Times 25186 – Nuke the Whalep!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 40 Minutes

Music: Schubert, Wanderer Fantasy, Pollini

This seemed like it was going to be an easy Monday puzzle, but I slowed down a little towards the end as some of the clues proved more difficult than expected. My cause was not helped when I somehow managed to write ‘gunwalep’ for 1 across, which make 5 down very difficult indeed.

There is nothing unknown or esoteric here, except perhaps for ‘nett’. I had not personally heard of ‘donkey jacket’, which is a UK-centric expression, but the cryptic hands that one to
you. So expect to see a few good times today, which mine was not.

Across
1 GUNWALES, [bringin]G [yo]U [agai]N + WALES.
9 OVERCAST, double definition, one jocular. The use of ‘how’ is slightly strained, but is needed for the surface.
10 Omitted
11 KINDERGARTEN, KINDER + G(ART)EN.
13 PLANER, PLAN + ER. Very easy, but I didn’t see how the cryptic worked at all.
14 OILCLOTH, anagram of CHILL TOO. The temptation to put ‘G’ in a word meaning rain is strong, but then you have too many letters to use ‘chill’.
15 MANSION, MAN’S + I(O)N, not a good clue because a servant makes you think of a mansion.
16 OPTICAL, OPTI(-c+M)AL. A reverse cryptic, where you go from the answer to the cryptic. In Roman numerals, M is C tenfold.OPTIMAL, OPTI(-c+M) where M is C tenfold. Not reversed at all.
20 BASILICA, B + A SILICA. I didn’t know that opal is a silica, but the answer is obvious enough. From Greek ‘basileus’, king.
22 RIGHTO, RIG + H + TO.
23 DONKEY JACKET, DON + KEY + JACK + [protectiv]E [garmen]T. ‘Jack’ in the sense of ‘every man Jack’ or ‘every Jack will have his Jill’.
25 OHIO, OH(I)O.
26 CATULLUS, CA(TU)LLUS.
27 MOTHERLY, M(OTHER L)Y. I had a hard time figuring this one out, thinking you had to put a second ‘l’ in the name of some writer.
 
Down
2 UMBRELLA, E[nglish] LL in anagram of BURMA. Few will need the cryptic if the first letter is already in.
3 WALKING STICK, LAW backwards + KING’S TICK. In the US, we used to say ‘In God We Trust, All Others Must Pay Cash’, and I would think that the first clause would probably apply to the king as well.
4 LEONARDO, LE(ON A RD)O. If you think the first ‘o’ is part of ‘Leo’, you will be puzzled by the cryptic, although the answer is easy enough.
5 SOMEHOW, SO(ME)HO + W. This should have been easy!
6 BENGAL, BEGAN with the N moved, + L. It is divided between India and Bangladesh.
7 Omitted, but it won’t take long.
8 STENDHAL, [we]ST END HAL[l]. A brilliantly hidden word, which had me playing with anagrams even after I saw the answer.
12 ROLLING STONE, double definition.
15 MOBY DICK, cryptic definition of sorts, where the whale is a bete blanche.
17 PARAKEET, P(A RAKE)ET.
18 ARTERIAL, A + R + T(E)RIAL. One of the better clues, with a well-concealed literal.
19 DADAISM, DA(DAIS)M, back to the easy ones.
21 IDYLLS, anagram of SILLY + D[aughter]
24 NETT, last letters of [logicia]N [ar]E [abou]T [righ]T. A rather obscure accounting term, but the cryptic confirms it nicely.

34 comments on “Times 25186 – Nuke the Whalep!”

  1. OVERCAST, UMBRELLA and OILCLOTH were very appropriate given the weather here in WA. The first of these plus 7dn were my last ones in. A very good puzzle with a lot of head-scratching over 16ac until the C —> M trick unfolded.

    Talking of which, Vinyl, you have OPTICAL as the answer; just a typo. There’s also a “ligician” at 24dn.

