Times 24892 – $10 a night if you make your own bed; so he handed me a hammer and some nails

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 35 minutes, give or take the complete obliteration of the puzzle when I hit the spacebar attempting to type the solution to 13ac

This seemmed pretty easy, even in the straitened circumstances, but well constructed and elucidated with a couple of clues I enjoyed immensely. Apologies for the brevitas, but time is of the essence. I’ll fix the no doubt numerous typos when I next have access to t’net.

Across
1 LAMEBRAIN = MEAL* + BRAIN as in use your loaf
6 Deliberately omitted, inspector.
9 WATER, being two H’s and an O, the finishing leters in witH mucH adO.
10 DISAPPEAR = SAP inside inDIan PEAR
11 ORLEANS = OR + A inside LENS
12 BANGKOK = G for good inside BANK + OK
13 DOUBLE NEGATIVE, a cryptic definition
17 TWO-DIMENSIONAL = (SOME TAILWIND? NO)*
21 ROISTER = I in ROSTER
23 WEEKDAY = (A KEY WE’D)*
25 SATELLITE = A TELL inside SITE
26 METRO = MET + R for resistance + O for over, the last a crickety thing
27 SUNNY, sounds like sonny, Jim
28 MISINFORM = M for male IS IN FORM

Down
1 LAWLORDS = AWL inside LORDS, another crickety thing
2 MOTEL, double definition, it being a portmanteau of miserable and hotel
3 BARNACLED = NaCl inside BARED. A lot of chemistry today.
4 ADDISON = A Doctor of Divinity IS ON
5 NOSEBAG = Equine inside NOSh BAG, for a semi-&lit
6 RIP ON
7 Deliberately omitted. It could be R & A
8 SHRIKE = SHRIEK with twisted tail
14 UNWRITTEN = IT inside (NEW TURN)*
15 TRIBESMAN = B for bishop inside TRIES + MAN for rook, say
16 PLAYROOM = (A POORLY)* to the crossword North of M for motorway
18 MARXISM = Two M’s for masses containing A + R for right next to X for vote + IS
19 NEWNESS, which has every which way repeated except for West
20 CRISIS, which thigs are comig to = C for a hundred + the River ISIS, which flows through Isisbridge University, aka Oxford
22 TALLY = TALL as in story + plaY
24 DITTO = Over The Top + I’D all reversed

49 comments on “Times 24892 – $10 a night if you make your own bed; so he handed me a hammer and some nails”

  1. DNF: missing ROISTER, despite the shockingly awful 2dn in the Weekend (so-called “Sunday Times”) Oz (743): “Bird — duck placed in a list (7)”. And so, also: CRISIS and TALLY.

    Didn’t understand NOSEBAG until K’s excellent blog. (Many thanks for it.) Totally unfair, I’d say. “Nosh” is Yiddish for (a) snack. It’s what you can do (verb)/eat (noun) on the Shabbat without actually preparing food and so breaking the rules.

    19dn should go into the book as one of the worst clues ever.

    And what’s the “year” doing in 28ac?

    Edited at 2011-07-04 03:43 am (UTC)

  2. Gentle start to the week, finishing with ROISTER/CRISIS. RIPON came up in today’s concise. 38 minutes.
  3. Took the wrong turning at 2dn and lost my portmanteau into the bargain, putting ‘metal’ for ‘on the road’.
  4. 38′, plus a bit more for 2d, which I’d thought of 10 times but didn’t twig until, well, some time after those 38 minutes had passed; let’s say 40. It hadn’t occurred to me to think of a more intellectually satisfying explanation of 5d; a nosebag holds a lot of food around an equine’s head, end of story. NOT end of story for WATER, and I’m grateful to koro for the explanation; I had the checkers, and the advanced chemical information –no doubt many of you were not aware, but don’t feel bad about it — that water is used in making solutions. Anyway, it was a pleasant go, with my COD going to 3d.
  5. Well, for me the chemistry not quite there with this setter. Saw HHO but too stupid to understand it, and had to cheat for BARNACLED only after which did I get MOTEL and ORLEANS. Didn’t understand NEWNESS (although I thought perfectly fair) and stuck in CRISIS on a wing and a prayer.
    Pretty poor performance today but I did learn this particular meaning of portmanteau.
  6. Returning for a moment to the crossword…

    48 minutes, slow but steady, no mistakes, not much levity, CRISIS last in.

