Times 24912: Gig 51 Revisited

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 42 minutes.

Struggled a bit with this one, with the top left and bottom right corners going in last. Also apologies to Jim: couldn’t post yesterday as Live Journal was Dead.

 

Across
 1 CREOLE. ‘aCtor’, ROLE, including E (energy).
 4 FLIP-FLOP. Flip (cheeky); flop (failure).
10 PAC(E)MAN.
11 GROW(L)ER. “A small iceberg that rises little above the water”.
12 Omitted. As LJ was all of yesterday.
13 DI(STILLER)Y. DIY (home work).
15 TOLPUDDLE. Anagram: led up to + L (galLows) + D.
16 GIG,LI. Benjamino, opera singer.
18 E,BONY.
19 A(R)BIT,RAGE. The def is a bit thin I thought.
21 SMOKING GUN. My grandpa had both a smoking jacket and a smoking hat. This is one of them. Then GUN (arm).
23 HISS. Two defs.
26 TEAR GAS. TEAR (race), reversal of SAG (drop).
27 SCUTTLE. Two defs.
28 STAND PAT. Two defs (again); one jocular. As you do in the St James Infirmary.
29 WARREN. Warre{d}; N{ormans}. No more Governors General?
Down
 1 CAP,ON.
 2 ESCAMILLO. Hidden answer. The chap from Carmen.
 3 LIMN. Homophone. “Depict or describe in painting or words”.
 5 LEG(A)TEE.
 6 PROF,LIGATE. The last part is “tie up or otherwise close off (an artery or vessel)”.
 7 L(ILL)E.
 8 PARTY LINE. Anagram: learn pity.
 9 IN KIND. ‘Ink in’ + D.
14 JURY-RIGGED. Two defs … yet again.
15 THERSITES. Anagram: ‘tee shirts’. Most likely the chap from Troilus and Cressida.
17 G(LAD,I)ATOR.
19 Omitted. Another homophone.
20 BLU(I)SH. Best of today’s bad bunch.
22 OSAKA. Oak = wood; A = area.
24 SK(E)IN. “A flock of wild geese or swans in flight, typically in a V-shaped formation”.
25 PUM,A. ‘Mup{pet}’ = foolish person.

 

24 comments on “Times 24912: Gig 51 Revisited”

  1. 30:00 .. much chewier than yesterday’s offering (belated happy returns, jimbo – liked the hint).

    I managed to pencil in some five or six different wrong answers, including the less famous, but some say superior, Wakefield tenor ACTLI.

  2. 40 minutes, the last 8 devoted to playing with the alphabet until SKEIN showed up, not that I’d ever heard the word in its avian sense. HISS seemed to good to be true, so I waited a long time before putting it in. Since I don’t know what arbitrage is, I put that one in mainly on a wing and a prayer, as I did with PUMA. Like GIGLI, TOLPUDDLE finally came to mind (both from cryptics); I could only think of Tonypandy for quite a while.
    A creole is a native language that develops from a pidgin, which is a mixture of languages. (Please don’t tell me what Chambers says, I don’t care; I’m not objecting to the clue.)
    1. and a pidgin too is not essentially a mixture; rather a re-creation from a simplified form
  3. Not in my book – I thought this was a very good puzzle, even if it took me 100 minutes, required me to check the spelling of one answer (LIMN) and defeated me at the last (with ‘sheen’ for the unfamiliar SKEIN).

    Having ‘flag gun’ (I thought I’d never heard this used for the the cartoon weapon that launches a floppy flag – although on checking it does exist … as almost everything does now with Google) for TEAR GAS didn’t help, but then THERSITES was hardly a gimme. Also, rather unaccountably wanted to put ‘scupper’ and then ‘scudder’ at 27ac, when all along SCUTTLE must have been screaming for my attention. COD to PUMA.

  4. Another puzzle of two halves for me. With the exception of ARBITRAGE (never heard of it), the RH side went in steadily (SKEIN has come up before many a time and provoked some discussion), but the LH proved almost impenetrable as I did not know STAND PAT, THERSITES or LIMN. I thought of PACEMAN at 10ac but couldn’t justify it as I have never heard of PAC MAN and incidentally, when I eventually got round to cheating (after an hour had passed) I found that PACEMAN is not in Collins, my edition of Chambers nor in the two-volume SOED; it is, however, in COED. The week is not going well so far.

    I have one minor gripe at 7ac that if LILLE is a stop before Paris then presumably it is also a stop after it depending on the direction of travel, so possibly a question-mark would have been in order.

    1. I think or an anglocentric paper like The Times (of London), ‘stop before Paris’ is fine. ‘Paceman’ is very common in the cricketing world.
  5. Thank heavens both Monday and Tuesday crosswords were straightforward (thank you vinyl and jimbo for, somehow, getting blogs online). Today was a different matter. Resounding failure and desperately in need of the blog to point out the multitude of my inadequacies (both knowledge and understanding of wordplay). For instance, I’d pencilled in CAPON but could not reconcile it to the clue …. Thank you mctext for letting me get on with my day.
  6. Really tricky, and was pleased to get almost to the end before resorting to solvers, but even then I managed to slip on the unfamiliar LIMN (putting in LIMB, but knowing it probably wasn’t right).

