Times 25,201 – Order Amidst Chaos

Author   yfyapPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
My two London grandchildren are visiting and it proved extremely difficult to solve and blog when they demand to hear Puff the Magic Dragon on You Tube or for me to read out Nature Trail featuring Peppa Pig and raising and lowering my swivel chair. But I prevailed amidst all the distractions and chaos. So here you are, a blog of a very fine puzzle that has almost every device and then some. Challenging and entertaining as well.

ACROSS
1 BROWSED *(Book English WORDS)
5 PIN-UP PI (pious, very good) NUP (rev of PUN, joke)
9 AWARD A WAR (struggle) D (died) Tony is a US award for meritorious work in the theatre after US actress, Antoinette Perry (died 1946)
10 ATROCIOUS Ins of OC (rev of CO, company) in A TRIO (group) + US (America)
11 LIMEADE Sounds like LIE (pork pie) MAID (young woman)
12 CHILLER C (Chapter) + ins of ILL (sick) in HER (girl)
13 PENICILLIN Ins if I (one, single) in PENCILLIN’ (makin’ use of drawer)
15 AS IF A SIFT (riddle) minus T
18 DOPE DOP (rev of POD, school) E (English used a second time to indicate E, tsk tsk)
20 INCENTIVES IN (at home) CENT (sounds like SENT. very happy) Charles IVES (1874–1954), U. S. classical music composer, scorer
23 TORNADO Ins of RN (Royal Navy, sailors) in TOAD (something amphibious) O (over)
24 Anagram of BRIGADE deliberately omitted
25 MEATINESS Ins of A TINE (sharp point) in MESS (stew)
26 MOORE Rev of ER (Elizabeth Regina, the Queen) O (old) OM (Order of Merit, award, answer to 9) Henry Moore (1898-1986) English sculptor whose works are monumental organic forms 
27 NOSEY NO (decisive answer) + SEY (rev of YES)
28 ha deliberately omitted
DOWN
1 BRAHMIN Ins of HM (him losing heart) in BRAIN (Mastermind) Someone later will surely explain why this has been clued as American intellectual
2 ORDNANCE OR (other ranks, soldiers) + ins of N (new) in DANCE (steps)
3 STAGE ST (rev of TurnS) AGE (time)
4 DIRECTIVE Ins of EC (European Commission) in DIRT (scandulous info) IVE (I have)
5 PICNIC Souns like PICK (cream) NICK (jug, prison)
6 NOODLES N (note) OODLES (an awful lot) I never knew till now that to noodle is to improvise on a musical instrument in a casual or desultory way, esp in jazz.
7 POSER PROSE (writer’s style) with R (right) placed at the end
8 WALLOPED Ins of ALL (everyone) + OP (opus, work) in WEDnesday (24 hours)
14 LONDON EYE Ins of DONE (finished) + Y (last letter of journey) in LONE (remote) for an attraction which I never managed to get on after two visits … the queues were just too long
16 FASTENER Ins of STEN (gun) in *(FEAR)  
17 STOREMAN STORY (yarn) minus Y + (EMAN, rev of NAME, call)
19 PERHAPS PE (physical education, exercise) *(SHARP)
21 VIDEOED V (volume) I (one) DE (French for OF, Marcel Proust being French) OED (Oxford English Dictionary, wordy tome)
22 FAMILY Ins of AMIL (rev of LIMA, capital of Peru) in FY (first and last letters of fifty)
23 TIMON Tiny TIM (Timothy Cratchit, a fictional character from the 1843 novella A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens) ON (appearing) for Timon of Athens, a play by William Shakespeare
24 ASSAM A + rev of MASS (large-scale)
++++++++++++++
Key to abbreviations
dd = double definition
dud = duplicate definition
tichy = tongue-in-cheek type
cd = cryptic definition
rev = reversed or reversal
ins = insertion
cha = charade
ha = hidden answer
*(fodder) = anagram

28 comments on “Times 25,201 – Order Amidst Chaos”

  1. NOAD has:
    “a socially or culturally superior person, esp. a member of the upper classes from New England”. Also spelled BRAHMAN.
  3. I was pleased with my time (65 minutes) but disappointed to come up one short, with ‘pickit’ for PICNIC – ‘do without’ indeed! This gets my COD ahead of 5ac, 8 and 20.

