Times 25,025

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
25:07 on the Club timer, and never easy going as far as I was concerned. So, testing but perfectly fair for the most part, though I still have one or two minor queries about the parsing on which I invite correspondence…

Across
1 GALSWORTHY – (SLAG)rev. + WORTHY. Most famous for The Forsyte Saga.
6 GRAZ – GRAZe. Both “pasture” and “graze” can be verbs as well as nouns, I learn (initially I thought it would have to be GRAZING which was truncated, which would have made the “mostly” less obvious, though still technically correct).
10 ULULANT – (LULU)rev. + ANT.
11 SARDINE – TSAR + DINE.
12 ANGOSTURA – ANGORA round STUart. The thing which makes a pink gin pink.
13 NIGER – (REGINA)rev. I shan’t tell you how long I spent trying to work out how NIG + E.R. could be turned into “not a setback for queen”.
14 SABAH – SARAH, minus Runs plus Bachelor gives one of the constituent states of Malaysia.
15 STEAMED UP – Son TEAMED UP; I began with S+CREWED UP, while rightly thinking to myself that it didn’t quite ring true.
17 TIREDNESS – (IT)* + REDNESS. Overseas solvers may not be familiar with the signs which are ubiquitous on British motorways saying “Tiredness kills, take a break”.
20 GROSS – double def., 144 and the sentiment which I believe young people today express as “Ewww”.
21 LOCUM – (COL)rev. + UM, with “let me see” being a rather charade-ish synonym for the thoughtful expression “um”.
23 SYMBIOSIS – I (current) in (MYBOSSIS)*.
25 SHOTGUN – secreT in SHOGUN.
26 UNICORN – PUNIC + Old R.N.; I began by toying with DIDO minus the O, and removing letters from HANNIBAL before spotting the correct parsing. Poeni was the Roman name for the natives of Carthage, from which came the adjective Punic; hence the Punic Wars were not named after punishment, even though that is exactly what they turned out to be.
27 NOSH – NOW + Serve + Hot.
28 REGARDLESS – cryptic def. based on a) Samson being “eyeless in Gaza” as per Milton, and b) “Carry On Regardless”, common phrase and part of the well-known sequence of risque comedy films (which came first, I wonder?).
 
Down
1 GOUDA – Gloucester + (A DUO)rev.
2 LOUNGE BAR – B.A. in LOUNGER.
3 WHATS THE DAMAGE – (WASTHATGAMEHED)*.
4 RAT RUNS – (TAR)rev. + RUNS(as tights may “ladder”); back streets used by motorists to avoid traffic jams on main roads.
5 HOSTAGE – HOST(entertainer) + Audience Given Encouragement.
7 RUING – herein lies my main difficulty today: I can see “I”=this writer, i.e. the setter, and “RUNG” presumably = “called”, with RUING meaning “sorry”. So does the “out” mean it’s an anagram of IRUNG (in which case, it’s an anagram of two words which don’t appear in the clue, which I would have thought was against the rules) or is it I in RUNG? If so, surely “out” doesn’t work? “Outside”, yes, but not “out”; or am I missing something (it has been known…)?
8 ZOETROPES – ZOE + Toyshop + ROPES.
9 TRANSMOGRIFIED – (FRAMESRIGIDNOT)*, the trick here being to discover which was the anagram indicator, and which the definition.
14 SETTLES IN – SETTLE + SIN. Settle famous as one end of the picturesque railway line which runs to Carlisle.
16 DROP SCONE – DROPS (as in eye drops) + CONE (ice cream). Drop scones are what I’ve always called Scotch pancakes, so your territory may also vary…
18 ESSENCE – ESSEN + Clubs + European.
19 SAMBUCA – (A CUB + MA’S)rev.
22 CROSS – double def., pass from the wing in football, and what one must bear, if one has a particular burden.
24 SINUS – Society in U.S., with “airspace” a nicely concealed definition.

Please note that in posting this, I am seizing a brief window of opportunity; it looks like another one of those days when LJ availability is hit and miss (mostly the latter). Thus I may not be able to correct errors or comment in a suitably timely fashion.

