Times 24996: A moist ooze

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 54 minutes.

As noted yesterday, I’ve lost my crossword mojo. Finished the puzzle but don’t understand one clue(*). All help appreciated

.

Across
 1 HE,A,RING-I’M,PAIRED.
 9 LOOK SMART. OKs and MAR inside LOT (fortune).
10 PUPIL. Two defs.
11 ATTIRE. T{hug} inside AT IRE.
12 FREE WILL{y}.
13 DOMINO. Anagram of ‘mood in’.
15 AS,TON,IS,H. TON for fashion.
18 BARBE{r}CUE. Sign to start = CUE. I was lured into QUE; which made no sense.
NOAD tells me “USAGE This common form arises understandably from a confused conflation of the proper spelling barbecue, the abbreviation Bar-B-Q, and phonetic spelling. Its frequency does not quite justify it: in no other English word does que attain the status of a stand-alone, terminal syllable”. Well go to the foot of our stairs.
19 Omitted. It’s called PASTE in Qld at the behest of the dairy lobby who know there’s no butter in it.
21 OP(ERA)TIC.
23 GROCER. Homophone.
26 ENO,CH. Reversal of ONE (a person).
27 ULULATION. LULU=belter (reversed); anagram of ‘into a’.
28 *POSTCODE LOTTERY. ??? All I know is that my parents’ L was changed to CH. The Wirral is like that I guess. So a cryptic def?
Down
 1 HOL{y}LAND. Small victory at UNESCO the other day.
 2 AF(O,O)T
 3 INSURANCE. Anagram.
 4 G,NAW. Reversal of ‘wan’=pale.
 5 MO(TO,R)IST.
 6 AM,PLE{a}.
 7 REP,TILIAN. REP=salesman; then NAIL IT reversed (tipped).
 8 DELILAH. Hailed.
14 MURDEROUS. Anagram of S{ociety} and RUMOURED.
16 OVERREACT. Anagram with O for ‘old’.
17 RU,BI(CU)ND.
18 BOOZE-UP. OOZE inside PUB reversed.
20 T(Y)RANNY. One transistor now costs the same as one printed alphabetical character in a newspaper.
22 Omitted. Our (almost) concluding passage?
24 C(HIM)E
25 FUEL. Shift the L in FLUE.

34 comments on “Times 24996: A moist ooze”

  1. Also 54 minutes. I struggled a bit but made steady if slow progress and never felt stuck. Nothing to add except I am bad at classifying certain types of clue and I’m not sure whether 28 is cryptic or &lit or both. The whole clue defines the whole answer anyway.
  2. I would have been in the other 50% on this one. A steady solve until I hit RUBICUND and POSTCODE LOTTERY and then stalled, not helped by having entered OVERARCH at 21; which I knew couldn’t be right but then there was a C in 17 that I couldn’t get out of my head or off the paper. Also troubled by the “at” in attire, but have sorted that out. I seem to have a blind spot for the various meanings of at. I note it is also a unit of currency. I hope we don’t see that anytime soon. COD to HEARING IMPAIRED

    Can’t help you with the LOTTERY, except I can’t see any wordplay so it stands as a c.d. until someone else helps us out.

  3. Downed by afoot where could only think of about; held up endlessly by that and fuel. So a 42-min. dnf. I think 28 is merely a cryptic def. with a play om ‘streets ahead’. Like mctext feeling slightly below par – or rather over, if one respects the vocabulary of golf if speaking of crosswords. Seems the thing to do.
  4. I think the answer is the reason treatment is, then streets for postcode plus lottery for the lucky ones. Your postcode can impact e.g. insurance prices but also health services ?
  5. This was the third of the three puzzles in Prelim 1. I don’t now why they’ve gone with this one instead of the second. Anyway, this was the puzzle that nearly did for me on the day.

    I reckon I spent about 20 minutes getting all but 3 answers and then went back to fill in the gaps I’d left in puzzle 2. Coming back to this one reptilian went straight in and then I stared at the crossing 17d/27a for what seemed like an age. On 17 I couldn’t get beyond RUDI something with DI as the copper. As the clock ticked on to about 56 minutes I revised my analysis of the wordplay and came up with RUBICUND which rang a very feint bell so in it went. That gave me ululation almost immediately so after a quick check of the answers to all 3 puzzles up went my number.

    I didn’t analyse postcode lottery much on the day but I think it’s just a CD based on the phrase the papers like to use when highlighting the different standards in NHS care around the country.

  6. Some areas will pay for drugs and treatments that other areas of the UK will not, hence the coinage “postcode lottery.” So it is actually a straightforward cryptic def. Never liked them a lot.
    Overall this was a canter compared to yesterday.
  7. Found this a bit of a struggle, and, with only two left threw in whatever fitted without worrying too much about parsing. Consequently got two wrong: clive and overaxis (thought it might be some sort of scenery…doh!).

    All others ok, coming slowly but surely.

  8. 6 minutes this morning, but then it was the second time I’d done it. Clearly memory isn’t the advantage it should be though because 11ac was my first in!
    I found this the easiest of the puzzles on the day: it was the only one I finished without moving to another one.
    I bunged in ULULATION without parsing the wordplay on the day, and I’m glad I did. If I’d seen that “belter” was supposed to be LULU I’d have thought I must have got it wrong. It can’t possibly be a reference to the singer, after all, and I’d never heard the other meaning until this morning.
    1. I was also doing this for the second time, and took 8 minutes – funny how memory of these things start to fade as soon as the ink is dry. First time round can’t have been more than 15 minutes, anyway, with AFOOT being last in.
      1. AFOOT was my last in too. I was helped by remembering an ultimately unsuccessful struggle over the same word and the same group of checkers in a puzzle that appeared just over a year ago. Strange that my memory is capable of recalling this but couldn’t remember the answers for today’s first three clues from a week and a half ago!

