Times 25040 – They’re not self-destructive (except in the computer game)

Author   daveperryPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 41:12 – I found this a fairly tough puzzle, although easier than the last couple of days. I cantered through the top half quite easily, but then came unstuck in the bottom half and had to crawl to the finish.

Not much by way of unusual words today. I was aware of ICONOCLAST, although it may be new to some. Also BOT in 6d may well be unfamiliar to those not in the industry.

My COD today has to go to 21d with its brilliant non-reference to 1 Down.

cd = cryptic def., dd = double def., rev = reversal, homophones are written in quotes, anagrams as (–)*, and removals like this

Across
1 MOTOCROSS = (SCOTS MOOR)*
9 UTOPIAN = (TOP + I) in (U + AN)
10 DICe + KEN + S
11 ARGUE = AGUE about Rotten
12 LAN(CAST)E + R – The Royal House of Lancaster was founded in 1362 which ought to qualify it as an old house in most people’s books.
13 SP(Y)RING
15 SH + OUT
17 S + LIME – A reference to Carol Reed’s 1949 film noir The Third Man which starred Orson Welles as Harry Lime, the Third Man of the title. The film was, of course, based on Graham Greene’s equally famous novel. Neither of which really explains to me what the (notably) is doing there. It seems rather superfluous. On edit: It’s probably a reference to the Third Man theme, but that’s not really anything to do with Lime himself. In fact, knowing that, I like this clue less.
18 C(H)OKE
19 MIRTH = H + TRIM all rev
20 FAN FARE – food for fans
23 SPECTACLE – a pair of spectacles would allow you to see the spectacle better
25 SIGHT = “CITE”
27 ALI BABA – cd, a reference to the eponymous character in the Arabic tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. He used the phrase ‘Open Sesame’ to open the door to the thieves’ treasure store.
28 LE(M + MIN)G – although they have never, as far as anyone knows, committed mass suicide as is commonly believed. It was a myth popularized by Disney in their 1958 film White Wilderness in which an apparent mass suicide was staged for the camera.
29 ELEMENTAL – I entered this without really understanding it. I had all the checkers, and thought that ‘radical’ might be a definition in some sort of chemistry sense. I also thought MENTAL might be unbalanced. I still can’t see any further than that though, so maybe someone else can explain it. It’s ELsE + MENTAL, see mctext’s comment below
Down
1 MUDDLE = DisconcerteD in MULE (a horse-donkey cross)
2 TECHNICIAN = (CHANCE IN IT)*
3 CREVASSE = ESCape about SAVER all rev
4 ON(S)E + T
5 SUPERSTAR = R in (PASTURES)* – although with the U in the anagrist, I first wondered if queen was going to be a Q.
6 BOTANY – I believe that ‘Study not concerned with the animated’ is the definition. Then a BOT is piece of software often used on the internet to perform repetative tasks in place of a person, and ANY = ‘at all’
7 ZING – hidden in leibni)Z IN Germany
8 IN LEAGUE = GAEL in (EU + NI) all rev
14 ICONOCLAST = CON in IOC + LAST
16 ON MESSAGE = (NAMES GOES)*
17 SOFT SELL = (SO + FELL) about ThiS
18 CHATLINE = TaLk in CHAINEd
21 ANTRIM = (MARTINi)* – brilliant ‘lift and separate’ required on ‘1 Down’. County Down in Northern Ireland shares a border with County Antrim.
22 DERAIL = LIAR + ED all rev
24 EVADE = rEADEr about V
26 GA(M)Y

40 comments on “Times 25040 – They’re not self-destructive (except in the computer game)”

  1. 17ac: I suspect that “notably” is a reference to the famous theme tune of the film.
    29ac: Parsed this as EL{s}E (“more” with the S{ociety} rejected) + MENTAL.

    Enjoyed this a lot and thought it was going to be a doddle after getting 1ac and 1dn right off. But not to be. It got progressively harder as the SE approached. Must give the COD to 21dn for the mis-direction in “1 Down”.

    Thanks for staying up late again, Dave!

    Edited at 2011-12-23 03:52 am (UTC)

    1. Thanks mctext, I can always rely on you to pick up the gauntlet on the clues I can’t understand!
      I still don’t like the (notably) in 17a. The theme song of the film doesn’t really have anything to do with Lime who is essentially a book character. Lime is actually the third man of the title, so that works fine. But the ‘notably’ spoils it for me.
      1. One minor point, Dave: Graham Greene wrote The Third Man primarily as a film script, and the (very short) novel was only published after the film came out. I think it was written to provide a framework for him to work on, and wasn’t intended for publication in its own right. It was always seen as a film project.
    2. Wasn’t the famous tune of the film known as the Harry Lime theme? Also could “notably” here simply indicate that Harry Lime was a particularly famous third man? Either way, I agree, the word seems somewhat superfluous and the clue would work perfectly well without it.
      1. We certainly used to know it as the Harry Lime theme in my younger days. I assumed that “notably” was simply a weakish pun on the (musical) notes that made up the tune.
  2. 25:23 … one of several puzzles lately giving the lie to the idea that puzzles get easier towards the bottom. This one got distinctly tricky south of the equator.

