Times 25222 – Another easy Monday

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 35 Minutes

Music: Eric Clapton, Unplugged

Quite a moderate puzzle, with a few tricks here and there. I seemed to be on the setter’s wavelength, and didn’t have any real problems, although there is an answer or two I couldn’t explain until I came to do the blog.

I did start out by putting one of the long answers in the wrong slot, but soon realized my error when nothing would fit. The numbers, apparently, are an important part of the puzzle, and one that bloggers often mix up.

Across
1 CROP, C(R)OP
3 ADDLE-PATED, A(DD)LE(PATE)D. I had never heard of the Welsh name ‘Aled’, but the correct answer is obvious enough.
10 OSTEOPATH, anagram of SOAP TO THE.
11 TRAIN, the answer, but I didn’t follow the cryptic. Now I see it refers to a bride’s train in a wedding ceremony, so double definition.
12 SERVANT, S(ER)(VAN)T, where ER is ‘re’ backwards.
13 RELIEF, RE + LIEF. Easy enough once you figure out that ‘once’ goes with ‘gladly’.
15 INSTRUMENTALIST, INSTRUMENTAL + I + S[tudy] T[he], where an instrument is used by metonymy for its player.
18 CALEDONIAN CANAL, anagram of A LAD IN A CLAN ONCE. Never heard of it, but likely enough.
21 Omitted!
23 TURNING, TU(R[hapsodically])NING.
26 Omitted!
27 GLISSANDI, cryptic definition, I believe – I can’t see anything else.
28 RUN-THROUGH, RUN + THROUGH. RUN is a quick flurry of notes, and THROUGH sounds like ‘threw’, used in the sense of confused or bewildered.
29 URGE, [s]URGE[on], a rather complicated subtraction clue.
 
Down
1 CROSSPIECE, CROSS + PIECE, a chestnut I was very slow to see.
2 Omitted!
4 DRAFTSMEN, D[ocuments] + RAFTSMEN.
5 LEHAR, hidden backwards in [Andor]RA HE L[ooked]. The first Hungarian composer most solvers would think of.
6 PATELLA, PATEL + L.A..
7 TRAGEDIAN, anagram of A DANGER, IT. You will waste a lot of time if you are looking for a specific role in Macbeth.
8 DONE, DO N[orth] E[ast]. A simple but elegant clue.
9 MOHAIR, MO(H)AIR. Here, ‘broadcast’ is not an anagram or sounds-like indicator.
14 STALAGMITE, STALAG + MITE. I believe we’ve seen this one before.
16 SALVATION, SAL(VAT + I)ON.
17 NEAR THING, anagram of GRIN AT HEN. Probably not the Lohengrin, though.
19 DELILAH, HAL I LED upside down.
20 CARESS, CAR[l]ESS. A neat removal and a well-concealed literal.
23 DOGGO, DOG + GO, where a turn comes after tail.
24 INNER, INN[keep]ER A shot in the game of darts.
25 SCAR, SCAR[borough].

39 comments on “Times 25222 – Another easy Monday”

  1. No real troubles — unlike Saturday!

    Wondered if PATEL (6dn) was a hyper-typically Indian name and went to the Wik which regales me with details of the Patel Motel Phenomenon: “50 percent of hotels and motels in the United States are owned by people of Indian Origin”. Hard to believe.

    And there’s the “fl” and the “oaters” separated again (4dn) in the online version.

    11ac is topical in London right now I suppose?

    1. “there’s the “fl” and the “oaters” separated again (4dn) in the online”

      Really? It looks okay from here, both in the Club and in the newspaper.

      1. Must be a printer glitch. I always get the “fi-” and “fl-” beginnings separated by a space. Something to do with ligatures in the print settings?
    2. Post-solve, I was disappointed to discover there was no Indian city called Patella … Then the penny dropped.
  3. 31 minutes. I put in 1ac and 2dn immediately but then took a while to get going.

    I’d heard of ‘addle-brained’ but not ADDLE-PATED so it was fortunate the wordplay was clear. I liked the wedding train reference at 11ac.