  2. 15:24, a nice time spoiled by being stupid at 16ac: I went for the definition, without stopping to figure out the clue, and I got the wrong definition. In short, I put in ‘optical’. Also stupid with 24d, not noticing the final letters and just going with the definition. At least I got the definition right. Feh. But some nice clues.
  3. Count me as another who walked into the trap for the overhasty at 16a, so my 11 minutes was indeed overhasty.

    I also managed a typo at 15d – disappointingly it was MOBU DICK rather than the more apt MOBY DUCK.

    1. I knew only two types of microscope – the electron microscope and the ‘microscope’ microscope with the glass slide with the cell culture on it in the biology lab. These things are so much easier when you’re faced with Hobson’s choice.
      1. If you discount the lens and the telescope (which are the forerunners) there are only “light known as optical” and “electron” microscopes. Robert Hooke was the key man I recall.
  4. A rare sub-30 for me with OVERCAST last in. A few years ago I won a donkey jacket in a quiz. It was too big for me then, but fits perfectly now. It’s amazing how these things shrink. I rather liked PLANER for its image of her majesty at the lathe.
    1. You remind me of a friend who had his BMI measured recently and concluded he had to become nine inches taller.
  5. 35 minutes with the last 10 spent on BENGAL and CATULLUS.

    I might have fallen into the trap at 16 but for having OPTIMUM as my initial answer and then having to modify it on spotting the hidden word at 8dn, so the M was already in place.

    I also lost time considering ‘maternal’ and ‘matronly at 27 before I cracked the wordplay.

    Knowing the expression ‘full to the GUNWALES / gunnels’ helped with 1ac.


  6. All went in very smoothly for me today, and was quite possibly a sub 30 minute solve (wow!) although I must admit I didn’t work out the cryptics for PLANER and OPTIMAL (like Ulaca, I luckily was not familiar with the microscope).

    Good start to the week.

  7. Just under 25 minutes for this enjoyable puzzle. I too was guilty of over-hastiness, and began scribbling in FRAGONARD instead of LEONARDO until I ran out of letters!

    Thought that STENDHAL had very cleverly camouflaged himself; so much so that he was the last one to appear.

    A DONKEY JACKET was, I recall, essential wear for any Trotskyite university student of the 1960s wishing to display his working-class credentials. Those who were not ashamed of their bourgeois roots wore reefer jackets.

    OILCLOTH is a word that takes me back: this was the cloth that covered the kitchen table in my grandparents’ house. I also recall Spike Jones describing the music he played as “Not Chiffon Swing, but Oilcloth Jazz.”

  8. Entertaining puzzle with 16A the real snake in the grass as can already be seen from previous comments. A classic clue to trip up those trying to go fast as against those who choose accuracy over speed.

    Never heard of the poet or the author but got both easily enough from wordplay. No real quibbles and a lot of fun. 20 minutes to solve.