25 comments on “Times 25,025”

  1. Phew! That was even harder than yesterday. 35 minutes. The left-hand side went in pretty quickly but the right, and particularly the NE corner, put up one hell of a fight. Last in the twin unknowns with the crossing Z.
    Some of these clues flirt with objectionable obscurity. For example 28 across REGARDLESS is a cryptic definition relying on quite specific knowledge. I forgot almost all the Milton I ever knew long ago, so all I really knew about Samson was that his hair was the source of his strength and he was involved in some sort of love triangle with Tom Jones. I didn’t know he was blind but I didn’t know he wasn’t either and the phrase “carry on regardless” was enough to speculate with confidence that he must have been. In Gaza. UNICORN, SABAH and ZOETROPE were similarly obscure but fairly clued.
    I thought the same as you on RUING but decided that “out” was close enough to “outside”.
    Overall I thought this was a first class puzzle. The difficulty is largely down to cunning and original wordplay. SARDINE, NIGER and RUING, for instance, are very simply constructed clues that took me forever to crack. Nice one setter.
  2. Hard but enjoyable: 75 minutes for me, with RUING last in. I couldn’t parse it, but I’m prepared to accept tim’s explanation. The Punic part of the UNICORN also passed me by, but Eyeless in Gaza was a familiar phrase; I seem to remember it from school as the title of an Aldous Huxley novel.
  3. Yup, it was a hard one. 46 minutes. I made it even harder by opting for grass instead of grazing in 6a (a bit wobbly on the Austrian place names) which made 8d inaccessible for a good 15 minutes.

    Tiredness and rat runs were just guesses for this US solver. Doing the Milton for Alevel came in handy. We actually sat through a performance in Chichester with Michael Redgrave in the lead. He blew his lines, twice. We sympathized. Very clever puzzle. Sinus was particularly good.

  4. I thought I knew the Austrian city and immediately put in GRAS which caused much RUING. Finally, after 20 minutes staring at the NE corner I gave up and went to Google the city. Once I had the correct spelling it all fell smoothly in place. I thought this was a challenging puzzle but not unreasonable. I enjoyed 28 across and thought most people would be familiar with the Samson story, including the blinding, but I can see that this would be difficult if you didn’t know the reference. (It helps to have done Samson Agonistes for A Level!) About 55 minutes
  5. Linz was the only Austrian city I could think of (Mozart symphony), so could only get ICING at 7d, which I tried to parse as ‘I sing’ which doesn’t really work.

    I’d heard of(though never read) the Huxley novel, and knew the Saint-Saens opera – not to mention the ‘Carry on’ film(!), so not much difficulty with 28a. Apropos of which, ‘Softly awakes …’ must be the least sincere love song ever, in spite of being one of the most beautiful.

  6. My 22:41 rather spoiled by a certainty that there was a Malaysian state of SUBAH – an embarrassing mistake for me given that my ‘nom de real life’ is, um, not unlike that of Abraham’s wife.

    I saw 7d as out=outside and didn’t really query it. Isn’t it an archaic and nonstandard meaning?

    This was, as others have said, rather hard. Last in: NIGER, after the penny dropped.

  7. 48 minutes with the DROP SCONE (is that the same as a pikelet or Scotch pancake, I wondered droolingly as I solved?) GROSS cross last to fall. SAMBUCA promised to test my F&B inventory to the limit, but we’ve had it often enough now to cause no more than a momentary panic.

    REGARDLESS from the Biblical story alone – not a fan of the so-called comedy films, which make me cringe to be British. If anyone else agrees, we’d be a pair of naughty knockers, wouldn’t we?

    Oooh!

  8. LH went in fairly easily but I needed assistance to get the anagram at 9dn and I also looked up ZOETROPES because as soon as I spotted it began with Z I knew I didn’t know the word.

    I didn’t understand 13 until coming here as I was fixated on making sense of ER (queen) and GAIN (not a setback) somehow losing the A and fitting together to make NIGER.

    Had no idea about Milton but solved 28ac from the checkers and the Carry On reference.

    Knew Graz because I once holidayed there.

    1 hour with two cheats along the way.

  9. 18:35, with the last 2½ minutes spent staring stupidly at 11ac (SARDINE).  Unknowns: LULU as “a remarkable or wonderful person or thing” (10ac ULULANT), SABAH (14ac), DROP SCONE (16dn).

    Nice puzzle, with some tricksy wordplay.

    Clue of the Day: 20ac (GROSS).