    1. Agreed on CRISIS (which I didn’t get): the implied R (for river) is a bit below the belt eh?
  7. 45 minutes with the last 15 spent on 3dn and the SW corner. I thought I was in for a quick solve but time slipped away.

    On completion of the grid I had 10 answers with queries against them but managed to sort out all but two of them later. Firstly I gave up on NOSEBAG as I wasn’t able to parse it and decided it must just be &lit. Secondly, who is this ADDISON referred to at 4dn? Wiki has four of them described as ‘author’. As I’ve never heard of any of them it would be nice to know who the setter had in mind.

    1. The most famous Addison is Joseph, whose best known work was probably his play Cato. Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College, Oxford, is named after him.

      CS Lewis fans know this as the place where he had a late night conversation with Hugo Dyson and JRR Tolkien that convinced him of the truth of Christianity.

        1. Now, now; what about Paul’s statement that ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things unseen’? Sounds like a solver’s credo to me.
            1. (Sorry, Rich.) Well, it was a letter to the Hebrews, you know; they’re probably still trying to agree on the content of a reply.
          2. What’s the difference between “the substance of things hoped for” and “wishful thinking”?
  8. Started off very quickly, with some (to my mind) easy ones, but then took an age to finish. Managed all correctly, but needed the blog for explanations of WATER and CRISIS. Hadn’t worked out the cryptic for NOSEBAG (but assumed there was none!). I quite liked NEWNESS. Hadn’t heard of ROISTER, but was easy from cryptic.

    Thanks for excellent (if concise!) blog, as far as I’m concerned, it does what it needs to…

  9. DNF. Too much chemistry for me! Quite pleased to get, and understand, ORLEANS – but defeated by WATER (not appreciating HHO), MOTEL (not grasping portmanteau) and BARNACLED (I’ve never regretted the opportunity to forgo the study of Chemistry – indeed all the sciences – at school but occasionally it shows up horrid gaps in my general knowledge).

    Thanks, koro, for a super blog.

  10. 15 minutes today, though initially I thought it was going to be quicker – it seemed to stall a couple of times, or more accurately I did. The MOTEL/WATER/BARNACLED crossings were my last in, and I eventually put in motel rather than metal as a rather unsatisfactory cryptic definition. Then I remembered my Lewis Carroll.
    Some rather clever clues today: I liked MISINFORM, the (semi?) &lit NOSEBAG and CoD BARNACLED, not least because it contained the only bit of chemistry I can remember.
    CRISIS I hesitated over because with “a hundred” clued, I wanted AC to be in there somewhere.
  11. 17 minutes.
    Quite loose in places. 19dn is a weird clue, although I suppose it kind of works as a semi-&lit. The definition in 5dn appears to be “it holds”, which is rather vague. The R in CRISIS is a bit of a stretch.
    Otherwise pretty vanilla fare, which is no bad thing on a Monday morning.
  12. 2 down. I only see one definition as I cannot see where ‘miserable’ comes from to make the portmanteau word. Please can someone put me out of my own misery! A good straitforward puzzle in about 35 minutes which is good for me.
    Many thanks
    Barry J
    1. He’s ‘aving a laff. It’s a portmanteau word made up of motor and hotel.
  14. A pleasing 24:59 for me. MOTEL was my last in, having originally put METAL as the obvious fit, but remembered to revisit it before submitting. A few went in without full understanding – WATER, MOTEL, NOSEBAG & CRISIS.

    The two long across clues were my first two in, which usually helps produce a decent time.

