Times 25252 – Francesca da Bikini!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time:80 Minutes

Music: Mahler, Symphony #9, Levine/Philadelphia

This is a bank holiday puzzle, and so is designed to take up your whole day – which is all well and good if you’re in the UK. Here in the US, however, we have to go to work tomorrow, so I tried to get on with it by bunging in what was evidently the most likely answer without worrying too much about the cryptics. This works up to a point, but it is easy to come a cropper and mess up a quadrant so badly you’ll never recover. Fortunately, I avoided that, and I believe I have the correct answers, and in most cases, the correct interpretation of the clue.

While the puzzle was hard, I really enjoyed it. I did not see many of the subtleties while solving, but as I write the blog I am finding quite a few tricky but completely fair and Ximenean points in the cryptics. For the few I can’t quite see, I’m sure some of the early commenters will have a full explanation.

If you’re wondering why I’m here, our new blogger Ulaca is traveling this week. He’ll be back to take the next two weeks before we resume our regular rotation, probably on puzzles much easier than this one. And away we go!

Across
1 JOB CLUB, JOB (the book of the Bible) + CLUB (the biggest one in your golf bag).
5 GUJARAT, GU(JAR + A)T, where ‘about’ is NOT a reversal indicator, and ‘corporation’ is not ‘tum’.
9 HIC, sounds like HICK
10 SNAP OUT OF IT, double definition, one jocular.
11 SUCHLIKE, anagram of HIS LUCK + E[uropean].
12 RIMINI, R.I. + MINI. Providence is the capital of Rhode Island. I had ‘Bikini’ for a while, as a sort of male-oriented cryptic definition, but when I solved 17 I decided these two words could not coexist in one puzzle.
15 NEED, NEE + D[epartment]. I’m not very sure how to interpret the literal, so I just put this in from the cryptic.
16 COURT ORDER, COURT(anagram of ROD)ER. In this definition, a solicitor is not a part of the British legal system, but one who is trying to wheedle a favor.
18 HELIOTROPE, HEL(I)OT + ROPE. Not a drunken Heliot, however, that’s another clue.
19 AXED, [t]AXED, which means ‘with duties’ in a very specific sense of ‘duties’.
22> LEPTON, LE[a]PT ON, where the omitted ‘a’ is ‘aircraft’s heading’. I struggled for a long time thinking the clue said to substitute ‘o’ for ‘a’ before seeing it properly. The lepton is an old Greek monetary unit, and not a subatomic particle at all.
23 TREKKIES, anagram of KIRK SET + E[nglish], where ‘kirk’ does double duty for the surface reading and Captain Kirk, and the setter generously gives you a hint by capitalizing the second ‘Kirk’.
25 BUGGINS’ TURN, BUG (GINS) TURN. A expression with which I was not familiar, which had to be gotten from the cryptic when all the crossing letters were in place. It refers to promoting the next person in line on the basis of seniority.
27 Omitted, my first in, ask if you can’t get it
28 TESTIFY, TEST IF ‘Y’.I don’t quite follow the cryptic, but the answer is evident enough, particularly with all the crossing letters in place. Comments invited. No, it’s simply TEST(IF)Y, a much more straightforward cryptic than what I proposed.
 