  9. 17:09 and my first go at this one – I was in the second lot. A fairly straightforward solve, although 15ac was my first in. Took a while to parse 9ac although the answer came quickly. 2dn LOI – curiously unsatisfying.
  10. Quite straightforward as competition puzzles go; interesting; fair; and reasonably challenging without being taxing. 20 minutes to finish top left to bottom right with no hold ups, no obscurities and no pesky poets. Some very good surface readings that at first read disguised the definition and parsing quite well.
  11. Just under 20 minutes but like mctext I chucked in BARBEQUE. It looked so right (probably because of the BBQ ‘abbreviation’) that I never thought to check the wordplay.

    For once, “space before U, it’s probably Q” was a false friend.

  12. 16 minutes, though a lot of those were trying to figure what went in RUBICUND, ULULATION and POSTCODE LOTTERY (I was wondering for a while if there was something called a POSTCARD LOTTERY).
  13. Thoroughly enjoyable but thank heavens I was doing it at leisure! Most went in steadily but I agonised for ages over DOMINO and even longer over AFOOT (wordplay now seems ‘obvious’ but only after a long trawl through possible five letter words with the checkers A-O-T and eventually coming up with AFOOT).

    Thank you, setter; too many great clues (including POSTCODE LOTTERY) to nominate a COD. I had a much more convoluted explanation of ‘NAIL IT’ than mctext, involving the ‘tip’ of ‘to’, ‘nail’ = ‘secure’ and ‘one’ = ‘i’ … not sure it works, however!

  14. Having arrived too late to get a copy of the first championship puzzles, I am only doing them as they come out on Wednesdays but already I can see that they were far harder than the second set. Since you are only competing against others in the same group this is not a major issue, however it concurs with the hearsay that showed that 35-40 mins was about the cut off for final qualification on the first prelim, and about the cutoff for invite back status on the second set.

    Interesting also to see how bloggers on here coped with yesterdays puzzle which I gave up on due to “vocabulary difficulties” and yet Jimbo knocked off in 20 mins. Definitely indicates the value of doing the barred stuff regularly.

    1. Difficulty is purely subjective. So far, I have found the 2 published puzzles from the first prelim a pretty straightforward solve and would not class them as harder than the second set. As a further example of “they’re all easy if you know the answers”, I had no “vocabulary difficulties” with yesterday’s puzzle and knocked it off in 16:35.
  15. 32:02 (1 wrong) – a very similar experience to others. Just like joekobi, I found myself left with 2d and could only think of ABOUT so bunged it in more in hope than expectation. Wasn’t surprised to discover it was wrong.
  16. I commented to someone the other day that any crossword with the word ‘competition’ linked to it had an immediate affect on my solving ability. The paper version today doesn’t mention the Championship so I solved this in under 20 minutes. A very enjoyable experience it was too. Perhaps I could enter the championship if no-one told me it was one!!
  17. 20 mins, totally fair, little if any arcanery….having said that, if I remarked to my mates that a girl was a Lulu I might get a belt I suspect..
  19. Chalk me up as another one who had ABOUT instead of AFOOT on competition day. I even went through the alphabet thinking of possible words that would fit, but only came up with ABOUT, ABORT, ADOPT and ALOFT. Of these ABOUT seemed the best fit for a pretty lame cryptic definition, but I wasn’t happy about it.
  20. I’m not sure if it’s the Jerusalem Syndrome or not, but being here in the Holy Land must have made me think I was doing a Sunday puzzle, as I never gave a second thought to Lulu = belter. Actually, thought it was rather good.

    Thought I’d finished in 47 minutes, but doing these things online you don’t have to scribble over obviously right letters when you’re entering obviously wrong ones, and so when I stuck in ‘postcard lottery’, I also had ‘rubicunr’. The anagram at 13 was, um, last to fall.

  21. I couldn’t immediately see 1a so started from the bottom and worked up. I think the top half was more difficult – certainly I spent longer on it. An enjoyable 31 minutes
  22. About 30 minutes, ending with RUBICUND and POSTCODE LOTTERY. I didn’t know of the latter at all, so I had to get RUBICUND first, where I found the wordplay tricky as it was replete with a loy of possibilities. Good thing I got it, or my guess for 28 would have been POSTCARD…, which at least sounds plausible to someone who hasn’t heard of either. Good puzzle though. Regards.
  23. I can’t remember how long this one took me on the day, but I remember making unduly heavy weather of it. I seem to lack stamina nowadays. (Sigh!) Nice puzzle though.
  24. 35′, but two wrong: the wrong spelling of BARBECUE, and 13ac, which I couldn’t get at all until I read the blog; very irritating to discover the solution. I slowed myself down by trying for ‘aloft’ for 2d (Why? you ask; good question), and ‘ad lib’ for 22d. Never heard of POSTCODE LOTTERY, but I couldn’t think of anything else with the checkers.
  25. Tried ‘Moby Dick’ (but couldn’t parse it), and it held up the NE corner for a good bit. Was no one else similarly misled ? Never heard of ‘Free Willy’. Should I feel deprived ?

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