date and date. If I clued “green” as “New colour of Camberwick Green (5)” I would surely be castigated, even if I claimed there was a subtle difference between green the colour and Green the place name. How about “Cheating when playing the fiddle” (2,3,6). It surely turns the Times into Fisher-Price crossword. Maybe used once it stretches credulity (like mine) enough to put off entry, but my vote is for a request to the setters/editors to ban identical words in clues and answers, hidden words being an obvious exception.
  22. My guesses (those words ending in ‘o’) proved correct; with a sigh of disbelief I went for OUT OF DATE. But, even though it couldn’t be anything else (?), I resisted SCRAPE, not twigging the meaning of ‘fine kettle of fish’: if the reference had been to otters, I would have been fine. About 60 minutes.
  23. 13 minutes, also balked at putting in OUT OF DATE until the very end. COCOTTE and SERRIED from wordplay, OCHRE from definition, and I’m afraid PALISADE just came from a word that I thought might fit the meaning and definitly fit the checking letters.
  24. An irritating failure today for me, with a dumb misspelling for IBUPROFIN, and trying CHANDIGARO for 14A (i.e. ‘havana’ being a ‘cigaro’). Irritating because I thought I had navigated through a whole bunch of unknown words via wordplay-only answers, such as the CHA city, MAESTOSO, SERRIED, COCOTTE, the ‘oche’ part of OCHRE, TABLA, ANTS EGGS. If this evidences a swiss cheeseish picture of my general knowledge, so be it. I also held back a long time on the DATE clue, which I don’t like at all, and SCRAPE, thinking ‘SCRIMP’. Believe it or not, my last entry was HOIST, clearly one of the clearest clues today. Arrgh. Regards to all.
  25. Weird! A funny mish mash of easy and barred puzzle words. My impression as a relative novice, is that Monday seems to throw up some rather eccentric puzzles.
  27. A disappointing 13:30 for me. I made particularly heavy weather of the NW corner, hoping that 9ac was going to end in ING. Like others, I pondered for a while over OUT OF DATE, wondering if there might be an alternative. Very odd. CHANDIGARH is well known to anyone interested in architecture.
  28. Chandigarh is a prime example of why it’s so exceedingly rare for me to solve a whole puzzle! I’ve barely heard of it. But I slapped my forehead when I realized I didn’t see that “worker” was nested in “havana!” I keep trying…

Comments are closed.