    1. Catullus ran after married skirt who he called, somewhat misleadingly, given her string of male lovers, Lesbia in his poems, one of the best known of which starts ‘Odi et amo’ (‘I hate and I love’).
      1. I’ve just read the Wiki piece about all this. She was quite a girl – the original merry widow – after marrying her first cousin and the poisoning him! Who in their right mind would want to get involved in that? Puts cutting up his clothes in quite a new light.
      2. Alas, Catullus was deemed far too strong meat for the O Level Latin syllabus back in the late 1950s when I was at school, but I seem to remember that an English version in the Loeb series was surreptitiously passed around, the pages well-thumbed at the raunchier passages. Extraordinary to recall that back then a pass in O Level Latin was the mandatory minimum requirement for entry to Oxford (and possibly Cambridge as well). The past is indeed another country.
      3. The one I had to learn in school had the line “da mi basia mille” (Give me a thousand kisses). Quite a lad!
        1. Have you come across Carl Orff’s Carmina Catulli? Amazingly the entire work is available here on YouTube, with Da mi basia … starting at 15:36. There’s a lot more raunchy stuff in there as well, for those whose Latin is up to it.
          1. Yes indeed I have. I once had a recording on vinyl but I let a friend borrow it (for ever, as it turned out!) Much more raunchy that C. Burana. An irrelevant anecdote: My late husband was a student in Munich in the 50s and was introduced to Professor Orff. The joke is that spouse knew nothing about music and didn’t realise that Karl Orff was famous outside Munich university! It was only when I mentioned that my choir were singing Carmina Burana that he told me about meeting the great man. Turns out husband had a best friend who was a composition student under Orff which was how they’d met. I’ve been told that in Germany they sing Carmina Burana from scratch – like we do Messiah. I bet they don’t do the Catulli!
  9. A nice, gentle 13 minute start to the week, with the standout clue being today’s “hidden”, perfectly designed to induce a self-kicking once seen. A sucker punch set up by having another “London area” close by?
    The DONKEY JACKET as fashion item reached its zenith (nadir?) when Michael Foot, hapless leader of the Labour Party in the early 80’s, wore one to the Cenotaph ceremony. It turned out is wasn’t a donkey jacket, but a £500 overcoat from Harrods. Should have got his money back.
  10. 15 minutes here. Quite straightforward but with a few minutes at the end on BENGAL. I was sure I was looking for a word meaning “started” going up.
    The connection between “servant” and MANSION didn’t help me in the slightest, such is the extent to which I’ve trained myself to ignore the surface reading. Not always helpful!

    Edited at 2012-06-11 08:08 am (UTC)

  11. 14:10 and a pleasant start to a wet Monday, without being tough enough to provide something else to do while it’s raining at Edgbaston. The long-term forecast on Test Match Special suggests it’s going to continue to rain lots for the next month, so anyone planning to go to a cricket match should probably take several crosswords…
  12. A pleasant and leisurely 45-minute amble for a Monday morning. A fun puzzle. I managed to avoid the OPTICAL/OPTIMAL trap, just. I thought OVERCAST an excellent DD, though I take Vinyl’s point about the use of “how” in the clue, which might have worked better along the lines of “The position of the director is not entirely fair”.
  13. 32 minutes, with a goodly 5 thinking there was yet another English public school I wasn’t familiar with. In the end it was KINDERGARTEN; ironic given that I was made to repeat it for consistently failing to fall asleep in afternoon nap. I didn’t know DONKEY JACKET or CATULLUS either, but the cryptic was clear enough, once I stopped trying to fit an M somewhere into the former and SCALEY around the TU in the latter. COD to the hidden STENDHAL.
  14. An enjoyable 27 minutes but with 16a wrong.I’m another who had the telescope as the definition. I felt at the time that it was a mistake but didn’t have time to rethink it because of a looming dental appontment. At least now I’ve got teeth to gnash!
  15. 8:22, ending with OVERCAST (9ac).  I managed most of this in 5½ minutes, but got needlessly bogged down in the NE corner.  Unfamiliar: GUNWALES (1ac).

    Clue of the Day: 8dn (STENDHAL).

  16. 12 very enjoyable minutes for me. I wrote the first four letters of 16a in and then waited and waited until I worked out that 18d had to be. An excellent Monday puzzle thank you setter and blogger too.
  17. I’m another Optical bungler. Other than that no hold ups. Enjoyed the topical (for northwest England) references to wet weather and accompanying paraphernalia.

    COD to Moby Dick for reminding me of Melville’s wonderful novel. I wonder if Pequod or Queequeg have appeared in a Times puzzle… and if they have how were they clued?!

  18. 28 minutes. I think in 6 it might have been ‘old province’. I like 8. Generally a neat number.
  19. About 30 minutes, ending with OVERCAST, but I had the non-OPTIMAL answer at 16. At least I’m not alone. That C to M trick went right over my head, and it’s pretty clever altogether. Regards.
  20. 7:08 for me, after another ridiculously slow start as I struggled to find the setter’s wavelength. Once I did, everything went pretty swimmingly apart from a last-minute hang-up on 7dn where I was spooked by the awkward ‑A‑T. Nice puzzle.

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