Times 25212: A cake, long in shape but short in duration

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 26:12

Filling in for Jerry today. He’s off to France.

Didn’t really understand ACCLAIMERS or VANITY until a pleasant phone call with one wiser in words than I. Otherwise, plain sailing.

Across
 1 SAW DOCTOR. Anagram of ‘towards’, including OC (reverse of CO).
 6 FLUNG. Last of ‘meN’ in GULF (reversed).
 9 A PASSAGE TO INDIA. ‘A pa’s saga’ including an anagram of ‘edition’.
10 EATERY. Hidden in ‘dEpArTs EaRlY’.
11 CON,SERVE. Do work = SERVE; counter = CON.
On edit: see kevingregg‘s comment which leans me towards CON (do) + SERVE (work behind counter); def=‘store’.
13 BEER CELLAR. BAR (another place of refreshment) including E’ER (always, ever) and CELL.
14 CODE. Reverse of e-DOC.
16 D,IRK.
17 ACCLAIMERS. Couldn’t parse this without my phone-a-friend. Turns out it’s this: drop the RE (about) from ‘eclairs c{RE}am’; anagram the resulting letters.
19 AM,USABLE. Anagram of ‘a blues’.
20 S.E. WAGE.
23 KEEPING ONES HEAD. Two defs, one slightly humorous.
24 Omitted.
25 TWO-SEATER. Anagram of ‘tots were’ inc. A.
Down
 1 S,LAKE.
 2 WEAR THE TROUSERS. Two defs, one slightly humorous.
 3 OB,STRU(C)T.
 4 TOGA. TO{o} GA{y}.
 5 Omitted.
 6 FL(IM,S)Y.
 7 UNDER,COVER A,GENT.
 8 GRA(CELE)SS. CELE{b}.
12 B(LACK) LIGHT.
13 BEDJACKET. Reverse DEB; JACK (honour card); reverse T{ens}E.
15 C(IN,E)ASTE. E{ntertainment}. On me dit que ‘cinéaste’, en français, désigne un film-maker.
18 VAN,{c}ITY. There is nothing (love perhaps?) in that which is in vain, I’m told. Vanity: “The quality of being worthless or futile” (US Oxford).
21 EIDER. Sounds like IDA.
22 INFO. IN F{oreign} O{ffice}.

28 comments on “Times 25212: A cake, long in shape but short in duration”

  1. DNF, 14ac being totally opaque to me–never heard of NHS Direct. Other than that, about 15′; 16:09 when I decided the hell with it. I put in EIDER because it had to be; once more rhoticism interferes with understanding a clue. (I thought for a moment it might be a misprint for Eiger.) I interpreted 11ac retrospectively as CON=do ‘cheat’ + SERVE=work, def. being ‘store’, conveniently ignoring ‘counter’; well, whatever works, I suppose.
  2. Off to a flying start (A PASSAGE TO INDIA went straight in simply from ‘novel’ and the enumeration) but I kept getting stuck and jumping around the grid in a very untidy solve. I finished in 60 minutes exactly just as I was thinking I may need to resort to aids to polish off the last two or three.

    The only unknown today was BLACK LIGHT but the wordplay was fairly obvious. I struggled a bit at 16 where for ages I could only think of DART, and at 13ac where thoughts of BEER PALACE got in my way.

  3. 36 minutes, which would have been quite a bit faster if the book had dropped at once. I found it hard to get past Hemingway’s WWI story for some reason, despite the incorrect enumeration.

    SAW DOCTOR (as opposed to ‘sawbones’) was new to me and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of BEDJACKET.

    A strange mixture this of the very easy (the last three acrosses were entered in a Sever-like 30 seconds) and the rather more tricky. My COD to FLUNG for having me searching vainly at the wrong end. LOIs CODE and SEWAGE.

  4. No wonder I couldn’t justify ‘cavity’ for 18 dn. I was thinking maybe CAV was an acronym, like SUV etc. Silly me. 18 mins but doesn’t count!
  5. Reasonably straightforward. Entered CODE from definition and took a while to see the the parsing. Thought NHS Direct might cause some problems. In amongst a lot of relatively easy stuff ACCLAIMERS is a little gem. 20 minutes to solve.
    1. 17a (ACCLAIMED) is the sort of clue which really annoys me. What does it mean? And why the colon? The cream’s not yet being whipped is hardly grounds for praise – that’s just a lazy baker and an unfinished eclair. I certainly wouldn’t commend any eclair that was deficient in the cream department.

      We have such different tastes, Jimbo. Must be why we get on so well!

  6. All ok for me today. Hadn’t heard of SAW DOCTOR, or ‘ida’, and I got ACCLAIMERS through a very strange anagram of the middle of ‘eclair’ + ‘creams’. Also, TOGA from TO(o) GA(udy), but thought that was a bit far-fetched. Didn’t know JACK was an ‘honour’ card.

    INFO and BEER CELLAR put in without parsing, I see now. Liked CODE.