    It’s a mark of a top-class crossword when the short multiword clues (PIN-UP and AS IF) are among the hardest, at least for me.

    Thanks to the setter and for Yap Suk for unravelling 3, 13, 21 and 22, plus the one I got wrong. Blasted ‘jug’!

  4. Good puzzle, though a lot of parsing notes in the margin. Even for the simpler clues/answers. Again, the SW proved the time confounder. Thinking of LONDON ??? — where’s the attraction. The ZOO? A BUS? Surely not the FOG? Then remembered that silly wheel thing that gets on the telly a fair bit. Didn’t know its name, but it had to include a Y somewhere.

    Things to note for the future:
    • Drawer = pencil
    • Scorer = IVES
    • Sculptor = MOORE (when it’s not RODIN, EPSTEIN or HEPWORTH)
    • The afore-mentioned BRAHMIN/BRAHMAN.

  5. Once upon a time, Afro-Celt Sound System included an app called “Noodle” with their albums. I still have it (in Mac OS9) and it’s lots of fun. The “instuments” sit as little disks outside the main (mix) disk. The user chooses which instruments they want to use and, within that, which riff. The closer they’re moved to the middle of mix, the louder they are. Hours of endless noodling!
  6. 31 minutes for a meaty start to the day. I like ‘do without’. Wallopped looks better to me than the single p. No it doesn’t; it looks awful. Time to get into work (English teacher).
  7. 49 minutes to complete the grid with one wrong answer discovered when I went back to review the wordplay. I found it hard to get started on this one, then I steamed through much of it but spent ages on the last half-dozen. LOI: PICNIC.

    Like Uncle Yap, I also didn’t know the required meaning of NOODLES.

    We had a reference to the Tony awards only a few days ago.

    My wrong answer was a very tentative MOANINESS at 25ac which I rather liked for “quality of beef”. I was sorry to find it doesn’t exist.

  8. Happy to finish all correct, but my time was lousy, mainly thanks to PICNIC (LOI).

    Couldn’t parse INCENTIVES (despite having seen IVES as ‘scorer’ or some such not long ago), or VIDEOED and didn’t know that meaning of BRAHMIN. Got DOPE quickly, having seen John from Lancs comment on ‘pod’ meaning ‘gam’ on here yesterday. Funny how some things seem to stick…

    Edited at 2012-06-28 07:53 am (UTC)

  9. 14m. Judging by comments above I must have been slap bang on the wavelength this morning. Another really enjoyable puzzle.
  10. Steady solve in 23 minutes, but the NE slowed it to a crawl. DOODLED looked plausible; D is, after all, a note. I couldn’t make POSE = style, but in the end put it in with a sigh. I’m pleased to see it was cleverer than that.
    PICNIC is a very fine clue, with the definition delightfully disguised: my pick of the day. For CHILLER, I either had Cher with no scope for chapter, or Ch(apter) and not much by way of a girl’s name. Penny eventually dropped.
  11. Defeated by NE, even with PIN-UP pencilled in. 5dn: I struggled for something meaning ‘do without’ (what’s the purpose of ‘without’ in the clue?); 7dn: ‘doodles’ seemed a better guess than NOODLES. Thanks for the blog, yfyap, in particular fully unravelling the wordplay for VIDEOED.
    1. In this case it’s the opposite of within, hence outside. “There is a green hill far away without a city wall” used to confuse me as a child, as I couldn’t see what a hill would by doing WITH a city wall.
  12. Really enjoyed this, even though it took me 50 minutes and two mugs of tea. Particularly liked the clever variety of clues in, say, PENICILLIN, PICNIC, AS IF and VIDEOED.

