Times 24924: Stranger on the typo

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Unknown solving time.

Liked this puzzle but couldn’t time it for personal reasons. I’d say about 20-25 minutes would be OK on a regular day. Be interested to see how the rest of the T4T community went with this.

I won’t be able to nurse this blog today. I (literally) have to see a man about a dog.
 

Across
 1 E,CU,ADOR. Had to begin with ECU. Then ADOR{e} — endless lov{e}. A littoral state.
 5 F(A,BERG)É. A composer (Berg) inside F (fine) and E (English). Gustav the Eggman. Goo goo g’joob.
 9 ILL,US,TRIO(U)S. ILL{inois} (state), US (American), TRIOS (chamber groups) inc. U (university).
10 Omitted. Out of the frier, into the friar? (As the Chip Monk said to the actress?)
11 MINCER. It moves campishly and grinds meat.
12 H(ERCUL)ES. Rev. of LUCRE in an remix of SHE. One noted for his labours.
14 SUBJECT MATTER. Two defs; one more cryptic than the other.
17 MAGNETIC NORTH. Frederick, Pommy PM 1770-1782. Guess we should forgive ‘with an …’ as a def in the wrong part of speech?
21 OV(ERR)ID,E. OVID and E (note), inc. ERR (blunder).
23 REPAIR. RE (say) + PAIR (socks): match them up and you get a definition by example. But see Jack’s parsing (thanks!) which is probably more correct. Still, ‘darn’ is a genuine DBE. (One can repair in several ways including this.)
25 HAL{e}.
26 GRAND NEP,HEW. £1000 (a grand); PEN (writer reversed); HEW (cut).
27 EGGHEAD. Anagram of ‘a hedge’ and G (last letter of ‘pleachinG’). A new word for me. NOAD has “entwine or interlace (tree branches) to form a hedge or provide cover for an outdoor walkway: an avenue of pleached limes”.
28 LITERAL. For some, sounds like ‘littoral’.
Down
 1 ENIGMA. Anagram of ‘{1}magine’ or ‘imag{1}ne’.
 2 U,PLAN,D,S. Anyone for charades?  
 3 DISS,(E)MB,LE. Diss is a hell of a place in Norfolk. ‘Extremely LargE’ = LE.
 4 R(OR)Y. RY = railway = line. The Other Ranks are included.
 5 FLO,RENT,IN,E. More charades anyone?
 6 Omitted. If unsure, go-ogle Arthur Benjamin.
 7 RINGLET. It’s not a S{on}-inglet.
 8 EX,POS,URE. Pilot OfficerS.
13 BE,HIND,HAND. Two farm workers = HIND and HAND.
15 A,GREE(MEN)T. Greet = cry, North of the border.
16 SMOOTHIE. Two defs.
18 GREY,LAG. LAG = ‘convict serving’.
19 HEAT HER up.
20 CRE(W)EL.
22 RO(G)UÉ.
24 IDOL. Homothingy for IDLE.

 

34 comments on “Times 24924: Stranger on the typo”

  1. Unfortunately put minces – mincer clearly better. 19 minutes with that. In India and feeling the explosion of the Big Society at a distance. I was here when Diana died and the Richter Scale’s about the same. Getting the hang of solving online. Looking forward, not gleefully, to the cricket. Shocked.
  2. Isn’t MAGNETIC NORTH a direction, (or possibly a location as an abbreviation for “magnetic north pole”) rather than a property? I don’t quite follow this.
    1. I take it as a noun (thing, place), with an attractive property.

      Edited at 2011-08-10 04:41 am (UTC)

  3. 34 minutes, so on the easy side of the scale for me with 7 and 12 taking it over the half hour.

    At 23ac I think ‘say’ indicates socks as an example of something one might match up or re-pair.

  4. I agree with SRN Jack re the re-pairing of socks. My COD. One or two I didn’t know (e.g. CREWEL) but they caused less problem than a pattern of wrong guessing: ‘top’ (‘pot’ reversed for PAN), ‘singlet’ for RINGLET (I’m a hopeless substitutor) and good old Ted Heath for NORTH. Concerning the last, I took ‘with’ in the clue to be merely a link word (cf. ‘having’), so no word-class problem for me there. A rather ponderous 69 minutes.
  5. 13:57 so much better than the last couple of days! Not sure about ‘another’ in 13D. Any ideas, anyone?
    1. Sorry – just looked up ‘hind’. Didn’t know it was a ‘simple peasant’; just thought it was a deer, thus ‘be hind hand’ I took as being a single farm worker.
    2. ‘Another’ refers to the ‘hand’, ‘farm-worker’ referring to the ‘hind’ (a Scottish word for the same).
  6. An hour for me, finishing up rather hesitantly with REPAIR. But for the second day running, jack managed to clear up the confusion – which says a lot for the benefits of retirement, I think. Quite pleased with myself for dredging up creel from the depths of my memory and finding that CREWEL was indeed a word, but my COD has to go to my charismatic namesake.
  7. Just under 50 minutes. No complaints. GREYLAG and CREWEL were new but gettable. Excellent puzzle.
  8. Top half went in very fast and overall sub 30 minutes. But slowed by SE: took a while to dredge ‘creel’ from my memory (‘crewel’ was new to me) and ‘greet’ = ‘weep’ was yet another Scottish term previously unknown to this Sassenach.

