Times 25254: For De Mille, young fur henchmen can’t be rowing

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 17:42

Phew! An easier puzzle on my blogging day after a couple of real stretches in the week’s two earlier numbers. The three cross-refs to 27ac made it simpler if you got it; harder if you didn’t; as is often the case with cross-refs. Be interesting to know who worked from the pivot clue and who reverse-engineered it. (My suspicions are that the tendency will be towards the latter.)

Across
 1 JUNTA. JUN{e}, several weeks; TA, Territorial Army.
 4 DEMITASSE. DEMIT, resign; AS; S{enior} E{executive}. A French word for a half cup starting with another French-derived word (démettre). I own a prized navvy’s type; made of enamelled tin.
 9 URBANISTS. Anagram: barn suits.
10 ROACH. Which is {b}ROACH, bring up, minus the first letter of ‘Boys’.
11 NOT ON YOUR LIFE. Two defs; one an attempt at humour. (YOUR: A pleasant change from the usual, checker-friendly, ‘ONES’.)
14 Omitted. Motorists of the world unite, you have nothing to choose but….
15 COMMERCIAL. COAL (fuel), inc M (=motorway) + MERCI (‘thanks’ for a 27ac). The def is ‘it pushes’.
18 SEDUCTRESS. E (European), DUC (noble 27ac), inside STRESS. ‘In grave, say’ might have been more thematic?
19 FEED. Two defs.
21 ENTER THE LISTS. Which is: enter the(l)ists.
24 EGRET. EG (for example); RE (on); {boa}T.
25 APPALOOSA. APPALS (horrifies), inc OO (rings), A.
27 FRENCHMAN. FR (father); ’ENCHMAN. Def = ‘possibly Jean’. (Would ‘Minder’ have sufficed?)
28 MIDGE. Included in the clue. Appropriately, Tyndrum is in Scotland, home of the midge.
Down
 1 JOURNALESE. ALES in JOURNE{y}. Remember Lunchtime O’Booze, he who put the ALES in JOURNALESE?
 2 NEB. Reversal of BEN. Various kinds of slang for the nose, a beak, brim of a cap…. What makes me think of Ringo here?
 3 AW(N)ING.
 4 DISCOLOUR. DISCO (party); LO (see); UR (old city). ‘Join’ at the start of the clue is an instruction so to do. ‘Fox’: a bibliophilic term. Discoloured pages are said to be foxed.
 5 MISER. Two defs. One (or both?) a well-boring tool.
 6 TERTIARY. TRY including {in}ERTIA.
 7 STATELINESS. STATE LESS (shorten declaration), inc IN (fashionable).
 8 ECHT. {br}ECHT. Uncle Bertolt, a grumpy cigar smoker who chucked out a few leftie plays now and then.
12 THIRD DEGREE. A joke. (As is the fact that most doctoral students in Australia only have one degree under their belts.)
13 CLYDESDALE. Anagram: called s{e}edy. Called a draught-horse because it has ALE at the back.
16 MISSHAPEN. MISHAP (accident) inc S{cooter}; EN (‘in’ for Jean). The interesting connection here, well-known to all roadies, is that a ‘frenchman’ is a reverse twist made when coiling a cable that has a kink in it; thus to straighten it.
17 EC,STATIC. The City area of London, East Central.
20 SLALOM. SLAM (attack) inc L (large) and {cr}O{wd}.
22 REALM. {tria}L inside REAM. The Mac Oxford’s example is “the realm of applied chemistry”. Does anyone ever say this?
23 BEEF. F with BEE (worker) first.
26 Omitted. I agree!

41 comments on “Times 25254: For De Mille, young fur henchmen can’t be rowing”

  1. 36 minutes. A quick start and finish with a rather long barren period in between. I have an intense dislike of puzzles with several clues cross-referenced to a single other, especially when the key clue proves unsolvable until late in the proceedings. Fortunately the Times doesn’t do this very often, for which I am most grateful.

    Roughly half my answers went in on definition alone. My only unknown word was APPALOOSA which luckily had straightforward wordplay as an alternative route to the answer. I also didn’t know the awl meaning of MISER although I have a feeling it has come up before and I failed to retain it for future use.