    Noodle. I first came across this particular meaning of the word in the Marx Brothers film Love Happy, when Leon Belasco “noodles around” on violin with Chico on the piano: “You noodle on that, I macaroni on this”.

    It’s one of the highlights in a mediocre film that Groucho apparently hated, the other being a cameo appearance of the young Marilyn Monroe.

  13. Another fine effort- it’s been a good week so far. Cod to picnic and sympathy to uncle Yap as i have my two small grandchildren here as well. Highly enjoyable but hard work! At least they don’t interfere with the blog, not being around at midnight…

    Edited at 2012-06-28 09:18 am (UTC)

    1. I recommend Lazy Town and Fireman Sam, on Youtube.. any other suggestions for 3 year olds?
  14. Now I think Brahmin generally denotes a snobbish old-money New Englander, as in the doggerel:

    “This is good old Boston
    Home of the bean and the cod
    Where Lowells speak only to Cabots
    And Cabots speak only to God”

    There are other variations.

  15. Just over the hour for this excellent puzzle. Well blogged, Yap, and thanks for explaining INCENTIVES which I hadn’t fully understood.
    I loved ‘do without’ as a definition for PICNIC, so that gets my COD, and VIDEOED was also excellent.
  16. Started it last night while unwell and tired, and it proved too much. Finished this morning after a struggle.

    Some clever stuff, especially PICNIC.

    Main gripe is the surface for VIDEOED. Is there any way that can be read as grammatical English? I’m not seeing it.

    1. I wondered about that, too. I eventually justified it to myself by thinking that if Proust had owned a copy of the OED then “of Proust’s wordy tome” might be “DE OED”.
      1. I’ll buy that for sheer ingenuity, especially as the earlier volumes were out before Proust shuffled off.

        But I think the setter owes you a pint, John, for imaginative bacon saving.

  17. 15:44, with the last 4 minutes spent on 3dn (STAGE) and finally 5dn (PICNIC).  Unknowns: Charles Ives (20ac INCENTIVES), Henry MOORE (26ac), BRAHMIN as an intellectual (1dn), STOREMAN (17dn).  I started this with a headache and finished it with the headache firmly intact.

    Edited at 2012-06-28 05:06 pm (UTC)

  18. 18 minutes, last in VIDEOED of all things – not quite on big brain day, but this was fun and challenging. Nice job, setter!
  19. 25 minutes after my best and most enjoyable round of golf for some time

    Thoroughly pleasing and inventive puzzle, thank you setter

    Note for Tony S – I’ve agreed to write a piece for the 1301 Project on producing an actuarial valuation in machine code. Didn’t realise that Arthur is an old Liv Vic machine – probably the one I worked on!

    1. Great that you’re getting involved, Jim.

      I’m kicking myself for chucking out the program I wrote (in spare moments while working overnight at Stevenage), that enabled me to play music using the manual indicators. I’d hung on to it until a couple of years ago, but finally ditched it and a number of other old programs – including MOWZART, the music program written by someone from the Ministry of Works – to make space for other things. (Sigh!)

  20. About 25 minutes, although held up at the end by PICNIC (COD for ‘do without’), VIDEOED and LOI, STOREMAN. I’d heard of a warehouseman, but a STOREMAN? But I put it in, nonetheless. I believe the ‘Boston Brahmin’ phrase was coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was clearly one of them, and there is a lasting association between the perceived class, and Harvard U., perhaps explaining the ‘intellectual’ in the clue. The Brahmin, though, would pronounce that as “Hah-vahd”. So if you don’t say it that way, well, you’re not one of them. And I’ve never seen ‘BRAHMAN’, by the way. Congrats to Jimbo on his best golf game, thanks to Uncle Yap, and the setter for fine work, and regards to all.
    1. At times like this I am put in mind of Tom Lehrer’s final word on The Elements (“These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard; and there may be many others but they haven’t been discarvard.”)

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