Times 25270 – Sonatine, Miroirs, Valse, Bolero…..

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 57 minutes

Music: Niamh Parsons, Blackbirds and Thrushes

In no way is this an easy Monday puzzle, unless you have built up your vocabulary by doing barred-grid puzzles – in which case it is still not an
easy Monday puzzle, but at least you might be able to solve it. Fortunately, the cryptics were fairly helpful, and I was able to dredge a few obscure terms from the depths of my brain.

Certainly, you should have no trouble getting started, because the two long answers across the center are very simple indeed. In fact, about half of the clues were not particularly
challenging for a moderately-skilled solver. It is only when you try to finish off the unsolved corners that you are likely to run into difficulties.

Across
1 CINEMATIC, anagram of MICE ACT IN.
6 THEFT, THE F(inancial) T(imes). It seems like they should have a lot to write about nowadays.
9 DONOR, RO(N)OD backwards.
10 AIRFIELDS, AIR + FIELDS, i.e. William Claude Fields.
11 ETERNAL TRIANGLE, ETERNAL + T(R.I.)ANGLE. Rhode Island is a very popular state among constructors, apparently. I wonder how many have been there.
13 PRIORITY, PRIOR(IT)Y.
14 FELLOE, FELL + O[v]E[r]. A bit of recondite vocabulary, but the crytic will give it to you if you can figure out which word to apply ‘regularly’ to.
16 BLENNY, B(L)ENNY, another word that may not come immediately to mind, and another American entertainer from the first half of the 20th century.
18 DENARIUS, DE(IRAN backwards)US. This time RI is not Rhode Island, although thinking of it may lead you to the answer.
21 IN THE FIRST PLACE, double definition.
23 HUMBLE BEE, HUMBLE + an allusion to the expression “the bee’s knees”. This expression would have been current when Fields made movies and Goodman played the clarinet.
25 Omitted, look for it.
26 REMUS, double definition, Uncle Remus, the creation of Joel Chandler Harris, and Remus the twin of Romulus. My first in, easy if you know the references.
27 DESTROYER, anagram of RESTORED + [nav]Y.
 
Down
1 CADRE, [-p +C]ADRE. I wasted a lot of time trying to justify ‘corps’.
2 NONRESIDENT, anagram of SON IN RENTED, a semi &lit.
3 MARINER, MAR(I)NE + R.
4 TEACLOTH, TE(A CLOT)H, where the enclosure is an anagram of ‘the’. I wanted ‘cast’ to be ‘try’ for the longest time, but couldn’t get it to work.
5 CURARE, CU + RARE, not as obvious as it should have been.
6 TZIGANE, anagram of EATING + Z[abaglione]. Most solvers will need the cryptic to have any hope of getting this, but first you have to realize that ‘oddly’ is not an every-other-letter indicator, and ‘eating’ is not an enclosure indicator.
7 EEL, [h]EEL, which presumably goes with ‘sole’. I had ‘ide’ for a while, thinking of the composition of the sole.
8 TASTELESS, TA(STE)LES + S[on]. Much simpler than expected.
12 GALLIMAUFRY, GAL + L[eft] I M[arried] + AU + FRY. A very clear cryptic that you just have to trust to give you the answer. The only real trick is to see that ‘to the’ goes together and yields the French ‘au’.
13 PUBLISHER, cryptic definition with an allusion to a supposed riposte from Wellington – “Publish and be damned!”
17 NEEDLES, NEEDLES[s]. A new version of a chestnut, where The Needles are the ones off the Isle Of Wight.
19 APPLIER, A P[ower] PLIER[s].
20 RIBBED, double definition.
22 ERROR, ER + R[eview] + OR.
24 Omitted….shhh!

32 comments on “Times 25270 – Sonatine, Miroirs, Valse, Bolero…..”

  1. Lots of stuff to chew over in this one. Had most trouble with FELLOE —— looking, as Vinyl notes, for the wrong “regular” letters. And never heard of the BLENNY.

    Do have to say that I could do without the construction: “such” + noun = adjective, used twice here at 1ac and 20dn.

    23ac raised a titter. Will we see DOG clued as “one with perfect … etc”? Or DUCK, similarly?

