Times 24943: Look, look, see A CAT RUN

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: see below.

Uncle Yap is away so I’m blogging after a late call from Linxit. It’s a rushed job and I hope to be forgiven for errors.

42 minutes for most of the puzzle, then an outrageous amount of time (including completing the Club Monthly!) on the PADS and the duck. Talking of boots, is Donald a transsexual icon yet … as in … he’s a drake?

More scribbling on the page than I can remember in a long while trying to figure out the parsings — more, even, than for the Monthly. As the double RESPECT let me down yesterday, I wasn’t going to be fooled by ‘news’ (plural, 22ac), except that I was! CODs all over the place today. But I have to give it to the blue and yellow bloomers by a short head from the drunken lord.

There’s A CAT RUN in column 5. But the other slight nina in row 10 could be a clue to the setter. Eh?

Across
  1 SKEDADDLE. Anag. of DESK + ADDLE.
  7 PADS. Cryptic def.
  9 CYNICISM. M’s ICY inc. IN (hip) and C (cold); reversed.
10 F,LYING.
11 COD WAR. Reversal of RAW DOC.
13 LOO,PHOLE. Anag. of L (last of CounciL) and HOPE.
14 AD,JUT,ANT BIRD.
17 DRUNK AS A LORD. The answer could clue ‘salad or’. DRUNK and NUTS are both anaginds.
20 LEAD UP TO. LEAD (van), UP TO (capable of).
21 PAC(I,F)Y. Next door’s dog is called Pacy. He’s not. More like Pacemaker, I’d say.
22 DUE,NN,A. This is the dread plural of ‘new’.
23 Omitted.
25 BED,E.
26 ED,WIN D,ROOD. ‘Trade perhaps’ = WIND. ‘Cross’ = ROOD.
Down
  2 KEYWORDS. Anag. of WORK and DYES.
  3 Omitted. Welsh jumper?
  4 DRI{v}ER.
  5 LAMPLIT. Cryptic def. The Lady of the Lamp.
  6 DAFFODILS. LID OFF (rev) inside SAD (rev).
  7 PSYCHED,ELI,C.
  8 DON,A,L{i}D.
12 WOUNDED KNEE. Anag. of {f}OUND WEEKEND.
15 A(QU)A,P,LANE. P for ‘parking’. AA for ‘motorists’.
16 GRAFFITO. Reverse inclusive.
18 K,NO,W-HO,W. ‘QuacK’, NO WHO, W(ith).
19 DE(D)UCE. Central letter of ‘stuDent’, inside DEUCE (as in ‘What the …?’)
21 P,IN-ON.
24 MAR. Reversal of the zodiac sign.

28 comments on “Times 24943: Look, look, see A CAT RUN”

  1. 44:09, but with one wrong. I too had trouble with the duck, and invented the DONTLE, a little-known species. Probably flightless, and found exclusively on some remote island in the Pacific somewhere.
    That aside, there were many excellent clues – DRUNK AS A LORD and DUENNA were both very sneaky. Good fun!
  2. I thought this was a good effort, a tad harder than average but not too much so – c20 mins. Pinon was new to me. cod for Donald, my last in after deciding “dontle” didn’t exist..
  3. 24:03 .. quite tricky but very enjoyable. Helped by seeing PADS straight off.

    COD .. LAMPLIT – elegant clue.

    Last in .. The PSYCHEDELIC priest. Far out, man.

  4. 25 minutes, with one wrong: I had LIMELIT with a query but was so relieved to get to the end of this brainwarper I forgot to go back and check. Apparently there’s a wallpaper called Florence Lime but I doubt if it’s part of the Times Lookupery.
    The drug and alcohol clues went in without understanding.
    Loved the LOOPHOLE clue with its powerful echo of the Frost Report.
    Thanks to McText for a second unscrewing of the inscrutable.
  5. I’ve no time to offer on this one because I started it last night and fell asleep, but it was certainly not a quick solve. I know I wasted ages trying to justify ELEPHANT BIRD at 14 before remembering the ADJUTANT. I knew all the vocabulary apart from PINON. As so often, the hidden word was one of my last in and for some reason BEDE eluded me until the very last moment.
  6. Held up at 1ac for a long time looking for an anagram of desk+rotten, but once I’d cottoned on to that, my solve was kick-started (thick moped rather than Harley) and I sputtered home in 98 minutes. Both the bird and the tilde-less tree from the wordplay. Lots to like, but COD to DONALD. Last in LEAD UP TO after pondering ‘head up to’.

    17 ac reminds me of the old joke about the witness giving evidence who described the defendant as being ‘drunk as a judge’.

    ‘You mean “as a lord”?’ the judge interposed.

    ‘Yes, milord.’

  7. Tricky and challenging puzzle, with a particularly good line in well-disguised whole or partial anagrams – SKEDADDLED, LOOPHOLE, KEYWORDS AND DRUNK AS A LORD were all excellent. Much ingenious cryptic parsing elsewhere – PSYCHEDELIC, CYNICISM and DONALD stood out. LAMPLIT was one of those elegantly simple clues that only seem simple once the penny has dropped. The only unfamiliar word was PINON, but the cryptic route to the solution was fairly signalled. Well done setter.
  8. My first comment got lost so this will be brief.

