Times 24901 – How would you like your good woman cooked?

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 12:12 – the crossword club is saying I have two mistakes, and I can see one typo, but now I’m a little unsure as to what is going on. I may have one entry completely wrong but I can’t see why right now (OK, found both typos while writing the blog).

I did terribly on a first run of across answers but fared a lot better with the downs and thought I was on the way to a quick time, but it wasn’t to be – I was stuck on 1 down for a long long time, thankfully the wordplay was split up one word at a time.

By the way, I’m not going to be able to get to any corrections for a while, so if something pointed out in comments that should make it into the blog, don’t worry, it will, it just won’t be until mid-afternoon UK time. On the other hand this blog could be spotless the first time (yeah right).

Away we go…

Across
1 BOMB: M in BOB
3 TWELFTH MAN: anagram of L,F,N (last letters) with MATTHEW. Rather nice surface for what is now going to be derided as an unfair cricket clue
10 NAVIGATOR: I put this in from the definition, but the wordplay is rather good – ROTA,1,VAN all reversed with a G(goods) in it
11 let’s keep this one hidden
12 ELEANOR: LEAN in E,OR
13 AS,TERN
15 EVERY MOTHER’S SON: had to piece this one together word by word – the wordplay is VERY(actual),M(male),OTHERS(the rest) in NOSE(detective’s talent) reversed
18 MATTER OF OPINION: MATTER(duller) then ONION with FOP and I in the middle
21 HUB(heart),RIS(k): over-confidence
23 EARPLUG: cryptic definition
26 HOIST: 1 in HOST(many)
27 ON DRAUGHT: O, then DR. in NAUGHT – in Americaland we write ON DRAFT so as not to confuse it with checkers
28 MONOCHROME: (COMMON,HERO)*
29 STUD(y)
 
Down
1 BONNE FEMME: BONNE(t)(most of cover), then MM(first letters of Main Meal) in FEE. Needed every ounce of wordplay here, did not know this term for simply cooked
2 MO,VIE: a film with the non-Australian Russell Crowe and non-rapper Joaquin Phoenix
4 WATER POLO: I think the wordplay here is WATERLO(GGED) (or maybe just waterlog) around PO. Edit: see comments, it’s not WATERLOGGED, it’s WATERLOO
5 LARVA: L(iberal) then alternating letters in hArRoViAn
6 TWEETER: double definition – so who are you following?
7 MAHARISHI: (AIR,HAS,HIM)*
8 N,ARK: get to/irritate
9 AGE,N.C.Y: the last three are first letters of Nurses Criticise Youth, and now I see the other type, I had this in as AGENGY
14 UNKNIGHTED: (THINK,NUDGE) – very very good clue here, nice surface, crafty definition (not Sir) and an improbable anagram!
16 EXTRUSION: X(times) in (ROUTINES)*
17 HOOVER DAM: OVER in HOD(brick carrier), then AM. I’ve been there a few times, it’s a pretty interesting (and iconic) piece of construction
19 ERRATIC: RAT in ERIC – Eric Ambler was a name I remember hearing, but couldn’t think of why. He wrote detective novels, apparently.
20 IN,ROAD: that road being a widened alley
22 I’ll leave this for you to sniff out
24 LEGIT: or LEG IT
25 C,HUM

37 comments on “Times 24901 – How would you like your good woman cooked?”

  1. Great puzzle today, I thought. 31 minutes with lots of misleading wordplay. As noted already, 4dn is a certain case in point.

    Only got the big ones (15ac and 18ac) from the crossing letters; then had to parse the clues after the fact. Lilys may have been gilded.

    I have to give my COD to ON DRAUGHT because of the mention of “stout”. The best in the world is Cascade and the best place it’s served ON DRAUGHT is at the Republic Hotel in North Hobart. Believe me.

