Times 25002 … as the thespian said to the Cardinal

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 34 minutes.

So confirming I’d have Buckley’s at the Championships. An interesting mixture today of business, theatre and religious vocabulary, with a smidge of music and politics. Don’t like cryptic defs in general and in particular I didn’t like today’s (1ac, 25ac, 7dn).

Across
 1 BAPTISMAL. I took this to be just a cryptic def. where “nomination” refers to the name-giving part of many (but not all) baptisms; and the “sponsors” bit refers to the godparents required to sponsor the new church member — again in some versions of baptism. As usual, a heavily christist slant.
 6 C(UP)ID. UP=revolting.
 9 A(C)TRESS. The key of C in a lock of hair.
10 B(AND)ITS.
11 HOO-HA. Middle letters of “tHe lOg fOr tHe dAy”.
12 PER,FORMER. Reversal of REP (theatre).
13 S(T)AID.
14 RE(LEGATE)D. A legate is “a member of the clergy, esp. a cardinal, representing the pope”. Here he is appropriately dressed in RED. Ximenean?
17 CHERRY PIE. Two defs. One is “the common or garden heliotrope”.
18 Omitted. Damn!
19 ALTISSIMO. Anagram: “So a limit’s”.
22 A,MISS. Two wordplays and a definition, in that order.
24 I,NEX(A,C)T.
25 RETRIAL. A cryptic def. after the manner of 1ac.
26 {s}NAKED.
27 DETHRONED. Anagram of “he’d noted”; insert R (for Rex, king).
Down
 1 Omitted. Rain in Scotland; brittle in America.
 2 PAT,R(ON)AGE. ON (performing); RAGE (fashion).
 3 ICE,LANDER. Germany is made up of 16 Länder.
 4 M(IS,APPROPRIATE)D. MD for Managing Director.
 5 LIBERAL DEMOCRAT. Anagram: “Mar electoral bid”.
 6 CANTO. Included in “signifiCANT Other”. From Italian, literally ‘song’, from Latin cantus.
 7 PRIAM. King of Troy when the Greeks gave him a horse. The siege was long. And (see jackkt’s helpful advice below) “investment” = “archaic: the surrounding of a place by a hostile force in order to besiege or blockade it”. So it‘s a cryptic def.
On edit: Can I open a beer now?
 8 D,ISCREDIT. Anagram of “1 directs”.
13 SEC,T,ARIAN. Arianism: “an influential heresy denying the divinity of Christ, originating with the Alexandrian priest Arius (c.250–c.336). Arianism maintained that the Son of God was created by the Father and was therefore neither coeternal with the Father, nor consubstantial”. More christism.
15 GIBRA,L,TAR. Anagram of “A brig”.
16 TRADITION. Anagram of “idiot, rant”.
20 T,WEAK.
21 S,HARD. Cf 6dn yesterday.
23 SOL(I)D.

34 comments on “Times 25002 … as the thespian said to the Cardinal”

  1. About 50 minutes for me, which I’d say was uncompetitive. I enjoyed this one more than the previous two preliminaries, with some nice touches, like INEXACT & SOLID, but COD to NAKED.

    I thought PRIAM was R.I.A. (Retirement Investment Account?)inside P.M., which would make Priam a city. City of Priam has google cred but mostly for Priam’s City, so we’d need a classical scholar, or just someone who knows.

    1. kororareka: “I thought PRIAM was R.I.A. (Retirement Investment Account?)inside P.M., which would make Priam a city. City of Priam has google cred but mostly for Priam’s City, so we’d need a classical scholar, or just someone who knows.”

      … or double-duty from “top man” (Troy’s king / PM).

      Is the likes of that allowed? I see it occasionally in American cryptics.

    1. ruin > injure > insult > slight > a bit > drills into things. What’s wrong with that? I think it maybe a CD after all. (see jackkt’s post below). I was drawing a long bow when, like Priam on first sighting the horse, I should have drawn a short one.
  2. 20:17 … Didn’t realize this was a Championship puzzle until after solving. On the grounds that I don’t think I would ever write STGID in a printed grid I’m going to declare a time regardless!