    Edited at 2012-08-29 01:14 am (UTC)

  2. 20:14, another who solved FRENCHMAN almost last (Jean’s dad? Mr Harlow?). Didn’t twig until COMMERCIAL and realising the D at the end of MISSHAPED was an N (Jean’s father? Ed Harlow?).
    Likewise my URBANITES felt more accurate, and dam’ the anagram, than the correct answer, which made Mr Fox at 6d (is there a name other than Reynard?) somewhat trickier than it needed to be.
    Thanks for the roadie’s take on FRENCHMAN, which I didn’t know, and is therefore the something new I will learn today. Is there a reason? Can it be printed?
    Shoulda bin quicker. CoD to STATELINESS for “shorten declaration” not being “take the end off something”.
    1. Something I’ve only heard among roadies; a strange crew with an even stranger argot of their own. Perhaps part of the denigration of all things Gallic and suggesting a tendency to … um … turn the wrong way?

      Edited at 2012-08-29 05:32 am (UTC)

    2. Forgot to mention it, but I had the same problem with URBANITES making 4dn impossible until the error was corrected.
  3. About an hour. Held up aon 7 down since I was sure that a shortened declaration was SATEMENt and the answer ended with MEN which was for sure plausible.

    Had to work out APPALOOSA (loi) from wordplay since I’d never heard of it. Didn’t know MISER had any drilling meaning either but what else could’d it be.

    Got FRENCHMAN since SEDUCTRESS was obvious even without it. And then it was a gimme

  4. Managed to duck under the half-hour. I agree with jackkt about over-linkage to a single clue. 20 reminds me of the Times clue a mere fifty years back or so that depended on Chinese ethics that appear backward, and going downhill or something. (I may have mentioned it here before.) Them were the days. Eye-opener of the day: isn’t Clydesdale an excellent word?
  5. 35 minutes, not having solved the Frenchman quickly nor any that hinged on it neither, although it was MISSHAPEN that made further progress possible. Today the NE held me up, unwilling as I was to enter MISER. LOI FEED. COD to DISCOLOUR.
  6. The Frenchman was nearly the last one I put in as it was almost possible to solve all the linked clues without knowing what the solution to 27 was. An enjoyable 10 minutes.
  7. Unlike some above I enjoyed the 15/16/18/27 interplay. They made a welcome change to the norm of all the clues being isolated. Demitasse, Journalese and Echt have all appeared recently in Times/Sunday Times puzzles so these came readily to mind.
    Enter The Lists was today’s unknown phrase and so too the Discolour meaning of fox and the Miser tool. LOI Stateliness.
  8. He doesn’t – not into the def anyhow. Jean is a common French name, hence Jean might be a Frenchman (possibly Jean). Father is FR, which together with ENCHMAN (supposedly how a cockney would pronounce “henchman”) supplies the solution.
    1. I like the “supposedly” since the setter ignores the fact that the stereotype cockney would be most unlikely to use the word “henchman”. He might use “minder” or just “mate”
      1. Good point. The whole “h”-dropping cockney thing is a rather tired old device anyhow IMHO.
  9. 20 minutes for a straightforward puzzle that didn’t require reference books to solve it and hence regular solvers are finishing it rather than reporting DNF

    I quite enjoyed the links to Jean since like Paul I solved siren=seductress and then saw “duc” making the answer to 27 obvious. Both the FOX and MISER unusual meanings have cropped up many times before