Down
1 JOHNSON, Andrew JOHNSON and Lyndon Baines JOHNSON…..but probably not Gary Johnson! Sorry, left out the cryptic, it’s JOHN (the Baptist) + SON[g].
2 BICYCLE CLIP, B + ICY + anagram of CELL I PC. Remember that ‘bags’ are an Oxbridge slang for trousers….or maybe an inclusion indicator!
3 LASTLY, hidden backwards in MY FLAT USUALLY when the odd letters are removed. ‘Wheeled out’ indicates the reversal.
4 BLACKBOARD, BLACK + B + O(A)R + D[aughter]. Rather tricky, comments invited. Correct parsing: B(LACK)B + O(A)R + D[aughter], where ‘opening’ is an enclosure indicator. Thanks to McText!
5 Omitted, ask if puzzled.
6 JETTISON, JET + TI(SO)N, where ‘bin’ is a verb, and a very cleverly concealed literal.
7 REF, last letters of [trade]R [gav]E [himsel]F. Presumably, a ref is in the middle between the two teams.
8 TATTIER, TAT + TIER, i.e. one who ties, and not a layer in a wedding cake.
13 INDEX FINGER, anagram of REDEFINING X. I admit, I never saw the cryptic, and just put in the answer as one of my first few in.
14 WRAPAROUND, W[ife] + RAP + A ROUND. One of the few cryptics of only moderate difficulty.
17 MONOKINI, MON(O)K + IN I, where a monk is an ‘order brother’, and ‘order’ is not an anagram indicator!
18 HALIBUT, HALI(-fax + BUT). The Wellington and the Halifax were the two most common British bombers in WWII; if you were trying to work in Bomber Harris, you wasted a lot of time. It took me a while to figure out this was a word-substitution clue.
20 DESKTOP, PO(T[al]K)SED, all backwards, i.e. ‘reflected’.
21 SKINNY, SK(INN)Y, where Sky TV is a UK-only product.
24 ESPY, E[ar] + SPY.
26 GAS, SAG upside down, where ‘O’ is oxygen. I blogged a puzzle where ‘He’ was helium, so I am wise to this trick.
29 DAY TRIP. Some sort of cryptic definition?

46 comments on “Times 25252 – Francesca da Bikini!”

  1. Yes, a very difficult puzzle — no idea it was a bank holiday. (Though with the current popularity level of banks in the UK, I doubt the term will remain for much longer.)

    Help? Not too sure about the parsing of 28ac and await illumination here.

    15ac: The literal is “must have”; it results from the cryptic.

    18ac: wot, not mention of the great Lancaster?

    1. Sorry forgot this one.
      I parsed it as: “miss”=LACK; included by (“opening”) B,B (books) … then, Vinyl, as you have it.

      Edited at 2012-08-27 02:17 am (UTC)

  2. Just worked this out. “In case” = IF; put this inside TESTY (short, as in “tempered”). &lit for the literal.
  3. 1D is also JOHN (the baptist) and SONg

    I expected a Monday light one and then I couldn’t put anything in until RIMINI.

  4. 70 minutes, but a very rewarding puzzle that was worth sticking with past the hour at which point I would usually be seriously considering resorting to aids. My only unknowns were GUJARAT and, yet again, the coin – my third in under a week!

    This is what I would describe as a lively and inspiring puzzle as compared with Friday’s effort which was workmanlike but dull by comparison.

    Too many excellent clues to list but JOB CLUB, BICYCLE CLIP, BLACKBOARD MONOKINI, GAS and DAY TRIP stood out for me.

    I thought we were heading for another pangram but we ended up three letters short.

    Edited at 2012-08-27 06:06 am (UTC)

  5. Nee strictly née is used to indicate a former surname (usually for ladies their single name). I have complaind before about the crossword convention of ignoring accents when it suits the purpose.
    1. I’ve complain(e)d before about people not spell-checking before entering, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.
    2. Nee (sic) is in Collins so is perfectly valid for Times crossword purposes even without resort to the convention you object to.
  6. 28:23 for one that had something of a club monthly feel, with Js and K’s everywhere, albeit with no really obscure detritus from the murkier depths of the dictionary. All perfectly fair clues but with many almost perfectly obfuscated. BICYCLE CLIP, for example, needed crossers and an inspired guess before the clue fell into place, as I dismissed out of hand a solution that might begin B ICY. And “pincher of bags” gets you nowhere near the answer until you have it.
    JOB CLUBS were set up for unemployed people looking for (hence “after”) work. I was involved in running one of the earliest. Sadly, only a few of them were any good, the rest merely the means to tick boxes for governments trying to appear to be doing something.
    Out of a hot collection, HALIBUT for CoD. Good enough for Jehovah.
    1. I was in a job club following voluntary redundancy in the early 90s and found it very useful. The job I got within a couple of months of joining suited me perfectly and I remained in it for 17 years until retirement. I enjoyed the social side of it too.
      1. Congratulations on finding one of the good ones (might have been mine!). A lot depended in the early days on whether people wanted to make use of what was an excellent facility or regarded it something they had to attend as a condition of continuing to receive their benefits. Some of the more recent incarnations have provided a way for clever contractors to make maximum profits while providing minimum services: one notoriously found a way of paying herself £8.6m in dividends on government funded job schemes.
  7. 34 minutes and very enjoyable. I like the use of ‘cards from’ (lastly) in 7. A football ref. has a yellow and a red card. Had no idea about the Trekkies, Star Trek being one of my allergies, but had to be. Delighted as an old-style teacher to see the word blackboard.
  8. No time to blog, but plenty to solve (and comment)!

