Times 25018 – Pleased to meet you, Mr Rubble……BAM!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time:42 minutes

Music: Tchaikovsky, Violin Concerto, Ferras/Karajan/BPO

A rather strange challenge. For the first twenty minutes I had nearly nothing, and was thinking what had I got myself into, an American
pretending that I could compete with the English (and the Welsh and the Scots and the Irish) at their own peculiar game. This was followed by ten minutes of rapidly writing in the answers, sometimes without full understanding of the clues. Maybe it was just blogger’s nerves, and then my instincts took over.

I was left with one that I found rather challenging. An unknown town had to be constructed using an unknown term for ‘row’. That was a tough one, but it turned out my guess was correct, although it could easily have been something else.

Looking at the puzzle after completing it, there were only a few clues that might be a little hard for the experienced solver. The only vocabulary stretch was ‘sirocco’, and that was my first in, although my spelling was wrong and had to be corrected later.

Across
1 DRIEST, [-p+D]RIEST substituting D[epart] for P[acific]. I had no idea of the cryptic when I put it in, but it seemed right.
4 FALSETTO, anagram of OF LATEST. Spotted the anagram quickly, had the ending ‘o’, and still couldn’t see it.
10 MATCHWOOD, MATCH + WOO + D[aughter]. Another one I wanted to write in instinctively that turned out to be correct. I couldn’t see why ‘fellow’ = ‘match’, but now it is obvious.
11 EERIE, E[v]ER + I.E. An easy one to get started
12 SERIOUS, SER(I)OUS. The enclosing word is a bit of an inkhorn term, but understandable
13 TOPPING, double definition.
14 IAMBI, I(A MB)I. The storage unit is either Mb or MB, take your choice. The difference is eightfold on your PC, but it makes no difference in the puzzle.
15 BARNSLEY. BARN(S[choo]L)EY. My last in, because I had never heard of the town and did not know ‘barney’. Fortunately, many towns end in ‘sley’, which leaves only two letters to deduce. It could have been ‘Barksley’ or something like that, but this was my guess, and it turned out all right.
18 ETAGERES, anagram of STEERAGE. Furniture that is found more often in puzzles than in real life.
20 APPLE, double definition, The Judgment of Paris and the Big Apple..
23 CARVERY, CAR[p] + VERY. .
25 SIROCCO, IS backwards + ROC + C[hicag]O. All the winds were used by car companies, this was a Volkswagen in the US, I’m not sure if it was called that in Europe.
26 EPOCH, H + COPE backwards.
27 OVERHASTY, anagram of TV HERO, SAY, with a nicely deceptive use of the ‘sounds like’ or ‘e.g.’ indicator..
28 ENTIRELY, E(NT)IRE + [on]LY. The use of ‘only fifty percent’ brought its opposite to mind for me, so a bit weak as a clue.
29 Omitted! The tradition continues…..
 
Down
1 DOMESTIC, DOME + STIC[k], just put in from the definition once I had the ‘D’. A well-hidden literal here, requiring a lift and separate.
2 INTERIM, IN + TER(I)M, another lift and separate.
3 SCHOOLING S + C(H[igher])OOLING. The whole darn puzzle is lift and separate!
5 AUDITORY SYSTEM, anagram of MAY DESTROY SUIT, with a very deceptive literal that is usually used in a ‘sounds like’ clue. I spotted it almost immediately, but was expecting some obscure bit of the inner ear.
6 STEEP, STE(E)P, as in a steep price.
7 TERRINE, TERRI(N)E[r]. Not an item of food, but the actual dish it comes in, another surprise.
8 ON EDGE, ONE + D[e]G[r]E[e].
9 GOOSEBERRY FOOL, GOOSEBERRY + FOOL in different senses. We have seen this one several times, but I can never remember it and have to work it out all over again.
16 SEA URCHIN, anagram of HUR[r]ICANE’S.
17 METONYMY, M(ETON)Y, MY. The cryptic is very useful if you can’t remember how to spell it
19 Omitted.
21 PACKS UP, PACK + SUP. Slightly delayed by the wrong spelling of ‘sirocco’.
22 ACCEDE, A C[onservative] + CEDE. What Labour will never do.
24 ESHER, [fr]ESHER. I should not have gotten this one so easily, UK-centric vocabulary must be sinking in.

33 comments on “Times 25018 – Pleased to meet you, Mr Rubble……BAM!”