    1. BREAK EVEN as a near eqivalent to ‘break (level) par’, I rather imagine.
      2. It doesn’t help that I don’t understand the original reference to R & A; but I read the clue simply as BREAK =opportunity EVEN = late in the day, yielding BREAK EVEN, i.e. not go into the red, hence still in business, etc.
  16. A sluggish 20 minutes or so for me today, mainly because I was fighting to stay awake on the train in this morning. Heavy night after a long day walking in the Cotswolds was to blame.
  17. Sorry chaps, I still cant see “nosebag” other than as a food bag tied around a horses head. Why does the “h” get dropped from Noshbag? Sorry, theres always one and today its me. Thanks.
  18. Quiet 25 minute amble after correcting tendancy to dehydration in the 19th hole. A bit of loose stuff flying around here, as others have noted. Nothing to get worked up about for any particular reason, good or bad.
  19. 27 minutes for me, so faster than usual. Probably because of the cricket, science and maths.
    CRISIS, MOTEL and WATER entered without full understanding, but what else could they be?
    Thought NOSEBAG was a straight cryptic until seeing the blog (thanks Kororareka). Although not particularly cryptic, in hindsight.
  20. Nice easy start to the week, with south west being the most tricky for me. Blog useful as I didnt understand a few of the answers. Thanks.
    Louise
  21. Very late coming here today. Have almost forgotten doing this puzzle this am. But I have a note in the margin that it took me 27 minutes and I remember I enjoyed it. I knew ADDISON from some sort of magazine together with someone called STEELE. Haven’t got time now to Google them since the pub quiz starts any minute now and I’ve got to get across the road to join the merry throng.

    1. Actually, Addison founded The Spectator with Richard Steele. He contributed to Steele’s Tatler. More in my link above.
      1. Oops! Thanks for setting the record straight. (Memo to self: next time check your facts before rushing into print!) I expect I knew that 50+ years ago when we “did” Addison & Steele at school, but it must have got garbled some time between then and now. (Sigh!)
        1. I rather pine for the pre-internet days sometimes, when you got things wrong, but interestingly wrong! Addison was one of the subjects tackled by CS Lewis in the posthumous 1969 collection Selected Literary Essays, which also included essays on Morris, Scott, Austen and Kipling, as well as an interesting piece called ‘The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version’ (answer: not a lot). Lewis’s memory was legendary – but of course that meant he misquoted things. Sometimes, though, I prefer his versions …
  22. 8:12 for me – a depressingly slow start to the week as I took simply ages to get going properly, though I did manage to pick up speed a little towards the end. Nice puzzle.
    1. No, I wouldn’t have thought of the Tatler. It’s just that the names go together in my mind like Laurel and Hardy. I think I must have read about them in school. Am replying so late because I’ve just got in from the pub quiz (which we won) and the follow-up Indian – all within 100yds of my front door. Civilisation! Thanks for the info.
      1. Apologies for giving you duff information – which I’m relieved that ulaca has corrected. (That’s why I’m better at crosswords than I am at quizzes – the number of letters would have been enough to set me on the right track.)
  24. I have only just got around to solving this puzzle.

    5dn: It holds a lot of food secure around equine’s head.

    This is described by kororareka as “semi-&lit”.

    I do not think that there is such a clue type.

    # The whole clue is clearly a definition.

    # Equally, the whole clue is also word-play. The “it” in “It holds” refers to the answer, so the word play is to be read as… “It (the answer) holds (contains) [etc]”.

    This is an &lit, not a semi-&lit.

    Clive Tooth

  25. I think semi-&lit is a definite, distinct clue type. The first word or two give a mini-definition, the rest of the clue is the wordplay, and the whole clue is a longer definition.

    My favourite all-time semi-&lit is:
    “Jesus the man: extremely hairy, pale, undressed” HYPOSTASIS from Big Dave’s NTSPP 45.
    Mini-def Jesus the man, then wordplay HairY POST=pale AS-IS=undressed e.g. wood or meat for sale.
    The &lit refers to medieval paintings of Jesus during and after crucifixion: Beard and long hair, northern-European pale not olive-skinned as he would have been, and naked except for a strategically-placed loincloth.

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