    64 minutes – but to me no more or less enjoyable than Friday 🙂 – with the BICYCLE CLIP followed by HIC (a bit low on the uptake there even though I’m in Somerset) last in. LEPTON didn’t exactly leap out but was dredgable up from school days; TAT as in ‘make fine material’ unknown; and my COD HALIFAX remained unparsed until coming here by dint of the fact that my knowledge of bombers (even after a visit last week to the Imperial War Museum – where the Holocaust section is superior even to Yad Vashem in my opinion) is limited to Wellingtons and Lancasters.

    2. My mistake, the lace made with pins is bobbin lace – tatting is made with a shuttle in the hand.
  9. What a wonderful puzzle for a wet bank holiday Monday! It took me 50 minutes but was well worth the effort.

    I’m ashamed to say I didn’t recognize the Halifax bomber reference; my late mother-in-law worked on them at English Electric’s Strand Road factory during the WWII and must be looking down on me now with disbelief and irritation.

    I’m still puzzled over the parsing of this one: is there not a word missing from the clue? It’s HALIFAX minus FAX plus BUT, isn’t it; but where is the indication to remove the FAX?

  10. 21:27 on the club timer: I seem to have been on the right wavelength for this one. Very enjoyable indeed. I was helped by having all the required knowledge except LEPTON, but there was some very clever misdirection in here.
  11. Congrats to Vinyl on blogging a very difficult puzzle. But something seems to have gone amiss with your numbering of the clues. BUGGINS TURN is is at 25 ac not 26, and you’ve left out 29 ac altogether.
  12. 29:14 .. crumbs and cripes! I wish they had labelled this ‘Bank Holiday Special’ or some such. Like others in N America I thought I would just rattle off the Monday puzzle before heading to bed … another late night.

    All been said, really. Fine work from setter, heroic stuff from blogger.

  13. I’d never heard of Monokini. What a strange word, given that the ‘mono’ replaces the ‘bi’ in bikini which doesn’t actually mean ‘two’. Either very horrible, or very clever, I suppose.
    1. You’re obviously not familiar with the Borat oeuvre, then. Also a blend of the horrible and clever.
  14. Thanks vinyl1, especially for Heliotrope. An anagram of toiler is in there somewhere and I became convinced that was the “Labourer” called for. The top half went in very quickly but then I got bogged down in the SW corner as I think many did. LEPTON in 22ac went in eventually but for ages I thought there must be a little known but ancient area of Athens called LUPANE. UP (= enthusiasm) inside (boarded) (P)LANE (aircraft heading out). Well, that was my analysis anyway!

    Edited at 2012-08-27 01:50 pm (UTC)

  15. Thanks, Jack. Like Vinyl, I didn’t completely understand this clue, even though I picked up the “jolly” reference. Astonishingly, the possibiiity of Sun as an abbreviation for Sunday never occurred to me, for some obscure reason. Perhaps the difficulty of the rest of the puzzle had left me shell-shocked by the time I got to 29 ac!
  16. Days like these I’m glad I no longer blog. Well done vinyl and on a swapped day to boot. I made it to ESPY before I got one. Unknowns included LEPTON as a coin, like martinp I thought it might be a suburb, HELOT, BUGGINS – all of which made the SW a bit of a slog, and I couldn’t parse HALIBUT even when I got it. So thanks to vinyl for that and jackkt for 29, which I didn’t get even though I knew Sun had to be the day. Extraordinarily good stuff here, so thanks to the setter as well. COD to TREKKIES among a host of near alternatives

    In 3, I took “wheeled” to be the reversal indicator and “out” to be the removal indicator as in (Take) odds bits from stuff out.