  1. Also without full understanding of 1ac and the MATCH part of 10ac. IAMBI was also a bit of a penny drop. (NOAD says MB or Mb for megabyte, BTW.) Would probably have been a bit quicker if I’d seen the long clues earlier. COD to the first of these: AUDITORY SYSTEM for the (noted) misleading “we hear”.
  2. 80 minutes broken up over several sessions, with ETAGERES (surely more of a vocab stretch than sirocco – unless you’ve got one in your parlour) last in. COD to vinyl’s deliberatley omitted TURNOUT, which was my penultimate in.

    For those, like me, who couldn’t fathom the ‘match/fellow’ bit, here’s something I found on the internet under fellow:

    4. One of a pair, or of two things used together or suited to each other; a mate; the male.

    This was my glove; here is the fellow of it. (Shakespeare)

    Or is the explanation simpler than that?

  3. 19:35 .. I’d say you’re giving us British Islanders a serious run for our money, vinyl.
    And I do like your description of my last in: ETAGERES.

    Looking back through for a COD, it’s all pretty darned clever, but SCHOOLING is just impeccably done.

  4. 50 minutes and not without some difficulty LH. RH went in quite easily with the exception of the long anagram at 5dn.

    I had no trouble with SIROCCO, surely along with ‘mistral’ one of the two best known of those pesky Mediterranean winds – though if any of the other six turn up I shall be in difficulty – but I had blind spots with ETAGERES and MATCHWOOD. I was going to claim ‘shiver’ as something of an obscurity until I remembered ‘shiver my timbers’ in the same area of meaning.

  5. Enjoyed this one – unlike Saturday’s, which I will be most interested to hear others’ views on when the time is right. Today’s anagrams were particularly pleasing with COD to falsetto.
  6. Seemed to be battling the headwinds today, trundling in at 36 minutes. A tricky little number. I rather like the award from Paris. I hope you’re not right about Labour, vinyl1.
  7. 13 minutes, couldn’t see the wordplay for DRIEST or MATCHWOOD. Didn’t have much luck with a first run of acrosses, but nearly all downs went in on a first look.
  8. Not the usual Monday breeze. I spent 35 minutes on this one. A lot of very good clues, especially some neat anagrams. I’m not sure that 20 is sound, however, with the lower case b in ‘big’.
  9. …and that one was the unknown METONYMY (I worked the cryptic our correctly, and ended up with the outlandish OETONYOY).

    Good puzzle, hadn’t heard of the Judgment of Paris, and hadn’t worked out the parsing of DRIEST, but all others ok.

    COD: AUDITORY SYSTEM.

  10. 21:27. Tricky this, I thought. The anagrams took ages.
    This was my first for a while, having been away without access to either the internet or the newspaper for a few days. Something of a backlog to catch up on.
    Like others I didn’t understand DRIEST or MATCHWOOD. I’m still not sure about “match” for “fellow”.
    No problems with SIROCCO, but I didn’t know SEROUS or the APPLE reference. I also considered OETONYOY briefly, but it looked very wrong and fortunately I have come across METONYMY before, although I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it was.
  11. 13:57 after dragging up ETAGERES from somewhere (by which I mean somewhere in crossword land rather than real life, as per the blog; I own no such items). I do like cunning clues such as 4dn, where some regularly-used bit of the cryptic vernacular such as “we hear” is part of the definition rather than the other wordplay.
  12. 28:42, COD to auditory system.

    With a couple of Ys and an O in place in 17 and knowing something had to be repated I fleetingly considered yoyoyyoy.

    I wasn’t familiar with the Paris tale. The Wiki entry consists mainly of old paintings of naked ladies with big bottoms.

    I wasn’t impressed with the inclusion of Barnsley 2 days after they nicked a win at Elland Road. Incidentally, it’s a bit nippy in Yorkshire today so I’m off to shiver an old etagere I found hanging around so I can light a fire.

  13. For those who like me have had trouble accessing LiveJournal today (yet another DDoS attack), I’m reposting the LiveJournal status address (which obviously uses a different server): http://status.livejournal.org/ . Many thanks to whoever posted this originally: it’s a very helpful check when the connection seems slow.

    Tough for a Monday. Took a while to get my head in gear but then a very enjoyable challenge. COD to IAMBI (I’m sure we’ve had something very like this before with Roman numerals encasing the rest of the wordplay – but it’s still quite pleasing when the penny finally drops).