  10. Definitely easier than recent puzzles. 45 mins or so for me. Helped by knowing “demitasse”, “appaloosa” as a type of horse and the specialist meaning of “fox” required here. I didn’t know the well-boring tool meaning of MISER nor had I met NEB before, but with checkers in place there was little doubt that both had to be right (as a quick check in the dictionary confirmed). I was among those who made life more difficult for themselves by initially having “urbanites” at 9 ac (surely far more common than URBANISTS, which I’ve never heard or seen used in the “townee” sense). SLALOM was my LOI.
    1. Please can you explain why the answer is not NIB which is hidden reversed in the clue?
      1. The answer has to be NEB (the Scottish for “mountain” in reverse) to satisfy the “mountain-climbing” bit of the clue. I agree that ‘nib” is a much more common word for “point” than NEB, but the latter is in the dictionaries defined as “snout, nose, bird’s beak” (I had to check that the word existed myself). Apart from that, I don’t think your reading would work, as there is nothing in the clue to indicate that we should be looking for a word meaning “point” hidden and reversed inside “mountain-climbing”.
        1. Thanks Mike, I see it now. As BIN is inside “climbing” it has no other reversal indicator in the clue. Cheers John
  11. Could someone kindly put ‘Anonymous’ out of his misery and tell me where Jean’s father comes into play please? I just don’t get it.
  12. Anon – Jean is supossedly a common French first name = John. Although in reality I find here they’re nearly all hyphenated e.g. Jean-Paul or Jean-Philippe or Jean- Marie.
    Took me 19 minutes to finish, having clocked Frenchman early on, only to find I had JOURNALISM (although didn’t get the parsing) so not Orl Korrect today.
  13. 23:25 on the club timer (forgot my paper on the commute this morning). I found this quite tricky, but the main difficulty came from putting in URBANITES and failing to spot the error for a long time. I haven’t seen “townee” spelled like that before.
    I was worried about 2dn. Was it a reversal of a familar word to make an obscure one (NEB) or a reversal of an obscure word to make a familiar one (NIB or NUB)? No way of knowing, but fortunately my default principle of following the wordplay worked out this time.
    Generally an enjoyable puzzle but I’m not a fan of linked clues. In some extreme examples it makes the puzzles almost impossible until you’ve got the link, and then extremely easy. This one wasn’t that bad of course but still I’d rather they didn’t.
  14. Hi all. About 30 minutes, ending with FEED. It took me a while to see the link among the clues, which I reached via the duc in SEDUCTRESS. I don”t mind the occasional link. Didn’t know of the MISER boring device, but again a US home court advantage with the quite well known APPALOOSA, which the wordplay helpfully directing me to the correct spelling. Regards.
  15. Most of it done apart from NE corner. Problem is I simply don’t have a broad enough vocabulary to get answers without dictionary aids: Appaloosa, echt today and a few yesterday. However in most cases can work backwords to the clue so I know they are right. Is this the joy of the cryptic solving and will it ever get better???
    1. There’s a knack to figuring out unknown words from wordplay, and it’s something you get better at with practice. It’s the key to consistent solving if, like me, there are nearly always words you don’t know in the puzzle. So stick at it!
  16. 15 minutes, also sloppy with writing in URBANITES without thinking about the anagram (making DISCOLOUR the last in), and got FRENCHMAN from SEDUCTRESS. Everything else went in with full understanding, so fun puzzle!
  17. It must be serendipity. Some weeks ago I recorded a western on my Skybox which I watched yesterday. Called “APPALOOSA”. I only recorded it because it was based on a novel of the same name by one of my favourite writers, Robert B Parker. Faithful to the novel but slower on film than it was in print. (I wonder if anyone else here is a fan of Parker’s private eye, Spencer. Probably not – I have plebian tastes. Georgette Heyer, Robert Parker, Joss Whedon (Buffy creator) etc. All witty writers though) I, like others, fell for URBANITES at 9d and wasted time unravelling the result.No real problem with any of the others, though I spent ages with a DO instead of DISCO as my party in 4d which was my LOI. 28 very enjoyable minutes. Ann
    1. I’m a great fan of Spenser and Hawk, though Susan can get on my nerves. Robert B. Parker is one of the stylists of the time. It’s the economy, as well as the wit, that I like. Sad he’s no longer with us.
      1. Just thinking about Spenser (who I mispelt above! Must remember “Like the poet”) makes me want to reread from the start. It’s a few books in before we meet Hawk but when we do… Wow. Glad someone else appreciates Mr Parker.
    2. Count me in as another huge fan of Robert B Parker. I came to him through the Jesse Stone novels, which I just love, and am working my way slowly (rationing myself) through the Spenser books. As joekobi suggests, that man could write most ‘serious’ novelists into the middle of next week. He rarely allowed himself a lyrical turn of phrase, but wow, when he did he could break your heart or make it sing.

      Incidentally, the Jesse Stone TV films, of which the first few were faithful to the books and very well done, are all filmed round about where I live here in Nova Scotia, so we watch them and play ‘spot the location’.

