Times 25240

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Posting this proved a lot more difficult than solving the puzzle, for which I’m very grateful to the setter. Two classical allusions, two very gettable F&B references and possibly the easiest quartet of 3-letter words ever set. And the odd charade…

34 minutes. I’m expecting great things from Ealing.

ACROSS

1 OVER-’SIGHT’ – nice easy one to get us started.
6 RATED – RATE+D[uke]:  Occam’s Razor tells you rate (archaic scold) must be related to berate and Occam’s Razor is right.
9 FARRAGO – FAR[RAG]O:  isn’t it the road to Faro that has the highest death rate in Western Europe? I will resist making a joke about Chinese drivers and move on.
10 BUFFOON – BUFF+O+ON:  as in the old adage, you can always tell a buffoon, but you can’t tell him much.
11 ROUGE – ROU[G]E: the reference is to roulette, which means ‘little wheel’.

12 NOTRE DAME – N+MODERATE*: arguably, ‘on’ or even ‘in’ the river.
14 omitted
15 NOSTRADAMUS- ARTS+MAD reversed in NOUS:  Provençal dispensing chemist who moonlighted and gained totally undeserved fame as a quack.
17 SPLIT SECOND – rather weak charade: I used to think ‘seconds out’ in boxing was an instruction from the ref to the bloke who had to tinkle the bell.
19 omitting this one too
20 AMARYLLIS – A+MARY+LL+IS: a nymph who fell in love with a shepherd who insisted on playing hard to get with interesting floral consequences. A lady of the same name features in a catchy number by William Byrd.
22 CANAL – CA+NA+L: another simple charade, even if I bunged in ‘renal’ at first. I would call it blogger’s nerves if I didn’t do this kind of thing all the time.
24 DENMARK – DEN+MARK: yet another charade; if study isn’t con in an easy puzzle, then it’s den . Mark as in Jaguar Mark 1, which went out of production the year I was born, but I think it was coincidental.
26 EVIDENT – EV[I’D]ENT
27 AIDES – A+[s]IDE+S[ucceeded]
28 MIDINETTE – MI+DINETTE: I think we know what this setter’s favourite parlour game is. This will be today’s unknown/unfamiliar for many.

DOWN

1 OFFER – [c]OFFER
2 EN ROUTE – [k]E[rouac] + TRUE NO*: ‘On The Road’ is a novel by Jack Kerouac, who was pretty well known in his day and like many other ‘rebels’ shot to superstardom when he died after abusing himself.
3 SHAKE ON IT – HAKE is our fish (and very nice too) followed by ON (working) all tucked up by SIT (rest).
4 GROUNDSWELL – got this from the literal: I reckon it’s GROUND (field of research as in ‘The IB Diploma covers less ground than traditional A- levels’), but I’m open to offers + SWELL.
5 omitted – Christine is not the only Keeler.
6 RIFLE – [t[RIFLE: that would be the verbal trifle.
7 TOOK AIM – TOO+K[A]IM
8 DINNER SET – [foo]D+INNER SET; service as in a matching set of crockery. CS Lewis (I had to get him in) was not very keen on ‘inner rings’.
13 TURN OF SPEED – UP FRONT SEE* +D: I used to call it ‘turn of foot’ when I still had it.
14 CASSANDRA – AS CANARDS*: more unrequited love, with the moral being don’t hack off a god who ‘s going to punish you by making everyone disbelieve you; an &lit or a semi &lit – I never know the difference.
16 DEDUCTION – a double definition and my last in: as I stuck this in I thought to myself ‘I have no idea how I’d define a corollary’ and was pleased to find the dictionary was having similar problems. The best it could come up with was ‘a proposition that follows from (and is often appended to) one already proved’, which I would only give a beta minus to.
18 LEARNED – L[ibrary] + EARNED: one more…
19 CONVENT – C[hapter] + ON + VENT: and another…
21 YEATS – A + T[rinity] in YES: his early poems and Irish plays, before his occult side took over completely, are rather fine; Auden dismissed his later stuff as the ‘deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India’. A versifying Nostradamus?
23 LITHE – L + IT +HE
25 omitted – hidden(-ish).

