Times 24,899 Wapping Edition

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 15 minutes

A plain vanilla puzzle that shouldn’t cause any problems with some very fast times from the Championship contenders

Across
1 HOGMANAY – HOG-MAN-AY; New Year’s Eve with kilts on;
5 LIZARD – LIZ-A-RD; female news editor, perhaps?
10 MARTHAS,VINEYARD – MART-HAS-VINE-(DRAY reversed); Uncle Sam’s 24D;
11 TABLESPOON – (noble past + o=ordained originally)*; for taking the medcine;
13 DATE – two meanings;
15 RESTART – RE-START; RE=Royal Engineers;
17 OVERTLY – OVER-T(L)Y; TY from T(att)Y; deliveries=OVER (cricket – what else?);
18 GREMLIN – G-(k)REMLIN;
19 STORIES – STOR(I)ES; scoop=big news story=phone hacking and bribery;
21 ECHT – (Br)ECHT; Bertolt 1898-1956;
22 IMPENITENT – I’M-PEN-I(mbibe)-TENT; female news editor, perhaps?
25 FOUNDING,FATHERS – weak cryptic definition – reference US Constitution created September 1787;
27 LADING – LA(DIN)G;
28 ENORMITY – EN(OR)MITY; bribery at Wapping, some might say;
 
Down
1 HAMSTER – H-AMSTER(dam);
2 GAR – RAG reversed; female news editor, perhaps?
3 ACHIEVABLE – A-CH-IE-V-ABLE; CH=Companion of Honour;
4 AESOP – A-ES-OP; ES from E(l) S(alvador);
6 ILEX – IL-EX; French for he=IL;
7 AMARANTHINE – the love-lies-bleeding genus (more faith in certain institutions than love);
8 DODDERY – D(ODDER)Y; DY=D(erb)Y; Scotland Yard’s approach to certain alleged crimes?
9 TIMOROUS – TIMOR-O-US; Scotland Yard’s approach to certain alleged crimes?
12 BASSET,HOUND – B(TESSA reversed-H)OUND; H=heroin=horse;
14 NEGOTIATOR – (to get on air)*;
16 TENEMENT – TEN-E(MEN)T;
18 GLEEFUL – GLEE-FUL; pun on GLEE=part song; NOW crossword setters – good for them;
20 SATISFY – SATISF(actor)Y;
23 ELFIN – (NILE reversed) around F=female;
24 EDEN – hidden (wall)ED EN(closure);
26 ELI – (t)E(l)L(s) I(t);

30 comments on “Times 24,899 Wapping Edition”

  1. 44 minutes, so I’m calling medium difficulty despite Jim’s considered assessment. There was much to like in this puzzle where several answers were obvious but the parsings had to come later. And, once seen, were interestingly devious.

    12dn is a good case in point (depending on which crossers you happen to have). That is: most will tend to find TESSA only after the fact. But then you also see that “naturally” isn’t doing much at all but act on the surface. (A surf-actant as I like to call it; aka “padding”.)

    What (fat?) chance of anyone solving 25ac without generous help from the crossing letters? As Jim under-statingly says: “weak”. More evidence for serious editorial reconsideration of the “cryptic def”? Most of the time, they’re not cryptic in any sense of that word. And this is a case in point.

    PS to Jim: remind me to tell you about Robert Chambers’s fascination with golf!

    1. We agree it’s barely cryptic. I read the clue and wrote the answer straight in. To me 1787 is a complete give away – it must be the Constitution and a 8,7 format just gives the answer. Confirmed it by solving 18D to give the leading F

      Robert Chambers?

      1. You might know him as one of W&R Chambers (publishers) now of dictionary fame. But he wrote the massively-selling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). This paved the way for public acceptance of (what he called) “transmutation”, aka evolution, and so eased the path for Darwin.

        In a piece called “Gossip about Golf” (Chambers Journal, 1842) he, a Scot, argued that his favourite sport was the inevitable result of the “existence of certain peculiar waste grounds called links”. Ditto cricket and village greens in England. So: natural selection in its infancy.

