Times 25102 – Not my cup of vegetables!

Solving time: DNF

Music: Berlioz, Harold in Italy, Davis/Imai/LSO

I have felt terrible all day, and in my weakened state this one was too much for me. Maybe if I was fully healthy I could have finished, despite a couple of answers I had never heard of.

But our loyal customers are expecting a blog, so a blog there shall be. In honor of this very clever puzzle, there will not be many omissions tonight.

Across
1 MACEDOINE, M(ACE DO)INE. This is one I had not heard of. The theory that ‘top cook’ = ‘C’ is very tempting, since there is a ‘C’ in the crossing letters. But in this case, ‘cook’ turns out to be ‘do’, which is usually a party or a swindle. I suspect this clue will give everyone a lot of trouble.
9 POUNCER, P[rey] + OUNCE + R. The literal is a bit awkwardly tacked on, so this should be one of the easier ones.
10 WANTAGE, WANT + AGE. Easy enough if you have heard of the place; if not, then it might equally well start with ‘lack’ or ‘miss’.
11 MUMPS, MUM + P[ill]S. Quite easy, but this held me up for a long time.
12 RECOLLECT, RE + COLL[i]E + C[hale]T. Another of the starter clues, which were sorely needed in this puzzle.
13 OUTLIVE, OUT + EVIL backwards. The trick is to lift and separate the literal, which is ‘weather’.
15 SWILL, double definition. I had ‘scrub’ for a long time, which does almost work.
17 TAPAS, AT backwards + PA + S. My first in, a comparatively easy clue once you parse the literal.
18 TAINT, hidden in [bri]TAIN T[oday]. I knew this must be a hidden, and still couldn’t see it for a bit.
19 PURER, P[o]URER, another easy one I had a hard time with.
20 RISOTTO, SIR backwards + OTTO. I nearly always forget to try ‘sir’ for ‘teacher’, and for a long time fancied ‘gelatti’.
23 RECEPTION, a cryptic definition, I believe, unless there is some trick I don’t see, which is likely enough.
25 Omitted!
27 TEA-ROSE, TEA(RO[ot])SE.
28 LAY DOWN, LAY + DOWN in different senses. Probably, ‘song sung’ = ‘lay’, i.e. from the oral tradition.
20 EXPRESSLY, EXPRESS + L[eft] + Y[ork]. Another well-hidden literal.
 
Down
1 MY WORD, MY WOR[l]D. Pretty clever use of ‘well’, which I spotted at once, but then wasted a lot of time on ‘area’ = ‘a’, which was not it at all.
2 CONSCRIPTS, CONS + CRI(P[icture])TS. This one should keep you guessing for a while, since not often do ‘reviews’ = ‘crits’.
3 DEAD LOSS, D(anagram of DEAL)OSS. I was familiar with ‘doss’ in the sense of vagrants bedding down for the night, but the secondary slang meaning was new to me.
4 IRENE, I RE[pi]NE. Another well-disguised literal, simply a woman’s name.
5 EPISTOLER, E(PISTOL)ER. This should have been easy, but I tried every sense of ‘piece’ except the right one before seeing it.
6 SUMMIT, SU(MM)IT. Yet another requiring lift and separate to get the literal.
7 SCAM, MAC[e]S backwards. The literal ‘game’ is used here in the metaphoric sense, as in ‘con game’.
8 PROSPECT, anagram of COPPERS + [contemp]T. One of the easier clues.
14 INIQUITOUS, IN + I + QUITO + US. I was beating my brains trying to think of a capital ending in ‘o’, when I finally thought of the answer and then remembered the capital.
16 IMPORTUNE, IMP + [f]ORTUNE. I had many theories about this, all of which turned out to be wrong.
17 THROSTLE, TH(anagram of STROL[l])E. The literal really is ‘old bird’, there is no lift and separate, which sure fooled me.
18 TRIPLANE, sounds like TRY, PLAIN. A ‘simple’ is not even a herb, the clue is that simple!.
21 TURBOT, TO[o] BRUT backwards. I was a little surprised that ‘too’ appears in both the clue and the answer, when it could easily have been avoided.
22 ANNECY, ANNE + C[it]Y. Never heard of it, but for once the cryptic hands it to you.
24 CUT UP, CUT + UP in different senses. Here, university does not = ‘u’, but ‘at university’ = ‘up’.
26 BOYO, B[ishop] + [e]O[j] Y[l]O[h]. A word that should be familiar to fans of The Clash.

