Times 24900: Put your left foot in

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 17 minutes.

And that’s a pretty good time for me, so there will be many faster than that. All quite straightforward except, possibly, the 5ac/8dn pair (my last two in, in that order) where there’s not a lot to go on — or else, too much depending on your solving style and experience. And a couple of very generous anagrams (1dn & 16ac) are there for the slow starters. You just have to love 17ac.
 

Across
 1 CATCH OUT. CAT and CUT (injured) around HO (house).
 5 PROSIT. PRO (top sportsman); SIT{ed} (placed). A drinking salutation: ‘may it benefit’.
 9 RA(PAC,IT)Y. The flat fish is a RAY, including PAC{k} and IT.
10 A,L,COVE. ‘Cove’, in this sense, was in a recent Sunday puzzle.
12 IN THE PIPELINE. Two defs, one jocular. Churchwardens are (smoking-type) pipes. Ah … for the days when you could smoke in church!
15 HOKEY. Half of the Hokey-Cokey (or, -Pokey in some places). In the US: “noticeably contrived: a hokey country-western accent”; also “mawkishly sentimental: a good-hearted, slightly hokey song” (US Oxford).
16 KRONSTADT. Anagram of ‘tots drank’. (There’s another one in Romania and another one …)
17 EMOTIONAL. I’ll pay this one! Reversal of LA No. 1 TOME. Would be even neater if le tome happened to be feminine.
19 Omitted. One for the East Lothians.
20 BY ALL ACCOUNTS. Two defs, one homophonic (BY=BUY).
22 IN A WAY. Read as IN and AWAY. (Not a soap opera.)
23 D,IS,RAEL,I. Reversal of LEAR (monarch about).
25 L,ADDER.
26 C(EREBRA)L. CL (class) containing an anagram of ‘be rare’.
Down
 1 CARMICHAEL. Anagram of ‘acclaim her’. Hoagland Howard (not 15ac).
 2 TIP. End of ‘repast’ = T; then 1P (one penny, small amount). Tidy &lit for the whole. (Unless you’re a big tipper.)
 3 H(ACKER)Y. First and last of ‘HappY’ including {b}ACKER. The def. is the currently apposite ‘rag trade’ = journalism. (Headline: HACKS TURN HACKERS?) I wonder whether {p}ACKER was a temptation for the setter?
 4 U(N,THIN,KIN)GLY. So … UGLY (squalid) containing N (note) and THIN (poor) KIN (family). Not so much as a whiff of Henry VIII this time.
 6 R,ALLIES.
 7 ST(ONE) MART,EN. Here we have ONE (I) inside ST (street) MART (market) and the EN from ‘wENt’. The animal and, by extension, its fur.
 8 TOED. Delete the W from ‘toWed’. You don’t want to be either in the hole (homophones notwithstanding).
11 RE,COLLECTIVE. Strictly DBE, but not one that should bother the solver.
13 TAKE ON BOARD. Two defs., one jocular. This time the press gang is not the rag trade.
14 S(T)ANDS,TILL. SANDS (deserts) and TILL (work) including an extra T (time).
18 I,M(A)MATE. M for ‘married’ and MATE (couple, verb).
19 S,COURGE. COURAGE (daring) minus the A.
21 P,ILL. With cheeky &lit-ish overtones.
24 Omitted; but don’t get in a flap.

 

23 comments on “Times 24900: Put your left foot in”

  1. Nodded off after 22 minutes, finished after dinner, no clear idea of the time taken, but probably under an hour. This was something of a Dr.Fell of a puzzle; I didn’t really like it, but why, I cannot tell. Being an ex-pipesmoker may have helped–I actually owned a churchwarden–but 12ac went in immediately; while on the other hand 2d took me forever. I deleted the T from ‘toted’ to get 8d; well, the result’s the same, so wottthehell.
  2. For Vinyl’s “nearly impossible” just remove the “nearly”. Brilliant time McText.
    I needed help with STONE MARTEN, STANDSTILL and, infuriatingly, IN A WAY. Had KRODSTANT as my port.
    Questions?
    Why See in 25?
    What sort of clue is RAPACITY?
    1. It might mean “If you see” = have, place, etc. L (for ‘large’). Or else it’s just a surf-actant (aka padding).

      Edited at 2011-07-13 07:10 am (UTC)

    2. It’s my least favourite kind where the def. is just “this” and you have to make the pronoun stand in for something else in the clue: that (anything) which endlessly consumes shows ….
  3. 60 minutes. I struggled with this too. It was a slow steady solve working from the bottom upwards but I was never really stuck until I was left with only 7, 8 and 5 which I eventually solved in that order.

    I didn’t know KRONSTADT but worked it out having spotted that it had to end in STADT which I knew from German. Speaking of which I was ashamed to take so long to spot PROSIT at 5ac having spent much time in the Hofbraeuhaus and similar establishments in Munich and elsewhere.

    Good to see old Hoagy get a mention at 1dn.