      Never quite got the whole Western thing, but I’m sure I’ll get around to Appaloosa when I run out of of Spensers. I’d be mad not to …

      1. And I love Jesse Stone as well. Just caught the last half hour of a TV film starring Tom Selleck as Jesse. He’s not how I imagine him but it seemed to have been a good film. I thought the seaside locations were beautiful. Would that be Nova Scotia? I read the Spensers in order after someone in my local pub recommended them. I read the first 16 as 2nd hand Amazon purchases but after I went over to Kindle I found the back-list wasn’t available. I was overheard moaning about this over coffee in my local Italian and the next day someone presented me with a disk containing the entire Parker oevre, including Sunny Randall, Jesse Stone and the westerns. 68 books in all. Feel a bit guilty because I didn’t pay anything for them. It was one of my greatest reading orgies of all time!
        1. I thought Tom Selleck did an admirable job. Yes, all the locations are in NS. We live by the sea and “Jesse’s house” is not far away (ours isn’t quite as romantic as his but is frequently shrouded in mist!). ‘Paradise’ is played by the town of Lunenburg, a world heritage site. Halifax occasionally doubles as Boston.

          Comfort yourself that Parker would have been amused at the manner by which you came to the books – an off-hand remark in the local bar, a conversation overheard in an Italian cafe, an anonymous stranger handing over a disc … all very intriguing!

          1. So it’s a series. Didn’t know. Will try to track it down. I also live by the sea in Swansea on the Bristol Channel – second only to the Bay of Fundy for tidal range. Thanks for the info. Ann
            1. I used to live on the other side of the Bristol Channel, being a West Country product. There are lots of signs here proclaiming the tidal achievements of the Bay of Fundy, but locals get a bit annoyed that most of the world neither knows nor cares.

              Yes, it is a series, made by CBS. It’s very unusual stuff for an American network and wouldn’t get made without Selleck’s clout. I think they’re available on DVD through Amazon etc. Very atmospheric TV, and paced more like a Scandinavian crime drama than your typical American crime show. And lovely use of music (I’m still trying to master the Brahms Intermezzo that gets used repeatedly – give me another few years and I’ll nail it).

    3. I met Mr. Parker once yrs ago in London at a book signing. I was the last in line and I asked him if I could ask him some questions. We wound up chatting for about 30 mins. The guy was so naturally funny and witty and altogether qute charming and friendly. At the time they had a screen play to be written by Tom Stoppard, Parker and his wife to produce a movie aboout Marllowe based on Parkers book. They hadnptgot anyone to play Marlowe. I soad hat I was availablemand we both laughed. He said he worte the thing and they wouldnt even let him play Marlowe. I suggested Bob Michum who played Marlowe before. Parker said that yes but Michum was just too too old then, but that Michum was his first choice, but that I (martin) a very close second! I cracked up. We chatted on until his minder came to take him away. A most memorable day, books signed and a lasting impression of a really cool guy.
      1. Thanks for sharing this memory. I’d read that RBP was a very approachable person. It’s also good that you had a meaningful chat, rather than a simple autograph request. He was quite prolific so I suppose we should be grateful for that but I feel he had a lot more books in him. A great loss.
  18. A rare finish for me these days and an even rarer sub 30 minutes at 27.28. I was helped by getting 27ac almost immediately with minor hold ups at DEMITASSE and linked answers as I didn’t know that synonym for resign. It was pleasing though to get to the end without resorting to aids or drink!
  19. 9:48 for me. I got 27ac reasonably quickly, but I’m with those who aren’t keen on puzzles where several clues rely on the answer to one of the others. Like jackkt I’m grateful that The Times doesn’t do this very often – but it would be even better if they avoided it altogether.
  20. Two wrong today (and it was hardly easier than the other puzzles this week, just as much solving on wordplay except I got the other ones right). The two mistakes were: READ (misled by the courses) rather than FEED, but at least now I know why I couldn’t find a connection between READ and paid, and NIB rather than NEB. I still write with fountain pens and it seemed far more likely that BIN was a variant of BEN than that NEB could be a variant of NIB. Oh well, can’t win them all (or very many of them, for that matter).
  21. I am a novice at this. But k had Cabindoors for 1d – hacks may use this short trip to secure drinks… Cab indoors – coors and the canin dolrs need to be secured.
    27a i had The Old Man – cockney and also the THAMES which of course supports the East End.
    Needless to,say ater those two ….things went sownhill.
    For siren i had Radio Noise which fit with misshapen.
    Thought urbanites must be wrong because cabinsoors fit so well. ,

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