    Lots of unknowns went in on wordplay (PACEMAN, GROWLER, WARREN, STAND PAT). Lots of clever clues, all in all a good puzzle.

    COD: DISTILLERY

  7. Just squeaked in under the hour at 59:10, but needed aids for LIMN and THERSITES. Both were unknown words, and although I could see the construction for both, but there wasn’t enough information in the wordplay for either to work out the answer. I thought LIMN in particular was an awful clue. It is surely an extremely obscure word, and there are several potential spellings that could fit just as well – LIMM or LYMB both seemed more likely to me.
    And, goodness me, Jack have you really never heard of Pac-man? Where have you been for the last 30 years?
    COD to PUMA, purely for its usage of the word muppet.
    2. Ridiculously late post, but I’ve only just managed to get access to the site for the first time this week.
      I agree with you entirely on LIMN. I thought THERSITES was OK because you can construct it with a reasonable degree of confidence from the fodder and checkers.
      No time, but it was probably close to an hour all told. Couldn’t get LIMN without aids though so an official DNF. Generally lots of obscurity in this puzzle I thought. At least I had no problem with ARBITRAGE but only because I work in the city and I have sympathy with those who struggled.
  8. After last week’s total disaster with no correct solutions, I’m very pleased to have the third correct solution in as many days this week, in just under an hour. And this despite the fact that I had never heard of PACEMAN, GROWLER (to mean an iceberg), GIGLI, WARREN Hastings, ESCAMILLO, THERSITES or a SKEIN of birds. That’s quite a list, but the wordplay was easy enough in all cases.

    I too filled in GUN in 26 ac until I discovered the first word of the answer and then the second was clear. Otherwise, no really outstanding clues, much the same as for the previous puzzles this week. Perhaps things will return to normal soon (and I won’t be able to complete the puzzles any more).

    What is causing the glitches on Live Journal?

    1. It seems that LJ is the most popular blogging platform in Russia these days, and the prevalent view is that the repeated attacks on its servers are a consequence of controversy over some of the political blogs it hosts. All sorts of conspiracy theories are out there, but clearly this blog, like many others, is caught up in somebody else’s war.

      Maybe time to revisit the question of moving TFFT to another platform? The consensus in the blogosphere seems to be that LJ is probably not the platform of the future.

      1. Thanks for the explanation. That explains why when I took up Chrome’s offer to show me a cached Livejournal page this afternoon it was in Russian with fascinating information about smog in Moscow.
  9. So the definition is ‘Making a turn’?

    I can’t see any connection between this and the definitions in the OED.

    Paul S.

    1. ‘Turn’ is a profit and ‘arbitrage’ is to do with making one, that’s as close as I can get to it as I don’t understand the jargon fully.
    2. This was perhaps the perfect clue if you knew the word – “making a turn” is perhaps the most succinct definition of arbitrage you could possibly have. In the old day, arbitrage was my profession and job title – the basic premise being that before near perfect communication links, computers on every desk and the internet, a good living could be made from exploiting the difference in value between securities in different markets/countries, buying the cheap one and selling the expensive one for a “turn” which varied from less than a percent to perhaps multiples. Great stories could be had about your “turn” – how big, how unlikely, how cunningly achieved etc. As time passed, the ability to watch everything simultaneously removed the margins (or turns) although nowadays there will still be endless computer algorithms running in the background to exploit even the slightest move out of line, either real or statistical.
      1. Thanks for explaining so fully. I could see all the meanings were there in the dictionaries but couldn’t quite piece it all together in my mind.
      2. Yes, thanks for the explanation.

        A bit obscure for my liking, though.

        Thought GIGLI was very good.

        Paul S.

  10. I tried a pithy post last night, but the livejournal site wasn’t having any of that, so I’m back by day here in the US. By memory, around 25 minutes, ending with the crossing HISS/SKEIN, by going through the alphabet for SKEIN, to confirm the hard to believe HISS, a la kevingregg. THERSITES, WARREN and GROWLER from wordplay only, so my vocabulary is expanded yet again. Regards to everyone. Thanks to linxit for giving us the explanation from livejournal of the recent problems, and it’s nice to know it’s not just me. COD to GIGLI, and thanks to mctext as well.
  11. Fine crossword, this one, with a number of top class clues – well done setter!

    One of the best clues is 19ac Arbitrage – I was quite startled that so many seem unfamiliar with the term

  12. Yes, I know it’s 3 days later, but I’ve only just got my LOI (CAPON – I was determined NOT to cheat but still had all the NW left at close of play)
    But I stil don’t see why CAPON – is it too late for anyone to see this now?

      James

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