        See this: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo3613191.html
        Worth a look for Darwinish golfers!

  2. Crushed by Jimbo’s assessment here. ILEX, ECHT and AMARANTHINE from wordplay, GLEEFUL from definition. Much tougher than yesterday, 3 times tougher in fact. Still, cheered by finally solving 1d in Saturday’s puzzle (with confirmation from Wiki) which has been causing sleepless nights. Bad COD to FOUNDING FATHERS, COD to NEGOTIATOR.
    Now I’m late for cricket.
  3. 43 minutes, with some time taken to try to justify 12d & 2d, although I knew they had to be correct; never did twig until I read the blog, which irritates me (the not twigging, not the blog). I first had ‘Hesse’ for 4d (H-E around ES’S), which doesn’t work, of course; on the other hand, did Aesop ever write a work?
  4. 25 minutes here, the last five or so on 14 and 19. Perhaps 25 would have been OK without ‘in 1787’? Interesting comment on Aesop above. Tastier than vanilla if not pistachio.
  5. Not quite as quick as jimbo but comfortably under 30 minutes. No major problems except disentangling my German dramatists: distracted by Goethe but eventually spotted Brecht (which fitted wordplay).

    Thanks, jimbo, for a great blog: real entertainment.

  6. 65 minutes, but a DNF with the anagram at 14 for some reason proving beyond me, when I first reckoned it ended in ‘-ter’ and then gave up thinking it was an anagram at all. I obviously need that break at the Open Championship with my daughter!

    I liked the 18s in particular, and indeed the puzzle as a whole. Will be buying a copy of The Times for the next week or so to get my daily fix, and may be able to haunt these pages from time to time in the next 10 days or so if my fat fingers can negotiate my sister’s Blackberry.

    On viewing the Maestro’s blog, I see I got the wrong German dramatist, plumping for Goethe, beheading him rather hopefully (well, the G and the O are there to be deleted) and ending up with ETHE, which I’m gratified to see is a word, even if it means ‘easy’.

  7. I found this easy until it got hard. Failed to get ECHT, and guessed incorrectly at ABARANTHINE. For some reason also failed to get DATE.
    One question for the blogger. Is the heroin necessary in the parsing of 12d? I’m sure that “h” is a common abbreviation for horse in racebooks and form guides, for example.
    1. Chambers doesn’t give h=horse directly and that’s my personal guide on these abbreviations (because it’s used for bar crosswords where these devices are used a lot)
  8. 15 minutes, bloated by time spent on 28, despite all the crossing letters, creating a rather nice word ANORTINY (Other Ranks in ANTI New York) in passing. Solving is perhaps not helped by the overwhelming current use of ENORMITY to be enormousness, greatness. The BBC on the US Open: “the enormity of what McIlroy is achieving out there looks like it’s just starting to sink in.” Perhaps the clue hedges its bets a little, since “outrageous act” could work both ways.
    Otherwise, I thought much of this was “cluing by numbers”, one of those where you could work through the cryptic with conventional replacements until a word appeared, ACHIEVABLE being a prime example.
    Perhaps 25 would have been more fun clued as “They originated in America in 17 (8,7)” As it was, with early checkers in place, it almost went in without looking at the clue at all.
    How nice to see DATE make a contrite, non-controversial return!
    CoD to TABLESPOON for the best concealed anagram of the day and the ordinand/server misdirection
    1. Enormity instead of immensity is becoming sickeningly prevalent. It is time sombody fried the tails of the press for wrongly using the word by cleaning them up in the courts on a libel charge. There is no excuse for deprecating the word, as there no adequate substitute in the English language. Crass ignorance and laziness.
      1. Not much point in getting upset about this sort of thing. The meanings of words change, nothing we can do about it and no real reason why we should want to.
        There was a discussion here recently about “disinterested”. It turns out this word has done a come full circle from “uninterested” to “impartial” and back again. Fascinating.
  9. Defeated by 3dn (couldn’t get away from the A+clever+ALLY idea), and then couldn’t get 10ac.

