Times 25,157

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
12:40 on the Club timer, so would have been a pretty good time, until I realised there was one mistake and it didn’t count. As well as receiving a lesson in overhastiness (assuming it’s the error I think it is), I learned a new bird’s name, a North Sea boat, and an expression which might come in useful the next time I catch a train, and need the mot juste to describe the people congregating at the platform end with notebooks and cameras.

Across
1 PLEASURE DOME – Played + LE + A SURE DO + ME. As decreed by Kubla Khan.
8 ELECTRA – ELECT Royal Academy. Sister of Orestes, who gives her name to a psychological complex.
9 TRANSIT – N,S in TRAIT.
11 RED LEAD – RE(=about) + D(=500), LEAD(=guide). Also known as minium.
12 DIORAMA – (Christian) DIOR + A MA.
13 GORGE – Goat in GORE.
14 OVERDRAWN – OVER(=above) + DRAWN(=haggard); depicted in too much detail rather than in trouble at the bank.
16 REARRANGE – REAR(=bottom) + RANGE(=line).
19 RECAP – [PACE + Right]all rev.
21 UPRIGHT – UP(=out of bed) + RIGHT(=correct).
23 FASTNET – where fleet is an adjective meaning speedy, “the catch of the fleet” could be described as a “FAST NET”. Fastnet, as will have been drummed into people from the Radio 4 Shipping Forecast without the need for them to go anywhere near the sea, is an area south of Ireland named after the eponymous rock (see link for details). Not FISHNET, which went in with insufficient thought, and has no basis apart from just vaguely fitting, which should have alerted me.
24 DRIFTER – I started with “TRAWLER”, though that didn’t seem to really fit the itinerant, then shifted to “DRIFTER”, although that didn’t really fit the boat. This was because I didn’t know the specific fishing vessel, which is the North Sea boat I referred to above.
25 ON LEAVE – ONE + LEAVE(=go).
26 BEANS ON TOAST – (NOTASTEASNOB)*.
 
Down
1 PLEADER – Power + LEADER.
2 EXTREME – double def.
3 STAND DOWN – STAND(=be still) + DOWN(=depressed).
4 RATED – RATE + Director.
5 DIAMOND – (NO MAID)rev. + Devil.
6 MASCARA – [A SCAR] in MA.
7 MERRY GO ROUND – MERRY(=elevated) + GO ROUND(=bypass).
10 TRAINSPOTTER – TRAINS + POTTER. Have to say I didn’t know “gricer” as a synonym.
15 EYES FRONT – EYES(=observes) + FRONT(=first).
17 AIRLINE – IRish in [A LINE].
18 RIGHT ON – BRIGHTON without the Bachelor. I thought of “RIGHT ON” as being more along the lines of “politically correct”, but the dictionary definitely combines modernity with the social trendiness aspect.
19 ROSELLA – ROSE + (ALL)rev. As I said, I wasn’t familiar with the Australian bird.
20 CONTACT – CONTRACT(=shrink) without the feaR.
22 TORSO – Temperature, OR SO.

38 comments on “Times 25,157”

  1. I think that the reference to Fastnet is to the fishing area rather than a type of fishing boat, Topical Tim, or maybe I’ve misunderstood your opening piece. The Shipping Forecast is one of the many iconic Radio 4 programmes I miss, living in Australia. It’s even inspired a book. See http://www.amazon.co.uk/Attention-All-Shipping-Journey-Forecast/dp/0349116032/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336446146&sr=1-1

    This was a PB for me: 24m 31s. I did enjoy the different uses of LEAD in 1d and 11ac. I also enjoyed the ROSELLAs. They are such gorgeous birds but tend to get bossed around at feeding time by the smaller, noisier, cockier, Lorikeets. I’ll leave others to play around with pleasure domes, Xanadu and Persons from Porlock. Finally, all that time I psent in my youth standing at the end of station platforms, I had no idea I was a gricer!

    Edited at 2012-05-08 03:10 am (UTC)

    1. Martin: it is already the case that the link from the solution “FASTNET” goes to the wiki page for the shipping area, and the link from the words “fishing vessel” in the description of a DRIFTER goes to the wiki page for the North Sea fishing boat of that name, which seemed pretty straightforward to me. However, as this was clearly too allusive, I have amended the associated text to make it (I hope) incontrovertibly clear.

      Edited at 2012-05-08 07:12 am (UTC)

      1. My mistake. I was obviously having a dense moment; probably euphoric after posting a personal best time. Thanks.
  2. Felt like a Monday puzzle; easy but nothing outstanding. The four 12s fell quickly and all the others joined those, leading to a quickish solve. TS will no doubt perform under 5:00.