    Edited at 2012-07-23 01:22 am (UTC)

  4. Nothing much to report besides putting ‘gone’ in at first at 8dn as in ‘Going, going…’. DOGGO is fast spreading into the chestnut section of the crossword arboretum. Can’t see the need for ‘to engage players’ at 27.

    One minor sporting point. It is my understanding that an ‘inner’ is a shot in shooting or archery that lands next to the bullseye. In darts, where I can’t recall hearing a throw referred to as an inner, ‘inner’ interestingly has to do with the bull itself, as in the inner circle of the two concentric ones that on most boards constitute the bullseye.


  5. All correct, but needed the blog for FU of several: hadn’t seen the double def of TRAIN, hadn’t heard of LEHAR or that meaning of INNER, I too assumed there to be an Indian city named PATELLA.

    LOI: STALAGMITE, once I’d corrected GLISSANDI (from ‘glissando’).

    Thanks, vinyl, for the explanations.

  6. 9 minutes (!) which means a) I found this very straightforward and b) I’m getting better just in time for a doctor’s appointment to find out why I’m not. Is this the reason why you can only get an appointment about a week in advance, to go along with the standard diagnoses of “it’s a virus” and “there’s a lot of it about”?
    How many clues does it take to turn a puzzle into a themed one, in this case musical?
    GLISSANDI seemed barely cryptic: I suppose it was a nod in the direction of the footie transfer market, or something. The other CD, for TRAIN, was rather more entertaining, but CoD to OSTEOPATH for a well disguised and apposite anagram. PATELLA (easily missed when solving quickly) was good too.
    1. In time you will also hear the unbelievably irritating “you must expect this at your age”
  7. Made a mess of this one in the SE corner putting Glissades at 27A and not correcting that until I’d got Instrumentalist and then Stalagmite.

    Thanks vinyl1 for parsing Patella, Inner and Urge – all so obvious now! Made one mistake though – a wrong guess at Crosspitch at 1D.

    The Caledonian Canal is well known to me from years’ hillwalking and travelling in Scotland. It runs about 60 miles from Corpach near Fort William on Scotland’s west coast to Inverness on the northeast coast. There’s an impressive flight of eight lochs called Neptune’s Staircase near the Corpach end. Only one third of the canal is man-made with the rest being natural bodies of water of which Loch Ness of Loch Ness Monster fame is one.

  8. 17 minutes. A straightforward steady solve ending with a pause in the NE for the unknown ADDLE-PATED and PATELLA. The latter is a vaguely familiar word but I needed the wordplay to put it in with confidence.
    Isn’t GLISSANDI a bit too specialised a word for a cryptic definition like 27ac? Sure there are lots of musicians among crossword solvers but I don’t think it’s a condition of membership.
    1. It doesn’t make it any less technical but the first two words of the clue could also stand as a literal. If the answer had been in the singular, ‘sliding’ alone might have sufficed as that’s what the musical direction ‘glissando’ means when written in a score.
      1. Indeed the setter might as well have left it at that, because there’s nothing in the clue that helps if you didn’t know the term. It’s more or less a straight GK clue in spite of the attempt to make it a bit cryptic.
        1. How about the magical existence of the S-scale and the A-scale (engineering terms for measuring pipe convexity) leading to (sliding S A)* for the wordplay….

          ….no, me neither!

  9. Pleasant and on the whole straightforward Monday fare. About 45 mins for me. I entered INNER and DELILAH without bothering to work out the wordplay (thanks to Vinyl for the explanations). I thought STALAGMITE was very good.

    I too wondered quite how the GLISSANDI clue qualified as cryptic – “sliding scales” could have gone straight into the Concise as a GK def. The rest of the clue seemed to me to be little more than rubbish padding to create the impression of crypticness.