  17. Thanks to vinyl and others for explaining those I didn’t fully understand. This took me about 45 minutes, ending with GUJARAT from the cryptic, since I don’t know my Indian states. I didn’t know the LEPTON or BUGGINS TURN either, so wordplay only for them too. And I didn’t think too much about DAY TRIP, but I certainly would not have ever seen the ‘jolly’ meaning. Very clever puzzle, and a heroic blog. Regards, and happy bank holiday.
  18. This took me a while last night and I was almost asleep when I started on it, but wide awake again once done. Didn’t realise the bank holiday deal, otherwise I would have left it for breaks today.

    DAY TRIP went in with a shrug, TESTIFY and HALIBUT from the definition and RIMINI and BUGGIN’S TURN from the wordplay.

  20. I’m so long retired that a bank holiday doesn’t feature on my radar. I was expecting an ordinary Monday puzzle and didn’t notice anything particulary difficult about this one. I guess it’s the old wave-length thingy. Anyway, I clocked off in 33 minutes – within my normal range. Is this the first time we Trekkies have appeared? Sorry about your allergy,Joekobi, but I was one of the earliest Trek fans in the UK and produced regular fanzines devoted to the show. I still have the occasional nostalgic twinge though I long ago emigrated to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica. De gustibus etc. Live long and prosper! Ann
    1. I wasn’t disputanding – it’s just that I can’t understand why all Times setters don’t have exactly my tastes. It’s part of the subtle appeal of the thing. Anyhow as well as blackboard I have bicycle clip to make me feel more at home, in a world of the past. I’ll settle for live long, or longer. My Captain Kirk I suppose is Dan Dare, pilot of the future. Now he’d have a Twitter account. – joekobi
      1. I was into Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, as well. (Also “Journey into Space”) Who can forget the Mekon. I had all the early issues of Eagle but my mother threw them out when I went to university. I resolved to be a different kind of mum. Which is why I’m still inundated with the junk accumulated by my 45 year old son! I love this site. So much to learn. And such a wide variety of contributors
  21. Was just about to ask what ‘tied’ was doing in the wordplay of 18ac, since cord isn’t tied rope, but have just seen it. A helot was a tied labourer once. Very clever. I wonder if anyone else like me failed to notice this.
  23. 16:35 for me, so I found this tough going as well – but most enjoyable.

    For the record, the apostrophe in BUGGINS’ TURN comes after the S. Although Chambers has “Buggins’s turn”, I don’t think I’ve ever come across that in real life, even though it’s arguably more grammatically correct. I’m quite happy with the given version as it follows the pattern of “Achilles’ heel”.

    I came to the same conclusion about DAY TRIP as jackkt, but I’m not terribly keen on it. Apart from that, I thought this was an exceptionally fine puzzle.

      1. Hm! It could be that I’m missing something obvious, but how does “on the Sun” work in that case?
        1. Well, if you’re on the sun (literally) a day trip’s on the cards, and the capital S for the newspaper’s your misdirection/complementary minor reading. It all seems to add up in its underhand way to a full-enough-hearted clue.
  24. Although I am not in the UK, my daughter was telling me about going to the Notting Hill Carnival today, so I could have realized it was a bank holiday. Very nice puzzle. I stopped just after an hour and came back and finished it in another 17 minutes later, but I still don’t know how. Just intelligent guessing on GUJARAT, BUGGINS’ TURN and LEPTON. CODs to the three-letter down clues, both of which I thought were rather good. I agree that DAY TRIP is a bit weak, but that was really all.

    Edited at 2012-08-27 11:06 pm (UTC)

  25. A final thanks from me for the excellent blog and all the comments.
    I was interested that someone had entered BIKINI at 12ac but changed it when they saw MONOKINI as the answer elsewhere. I’m nearly certain, thinking back, that I originally had BIKINI at 12ac until I came to use MOMOKINI at 17dn, so changed the first answer to RIMINI.
  26. I can confirm that “Sun” in the clue was intended as the abbreviation for Sunday.
    1. Well, there you go. A more tangled web than you set out to weave, but not the deceiver’s fault. Good for my soul to get everything wrong under the sun.
  27. O is an element. O aint a gas. O(subscript)2 is, and O(subscript)3 is. Just saying, 5 or 6 years after.

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