  14. A pleasant enough puzzle of about average difficulty – 25 minutes after another soggy round of golf

    Got APPLE from “big” and NY not knowing (or having forgotten) the Paris reference but overall nothing too taxing

  15. but couldn’t post.
    25 minutes with hold-ups everywhere, especially in the NW where the jam was not where I thought, there was no tent in 2d, “ft” didn’t go between the two ones, and I eventually found out what serous means. Oh, and TOUCHWOOD was wrong. Try making “touch” mean “fellow” for a real challenge. Apparently, I DO have an étagère. We just called it a storage unit.
    Lots of really good stuff- that anagram and not-a-sound-alike at 5d was a swine for anyone travelling at speed, as was “what’s French for ‘award’?” in 20.
    The Veedubya Scirocco was (is?) indeed on sale in the UK, but with that extra C. If that was deliberately placed to confuse Times crossword solvers, it must count as one of the longest sleepers in history. “At last, our little joke has paid off”, as they say in Wolfsburg.
    For some reason, I had ENTIRETY for a while at 28, making the dessert interesting at 9.
    CoD to FALSETTO for yet another clean surface, though lots of contenders.
    1. As Vinyl says: “All the winds were used by car companies”. Watch out for the Skoda Flatulence.
  16. 7:12, finishing with STEEP (6dn).  My only unknowns were SEROUS (12ac SERIOUS) and ESHER (24dn), but MATCHWOOD (10ac) was strangely unfamiliar.  A rather nice grid, I thought.

    Clue of the Day: 5dn (AUDITORY SYSTEM).

    1. ‘I’ ≠ ’round’. It’s A + MB (see blog) surrounded by the Roman numeral II (‘two’).
  18. Sorry to be late. Not easy for a Monday, at all. About 40 minutes, ending, like vinyl, with having to make a stab at B?R?SLE?, and guessing right. Whew. Unknowns for me today were Barney and BARNSLEY, Esher, serous, METONYMY and the ETAGERES. Nice puzzle altogether, with COD’s to SCHOOLING and TURNOUT. Regards.
  19. 10:42 for me – not helped by wasting time trying to work out why 1ac should be DRYEST and (like z8b8d8k) why 28ac should be ENTIRETY.

    Nice puzzle.

  21. 58′, hard slogging for a Monday. I figured out early on that 9d was some sort of FOOL, but who’s Charlie? Also never heard of ‘barney’; but in retrospect I’m not sure why it took me so long. Liked 20ac, but I suppose my COD goes to 5d.
    1. ‘Charlie’ with or without a capital is a inoffensive term for a fool, however it has its origins in Cockney rhyming slang where it stood for something stronger which is unlikely to turn up in the Times crossword. I don’t know who Charlie Hunt was.’Charlies’ (plural) has other anatomical associations.

      I’m not sure if ‘charlie’ meaning ‘heroin’ has ever appeared but it’s worth remembering in case it does.

      1. I should have thought of that; although I’m glad I didn’t think of ‘Charlie Hunt’. At least it wasn’t a cricket term (unless Charlie Hunt was a cricketer). Is a Charlie worse than a Kevin?
      3. From the Two Ronnies Mastermind sketch – specialist subject: answering the question before last.

        Q: In 1892 Brandon Thomas wrote a famous long running British farce, what was it?
        A: British Leyland.

        Q: Correct. Complete the following quota…(a beep is heard)…I started, so I finish! Complete the following quotation about Mrs Thatcher: “Her heart may be in the right place but her ..”
        A:Charlies Aunt.

        Q: Correct!

      4. Maybe not as heroin, maybe as cocaine, certainly appeared as a drug…

        4 or 5 years ago (when I started doing The Times) one puzzle had 2 identical 2-word clues, can’t remember exactly but “drug fool” to paraphrase. The 2 answers were charlie and dope.

        Rob

        1. Hi, Rob, and thanks for your contribution. As this is quite an old puzzle now the only people likely see it are the person who originally blogged the puzzle (vinyl1 in this case) and the contributor whose comment you replied to (myself) because we get notified by email when something new has been added.

          I’m not sure if this is your first contribution, but in any case I hope that you will be joining in discussion of the current day’s puzzles as they appear so that you can interact with the regulars.

          If you want your own avatar you can sign up and register your own Live Journal account. It doesn’t cost anything to do so.

          Regards

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