    Edited at 2011-07-14 01:47 am (UTC)

  2. I had to log on to echo mctext in that this is a great puzzle today (it’s late PM Wed. in NY). I agree with both mctext and vinyl that the ‘thrashing’ in 4D is a Waterloo reference, and a clever one at that. About 35 minutes for me, ending with the BONNE FEMME/BOMB pair, with the former first, and from wordplay only. Luckily I got the two 15 letter across clues on first read, or I would have taken far longer. There are too many good ones to mention, so I’ll just say that EARPLUG was the only one I didn’t like. I may be the only one to take the wordplay so literally to try ‘PGONCY’ at first where AGENCY belongs. When you don’t know British, anything’s possible. Thanks setter, and George as well. Regards everyone.
  3. Is everyone happy with 21? What I see as the definition in the clue “having an extremely big head” calls for an adjective, not a noun. If the definition is just “an extremely big head” I can’t see how that could work to clue the abstract noun.
  4. 35 minutes for me, so competitive with the likes of Jack, Vinyl, McText and Kevin. Distinguished company indeed.
    Took ages to get HUBRIS, and agree with Anonymous that something about this clue doesn’t look right.
  5. Rattled through most of this in 25 minutes and then ground to a halt with both Ones missing and half a dozen unsolved towards the SE. It then took me as long again to sort these out.

    ‘Our’ in 20dn is a bit naughty but it makes the Gracie Fields film title which is rather nice so it would be churlish to complain about it.

    Reported solving times seem to have varied a lot this week so I’m not sure whether we’ve yet had the hardest of the weekday puzzles and I’m feeling a little nervous about tomorrow’s blog.

  6. A fast start but slowed down both by NE and SE; took ages to get TWELFTH MAN, even with all the checkers and realisation that an anagram was involved. Misled by the mundane nature of 23ac: kept thinking of something like ‘signet ring’ (‘seal’) or ‘earring’ until penny dropped after spotting LEGIT (I think I’ve seen this before). COD to BONNE FEMME (after working out that I couldn’t get ‘baine marie’ either to fit wordplay or number of letters, once I’d spotted spelling error!).

    Thanks for the blog, George: I didn’t fully appreciate NAVIGATOR until reading your explanation..

  7. 43 minutes with a mistake at the very end – LIGHT for LEGIT. Had a feeling it was wrong as I put it in, but couldn’t stop myself. COD in a good puzzle to the very modern TWEETER.
  8. Managed to finish this one correctly – seems like an age since the last one! – and, maybe as a consequence, enjoyed it a lot. BOMB was my FOI, and from this auspicious start I thought I was going to race through…not the case. Dismissed TRILLER, and TREBLER (x3, geddit?) before getting 6dn, I too thought along the lines of WATERLOGGED for 4dn (but can see that’s just wrong) and wasn’t too keen on EARPLUG. HUBRIS took an age (even had me questioning whether 16dn was in fact EXTURSION).

    Ps. I too toyed with the ludicrous PGONCY…!

