Times 25166 – Two by Two

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Off to a flying start but I had problems getting the answers flowing and finished eventually in 39 minutes which was disappointing because on writing the blog it became apparent how very easy most of it was. Having said that, there were a couple of unknowns (or forgottens), namely ‘desman’ and ‘ternate’. Some of the clues seemed to go in pairs. Apart from the two linked by the setter I spotted two rum references, two Spanish, two explosives, two military ranks, two things tired and both Houses of Parliament.

Across
1 CODGER – DOC (GP) reversed + GERm (cause of disease shortly).
5 CUPIDITY – UP (at an end, as in ‘the game’s up’) + ID (I had) all inside CITY (business community).
9 SIDESMAN – IS reversed + DESMAN (mole-like creature). I’ve never heard of this animal which seems to have burrowed itself up from Mephistoland where both George and Jimbo have blogged it within the past 9 months.
10 Deliberately omitted.
11 PINA COLADA – IN + A + CO (firm) + LAD (young male) all inside PA (assistant). A drink consisting of pineapple juice, coconut and 4dn.
13 GOYA – A, YOGa all reversed. The Spanish painter (1746-1828).
14 PAGE – PAGEant (Procession, minus its insect).
15 COMMON SALT – COMMONS (House) + ALT (key). Not by a long way the first ‘kitchen item’ I would have thought of. Alt and Esc seem to crop up most weeks now. Have we had Tab yet?
18 FEATHERBED – Double definition.
20 CAGE – Double definition, one being the American composer John Cage born 100 years ago this year and his notorious ‘composition’ Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds. The clue mistakenly assumes there is silence when it is being performed.
21 RUHR – Hidden and reversed. The vast industrial area in Germany.
23 TOWER BLOCK – Double definition, one cryptic with reference to 29ac.
25 MANANA – MAN (fellow) + ANA (reminiscences). ANA caught me out last time it came up but fortunately I remembered it this time round. The Spanish word for tomorrow or sometime in the future learned in my childhood from the song by Peggy Lee.
26 ALL IN ALL – ALL IN (whacked) + ALL (everyone).
28 SEVERELY – SEVER (split) + ELY (cathedral).
29 BOLEYN – Anagram of NOBLE + Y. Unusual to go 16 clues before finding one with anagram content.

Some may remember the song made famous by Stanley Holloway:

In the Tower of London large as life,
The Ghost of Anne Boleyn walks they declare.
For Anne Boleyn was once King Henry’s wife,
Until he made the headsman bob her hair!
Ah, yes, he did her wrong, long years ago
And, she comes up at night to tell him soooo!

With her head tucked underneath her arm
She walks the Bloody Tower
With her head tucked underneath her arm
At the midnight hour.

Down
2 ORIGINATE – Anagram of GO + INERTIA.
3 GRENADE – GRENADa with E for A substitution.
4 RUM – RUMpus (noisy disturbance) with its second half removed.
5 CINNA – Sounds like ‘sinner’ (wicked fellah).
6 POSTAL ORDER – A LORD (a top legislator) inside POSTER (bill).
7 DAMAGES – DAM (mother) + AGES ( a long time).
8 TELLY – TELL (communicate by words) + Y (unknown)
12 ORCHESTRATE – Anagram of THE CREATORS
16 MOB – BOMb reversed.
17 LOGICALLY – GI (soldier) inside LOCALLY (particular area).
19 TERNATE – TERN (aquatic bird) + ATE (devoured).
20 COLONEL – LONE ( solitary) inside COL (mountain pass).
22 USAGE – USA + moderatinG + English.
24 WEARY – WEAR (sport) + plaY
27 Deliberately omitted.

35 comments on “Times 25166 – Two by Two”

  1. 20:35 .. struggled with the SW, especially after typing in RHUR.

    Must admit that I always thought CUPIDITY meant fickleness, so I’ve learnt something. It’s just as well I can’t recall ever actually using the word.

  2. Workaday puzzle with the unknowns Jack noted (TERNATE, ANA, DESMAN), ‘completed’ in 40 minutes but with ‘Tower Place’ for the [too] clever [for me] TOWER BLOCK. My COD to SEVERELY, as I have happy memories of singing in Ely Cathedral as a lad.
  3. Whoops! One wrong – I had TALKY at 8dn but it turns out that it is spelt TALKIE. At 3dn I was not sure from the clue if the answer was the explosive or the island, so waited until I’d figure out 14ac.
      1. Me too, romped through in 16 minutes, but had ‘talky’ for 8 dn, seems just as good an answer as the slang ‘telly’ (tele I thought) are we sure that’s always ‘talkie’?
        I liked the CoD, Commons alt.

        Edited at 2012-05-18 08:18 am (UTC)

  4. After an hour or so between (and during!) meetings, I failed to see MANANA — so many insertable possibilities. As with others: DESMAN was a complete guess. Doesn’t he have a burrow in the marketplace?
  5. Another straightforward one, six in a row now.. I was familiar with desmans (but don’t tell) which are common in the Pyrenees.
    I tend these days to regard the Lords not as “top legislators” but rather as a comfortable retirement home for obedient party apparatchiks.
    1. Well said Jerry. The Tower would be a better place for many of them!
  6. Not a difficult puzzle, 20 minutes to solve, but a couple of talking points. I knew desman of course, as Jack has pointed out

    The “kitchen item” is table salt. Unrefined common salt is used in things like bath salts. Natural salt needs refining to remove impurities and the addition of anti-caking substances to stop deliquescence and keep it flowing

    Are postal orders still current – years since I used one and I had a feeling they had been discontinued?