    Nice puzzle. I especially enjoyed the cardinal … which isn’t something I ever expected to say.

  3. 19 minutes, much to my surprise; the 3 championship puzzles so far, in fact, have been easier for me than the other dailies. Several of the clues just came to me in a sort of satori, with the parsing coming after. In fact, I only got CHERRY PIE thanks to mctext. Loved 7d.
  4. A very enjoyable puzzle which I completed in 25 minutes.

    21dn did not delay me long having spent for ever yesterday trying to make it fit at 6dn in 25001 and finding it wouldn’t go.

    PRIAM was my last in because I managed temporarily to forget the old chestnut investment/siege which would have instantly justified the answer I’d had in mind for some time.

    The only unknown today was cherry-pie, the flower.

    1. Yes … I’d forgotten that too. Will stick the dictionary def on the blog and hope it will remind me also. Thanks. The P(RIA)M possibility was bothering me. Except: Priam isn’t a city and AcronymFinder doesn’t turn up RIA as the/an investment.

      Edited at 2011-11-09 06:00 am (UTC)

  5. 20m, and I thought this probably the easiest one of the crosswords used at the championships.
    Never been a huge fan of cryptic defs, it seems a lazy way to set a clue.. 1ac for example seems a poor clue to me
  6. Could not parse the clue for PRIAM so grateful for the blog, mctext, and other coments above. Rather surprised by the number of ‘easy’ anagrams (or part anagrams) in a competition puzzle. Comfortably under 30 minutes so this seemed much less demanding than yesterday’s (which provided a helpful nudge for SHARD – which I did know).
  7. I was well into this one before realising (CHERRY PIE the giveaway) that I’d done it before – perhaps a commentary on how at the Championships one solves without committing anything to memory – this one does anyway.
    I agree that this was the easiest of the three in the first heat.
    I’m no big fan of cutesy CDs, and PRIAM rather neatly illustrates why – it looks like a definition and wordplay, as much discussed above, and becomes something of a time waster as you slosh around the possibilities. RETRIAL equally, with one, second, case, initially and mishandled has a veritable glossary of cryptic indicators, but no real use for them.
    CoD therefore to the triple at AMISS. Oh, and it still took me 12 minutes today – I got stuck on TWEAK/INEXACT for no discernible reason.
    1. I quite like this sort of CD for this very reason: if it can fool you into thinking it’s one thing when it’s another then it’s a good clue in my book.
  8. My first one finished correctly for ages, although I did have a few queries: Couldn’t work out PRIAM or RELEGATED, eg.

    Quite liked the clue for HOO HA. Unknown vocab: CHERRY PIE for the flower.

  9. 32 minutes with several word-plays not seen on the way. Last in Tweak, annoyingly. Three CDs is perhaps one too many; though perhaps they fit better slipped into tournament puzzles. I don’t think the RIA in the PM can work as a back-up to the CD in 7 as a PM can’t be merely a man now. Liked hoo-ha.
  10. This puzzle worried me on the day, because I couldn’t explain PRIAM or CHERRY PIE. I was also a bit concerned about SHARD because I thought the definition a bit unsatisfying somehow. I thought SHERD rang a bell yesterday.
    In the event bunging the answers in worked out fine for once.
  11. Like others I found this relatively straightforward 20 minutes with some nice touches but some real irritations in the shape of the cryptic definitions and the frequent references to the christian church

    For me cryptic definitions have to be really good or not used at all. Today’s bunch are all poor in my opinion. BAPTISMAL I got from checkers – awful clue I think not just because of its CD construction but the religious overtones also put me off. RETRIAL as is said above is a real time waster as you run through the alphabet until the penny drops – not what solving should be about. PRIAM also solved from checkers and sudden memory of obscure meaning of “investment”.