43 comments on “Times 25102 – Not my cup of vegetables!”

  1. Probably feeling as bad as our esteemed blogger and had to fight for most of the answers. I figured MACEDOINE as the answer to 1ac from the literal and pencilled it very lightly. It’s always been one of my favourite strange words. (Used to buy it in cans when a student and feeling short of veg but not being up to prep time.) Learned later that it was a reference to “the mixture of peoples in the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great”. Wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing today? (Though we do still say “Balkanised”.)

    At the other end: no idea about ANNECY; but it did have me rehearsing David Crosby’s “Orleans” in case the answer was one of the places in the song. It wasn’t.

    Crossed out SCOUR and SCRUB at 15ac before remembering an Australian Prime Minister’s reference to the Senate as “unrepresentative swill”.

    LOI: 13ac, OUTLIVE. Fiendishest of the fiendish.

  2. Third vote in for being a bazillion miles away from the wavelength of the setter. Had to put it down for a while and come back to make sense of the middle section. SCRUB was eventually removed be EPISTOLER, and RECEPTION was my last in.
  3. It took me 3 minutes to come up with an answer to write in (this was at 25ac) so I thought I was in for a major problem today but this was soon proved wrong and I made steady if not spectacular progress completing the grid in 38 minutes.

    I took a number of guesses from literals which at first seemed unlikely to fit the wordplay but on closer examination turned out to be correct – MACEDOINE being the first of several examples. I remembered the word from menus back in the 50s as it was an item that sounded exotic and exciting yet when served turned out to be utterly disappointing having obviously come straight out of tins like mct used to buy.

    There were only a couple of unknowns for me today, DOSS as an easy task and EPISTOLER with an O.

    23ac is a double definition, not a cryptic. It’s the first class in an infant school in addition to the drinks party. It was also my last in.

    Edited at 2012-03-05 05:22 am (UTC)

    1. Jack,
      You are an “abundant supply” (1ac, not an anagram) of information. So thanks for working out RECEPTION in particular. Meant to mention this as a complete unknown. But what else do you do with R-C-P-I-N?
      1. I only worked it out from the checkers despite knowing both definitions neither of which came to mind until afterwards.

        I’m curious to know how you manage to appear both with and without your avatar in the same discussion?

        Edited at 2012-03-05 06:11 am (UTC)

          1. For the curious:
            1. Don’t set a default userpic in the LiveJournal settings.
            2. Select the userpic you want for each post.
            3. Leaving it as “(default)” under “Picture to use” = no userpic.

            BTW: In LiveJournal speak, “avatar” = username (mctext).
            “Userpic” = what you’d expect it to mean.

            Edited at 2012-03-05 09:17 am (UTC)