    1. These gave undergone a revamp and resurgence in popularity according to Wikipedia as a means of payment on auction sites such as ebay.
  7. 26 minutes but with talky and tower place. A neat and quietly testing puzzle overall – but why do you say jackkt the clue is mistaken about Cage’s creation of silence? I rather like the definition: it actually lends some meaning to the artistic idea.
    1. It’s performed in the absence of deliberate sound which in my book is not the same thing as ‘creating silence’. I’m not really picking holes and complaining about the clue though, but I just thought I’d mention it.
      1. My point is that, while as Cage noted there’s always some noise going on, all the preparatory paraphernalia of the 4’33” of no music, presenting it as an artistic piece, the musicians walking on stage etc., may be said to be the creation of something that’s at least very like silence, as opposed to just letting it happen. Almost in contrast to what convention would expect from said paraphernalia. Anyhow I found the clue’s wording elucidated something for me about the whole 4’33” shebang.
        1. I liked Artur Rubenstein’s comment on the piece: “I look forward to works of major length…”
    2. Indeed, in the words of the composer:

      They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.

      — John Cage speaking about the premiere of 4′33″.

  8. Nice easy one for a Friday…

    Unknowns for me same as others (DESMAN, ALA, TERNATE). Also hadn’t heard of CAGE or CINNA. Didn’t take the time to parse PINA COLADA or POSTAL ORDER, but they so obviously had to be right, so thanks for that.

    Best wishes to all for a good weekend!

  9. 15 minutes for all of this except 9ac. I’ve never heard of the church official and I’d forgotten DESMAN from Mephistos past. After another ten minutes I bunged in SIDESMAN as the best combination of letters I could come up with, fully expecting it to be wrong.
    COMMON SALT and TERNATE were also new to me.
    1. It’s not difficult to beat me on the best of days unfortunately but I reckon blogging duty adds at least about 10 minutes to my time!
  10. 16 minutes, leaving the terrifying PAGE ’til last. Is there any more daunting light than the one that goes ?A?E(?)
    I thought GOYA was a rather clever clue the way I parsed it: almost get to the end of yoga and flip that. Pity it’s much more prosaic.
    LOB threw me for quite a while (I like to go for the 3-letter clues) because I had the whole thing the wrong way round, expecting a skied shot to lose its tail and reverse. TOWER BLOCK (is there such a building as Tower Place?) came to the rescue giving the unexpectedly unmasculine BOLEYN and hence the B.
    I liked the MANANA creation, even if mañana itself has cropped up a couple of times recently. And I guess, with deference to Jim, ignorance is bliss when it comes to COMMON SALT, which went in without flinching.
    Thanks to Jack for reviving memories of the Anne Boleyn song, as it gave my Grandfather the gleeful chance to sing “bloody” without reprimand. He liked G&S’s “On a tree by a river a little tom-tit Sang ‘Willow, titwillow, titwillow'” for much the same reason.
  11. DNF. Clueless at 9ac, about both sidesmen and desmans. I thought the mole-like creature could be a linesman, but that would depend on how many incorrect offside decisions had been made. “Incorrect offside decision” – is that tautology? COD to SEVERELY.
  12. Throughly enjoyable despite taking an age to crack PAGE. Maybe ignorance is bliss (e.g. over COMMON SALT) but I found nothing particularly troublesome or arcane here: just took some time to work everything out. COD to the witty TOWER BLOCK.
  13. 16 minutes for me and I enjoyed myself. Slight bemused for a while by the cathedral coming before the split in the clue for 28a but it couldn’t have been any other solution so… Tower Block is my clue of the day too.
  14. About 20 minutes, ending with SIDESMAN. There I had all the checkers, saw “is wheeling”, figured that meant it started “SI..”, and just guessed at the other letters to make like what seemed the only plausible looking word. Beyond that, everything else went pretty much according to Hoyle. My COD, the one that made me laugh, was the wicked fellah, even though it was my first entry. Regards to all.
  15. 45.23 today. Held up by my own stupidity in misspelling ORIGINATE making PAGE impossible. This took me over10 minutes to spot! I must learn to check the obvious before I look for the difficult.
  16. A slightly disappointing 10:13 – disappointing because I was hoping to break 10 minutes but made ridiculously heavy weather of some easy clues. All part of this dreary business of getting older. (Sigh!)

    Nice puzzle, though.

  17. Loved this puzzle, but boy am I a dummy! I had TALKY instead of TELLY, even though I was squeezing my brain for another word meaning ‘communicate by words’.

    Didn’t know SIDESMAN or DESMAN, and I had TOWER CLOCK instead of TOWER BLOCK. Still not sure I get it…

    1. Can’t say much more than that’s what ‘ana’ means and has done since the 18th century. It’s in all the usual dictionaries except Chambers for reasons best known to their compilers.

      Edited at 2012-05-18 11:27 pm (UTC)

      1. It’s news to me that it isn’t in Chambers, since I’ve seen it used many times in puzzles for which Chambers is the primary reference. It appears under the suffix -ana from which it is derived.

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