Times 25038: But screw your Boerewors to the sticking-place, / And we shall not fail.

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: Technical DNF

To explain: abandoned after an hour and a bit, totally confused by 19dn (see title) because I had a mistaken C at the end of 17ac and figured COURAGE; but what could that have to do with the clue? The Dutch variety perhaps? Said was then called for and a small-denomination token descended. Too late by then.

Across
 1 F(REEB)IE. A reversal of BEER inside FIE (That, I don’t like!). The inclusion indicator is ‘drinking’. Comp trap: rushing into FREEBEE?
 5 NOSE JOB. Sounds like ‘knows job’. ‘Features editor’ for the plastic surgeon … Ho ho ho.
 9 S(TICK) (FIG)URE.
10 CAT. Two defs and a hidden answer.
11 ALIGHT. Two defs.
12 BED,AZZ,LE. BED (mattress); ANN with her Ns turned 90˚ counter-clockwise = AZZ; LE{e}. The def is ‘blind’. Only saw the parsing just now.
14 THE TOOTH FAIRY. Cryptic def.
17 PSYCHO,KIN,E,SIS. The E from ‘embracE’. (How I managed to get ‘psychokinesiC’, which isn’t even a word, will remain forever a mystery. My undoing none the less.)
21 F,LAT(MA)TE. F{ollowing}; then mater stuck in the coffee. (There’s another one crossing at 22dn.)
23 PI(QUE)T. Chile, official language: Spanish. So ‘that’ = que.
25 Left OUTT.
26 CHI(NESE WA)LL. Anagram of ‘new sea’ inside CHILL. ‘Winds’ (verb) is the indicator.
27 GARB,AGE.
28 DI(SCER)N. The filler is from ‘Six Crossword Editors Richard’; initials.
Down
 1 FI,S(CA)L. Reversal: L (pounds) and S (shillings) around AC (account) & IF.
 2 E,L(ITIS)T. E{ugenics}; IT IS inside gaLTon. &lit. Someone will appreciate a mention of Darwin’s cousin no doubt.
 3 BAK(SHE)ES,H. BAKES (cooks), inc SHE and H (hard).
 4 Omitted. Cf ‘just the ticket’.
 5 NA(USEATIN)G. The filler is USE A TIN (preserve!); Xantippe, wife of Socrates, and such a famous termagant that she has now given her name (lower case) to shrews-in-general.
 6 S(HEB)A. AS (when); HEB{rew}.
 7 JA(CU)ZZ,I. CU (copper) in JAZZ & I.
 8 BY THE BYE. ‘patienT’ & H{ospital} inside BYE-BYE. The def is ‘in passing’.
13 CO(CKATR)ICE. Anagram of TRACK inside C{h}OICE (superior); aka Basilisk.
15 F,US(SINES)S. F{emale}; SINES (functions) in US & S (society).
16 S,PI(FFIN)G. Reversal of NIFF (pong).
18 Y,EARNER. Can’t see where the Y comes from. Maybe because he earns an unknown amount? (Anyone in need of a towel? I have one to throw in.)
On edit: see comments and speculations below. The obscure, but most likely, candidate is ¥ = Yen.
19 SA,USAGE. As in South African parlance. As noted, my undoing.
20 STOLEN. The def is ‘hot’: ST{uff} OL{d} EN{glish}.
22 MOCCA. MOCHA. Sounds like ‘mocker’. (Apologies for the original typo; thanks to Jackkt.)
24 F,END. As in ‘… for oneself’.

43 comments on “Times 25038: But screw your Boerewors to the sticking-place, / And we shall not fail.”

  1. I think 22dn is MOCHA. If there’s an alternative spelling with two Cs then it would be a poor clue because there’d be no way of telling which was required.

    I wonder if the Y in 18dn refers to the Y chromosome, hence salaryMAN.

    1. Oops! A typo. Honest. Thanks. Is this a MOCCA-sin? Will correct.

      Edited at 2011-12-21 06:43 am (UTC)

  2. Also a technical DNF because at 60 minutes I cheated to get COCKATRICE – I had all the checkers but couldn’t think of a word that fitted – and I finally opted rather desperately for STELA at 6dn (A(LET)S reversed) that well-known Hebrew kingdom!

    Rather oddly it appears that STICK FIGURE is not in any of the usual dictionaries.

    The rotating letter device used at 12ac appeared recently so didn’t baffle me this time, at least not once I had got rid of the notion of mattress = Z-BED (anyone remember them?). Unfortunately the trick doesn’t work for those of us who put a stroke through our Zeds.

    I think we are missing a V to complete the pangram.

  3. Since a salary can be expressed as an annual sum, I think it could be Y (abbreviation for year) + EARNER.
    1. Not sure I like it any better than my dodgy suggestion. Definitions of salary in the usual sources all mention monthly rather than yearly, though of course I take your point that salaries would usually be quoted for the year.
      1. I checked Oxford Online before submitting my comment and it has ‘a fixed regular payment, typically paid on a monthly basis but often expressed as an annual sum’, which seems close enough, if not perhaps clinching.