            1. I got there by intuition but thanks for taking the trouble and for pointing out my terminological inaccuracy. I knew that too but my brain is addled!
  4. I rather enjoyed this in spite of having to look up 1ac in Chambers to finish the grid. Like Vinyl, I was fixated on C as top cook – ‘ace’ would have seen me home. 35 minutes for all bar 1, 2, 4, 7, and 9, and then another half hour for those. Lots of good stuff, but my COD to the virgin soldiers, and a salute to Jack for a top time.
  5. 20m here, so not as hard as it felt.
    There were a lot of clues here where you had to remove a bit of a word. In the case of 4dn and 11ac the bits themselves are whole words. I think this contributed to the difficulty because it makes the wordplay much less obvious.
  6. 67 minutes for me,with the last 3 CONSCRIPTS, WANTAGE and MACEDOINE taking some inordinate amount of time. It never ceases to amaze me what things there are words for and what things merely phrases. Who would have thought carrots chopped into small cubes would be in the top tier? Is there a word for things which can only be described in phrases? Ineffable seems too strong. Anyway, a fine puzzle, throughout which I kept thinking “But it’s Monday; I can’t be this difficult!”. COD to OUTLIVE over SUMMIT, both of which worth the price of admission. Not that I’m admitting I didn’t know doss in that sense or where Annecy might be.
    1. This is just the tip of the iceberg: MACEDOINE refers to a particular size. A Parmentier is the same thing but a bit larger. A Brunoise is smaller.
        1. Indeed. I believe they revoke stars if they see anything larger than a Brunoise.
          1. It must be difficult to live in world knowing your next carrot slice could bring your ruin, says the man who deftly removed part of his finger slicing shallots to who knows what international standard.
            1. Actually, based on the experience of a friend of mine the real risk is that the psychopath going by the name “chef” will have a hysterical screaming fit, throw the product of three hours’ painstaking labour in the bin and tell you to do it again.
  7. 21 minutes, with the top half smoother than the bottom, though the POUNCER/SCAM cross was my last in. I found myself wondering if a snow leopard was a lunge for a while, and I stolidly rejected MACE as the club in 7 down because once you knocked off the E there weren’t enough letters. “Game” presents way too many possibilities.
    Lucky to get MACEDOINE straight off from the cryptic. I think it may be more of an eastern European thing these days, certainly the context in which I’ve eaten it recently.
    The SOBER judge thing turned up in Another Place this weekend.
    A lot of rather slangy stuff in this one?
    CoD to OUTLIVE, and I liked LAY DOWN for its neat use of Neil Diamond. This version’s really cheesy, and a bit off key, too.

  8. Was pleased to finish this correctly, albeit pretty slowly, with full understanding of all but IRENE (never heard of REPINE), and EXPRESSLY (didn’t think too hard about where the L and Y came from).

    Thought WANTAGE was in Dorset (Swanage?), but the cryptic was clear.

    CoD: OUTLIVE for the ‘bad weather’ misdirection.

  9. Too tough for me to do much of it today. I think RECEPTION is a double definition, as in first class of school, and also meaning a drinks party.
  10. Two sessions today (work intervened) but about 20 – 25 mins in total. Particuarly tricky today I thought, not helped because I too had SCRUB in at 15a until I realised that was why I couldn’t finish 5d. Like jakkt, I remember MACEDOINE from the 1950s – probably our first venture into ‘foreign food’!!

    Edited at 2012-03-05 12:40 pm (UTC)

  11. Only managed 9 holes today as still recovering from wretched virus. Found this tough going – 30 minutes to solve. Never seemed to gell with the setter and wrote a lot of answers in lightly “on spec” because not convinced I’d got it right. “top cook” is particularly clever and I solved from the definition, having the same memories as others of rubbish eaten in days of yore.
  12. Outlive was dead hard and dead loss required a lot of head scratching here. Reception was a wily DD. Admiration for our blogger admitting a DNF. Proving at least one contributor to TFTT is human.

    Enigma

  13. I was doing fine at around 15 minutes when I hit the buffers with 3 clues left to solve: MACEDOINE, MY WORD and THROSTLE.

    So I had to cheat.

    I know it’s bad to flaunt one’s ignorance, but I’m actually quite proud not to know the word MACEDOINE. If you ever hear me using it, shoot me. The setter is redeemed by including THROSTLE, which I wish I’d known years ago. Proper word, which should surely be delivered in a broad Yorkshire accent and preceded by ‘yon’.