    FASTNET: the apostrophe-S = “Fleet has”, rather than possessive.

    TRAINSPOTTER: also watch out for “foamer” and “gunzel”.

    Edited at 2012-05-08 03:57 am (UTC)

    1. Sorry, I was a bit (about half a minute) off the pace. (Feeling old and tired. Sigh!)

      Thanks for “foamer” and “gunzel”. I hadn’t come across either of those before.

  3. Change of pace from yesterday was nice – seemed like every answer went in after about 20-30 seconds on the clue, which for me would be quite Severs-like in my own way.
  4. Pb of 14 minutes, a great relief after yesterday’s heavy weather. Glad that gricers and trainspotters are identical.
  5. 27 minutes (congratulations to Martin on his PB). ‘Rosella’ unknown, but ‘gricer’ vaguely remembered from a previous online discussion (is there any other these days?, maybe here. I owe ‘drifter’ to my prep school Geography teacher, ‘drifter’ and ‘trawler’ being forever seared on my mind together with BROM (Marlborough’s battles) from History.

    Edited at 2012-05-08 03:32 am (UTC)

  6. A couple of passing thoughts on The Shipping Forecast:
    – Finisterre was renamed Fitzroy several years ago in honour of the founder of the Met Office.
    – As part of the Yachtmaster Offshore theory course students used to have to listen to a shipping forecast then plot a weather map from the information given out, complete with isobars.
    Thank you for your congratulations, ulaca!

    Edited at 2012-05-08 06:10 am (UTC)

  7. I took several minutes to get started on this one – 13ac being my first in – which was disappointing as I completed the grid in 17 minutes so had I been a bit quicker off the mark I might have broken the elusive 15 minute barrier.

    GRICER rang a bell but I couldn’t think what it meant until I had a few checkers in place and TRAINS jumped out at me. It came up here in a discussion about nerds and anoraks re a puzzle I blogged in 2010 when PB posted a link to it: http://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/545729.html?thread=7762881. More recently it was in the Everyman puzzle which I do every Sunday.

    Before checkers arrived to ruin it I was willing the shipping area at 23ac to be ROCKALL so I could post a link to the Flanders & Swann song of that name. Alas this wasn’t to be, but I shall post it anyway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRc9uOZfCF0

  8. Very much after yesterday’s Lord Mayor’s show (if you missed it, it’s worth using the club archive to have a go)

    10 minutes here, straight through top to bottom. Only knew gricer from inhabiting crossword land.

  9. A welcome change of pace today. Odd that today’s puzzle should coninue the theme of Australian wildlife. Crimson rosellas are crimson and blue when mature, but green when young which is why my kids used to call the young ones “unripe”.
  10. Very pleased with 7m 30s. Rosella was unknown but gettable, the rest straightforward. I agree about yesterday – fair but extremely challenging. Something nice to do on a bank holiday though!
  11. 13 minutes, perhaps inevitably more humdrum than yesterday’s tour de force. Indeed, my issue today was carelessness going for the stylish early finish, with RATIO at 4 and OVERTIRED at 14 stuck in with no regard for wordplay, making the NE corner needlessly tricky.
    I’m pretty sure gricer numbers have dropped considerably from the days of steam, though I do remember dutifully noting down the numbers on Diesel Multiple Units (even the name flattens any romance). I also remember the dismay of realising that a Railbus was just an ordinary sort of bus with steel wheels, and not really a train at all. You couldn’t seriously collect those numbers.
    ROSELLA was the only one that went in on wordplay in the hope that it wasn’t another misremembered version of measles.
    Let’s give CoD to BEANS ON TOAST, for correctly typifying this cheap and cheerful number in contrast to more Michelin starred offerings.

    Edited at 2012-05-08 08:23 am (UTC)