        Perhaps the answer is obvious and we will be enlightened in due course.

          1. Thank you. Might I politely suggest when joining a thread later in the day it might be helpful to check through earlier contributions before responding to a query posted at the start of it?
  4. 109 minutes on this crafty fellow, with the two tricky and unfamiliar crossing long words (13 and 17) last in. Unknowns included NIFF (16), ‘boloney’ (19) and PIQUET (23), the last of which I’ve probably come across in one of these things.

    As noted, YEARNER was a bit of a poser, as it seemed to be a rather middling cryptic clue at first, while I needed to parse 3 carefully in order to decide between the correct answer and ‘buksheesh’. Not a word one sees in writing a lot.

    Looking at the Grand Final Puzzles as a whole, I found No. 1 (25032) the hardest (the easiest to some others), No. 2 (25026) the easiest (the hardest to some others) and No. 3 (this one) in the middle. Actually, they were all very challenging to me, and I was just pleased to finish 2 out of 3.

    I looked up last year’s Grand Final pages on this blog and found write-ups by three of the finalists. However, I cannot find the corresponding puzzles. Are they available online?

    2. Last year all three were published together on the Monday following the final. They’re available online as a PDF here.
      1. Let us (jerrywh and I) hope they revive that convention next year! Vinyl1 and Koro can then sort them out.

        Edited at 2011-12-21 07:37 am (UTC)

  6. Clockwise and counter-clockwise?

    Is the y in yearner for year earner? Although the chromosome looks better.

  7. DNF. What a brilliant crossword, utterly demonstrating my non-championship potential! Even clues which I had cracked, I could not fully parse: so many thanks for the blog, mctext. I also made life difficult for myself by assuming (16dn) that the reference to ‘small porker’ was ‘gilt’ rather than the more obvious S PIG. COD to NOSE JOB.
  9. – (incomplete message sent inadvertently) –
    … was going to say that I was expecting a pangram: VEND for FEND wasn’t going to work, so there’s no V.
  10. Brilliant and challenging puzzle. It beggars belief that anyone could have done it in 8 minutes. The only point at which I even came close to Mark G’s performance was in initially entering BY THE WAY instead of BY THE BYE at 8dn. About 60 mins for me, but like Jack I had to cheat (by looking up synonyms for “monster” in Bradford’s) to get COCKATRICE despite having all the checkers and, like Mctext, carelessly misspelt MOCHA as “mocca”. A puzzle studded with excellent clues. There were a number which stood out as combining far from obvious definitions with devilishly devious wordplay – e.g. NOSE JOB, STICK FIGURE, CHINESE WALL – and some, such as FREEBIE, where the def was straightforward but you hesitated to enter it because you couldn’t immediately see how to parse it. Having lived in Japan for a time, I can confirm, as Jack says, that “salaryman” is standard Japlish for what we would call a “white-collar worker”. It’s perfectly true that salaries are usually paid monthly but they are invariably expressed as annual amounts. So no problems with YEARNER as far as I’m concerned. Indeed, it’s one of the better clues in a generally high-class puzzle.
  11. I found this the hardest of the three and struggled with it for circa 45 minutes. All great fun and my thanks to the setter for an all round brilliant puzzle. What can one say about Mark finishing in 8 minutes in test conditions?

    I’m with Jack, a “salaryman” is a Japanese term that I came across when doing work for Fujitsu and Y is the abbreviation for Yen so its Y-EARNER. I loved 2D for obvious reasons.

    Well done again McText – large scotch called for!

    1. Good point, Jimbo, about Y = yen not year[ly] here, which I failed to twig immediately even knowing the Japlish term “salaryman”!
  12. What a shame not to deliver the pangram when the v could have been found so easily (anon above). A really spiffing puzzle. Congratulations setter and the eight-minute wonder. 46 for me and OK with that. Several of these clues would walk away with the COD on most days. My favourite is cockatrice, with nauseating and the yen-earner close second. ‘Discontented salaryman?’ is a touch neater (but maybe easier somehow). Just a query: is it OK for a dbe not to have any indication as to the delimitation of a wider field (4 dn)? (The sender process seems a bit chippy – a word worth nudging along, I feel – so signing here, joekobi.)
  13. Evening all. I’ve just made the jump from being a month behind c/o The Australian to joining up to the Times club, and what a day for it! Cracker of a puzzle, and I was most chuffed to get it out in under an hour.

    Except that the leaderboard says I took ten. Should I assume, then, that the whole clock-stopping nature of the pause button is fairly pointless in this regard?

    Had COCOA pencilled in for quite a while – standard clown name, right? And GARBAGE flitted across my mind for 19dn at first, just from the opening word. Felt that was a gift to me.

    Is it embarrassing to admit that I was expecting ‘in lively manner’ to be the defn, and when I filled in JACUZZI I presumed this was another piece of musical notation (for the pretentious composer), for a short time at least?!

    Hope to drop by more often now I’m in sync.