    18:15 so I must have hit on the right wavelength. This helped with some of the tricky definitions for sure.

    Excellent puzzle.

  9. I found this fairly tough until the end, when it became really tough. 45 minutes for all but 7ac. Unfortunately I’d entered PINTLE [PIN + T(I)LE] for 8 on the mistaken assumption that PINTLE was a variant of PINTAIL, which is a duck. I never did resolve the issue

    The puzzle included many excellent clues, though I’m not all that keen on 7ac. However, if I’d had D as the third letter it wouldn’t have been hard to see which of the the three possibilities was right.

  10. After an hour I still had the ducking and blocking to go, on which no further progress was made, except for the aforementioned dontle (I was half convinced by PADS). Progress was exceeeding difficult but a delight all the same, the more so after I got my first answer (BEDE) after much travail and some hope of finishing blossomed, as it were. Speaking of which, DAFFODIL gets my vote for COD too, but really, take your pick. Well done, that setter, whoever they might be.
  11. I agree with Vinyl! This was tough but I was pleased to finish this ‘correctly’, without aids, until I came here and found I couldn’t spell PSYCHEDELIC. Eventually bludgeoned most of the wordplays into submission: but particular thanks, mctext, for adding detail to CYNICISM and DRUNK AS A LORD. That said, I still can’t see how PACIFY works … Just seen it with mctext’s help! PACY = ‘like the wind’ etc.
  12. I also found this a bit of a struggle – 25 minutes to solve with some “Doh” moments along the way. PADS last in, seems to be a common theme, but got DONALD straight away – clearly I’m reverting to a childlike state. Well done setter.
  13. found this tough like many others. pressed the submit button too early on the club site without completing the last small 3 letter word…annoying
    COD for Daffodils…thought the oartial anagrams were quite hard to spot and pleased i wasnt the only person to be slow in spotting the hidden reversed word!
    Good puzzle
  14. I toyed with “dontle” and “dolido” before seeing the bleeding obvious! My last in. A slow, but very enjoyable, solve. 37 minutes.
    1. Super puzzle this, for all the reasons mentioned. Just under half an hour of very enjoyable wrestling.
      One typo though, irritatingly. I’m pretty sure I do know how to spell PSYCHEDELIC and even if there were any doubt I understood the wordplay. Somehow I still managed to type PSYCHODELIC.
      Come to think of it very little of this without understanding the worplay: a mark of quality in my book.
      Last in, as so often, the hidden.
      My complements to the setter.
  15. 71 minutes, but a real feeling of accomplishment at the end; after a half-hour or so I thought I was facing the mother of all DNFs, as simply nothing seemed solvable. As so often happens, there were a couple of words that had appeared recently, COD WAR among them, that I might have taken much more time to get otherwise. COD to 19d.
    Is anyone else now forced to sit through the advertising before being allowed to read the comments? There used to be an X to click on. Now I had to view the ad, and the screen remained black.
    1. Sometimes I get the “x” to cancel, sometimes I don’t, Kevin. But I always get the black screen. Very annoying.
      1. Somebody tipped us off, ages ago: you click the ‘refresh’ button to skip the advert. I’ve never waited to find out what it’s advertising.
        1. go to the firefox add-ons page and search for “adblock plus”.. there are two or three elements that work together. Download all of them, and say goodbye to irritating adverts..
  16. Wonderful puzzle, although not at all easy, taking over an hour, ending with PADS and DONALD. I too thought there might be a DONTLE for quite a while, until I thought of the simple lid. Extraordinary clue writing by today’s setter: ‘Privy Council’, ‘Journalist by trade’, Florence’s enlightenment. All very good, and reminds me why I do these puzzles. Best regards to all, setter included.
  17. I must have been on something (Starbucks coffee) to type an A in the middle of “psychedelic”. That, and taking 40 mins over 7 clues in the bottom half of the grid ended my hopes of a 3rd sub-60min cryptic this week; 83 mins and some secs. Thanks mctext for the parsing of 17ac, 6d and 7d. Yesterday I had said how much I enjoy the type of clue represented by “oddly enough”, then I missed “drunk as a lord” Lordy! I should also have spotted “eli” as the priest. Being in two-minds (well, I am a Gemini) as to whether there was an A or a C at the end of 7d didn’t help me with 21ac. COD to 8d. “Trade” in 26ac gave me as much fun as “Instruction to boxer” = sit! in yesterday’s.
  18. Glad to see I wasn’t the only one to find this one difficult – 19:34 here. I also thought of DONTLE as a possible outcome of the wordplay to 8D, but fortunately dismissed it out of hand – which I wouldn’t have done if this was the Club Monthly!

    Many thanks to mctext for stepping in at such short notice – Uncle Yap asked me to find a sub weeks ago, but for some reason I got it into my head that it was for next week, and I was planning to send out a “Sub required” email today!

  19. Excellent puzzle, very testing but very satisying to finish – and in my case, that only happened the morning after the night before. But one small moment of insight (sharing secret = IN ON in 21dn) got everything moving. DONALD Duck was one of my first entries, but PADS was still the last.
  20. I found this tough as well, failing to find the setter’s wavelength and struggling to a miserable 15:53. I don’t recall coming across PINON before.

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