  12. A pleasant, gentle challenge after yesterday: sub 20 minutes, so very fast by my standards. ‘Gricer’ unknown but answer easily gettable from the clue. ‘IR’ for ‘Irish’ seems to have come up quite a lot recently: is this just a cruciverbalism or is there something I should know? (I wondered if it was top-level internet domain for Ireland: but .ir = Iran and Ireland = .ie)
    1. Ir. is in Chambers as an abbreviation for Ireland. Not to be confused with Ir (Iridium), ir (infrared) or IR (Inland Revenue or Iran).
      1. Many thanks. Strangely, it’s not in my usual first port of call (OED online – paid version).
  13. 13m, slowed down at the end unpicking a hastily-bunged-in EYES RIGHT. RED LEAD, DRIFTER, “gricer” and ROSELLA were unknown but the answers were all clear. Actually ROSELLA rang a vague bell and I see it has come up before.
  14. Hello everyone. New to this site and this is my first post! 29 minutes for me with 2 unsolved. Looking forward to much more solving and insight from this blog.
    2. Welcome aboard fellow boondocks dweller. Don’t hesitate to join in and never be frightened to ask a question.
  15. A shade over 15 minutes, which must be about as quick as I’ve ever gone. I might have broken the 15 minutes had I not tried to anagram pink all thinking as usual that it had to be some species of bird I’d never seen or heard of, and then it turns out to be the very familiar rosella. I was disappointed to learn rosella is a corruption of Rose Hill (according to the ODE); I’d always imagined the origins of the name to be more exotic than that. COD to RECAP
  16. Should have been faster but I struggled for the best part of 10 minutes to get RED LEAD. I didn’t know the term, and the second word took forever to extract from the wordplay.
  17. Had an amusing one here, got back after what may have been a big meal and a few drinks, loaded the puzzle and passed out. So I think I have a correct entry sitting at 8 hours and 10 minutes.

    Enjoyed the puzzle, though for some reason put EYES RIGHT in at first.

  18. 7 minutes for me – definitely one of those where it helps to have done cryptic crosswords for as many yaers as I have.
  19. A very rare sub20 at 18.34and I noticed it took me nearly 4 minutes to get going with FOI at 21a. No standouts today but enjoyed GRICER; it seems such an apt sounding name for them. I wonder if there is a word for those who stand on motorway bridges spotting lorries.
  20. A steady solve today held up only in the Kent corner where I hadn’t heard of Eyes Front and pencilled in Eyes Right. Dragged up Rosella from somewhere after deciding, once I had the checking A in place, that it wasn’t perhaps an anagram of “pink all” but instead ended LLA.

    Merry-Go-Round came to mind readily after one of the daughters in our group spent a happy five minutes on one at the beachfront fair in Barmouth on Sunday (and where I had fun feeding 2p pieces into the amusement arcade slots!).

  21. 9:19 .. yippee! I still got it. I never lost it. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender….

    But then I looked at the leaderboard and half the world’s sub-10 today.

    Easy, but good stuff. I know I would have appreciated this puzzle hugely when I was first trying to get the hang of this crossword malarkey. A nice change of pace.

  22. Couldn’t believe my rate of progress. Had visions of a first ever sub 15 minute solve. Then I entered ‘eyes right’ at 15 d and spent the next 10 minutes trying to figure out 23 and 25 across and 20 down until I about turned and changed right to front. Wonder about ‘range’ for ‘line’. Happy nevertheless to record a 29 minutes solve.

    Enigma

  23. Swift left but hobbled on the right: started thinking too much. 17 minutes. A 7 in the 1 ac. COD beans on toast, that all 1 acs. should offer.
  24. Steady solve, back on form after a bad week, 13 minutes, SE corner was last to go in, had to guess ROSELLA and never heard of GRICER (but guessed right. I found this etymology on Urban Dictionary:not sure I believe it.
    GRICER
    “The word was first coined in about 1970 at the Bluebell Railway when a group of hard-core railway enthusiasts arrived one cold December afternoon to look around, in a removals van with the company name G.Ricer on the side.”
  25. Less than 15 minutes, all correct, so a similar experience to everyone else. A relief after yesterday’s admirable but time-consuming offering. LOI’s were ROSELLA and FASTNET. Hadn’t known of ‘gricer’ before, or that a DRIFTER was a specific type of boat. Regards to all.
  26. A fast solve (no pun intended) with FISHNET and CONTACT my last in. I labored over that final cross for some time, and I had made the fleet = FAST connection. But then I got CONTACT and FISHNET went in with neither a thought nor a care. I do hate those final crosses.

    I didn’t know RED LEAD, FASTNET, DRIFTER = boat, gricer, RIGHT ON = modern (I’ll have to look that up…), or ROSELLA.

  27. 5:26 of me. I should have been faster but I was tired (as usual on a Tuesday) and made heavy weather of some easy clues.
  28. A personal best of 20 minutes for me whilst consuming tea and a bacon sandwich, so a happy occasion. I did have the feeling that this must have been quite an easy puzzle but it was still enjoyable. Didn’t know gricer or ROSELLA but they were easy enough from the wordplay. I toyed with EYES RIGHT, but was convinced enough by FASTNET not to dally with it. PLEASURE DOME went in straight away with PLEADER and I was off!

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