    Good puzzle, good blog. Thanks for several explanations of answers that went in on either cryptic OR definition.

  10. Only a little under an hour for me. Jim’s assessment of the level of difficulty seems unsupported by other contributors so far, going by solving times posted but this may change of course as the day progresses.

    28 and 14 were my last in and I came here not having worked out the wordplay at 20dn where the explanation was staring me in the face. I had been looking to remove a term for or name of an actor, rather than the word in the clue itself.

  11. Pushing 30 min. Would have been 15 min and something of a doddle, but undone by the double German (may as well have been double Dutch as far as I was concerned) 21 ac. Eventually went to the aids only to be left with an insipid taste.
  12. I will have to disagree with the common view. I think 25 was an ok cryptic def. It may not have been brilliant, but it wasnt the worst. The date spoilt it a bit, just the first 4 words would have sufficed, but it fulfilled the prime objective of having a surface with different implications to the answer due to the (slightly) differing uses of “originated”.

    Otherwise I was also one who spent ages on 14d even with all the checkers. My initial thought of anagram was waylaid as I picked “on air trip” and then discounted as only 9 letters. The definition was cunningly hidden, and it was only when I reverted to the anagram idea that I realised “trip” was the anagrind. Even then I was sure it started AERO or ended -ITTER and so spent more time than I should there.

    Other than that it was a fairly straightforward offering, even though I had never heard of the word LADING, and quibbled a bit with the definition of 28.

  13. Agree with Jimbo, a very vanilla 15 minutes for me too but no less enjoyable for that.
  14. DNF after a disaster in the SE corner with several wrong answers. I didn’t know AMARANTHINE, and went for AMARANTHOUS instead. This gave me a wrong checker in 19 for which I got SIPHONS (=scoops, sort of, and anag of IN SHOPS), this in turn gave me another wrong checker in 14 for which I got RESPIRATOR as a sort of cryptic def. This left me with two wrong checkers in 22 for which even I couldn’t invent a word to fit.

    Shame, because I’d started really quickly, finishing the top half in under 10 minutes.

  15. 23 minutes with the compulsory typo – TINOROUS, today.

    Thanks for the hugely entertaining blog, jimbo.

  16. 15 minutes, no real hangups, though FOUNDING FATHERS went in with a bit of a “huh”.
    1. Made me smile. But, given the secret nature of an assignation, one would suspect that fruitfulness would not be a desired outcome!
  18. 12:37 here, as Jimbo and a couple of others found, quite an easy one but with a couple of traps for the unwary. I also struggled to get NEGOTIATOR even though I was looking at the right set of letters all along. Not sure why.
  19. Travelling all day today so a very late post indeed. “Why do I bother?” I hear you ask. Good question, but if you’re reading this you’ve answered it.
    I finally settled down to this on a flight back to London but should have started about 15 minutes later. As it was I was quite distracted by a succession of BA employees introducing themselves to me, telling me it was their pleasure to be serving me this evening and imparting information only likely to be of any use in a plane crash of precisely the correct level of severity.
    Anyway, 19 minutes with all that, so quite straighforward. I thought it was going to be very easy but got held up by a few at the end including MARTHA’S VINEYARD and ENORMITY.
    The word AMARANTH first came to my attention as the name of a hedge fund that blew up spectacularly in 2006. A year later hedge funds blowing up spectacularly stopped making the news even in the FT.
    Similar reaction to others to FOUNDING FATHERS (is that it?).
    GLEE is my new word for the day. Thanks for that and making me chuckle Jimbo.
  20. I’m so late posting that it’s tomorrow! So I don’t expect anyone is still reading this. Did the puzzle before I got up this am but haven’t had a chance to read the blog. A nice smooth solve at 25 minutes with no hold-ups

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