  9. Waterloo thrashing follows on from the controversial “rout” a little while ago.
    One of those slow but steady solves but met my Waterloo with the 2 1s. BOMB courtesy of M. Roget which gave me BONNE (already had the FEMME).
  11. 26 minutes to get everything but the 2 1’s, 23 more minutes to stare at those two clues, and then after dinner, a few more minutes to decide the hell with it. I never did try to parse 15ac; thanks, George. And Eric Ambler didn’t write mysteries, he wrote spy novels and thrillers; indeed, he pretty much founded the genre. Many of his books are still in print, and rightly so; to compare his stuff to the turgid verbosity of Ludlum and that ilk, it is, to coin a phrase, Hyperion to a satyr.
  12. Lurched along shakily to 37 minutes and a slightly jarring feeling, as of a crazy fast tune that had its own music. Took forever, annoyingly, to get 1 ac. and so 1 down, but the latter worth waiting for, a new phrase to warm the cockles of my sexist heart. 21 I think is OK, ”an extremely big head’ replaceable by ‘hubris’ with a touch of envelope-stretching, made up for by the (admittedly slightly off in this case, though I’m no doctor) touch of raciness in the surface – a type of clue that crops up from time to time. Having to run to stand still these days – hope for a sub-twenty soon.
  13. 20 minutes, a good deal of which spent becalmed in the SE. A very good puzzle I thought.
    I wasn’t sure what “supposedly” is doing in 11ac. I also queried “our” in 20ac but suspected this must be the name of some book/film/play, and in that context I think it’s more than forgiveable.
    HUBRIS seems fine to me if you read “having a big head” as “the state of having a big head”.
    1. It can be defined as “the notional medium of radio transmission” and I think ‘supposedly’ refers to its being notional.
      1. Doh! I was on the wrong track altogether. I thought this was a chemical reference, and was reading “medium” as something akin to “solvent”. Sometimes ignorance can help you to the right answer by the wrong route!
        Thank you.
  15. Time probably in the twenties once allowance is made for interruptions, but in truth I was also becalmed a fair while in the SE, and HUBRIS took forever to get. Conditioned by a crossword where many clues needed an optimistic punt on what might be a definition followed by a tortuous unravelling of the cryptic (both long ones, lots of others) there were simply too many possible definitions packed in.
    A fine workout. I think we are being encouraged towards the revisionist view that Waterloo was no dam’d close run thing – history rewritten by cryptic convention.
    EARPLUG was the only duffer I noted, CoD to one or other of the the improbable anagrams, TWELFTH MAN or UNKNIGHTED, both with too many consonants for ease of operation.
    1. Thanks – wow that took a long time to get picked up on – I’m going to claim number dyslexia.
  18. re 1ac: In what contexts does ‘m’ represent ‘marks’? And by the way, when ‘are’ is used to clue ‘a’ without ‘some say’, is it still on the basis of a supposed homophone or is there any other excuse?
  19. 25 minutes again after golf but a much more satisfactory solve than yesterday. I’m in the “feel a bit uneasy” camp over HUBRIS, my last in like several others.

    Quite surprised that folks are not familiar with BONNE FEMME which I solved from definition. Fresh fish is often cooked this way and served with a cold Pouilly say, delicious.

  20. Very enjoyable but it took me a while to get into it. It had never struck me before that TWELFTH is a very peculiar word – up there with RHYTHM and other words short on vowels. 37 minutes
    1. My favourite is KNIGHTSBRIDGE, which as far as I’m aware is the only English word with six straight consonants.
      1. How about SIGHTSCREEN (can be a single word as well as hyphenated and separate words), WATCHSPRING and WATCHSTRAP? (There are plenty of loan words as well, but these three are unequivocally English.)
  21. 11:52 for me, slowed down at the end by a foodie answer (BONNE FEMME) – as usual.

    Anyone doubting the soundness of 21ac should look up “gerund” (of which “having” is an example) in the dictionary.

    1. I think we all know what a gerund is. The problem is whether “having [gerund] a big head” is a definition of “hubris” any more than “having [gerund] a nasal infection” is a definition of “a cold”. “A nasal infection” is a definition of “a cold”. “To have a big head” may be a metaphorical definition of “to have(or suffer from) hubris” but “a big head” doesn’t work as a definition of hubris because it is only a part of the metaphorical expression.
      1. Actually I didn’t know what a gerund was. I do now!

        But I assuaged my earlier concerns by substituting “hubris” for “having a big head” in the following sentence: “Kevin Pietersen appears to suffer from having a big head.” That works, doesn’t it?

      2. Compare the following.

        1. I really hate having a nasal infection. (OK)
        2. I really hate having a cold. (OK; means the same as 1. (to the non-specialist))
        3. I really hate a cold. (OK; likely to mean the same as 1. but could mean something different if someone has just sneezed all over you)

        4. One of his worst faults is having an extremely big head. (OK)
        5. One of his worst faults is having hubris. (sounds decidedly odd and would never (?) be used in practice, but would presumably mean the same as 4. in its metaphorical sense)
        6. One of his worst faults is hubris. (OK; means the same as 4. in its metaphorical sense)

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