  10. The problem with 27 is the laziness of the game analogy, scorers hardly being the ones to sign up colleagues. Was a bit addle-pated over this one generally, or merely a return to normal, taking 32 minutes. It looks as if ‘do’ for ‘explore’ is a done deal now, if scarcely elegant.
  12. 26.20 so on my easy side. Pleasant and generally straightforward with my COD to STALGMITE. As ever thanks for blog and explantations.
  13. I imagine that there is a Yorkshire borough called Scar (hence Scarborough, Scarsdale, etc). Otherwise I don’t really see how the borough is removed from Scarborough.
    1. I wondered about this, but I don’t think there is such a borough: according to Wikipedia Scarborough is in the borough of, er, Scarborough. It’s just a tongue-in-cheek (hence the question mark) definition based on the name of the town.
  14. Easy enough 15 minute puzzle even after 18 holes in baking sunlight – need to get acclimatized! Didn’t like GLISSANDI but the rest is OK
  16. No time to post, but I didn’t find it the walk in the park that others seem to describe. No particular quibbles, though, except I’d never heard of ADDLE-PATED. My brain was in third gear, I suppose, illustrated by the fact that my last 2 entries were the crossing SCAR and the unblogworthy CHILL. COD to OSTEOPATH, and regards to all.
  17. In these parts PATEL is almost exclusively a Pakistani name. A Muslim one, I presume, since all the Indians I know are Hindu and none of them are Patels. That’s why I couldn’t see PATELLA. (For the record, the most popular Bangladeshi name is Miah. I’m waiting for that to crop up in the crossword.) ALED is a common name here in Wales – so I got that one easily enough. Zipped through most of this but then hit the buffers. 40 minutes
    1. Fairly confident that the majority of Patels are hindu. There are some muslims but it is a minority. I think that both itself and the sikh name Singh appear in the top ten surnames in the UK. Perhaps not as a whole, but definitely in most of the major conurbations.
      1. According to Wikipedia it is mostly Hindu, but also a common name amongst Muslims in India and Pakistan, and presumably in some parts of the UK.
        Similarly rigorous research reveals that it is 20th most common surname in England. Singh is 76th.
  18. 13 minutes, sounds like I had the same issues as most, with GLISSANDI, TRAIN and PATELLA going in from definition alone. Needed the anagram to confirm CALEDONIAN though the CANAL part went straight in, ditto ADDLE-PATED which was ADDLE????? for a long time.
  19. I knew addle-pated from the Jennings and Darbishire books which I read as a child. “You addle-pated clodpole”.
  20. 7:22 for me, but should have been faster for a nice straightforward Times puzzle.

    No complaints whatsoever: I liked 27ac (GLISSANDI) and 25dn (SCAR – which went straight in without any crossing letters, though admittedly I had the advantage of being born in Scarborough). I too knew ADDLE-PATED from the Jennings and Darbishire books.

    1. Interested to know what you liked about GLISSANDI, Tony. After “sliding scale”, which is a perfectly decent non-cryptic definition, it’s not clear to me what the rest of the clue is trying to do. It seems to be something sports-related, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It doesn’t bother me unduly, but I can’t see a lot to like. What am I missing?
      I rather like the phrase “addle-pated clodpole”. I’ll have to try and use it.
      1. As you rightly guessed, the rest of the clue was simply trying to make you think of sport (possibly cricket) rather than music. I didn’t spent more than a second or so thinking about it (I had both letter Is in place, which made the answer immediately obvious) – just enough to recognise that “scorer” and “players” would do for music as well as sport, which I thought was quite a nice touch. I wasn’t too concerned about whether the whole thing really made a great deal of sense in sporting terms, though it didn’t (and doesn’t) seem entirely implausible.

        I suppose it may seem rather old-fashioned to modern tastes, but I quite like old-fashioned clues.

        1. Fair enough. I solved the clue rather as you did (albeit much more slowly!), and didn’t think about it until afterwards. I see the point about scorer/players but I can’t help feeling there must be a way of using the link that makes more sense in a sporting context. Perhaps it does make perfect sense in a way I’ve missed – sport is not my strong suit.
          Undeniably the fact that I even think twice about these things puts me in the “modernist” camp, but I do like old-fashioned clues too… sometimes!
  22. I believe this clue has a reference to the South Africa cricket players.

    “SLIDING” scales, i.e. coats or goes around “SA”, giving the anagram for GLISSANDI.

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