    I suspect the key to a fast time was seeing SOFT SELL quickly, which I certainly didn’t.

    Last in BOTANY, which is a bit fishy, you ask me.

    I was looking for a Bond theme after the mention of Fleming and the stirred martini but couldn’t spot one – unless the spectacles are ’00’ (and of course For Your Eyes Only). At least there’s a possible Bond Girl in Eva de Fanfare.

  3. Just occurred to me that the lemming at 28ac is the proverbial rather than the literal one. NOAD has a timely entry:

    a person who unthinkingly joins a mass movement, esp. a headlong rush to destruction: the flailings of the lemmings on Wall Street.

    Edited at 2011-12-23 04:18 am (UTC)

    1. Yes, it’s interesting. One has the inaccurate, literal meaning (almost metaphorical itself) vying with the extended, figurative one.
      1. Yes, I did realise that it was accurate in the figurative sense, but I thought I’d challenge the misconception nonetheless.
  4. Lots to like here. Another COD nomination for ANTRIM, with GAMY a close second, and MIRTH (with its ‘mural’ distractor) worthy of a podium finish too. 50 minutes, but unlike everyone else I finished in the NW – but only in retrospect because I couldn’t get MOTOCROSS on first couple of run-throughs.
  5. Considering the trouble I had getting started and I felt that at any moment I was going hit a brick wall I was rather surprised to find the grid completed without resort to aids in 40 minutes.

    At the end of it (and a little extra time to revisit and parse some of the clues) I had two unexplained, BOTANY and ELEMENTAL. I’ve vaguely heard of something called ‘Spybot’ with reference to computers so I assumed that accounted for the first three letters of 6dn. Thanks to mct for sorting out 29ac and of course to Dave for an excellent blog which can’t have been easy to write.

    Having no interest whatsoever in the activity at 1ac I was not aware until today that it’s called MOTOCROSS rather than ‘motorcross’, so I have learned something new.

    1. I remember watching both off-track motorbike racing (scrambling or motocross?) and off-track car racing – mainly bangers – (autocross?) in the 70s on Grandstand. I wonder if the spelling of the latter affected the former. It depends rather on which word came, or established itself, first, I suppose.
  6. Still not convinced of parsing for ELEMENTAL and needed blog (thanks, dave) fully to understand BOTANY. Top half completed much more quickly than bottom: about 40 mins overall. An enjoyable challenge but, for some unknown reason, no clue stood out as a COD.
  7. I never tuned in to this setter and as a result the puzzle was hard work and little things irritated more than would be the case if I had been going swimmingly.

    The (notably) in 17A is very strange and completely superfluous. “notably third” had me trying to put “t” into the answer. SOFT SELL isn’t “psychological manipulation” which is more akin to brain washing. Thanks to Dave for sorting out “bot” which I see from the dictionary is short for “robot”. I did like ANTRIM where the “lift and separate” is very good.

    Have a good holiday one and all

    1. I share some of your irritation with this puzzle, but I’d be prepared to defend SOFT SELL = psychological manipulation. My Chambers defines this marketing practice as: “sale or selling by preliminary softening up or other indirect method; mild persuasion, or mildly persuasive tactics”, which I guess amounts to a kind of (mild) brain washing.

      Thanks to Mctext for explaining how ELEMENTAL works. I always forget that S on its own can be an abbreviation for “society”.

  8. 63 minutes for me. Should have been well under the hour but I circled round BOTANY like a Qantas pilot for 15 minutes at the end. And thanks to Dave for putting me right about lemmings and correcting the misinformation planted in my brain at an early age by those evil Disney people.

    Btw here’s another of those eerie coincidences. I finally got round to doing Wednesday’s championship puzzle this morning and had to check cockatrice afterwards (yes, ok, I thought it was a real live bird. Probably Disney’s fault). Anyway, the Wikipedia entry for cockatrice shows a fine example carved into Belvedere Castle at Central Park. How strange! – and my apologies to anyone who hasn’t done the last two puzzles, to whom this will make no sense at all.