    1. Welcome Anthony and do please join in the fun

      Why not have a go at Sotira’s survey which you will find a link to on yesterday’s blog

      1. Found it. My time was substantially faster than the one for the crossword. The leaderboard seems to be broken though, so I’m unsure how it compares 😉
      2. Thanks, jimbo, for the plug. And welcome Anthony.

        Yes, the survey is still to be found at Not the Times for The Times Festive Survey

        I should point out that it’s not very festive. But it now seems customary to put ‘festive’ in front of everything for several weeks each year. I just wanted to annoy Jeremy Paxman.

        I should also mention that the URL has no significance for the survey. It’s just an unused WordPress blog I happened to have and WordPress has a nice easy survey plug-in.

        Thank you to all those who have already given it a go (we’re past the half century mark). A brief perusal suggests some entertaining and interesting contributions, not to mention several eminently sensible suggestions for questions I should have included but didn’t. Next year, someone less scatterbrained can do it!

  14. Somewhere over 30, but again with interruptions. No idea until here how BEDAZZLED, NAUSEATING and CHINESE WALL worked. Eventually got COCKATRICE but NOT from wordplay. STICK FIGURE looks rather weird but I suppose it’s alright – I don’t know what else I’d call it and Wiki’s got an article on it.
    Lots of very sophisticated cluing, not many laughs apart from FREEBIE, a mischievous use of old girl to mean two different things – what’s not to like?
    Wouldn’t have come close to this in competition – too many demanded close attention, gnarly unpicking and hyper-intuitive definition spotting.
    Let’s give CoD to SPIFFING, though for once I didn’t mind the cutesy CD at 14
    1. What else to call it? All the usual sources have MATCHSTICK FIGURE.

      I saw the article on Wiki and interestingly (for me) the figure they describe and give an example of is not what I’d think of as a matchstick figure at all. But then I wasted years of my life following The Saint.

      1. I think the more familiar ones are further down on wiki, including a prehistoric example. You’re quite right – I just couldn’t bring matchstick/stalk to mind.
  15. 42 minutes wrestling this into submission and, like everyone else, happy to have completed it at all, astonished that someone could knock it off in around 8.
  16. 44 minutes. I found this a bit of a grind, and didn’t really enjoy it. Looking back at it post-solve it’s clearly an absolutely first-rate puzzle so it must be me. Strange because I don’t even feel particularly grumpy!
    I couldn’t parse NAUSEATING or YEARNER, so thanks to mctext and others for clearly those up. I’m certain the latter is a Yen reference. I knew salaryman as a specifically Japanese term but still didn’t see it.
  17. I have it on good authority (I’m using his laptop) that this puzzle was set by an ex-Times Champion.

    Poacher turned gamekeeper, as a regular finalist quipped on the day.

  18. 37:32 .. looking back at it, there’s a lot which doesn’t seem so hard. But I guess that’s what makes it a good crossword puzzle – easy once you know.

    Top-left was the major problem area for me, remaining entirely blank for 20 minutes plus.

    8 minutes for this? Give me a break. The man’s clearly sold his soul to the devil.

  19. 122 minutes, so I can make everyone, including ulaca, feel good.
    I am firmly in the Yen camp for 18, as “salaryman” seems to be a purely japanese word. (Incidentally, how many people know that that the japanese word for suit, SABIRU, comes from “Saville Row”?)
    Many thanks to mctext for the explanations of all those (26,5d,8,13,15 & 18)that I could not parse.
  20. I would NOT have been one of them. To echo some tales of woe from above, I used up a full 60 minutes and still needed aids for the monster. Never heard of him. The list of what I couldn’t parse includes YEARNER, the toppled N’s, the ‘use a tin’ trick, the SA usage, but I got those from definitions only. Overall, an excellent if difficult puzzle. An outstanding puzzle, in my opinion, that is so devious that I’m surprised the editors used it in a competition final round. I assume they had faith that it would separate the wheat (8 minutes!?!?) from, well, everyone else. And apparently, it did. Congratulations to the Champ, and the other 17 competitors who completed this, and an awe-inspired salute to the setter. Regards to all.
  21. Somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes for me, working through it at a steady plod (after coming to a stand with No. 2). An excellent puzzle, at just the right level for a Championship final IMO.

    I was sitting next to Jason James, a fluent Japanese speaker, and smiled to myself to think that he’d have had no problem with YEARNER; so I was surprised when I had to explain it to him after we’d finished!

  22. I gave up timing myself after the first half-hour, but I think maybe it took me 2+ hours. The thing is, I actually finished it, which is enough for me. I live in Japan, so I should have figured out YEARNER; but no, I just put it in because I had the Y.
  23. I only got round to solving this puzzle tonight. 45 minutes. Put a lot in from checkers and definitions (e.g. cockatrice and nauseating) so thanks mctext for your detailed explanations.

    This was the only Grand Final puzzle that I managed to finish unaided (I came up two or three short on the other two), but I had one error – an incorrect piquat for piquet – and is 4 Enid?

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