Thanks to McT for the technical assistance.

28 comments on “Times 25240”

  1. Congratulations ulaca; good to have the new voice. Dipped under 11 minutes and would’ve beaten my best of 10.30 but for dithering over last in, 28. I too prefer Yeats’ early poems, when he wasn’t trying too hard. Pleasant puzzle, very light.
  2. Grats on your first, Mr U.

    Had a few queries here: “field of research” for “area of knowledge” (perhaps) in 4dn.

    Most academics I know (and I know a fair swag) are not “learned” in any sense whatsoever (18dn). For the most part, they merely turn out graduates in trampolining, golf and chiropractic.

    15ac: “schemes” = ARTS?

    MIDINETTE has cropped up before. But FARO is a bit obscure maybe?

  3. 12 minutes, might have been quicker had I not developed a habit (hopefully not unbreakable) of putting the right answers in the wrong lights.
    More or less a solve by numbers – C on vent – oh yeah, CONVENT, enlivened by a couple of rather tidy literary allusions, CASSANDRA and the YEATS clue, though in reality it was an honorary doctorate.
    Our very perceptive new blogger correctly identified today’s jamais couche avec, MIDINETTE, rather charmingly elucidated in Chambers.
    Excellent blog!
  4. Welcome to Mondays, ulaca. Despite the occasional claims from the editor’s direction that Monday is no more or less difficult than any other day of the week, I hadn’t looked at too many clues before thinking “Ah, another nice gentle start to the week.” Stopped the timer at a touch under 9 minutes, with MIDINETTE unknown but clearly clued.
  5. Fairly easy one today, as befits a Monday apparently.

    Midinette should not be unknown as it is become something of a regular here. According to Google: 29 Jan 2008, 24 Feb 2008, 27 March 2008, 26 Nov 2009, and 10 Nov 2011 (in a Jumbo).

    Welcome aboard, Ulaca!

    Edited at 2012-08-13 09:31 am (UTC)

  6. Congrats on your first blog, ulaca!

    I finished in 21 minutes so it must have been quite easy but I lost a few minutes in the SE corner where I had inadvertently written DEDUCTING so giving myself a problem working out the unknown MIDINETTE from the wordplay. I had also started by considering RENAL at 22ac so you were not alone in that thought.

    Edited at 2012-08-13 08:40 am (UTC)

  8. Nice easy start Ulaca but it’s a bit different when you’re under that extra pressure so well done.

    Corollary is me thinks a mathematical concept originally. It comes after the proof of a theorm and in effect says, now we’ve demonstrated that X=Y it follows as a corollory that X=Z as well.

  9. The perfect puzzle for the first time blogger (thank you) or the rest of us suffering from post Olympic/ holiday back to workness. Took me 6 minutes and I did enjoy myself.
  10. Welcome to the gang, ulaca (hey, we’re on the same week schedule). 8 minutes, pretty much a race through, though I didn’t know all of the wordplay to FARRAGO (which was the name of the student newspaper at Melbourne Uni) or the definition for ROGUE
  11. On holiday this week, but these days isolated cottages in Canada have wifi.
    11m for this, nice and gentle. I remembered MIDINETTE from a past puzzle.
    Thanks & congratulations on the first blog.

    Edited at 2012-08-13 01:57 pm (UTC)

  12. At 14 minutes one of my best times, so it must have been quite easy. It’s good to see someone brave (or foolhardy) enough to take on regular blogging duties. Well done, Ulaca. (Btw, I seem to remember you sing in a male-voice choir. I hope you got a chance to hear the London-Welsh Male Voice sing the Olympic Anthem at the closing ceremony. The boys done good!) Ann
      1. It’s so refreshing to hear a traditional male-voice choir. Ever since the success of “Only Men Aloud” (and programmes like “Glee”)it has become almost obligatory to cavort while singing. I appreciate the different styles but wouldn’t like the “just-stand-there-and-sing” method to die out! The HKWMVC must be an interesting bunch.
      2. Since writing the above I have been to my local to do the quiz (which we won, btw). One of my fellow quiz team members knows a guy called Hopkins who used to sing in the HKWMVC and now sings in the London Welsh Choir. He may be one of your five! If so, it’s a nice coincidence and says something about degrees of separation. Cheers, Ann
        1. That name wasn’t on the list I received in our weekly bulletin but I will check with the writer this evening at CP. You seem to do well in your quizzes. Our team experienced the delicious feeling of winning by one point last week. I of course put it all down to my dredging up who the writer/director of ‘All About Eve’ was, when the ‘brainbox’ of the team kept telling me it was Frank Capra…or George Cukor!