    Edited at 2012-07-11 07:45 am (UTC)

  7. I parsed this as relating to not having the cricketer in the field, but yours looks a little better, celeb a bit too hard for me.
  8. 31 minutes with too many of them on some of the short clues. ‘Whipped’ is nice in 17. Saw doctor is new to me; a tree surgeon’s qualification? It remains an ambition of mine to get through ‘A Passage to India’ – must’ve started it a dozen times. Something infinitely dreary about the style.
    1. Hardly seems worth the effort to me; Forster is a bit dreary in style and topic. . I had a similar problem with Conrad’s ‘Nostromo’ and when I did force myself through it wished I’d spent the time rereading Bleak House.
      1. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is more than worth the effort however.

        Edited at 2012-07-11 02:46 pm (UTC)

  9. In Bridge the honours are the Ace, King, Queen, Jack and Ten of trumps but in crossword land I don’t recall seeing the Ten clued in that way.
  10. Forgot to mention I knew SAW DOCTOR from a Times puzzle I blogged in January 2009 clued as “One sharpening teeth, being monstrous to cowards”. It turned up again only a few days later clued as “One taking care of teeth had a medical appointment”.
    1. Thanks for that Jack. I hadn’t checked the meaning in a dictionary and thought it meant a surgeon, as alluded to earlier.
  11. 11 minutes.
    An awful lot of these clues went straight in without understanding. At 9ac for instance I read “Novel – a Father’s” and starting writing the answer in without even looking at the enumeration.
    However I came a cropper on 21dn. The clue points so clearly towards a mountain that is a homophone of a bird that I didn’t even spend that long wondering where Mount EYDER might be. Drat.
  12. Exactly 30 minutes. A wide variety of clues, with something to please the analytical types, the lateral thinkers and those of us who just bung in the answers and parse the clues when we’ve finished! And some humour and witty surfaces, which always make the puzzle more enjoyable: particularly liked 2 down.

    I imagine you would have difficulty finding a SAW DOCTOR these days. Cheap imports of good quality tools make it uneconomic to sharpen old saws: just use ‘em and throw ‘em away, like safety razors. What a terribly wasteful world we live in.

    1. I imagine the only place you would find a real saw doctor is in a timber mill, or around wood sawing competitions still popular in the white Commonwealth. A real black art, and a highly paid one apparently. These guys change the set of saw teeth according to the type and water content of the wood to be cut.
  13. A messy 50 minute solve, held up by SEWAGE, CODE, EIDER and in trying to parse ACCLAIMERS, which I failed to do. Hooray for your phone a friend. Done in by UNCO at 22d but, as in I meant to revisit it, but didn’t. A curious mix of the easy and impenetrable (at least for me) but witty throughout. COD to GRACELESS over CONSERVE.
  14. 18’29”, imagining GRACELESS was derived from the good doctor (famous person…in the field=Grace, taken short=less. Wrong, but happily right.
    Lots of clever stuff here – I quite liked the e-doc but can well understand that the NHS Direct reference might not be useful for for everyone. Perhaps the easiest and most generous clues were the four long ones.
    DIRK was very nearly DART, though how art=needle worried me enough for a revisit. Last in was EIDER, because I couldn’t work out from the clue which way the homophone went until I dredged mount (and not princess) Ida from the dark recesses.
    CoD to SEWAGE, not least because the majority of said commuters’ earnings are wasted on the commuting itself.
  15. 13:09 … so a fairly breezy solve for me.

    SAW DOCTOR is what we used to be able to say before the emergence of NHS Direct and its equivalents. Those were the days …

  16. A 40 minute DNF, failing to get near SAW DOCTOR and therefore TOGA having guessed TOGS for no other reason than desperation. Also failed to get CODE and was just about to ask for further guidance when the penny dropped.
  17. Pleased with my 35-min sprint and tickled by ‘flung’ which was my last in. Query NHS Direct equals ‘E’ although answer had to be ‘code’. Likewise ‘acclaimers’ with the checkers in and, thanks to the blogger, I now understand how. Clever clue that.

    Enigma

  18. About 15 minutes, ending with CODE, from definition only, not knowing anything about NHS Direct. But I presume an e-doc is someone who answers medical questions on-line, or over the phone(?). Beyond that, no real difficulties. Regards to all.
  19. It’s rare that I time myself but I did this evening and stopped the clock after 25 minutes. Slow to get going – I started with the downs (usually do) and didn’t get any until Flimsy.

    Thanks mctext for explaining the three I didn’t understand at the time: Saw Doctor, Beer Cellar and Eider. LOI Saw Doctor.

  20. There is something rather nice about sitting on a comfortable ferry, watching the sun rise over the channel, coffee to hand, and doing, in a leisurely sort of way, a crossword you are supposed to have been blogging.. grateful thanks to mctext for swapping at fairly short notice.

    Not having any means of checking the answers, and having two tiny grandchildren to keep under control, two or three clues went in without clear understanding, though it seems I got them all correct. I liked this crossword.. good surfaces, mostly, and about the right level of difficulty.

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