    1. I agree, Jimbo, that CDs shouldn’t be overdone, but both BAPTISMAL and RETRIAL seem to me to be perfectly fair and rather good examples of the genre. To object to too many “references to the christian church” (or indeed to any other church for that matter) seems a little odd, even if, as in my case, one has long ceased to subscribe to any religion. Or are you suggesting that there should have been a couple of other clues alluding to, say, Islam and Buddhism to give some sort of BBC-type balance? Almost any clue requiring general knowledge is going to irritate someone if it doesn’t happen to be the branch of GK that floats their boat. I know there is a school of thought that GK has no place in cryptic xwords, but that has never been the tradition of the Times cryptic. On the whole, I thought thjs a good puzzle. I particularly liked PRIAM and RELEGATED.
  12. 13:26 for a puzzle where the pretty straightforward long clues down the middle helped a lot with checkers.

    PRIAM was fine for this one-time classicist (coincidentally I had a dream last night in which I was going into an important exam, but was woefully underprepared: not so much an anxiety dream as a pretty accurate recollection of what happened 20 years ago). CHERRY PIE less so; as usual with plants I had to rely on everything else in the clue looking right.

    1. Ha ha, I sympathise Tim. If I were prone to look backward, I would have that dream every night 🙂
  13. To add my penn’orth to the cryptic definition debate: like un-PC jokes, CDs can be very good if clever and preferably succinct, awful if not. An example that I liked in a previous Times x-word was ‘Historic subject of art (4)’. Hint: ends in ‘u’. 24 seemed the opposite: a boring definition disguised as a clunking bit of wordplay.
    1. be aware that so long as you choose to remain anonymous, your opinion is worth only a pennorth indeed. If that.
  14. I can see why people may not like cryptics, but as an alternative to other clue structures they must be acceptable as long as (as with any clue form) thay are good enough.
    I don’t see the problem with the occasional religious reference. Religion of all varieties is part of history and the present. Is a religious fact worth less than any other? I can see that 3 references in one puzzle might irk the enthusiastic atheist, but I suspect most of us are a little more tolerant.
  15. I entered PRIAM at the end in preference to the only other word that would fit, PRISM, but I didn’t understand the clue, so thanks for the CD explanation. The rest was largely straightforward, but I thought 25 was awful. Apart from being an inaccurate definition (there are various reasons for re-trials) the wording of the clue suggests an adverbial answer because of the introductory “How”. Surely the appropriate answer should be “with/by a re-trial. I’d would have preferred, “With this one gets…”, which at least would steer one to the right part of speech.
  16. Priam was a struggle. Have to admit the blogger’s explanation suggests it is a very good cryptic. Cherry Pie had me foxed. Ages spent trying to fit a river inside a fruit to make a dish. Too many cryptic ingredients to spot the DD!

    Enigma

  17. Interesting comments above. I also thought there were too many CD’s today, of which PRIAM ws best and RETRIAL the opposite, in my opinion. I finished this in 25 minutes, ending with CHERRY PIE, since I didn’t know of the flower. But that was the only thing I didn’t know today, so most everything else went smoothly. Regards.
  18. I certainly found this the easiest of the first preliminary round’s puzzles. I’m not sure how long I took, but I don’t recall anything that held me up so I think I was probably reasonably fast (though by no means spectacularly so).

    I thought this was an excellent puzzle – almost ideal as something easy for less experienced solvers to enjoy in a preliminary. The cryptic definitions were just fine – at any rate they were obvious enough for me to solve them at a first reading, though I probably had some crossing letters available except for 1ac. (I find CDs often come as a blessed relief after some of the convoluted clues that some setters come up with these days.)

    My one minor objection is to LANDER being used to represent Länder in 3d (should be LAENDER in my book) – but I expect you’re as bored with me banging on about this as I am with others riding their hobby-horses to death.

  19. I agree with Tony about LÄNDER (but then I live in Germany and forget about English inadequacies with the German language). It took me exactly an hour to solve all but PRIAM and another several minutes of thought to decide to put in PRIAM after all — I just couldn’t think of anything else to fit the checked letters and having anything to do with “City’s top man”. CHERRY PIE was also an informed guess. And I agree there were too many CDs.
    COD to HOO-HA for the wordplay.
  20. I’ve run across this clue before, and I’ve taken “support” from sponsors to be a sort of pun–referring to the need for someone to lend a hand in keeping the baby upright in the font. This may just be my fancy, though.

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