    1. GROSS seconded – I meant to mention that it made me smile. I love those economical,witty clues.
  10. Excellent and ingenious puzzle. Good blog, Tim. RUING was my last in and took an age to crack. I’m with those who think your second explanation of this clue has to be the right one, Tim. It seems to me to work perfectly OK if “out” is taken here in the sense of “on the outside”. As Keriothe says, a beautifully simple clue once – and it’s a big “once” -you’ve spotted where the setter is coming from. PS: relieved to see that others had difficulty downloading LJ today. Thought it might just be my computer.

  11. …needed a solver to fill in the gaps in the grid, and the blog to fill in the gaps in my understanding. Many thanks!

  12. A tough(ish) cookie – almost as hard as logging on today. 41 minutes for the former. Zoetropes are new to me. 28 rang up the phrase but not the film though I knew of both. Couldn’t parse gouda, being ridiculously stuck on ou as a couple from the south, an unsubtle trap that still caught me out; except that the answer was by then unavoidable. I rather like the bottom line reading across for the name of a cheap restaurant.
  13. No time today, completed over two not-concentrated sessions (Crosswords and Countdown don’t actually complement each other).
    The NE was my main hold up: can I contribute WIEN as another Austrian possibility? Round here, there’s more than one cul-de-sac called “The Wiend” or Weind” and I figured, if it had any meaning at all it might mean pasture or meadow. Post solve research doesn’t come up with any interesting answers, though.
    CoD to REGARDLESS – my vintage and made me smile. SARDINE was good, too, in a field of decent clues.
    I got in today through LJ’s back door, logging on to livejournal.com and winging it from there. Found out I have a mailbox!
  14. No problems with Graz, being a paid-up member of the Austrian Alpine Club. Also not sure why ruing caused me difficulties.. doesn’t the out in “inside out” mean outside?
    Having said that it still took me 35 mins to finish, quite a lot of it mopping up the stubborn last half dozen or so clues, including ruing… Good stuff!
  15. Thank you, T.T., especially for explaining the Uni(c) part of Unicorn and for the A.G. of Hostage. With the latter I was just including the E from encouragement. Is it Graz or Linz where Arnie comes from? 91mins with the last 28 spent on 3 clues.
  16. 14:54 here for an interesting and enjoyable puzzle, with 17ac (the answer not the clue!) contributing to a slower time than I feel I ought to have posted. I suspect I may have come across SABAH before and forgotten about it, but at least it was easy to get from the wordplay.
  17. Many hours ago I’d given up and came here for rescue! But LJ was inaccessible. By the time I managed to squeeze in, I’d managed to finish but with no understanding of the wordplay for RUING and NIGER. Thank you, Tim. And a somewhat grudging thank you to the setter! It was tough going but eventually I emerged with some satisfaction.

    This is my third attempt to post this comment …. (I wonder if those anti-Putin demonstrations in Moscow are in some way linked to DDOS attacks on LJ?)

    1. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but it seems pretty clear that spikes in LJ outage coincide with times when politics in Moscow get interesting. I doubt those involved realise they are interfering with the pleasures of crossword solvers across the English speaking world…
  18. I also found this one tough going – 46:31, although I had about three-quarters of it in after 10 minutes! Fell into all the same traps that Tim mentioned in the blog, plus a couple of my own devising. I tried posting several times earlier, but access to the blog has been sporadic all day and previous attempts timed out. Sorry but there’s nothing I can do about it at the moment.

    I’ve earmarked the week between Christmas and New Year for attempting to migrate the site (complete with all historical blog entries) over to WordPress, but I’m not promising anything at this stage.

    1. Sad that an innocent bunch of crossword solvers should have to concede victory, of sorts, to those responsible for DDOS attacks. I would like to think that we should be defiant, resolute and truly Churchillian in our determination that they should not enjoy even a whiff of success. That said, best of luck in your efforts to migrate the site! I enjoy the company of fellow bloggers and I was suffering withdrawal symptoms for much of today.
  19. I had two sessions at this one with work in between. I plodded away fairly well until I had just the NE corner left. I had to look up a map of Austria to check if it was GRASs or GRAZing, but then got ZOETROPES from the worplay(double checked afterwards with Google) with RUING LOI. I thought “outside” would’ve been a better way of cluing it than “out” too. Like Jackkt I tried to work with GAIN and ER for NIGER, so thanks to Tim for the proper explanation. I managed to parse the rest apart from the Milton connection for 28ac, but I got that from the film reference and checkers. Probably around 90 minutes in all, but a most enjoyable puzzle.

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