    Thanks for the blog, mctext. However, I’m with jackkt on the parsing (or is it imagery) of 23ac. For years I had nothing but near identical grey socks (a nightmare to match up): in my dotage I’ve switched to bright multi-coloured socks which can be paired instantly.

    1. I have nothing but identical (as opposed to near-identical) grey socks. They don’t need matching up!
  9. Much easier than some of late…finished in good time with just one wrong: desperately put in GREWLAG, having not heard of GREYLAG. All others ok, but was a bit hesitant about SMOOTHIE (mostly they’re just fruit, no yoghurt, in my experience), and RORY (thought the def ‘male’ a bit lame for a name).

  10. Easy one, c12mins, except crewel was new to me and I have never had a smoothie.. but I am informed that many don’t have yoghurt.
  11. Well this is not looking good as I completely spaced on Faberge, and I can’t remember what I entered, but it wasn’t the eggy people.
  12. This didn’t take long – 13 mins – but was such fun that it was almost disappointing not to have taken longer to enjoy it. Hard to pick a clue of the day today.
  13. An easy ride after yesterday – 20 minutes with no hold ups or real queries

    Didn’t know the yoghurt drink that isn’t (wife confirms more of a fruit thing than yoghurt). Got CREWEL from the wordplay. Quite enjoyed the socks.

  14. 20 minutes for all but 20dn. After about another ten minutes I gave up, thinking I was probably looking for two unknown words, and so it turned out. I dislike clues like this: less a cryptic clue than a vocabulary test.
    SMOOTHIE is a DBE. They can have yoghurt in them but as Janie says they usually don’t. Collins says differently but in this case Collins is wrong. I can’t see this preventing anyone from solving the clue though so no complaints, even if my DNF has made me grumpy!
  15. 45 minutes after getting stuck in the bottom half for a time and general lethargy. COD to HERCULES over DISSEMBLE.

    I googled Arthur Benjamin and am none the wiser.

    1. Me too Koro, but I wouldn’t say I’m none the wiser. I now know how to square five-digit numbers in my head. That should come in handy.
    2. You probably got the wrong Benjamin. I’m guessing Mctext means the Oz composer that wrote Jamaica Rumba. Or he might have gone for John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, of course.
      2. Ah, Jamaican Rhumba! Mantovani recorded it and it was on the flip-side of Swedish Rhapsody, number 2 in the charts in 1953. I remember it well despite being only 6 at the time!
  16. 23 minutes including time taken to watch overnight news from the UK. So Alevel history does come in handy after all. One pearl of wisdom from 16 year-old self was “Lord North gets tough with the colonies” (American husband always howls over that one). Insufficient charisma perhaps.
  17. 17:51 .. ringlets, Fabergé, darning socks and crewelwork, Hercules and hinds at their labours, the Artful Dodger on Facebook … those were the days.

    COD… more Combination of the Day: putting HERCULES and MINCER on the same line. I say, setter, steady on!

  18. Found today’s on the easier side, going through in 15 minutes, with the only hold-up being my choice between GREYLAG and GREYLAG, and DISSEMBLE, my last entry. I remembered the ‘lag’=’convict’ thing only from earlier puzzles here, and didn’t remember how ‘diss’=’Norfolk’, but with the checking letters all in plaace, I figured it just had to be so. Over here, I think it’s safe to say that a SMOOTHIE doesn’t need yogurt either, but it must have fruit. I’m tossing my COD pick to FABERGE, very clever. Regards.
  19. 8:19 for me. Should really have been faster for such an easy puzzle, but at least I got the damned thing right!

    I didn’t know a SMOOTHIE could be made with yoghurt, but then that’s not the sort of thing I would know. At least I’ve heard of it (though I’ve never actually drunk one).

  20. I once had a friend whom I observed was wearing odd socks. He replied that they were indeed a pair, and moreover he had another pair exactly the same at home.
  21. Ref. the last post. On reflection the ‘whom’ in it should be ‘who’. (Thank you Oliver Kamm – the ‘pedant’). Also I suspect my friend had set the whole thing up.
  22. “Nap” was last in for me – a game I’d never heard of during my parochial existence here in the States, but confirmed on Google. It must be very well known in Britain, because the solver omitted it and no one has mentioned it in the comments.

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