    1. I’ll be Hofbrauhausing at the end of the month. Will give you a Prosit in absentia!
  4. …but I rejoiced as I managed to finish without aids … or so I thought…

    Having got RECOLLECTION without really questioning it, I then found 26ac impossible, and stuffed in INTEGRAL as it was the only thing I could think of that fit. I also put in TR(awl)ED at 8dn. Hey ho, another day, another DNF!

    COD to EMOTIONAL

    1. Thank God I am no alone with recollection/integral. I did get the rest with some minimal help, but felt like a fish out of water over all.
  5. Strange game this solving crosswords. After racing through yesterday’s I never got on the same wavelength as this setter and was always struggling throughout my 25 minute solve.

    Derived the port in the same way as Jack and thought of him immediately at 1D. Took an age to understand HACKERY for some reason. Ended up feeling I should have done better.

    1. I suspect it’s a blog-duty thing.
      You either panic and take ages or see things right off because you bloody-well have to. Or else.
      I keep fluctuating between the two modes. Guess I’ll settle down before too long.
      Perhaps a lingering over-awareness of the shoes I’ve been filling? ((Bring on the Freudians.))
  6. I too found this tricky. 38 minutes. Respect to mctext’s time. A bit surprised by Carmichael and hackery, for different reasons. A good mix of the more, the less and the variously concealed without quite having one climbing the walls.
  7. 40 minutes here, of which nearly half on PROSIT/TOED/STONE MARTEN. First I bunged in SHED at 8dn (which would be a valid answer of sorts if the clue had been “kicked and kicked heartlessly”) and then when I’d sorted that out I wasted ages thinking the fur would be STOLE. I pieced it all together eventually.
    I found the rest pretty difficult too. Never having heard of the pipe or Hoagy CARMICHAEL slowed me down a fair bit.
  8. DNF. Mostly defeated by NW. The inclusion of ‘her’ (1dn) put me on the wrong track looking for a female; TIP (2dn) seemed too simple; could not get HOSIERY (3dn) out of my head and did not know HACKERY anyhow; and STONE MARTEN was unknown (though pencilled in from wordplay).

    Thanks for an informative blog, mctext, (particularly the explanation of IN THE PIPELINE) and thanks, too, to the setter: too tough for me – but fair.

  9. This was a perfect example of how not to do a crossword for me. Lots of kneejerk filling in and overwriting later, plus finishing with STONE MARTIN (!) and KNORSTADT (which I have no qualms about apart from a lack of general knowledge.)

    Stuck in UNTHOUGHTFUL, then YOU as the second word of 20A, before changing later. Stuck in RECOLLECTION, making 26A a struggle until I realised that is was an error.

    All in all a bit of a shambles, avoidable (apart from 16) with a little less haste.

  10. Tricky for me too – several Tippex moments before the penny dropping ones. Looking back on it, some good clues which I did enjoy.
  11. Delighted to finish without aids, given that at various times I entered RECOLLECTION, TAD, TAKE TO HEART and HOSIERY. Probably explains why it took well over an hour.
    COD to EMOTIONAL, by a mile.
  12. Just over an hour for me, hindered by my inability to work out the anagram at 1dn until the very end. EMOTIONAL was excellent – which reminds me that I got a very late reply that people may not have seen about one of the best clues of last week, the Boston tea party CHA RIOT. The writer reckoned that an identical clue was much admired by one of his or her schoolteachers 40 years ago. Oh well, the best ones are worth recycling, I suppose.
  13. I struggled to get started with this. I too was looking for a woman musician at 1d and even after I got the anagram I didn’t think of Hoagy Carmichael (In spite of having a book of his greatest hits somewhere in my sheet music mountain) I saw PROSIT almost immediately but didn’t understand the IT bit until reading the blog. I thought KRONSTADT was a swine of an anagram to work out without checking letters. There didn’t seem to be enough vowels. (Though, living in Wales, I shouldn’t complain!) The fact that it is a German name, rather than a Russian one, just added to the confusion. Once I spotted STADT though it all fell into place. My compliments to the blogger – not an easy task today for most of us. I was relieved to finish at all. 47 minutes.
  14. Couldn’t do this in one sitting, had to come back to it after breakfast (most of the hold-ups caused by 7 and 16). Then saw it all – KRONSTADT from the wordplay and of all things, my last in was TOED!
  15. I also made heavy weather of the puzzle today, about an hour while sneaking glimpses at the US All Star baseball game. Last entries were HACKERY and CARMICHAEL, for which latter, while I saw the anagram and fodder at first read, I couldn’t get it til the end. Same with KRONSTADT, which I would never have placed in Russia. Didn’t know of churchwarden pipes, either. A challenge of a puzzle, definitely not HOKEY. Thanks to mctext for the blog, although your time could make the rest of us feel like boneheads. Regards to all.
  16. I worked out it had to be Kronstadt, but had a problem with Russia. According to our Philips Atlas (1992)Kronstadt is in Romania, and some other reference I forget pro tem. The Russian similar name is Kronshtadt. Bob Spencer.

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