    1. I only knew Throstle because I have a friend who supports West Bromwich Albion and in the “olden days”, before they were “The Baggies”, West Brom were known as “The Throstles”. In fact they still have said bird on their shirt badge and there’s one at the ground, The Hawthorns.

      Shirt badge

      Pretty picture

      Ergo the word is best delivered with a black country accent.

      Edited at 2012-03-05 04:29 pm (UTC)

  14. Finished eventually, maybe an hour, a toughie this one, put in ‘epistoler’ although never seen it before, also didn’t parse ‘irene’. Put in ‘outlive’ but still don’t get the word play – outlive means weather? You weather a storm maybe… do you weather a person? Cod – Loved ‘reception’ (son in law is a primary teacher so knew this).
  15. 28:48 but had to cheat get Alexander the Great’s side dish.

    Can’t decide on tea tonight: tapas, Annency throstle risotto or cut up turbot with macedoine? I’ll probably end up with swill.

      1. I didn’t see your comment when I offered my explanation (the 2nd time)

        Edited at 2012-03-05 06:23 pm (UTC)

  16. Unlike vinyl, I felt fine when starting in on the puzzle, but I still have to fess up to a DNF. I tried for 2 hours, though, before I threw in the towel. What I didn’t know: MACEDOINE, doss, WANTAGE, THROSTLE, ANNECY. Wordplay I didn’t see, solved from the definition: EPISTOLER, IRENE, RECEPTION. COD’s to SUMMIT and MY WORD. Well done by the settter, but take it a bit easier next time, please. Regards.
  17. Bumbled along on this with interruptions – 35 to 40 minutes. Affronted at epistoler. The sort of word that gets in because it’s in the dictionaries and not because it’s used. Other than that I rather liked it for an offbeat quality. – joekobi
  18. I do occasionally complain (some might say whinge) about obscurity but surely if an arcane word like this is fairly clued it is to be welcomed, no? The clue here is perfectly fair, if tricky.
    Mind you I’ve been doing a fair bit of Mephisto of late so my idea of what’s obscure might be a bit squiffy.
    1. I agree. It’s very satisfying to get to an obscure answer by means of fair wordplay. In this case I think it’s the alternative spelling that the obscure thing rather than idea of the word itself, and the wordplay relies on two chestnuts: ‘always’ = E’ER, and ‘piece’ = PISTOL or some other sort of gun. What I might complain about are clues where an obscure word is clued by wordplay that relies on other obscurities.
        1. EPISTLER, which according to Collins is the usual spelling for someone who write epistles. To be honest I didn’t know either word existed but ‘man of letters’ and the checkers I had in place led me to think of ‘epistler’ which seemed a reasonable possibility, only to find it was one letter short. The wordplay (piece) then made me realise that ‘epistoler’ must be an alternative.

          Edited at 2012-03-06 02:56 am (UTC)

          1. Thanks for that. ‘Epistoler’ is accessible, at least to me, from the Greek epistole. Each is an ugly word, though.
  19. 12:34 for me, plodding slowly but steadily through some quite tricksy clues.

    For once I actually solved the foodie clue (MACEDOINE) straight off – though, more typically, I hadn’t heard of keriothe’s brunoise before.

    DOSS = “easy task” was new to me, but everything else was familiar: I once worked with a chap who was mayor of WANTAGE at the time; EPISTOLER has been on my list of difficult words for many years; and I used to have a French pen-friend who lived in ANNECY.

  20. Technically a DNF, I suppose, since I seem to have forgotten to type the V of OUTLIVE (a lovely clue); but somewhere between 45 and 50′. MACEDOINE finally emerged from memory, although I thought it was a fruit thing. I think ANNECY was one of my first in; I have no idea why I know the name. I’m assuming that ‘scoff’ in 17ac is a noun; in which case wouldn’t the clue be better without the ‘The’? Thanks, vinyl, for explaining IRENE, and for persevering.

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