  9. Another who found this trickier in the lower reaches, apart from BOTANY, which had to wait until it couldn’t really be anything else. And another for ACME until it couldn’t be.
    I didn’t like ALI BABA much, teetering on the very edge of crypticity. 21 was a decent clue, slightly marred in the printed edition with the line break, coming after the 1, doing the lift and separate for you.
    20 minutes, CoD to the tidy ROTTEN ROW
  10. 29 minutes but with game for gamy – had intended to go back to it but with the half-hour dinning jumped off the edge. A pleasant mixture of tough and moderate-to-soft and for me all well done. (What a ghastly image now I re-read.) Including the ‘notably’ which I see as a nudge to the HL theme and nothing to get excited about. COD chatline.
  11. 16 mins, my major hold up being MIRTH. A puzzle full of d’oh moments, particularly the ‘1 Down’ in 21d.
  12. I commented a few weeks ago about the equating of ‘engineer’ with ‘mechanic’. Now an ignorant setter and a lazy editor have allowed ‘engineer’ to be equated with ‘technician’. Presumably we are going to be treated to ‘doctor’ = ‘nurse’, architect’ = ‘draughtsman’ or ‘solicitor’ = ‘legal clerk’ in future puzzles. Come on, editor, do your job and sharpen up.
    1. I too have fulminated about this misuse in the past. However, if we allow that dictionary definitions are descriptive of the language, rather than prescriptive, I guess we have to accept it.
      “I will send an engineer to fix your washing machine tomorrow morning” means that a technician may well turn up in the next 36 hours or so. And his hourly rate will probably be higher than that of many chartered engineers.
      1. > if we allow that dictionary definitions are descriptive of the language, rather than prescriptive
        This is not really something to be allowed or disallowed is it? It’s an incontrovertible fact.
        Tricky puzzle this, and not one I particularly enjoyed. I didn’t help myself by bunging in MURAL for 19ac. I had a logic I won’t bore you with!
        Happy Christmas all: something tells me I won’t be commenting again this side of Monday. Now where did I put my glass…
        1. Sorry, I may have been a bit ambiguous there. I was using “allow” in the sense of “acknowledge” rather than “permit”.
          1. Yes I think that’s how I understood it but it still sounds odd to me. A bit like saying “if we allow that the earth goes round the sun, rather than vice versa”.
  13. Hey, anonymous, a technician engineers set-ups that work. It’s not an official equation of a public title. The verb behind the noun can take the lead in a clue: thus your ‘solicitor’ can solicit extra-legal custom. Have a happy Christmas.
  15. I still can’t understand the homophone at 25a. I bunged it in as soon as I got the T from ANTRIM but I was looking for a word that sounded like “judgement” as well as “quote”. What am I not seeing here? I also didn’t know ELEMENTAL as “radical”. A struggle but I got there in the end. 47 minutes.
  17. I have no problem at all with engineer = technician. Chambers defines a technician as ‘a person skilled in a practical or mechanical art’. This surely covers an engineer, doesn’t it? Incidentally, Anonymous, I don’t think I’d have a problem with doctor = nurse either. As verbs, they can both mean to tend to the sick. I certainly wouldn’t consider either the setter to be ignorant, or the editor to be lazy.
  18. 14:03 for me, with tiredness once again taking its toll, particularly in the bottom half.

    No problems with the BOT part of BOTANY, but I’m not too keen on the definition part – “study not concerned with the animated” – which seems to assume that plants aren’t living organisms. I suppose the setter may be trying to say that some plants are proverbial for their lack of liveliness (“he sat there like a vegetable”); on the other hand, perhaps I’m missing something more obvious.

    1. I wonder if the setter meant ‘animate’; this would have made better sense. Or was he or she adding ‘crypticity’ by exploiting the ‘breath’ meaning of anima?
  19. DNF for me but only two I couldn’t get, pretty happy with that being a relative novice to The Times (weaned on The Telegraph for a couple of years). Could someone please explain the word play for soft sell?
    1. Hello and welcome. It’s in the blog in shorthand, but to expand it’s:

      True = SO
      evil = FELL
      embraces = enclosure indicator
      this heartless = T–S (middle letters removed)
      psychological manipulation = definition of SOFT SELL

      1. I worked it out that way but have never come across the evil = fell definition. I reasoned it couldn’t be anything else though. Managed to finish this one in about 90 minutes with a break for present wrapping. I’m described as an customer service engineer by my company when I travel round datacentres and offices fixing/installing everything from laptops to mainframes, but I didn’t do an engineering degree, just a basic degree in electronics and computing at Durham in the late sixties/early seventies, so I suppose I’m just a technician really. Mind you most of my colleagues who did the physics module finished up as accountants so I consider myself unusual in following a career that relates to my degree.
        I’ve just started a week of on call, so no Christmas cheer for me until next weekend. Won’t have to worry about being breathalysed though:-)
        Merry Christmas to all.
        1. You’ll be familiar with this sense, if subconsciously, from the phrase ‘in one fell swoop’, which comes down to us from Macbeth (Macduff speaking therein, having heard that the king – portrayed as a kite – intends to kill his whole family):

          ‘What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam,
          At one fell swoop?’

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