          Edited at 2012-08-14 01:04 am (UTC)

  13. Thanks for the warm messages. I will now take a blogging break as I leave for the UK to settle my girl into her resort hotel, AKA my old school.
    1. Congratulations on your first Blog. I’m a couple of days behind, as usual, due to a busy working life. I managed this one in just under 30 minutes, so it had to be quite easy. Glad you didn’t get a stinker! I’d not come across MIDINETTE, but it was quite obvious from the clueing. I had to think about ROUGE for a while, but then spotted the roulette reference.
      Time to finish Tuesday’s paper and start the next crossword:-) If I get time I might even read today’s paper!
      Cheers John
  14. Congratulations, Ulaca, and thanks for taking on the job. I clocked in with 12:46, so definitely easy; but then I noticed that I hadn’t put in 7d, which took a few more seconds; irritating. I would have said that Nostradamus has a deserved reputation as a quack. And Amaryllis shows up in Milton’s ‘Lycidas’: To sport with Amaryllis in the shade.
  15. About 15 minutes, no real hold ups exceept TURN OF SPEED, which I expect must be a UK-ism. But not much of a hold up since all one had to do was line up the anagram material properly, which didn’t take long. Well done Ulaca, and I echo the thanks of others for your rising to the occasion. Regards.
  16. 50 minutes, or rather 35 minutes plus some time pondering over my two LOI, finally just guessing MIDINETTE and FARRAGO (well, for MIDINETTE I had the wordplay and FARRAGO just sounded likely, although I didn’t know whether the Portuguese resort was FARO or FANO and RAG as a charitable event seems not to be in my vocabulary). Fortunately I guessed right. The rest of the puzzle was quite easy.

    As for AMARYLLIS, she always makes me think of the 17th century Jacob van Eyck recorder tune “Amarilleken doet myn willeken”, which I assume needs no translation.

    Congrats, ulaca, on your good start!

    Edited at 2012-08-13 06:34 pm (UTC)

  17. Congratulations on your first blog, ulaca, and thank you for explaining ROUGE: the association with roulette had gone right over my head.

    A straightforward crossword (about 20 minutes, including numerous interruptions) but very enjoyable. Reminds me of my rock-climbing days: there were many fine climbs in the mountains that were graded only “moderate” by the experts.

    Corollary: yes, I remember corollaries from schooldays, studying Quadling’s Mathematical Analysis; and weren’t there also lemmas?

    1. A lemma is a proven theorm that acts as a stepping stone or foundation stone used in proving a more complex theorm. A lot of them go way back so Euclid for example had one that related to the properties of prime numbers.
  18. A rather dozy 6:40 for me. In fact I was feeling so dozy (after watching the Olympics closing ceremony) that I’d actually intended to tackle the Sunday Times cryptic but found after I’d finished that I’d done this one instead. (Thought it was a bit easy!) Sorry to let Ealing down though.

    Thanks for the entertaining blog. One minor comment (which could be just my browser playing up): it’s conventionally &lit (or “& lit.” if you follow Ximenes strictly) with an ampersand rather than an at sign.

    1. Thanks Tony – and to everyone else who noticed my blunder but was too kind to mention it. In my earlier days contributing here I would always do a Google search to check this, but then of course they make me a blogger and I get all blasé! The things power does…

      Fine-tuning of my parsing and categorising always most welcome. I’m here to learn.

      1. I didn’t notice, but anyway I try to avoid any mention of &lits when I’m blogging as they always get me into trouble.

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