  2. Apart from the rather mean crossing of 6dn (where it was a 1-in-6 chance of picking the right combination of letters) and 14ac, this was a fair test of a puzzle
  3. You have described my solving pattern almost exactly, vinyl1.

    I thought this was going to be dead easy but after about 30 minutes doubts had set in as there were too many gaps remaining around the edges. In the end as I reached the 60 minute mark I resorted to aids for the final two or three, GALLIMAUFRY and FELLOE (didn’t know either) and the elusive 13dn where the only fit I could find was PUBLIC BAR as somehow the alternative to BUMBLE-BEE has passed me by all my life.

    I was pleased to work out TZIGANE from knowing its alternative ZIGEUNER which used as the title of a song by Noel Coward.

    Not a good start to the week.

    BTW, you have duplicated 19dn in the blog.

    Edited at 2012-09-17 01:20 am (UTC)

  4. I don’t think 6dn is as unfair as David suggests, as one has three checked letters to work with (T_I_A_ _). On the other hand, this is where I fell short, resorting to aids on the hour mark. I believe I would have got home if I’d have been as ‘clever’ about spotting the wordplay at 14 ac as I had been in other places (notably for GALLIMAUFRY), but a combination of being buffeted about and of realising that I’d strayed into dreaded Mephisto land (on a Monday of all days!) meant I remained short of that final checker and possible aidless completion.

    Strange puzzle, as will no doubt be noted all round, with at least 5 words/phrases unknown to me. As one fond of cryptic clues, not to mention, words within my ken, my COD goes to PUBLISHER.

  5. I found this curiously easy: I had all but 14ac done in just under 10 minutes and only needed another 4 to be reasonably confident of that answer. It was the only word I didn’t know, so the setter has done a good job today of picking obscurities that just happen to be familiar to me for various reasons. I know BLENNY from The Octonauts and the Combtooth Blenny, for instance. Dead intellectual, me.
    W. C. Fields is topical so soon after Andy Murray’s victory at Flushing Meadows.

    Edited at 2012-09-17 07:55 pm (UTC)

  6. Like keriothe, I also found this one “curiously easy” with 14ac the only unknown. 6d went in from the definition once I realized there was a “z” in it, as did 12dn although the cryptic was useful to get the spelling right. Generally the definitions were very helpful!

    Derek

  7. Held up a long time in NE. 42 minutes eventually; last in teacloth, where at the last second I managed not to write in a despairing tracloty. I’m surprised you object to ‘such’ McT; such a use is surely cast in stone by now. This was an interesting puzzle with its long easy stretches and one or two agonisingly difficult bends.
  8. 10 minute romp for me, I’m afraid. I got 6d by recalling the Anvil Chorus, where it’s zingari and concocting the spelling here from the cryptic. Chambers has either tzigany or tsigane, but not this hybrid. And yes, the anvils in this clip ARE out of tune. Sorry.
    Like everyone else it seems, FELLOE was my last in, partly because of the riot of indicators represented by the clue, “of” being the only innocent word. Maybe give it the CoD for that reason.
    I have always assumed that “the bees knees” was a (possibly) Yiddish take on “business” but I see there are many disputed origins.
        1. You mean you don’t have the iPhone 5?!

          [I only got a mobile last year – a present(?) from a despairing teenage daughter.)

          1. I won’t touch iPhones now that Steve Jobs is not around to assemble each one by hand. And I never could work out how I was supposed to connect it to my phone line. And the promised toaster app never materialised.
            1. Does anyone know if the story is true about Steve Jobs throwing a prototype for the latest iPhone or iPod into his office fish tank, watching a stream of air bubbles rise to the surface and saying to the minion who had brought the device to him: “Why all the wasted space?”
    2. That’s one I do know, the Italian word for gypsy. Nowadays mostly used as a highly offensive epithet.

      But otherwise very much defeated by this crossword, too many glaring gaps in GK and vocabulary.

      Rob

  9. Knowing Sarasate’s Zigunerweisen gave me confidence to write in TZIGANE. Wasn’t so sure about FELLOE. Ticks for AIRFIELDS and HUMBLE BEE.

    “The bee’s knees” is not an expression I was aware of as a child: in the region I was brought up we spoke of “the cat’s whiskers”. My 1970 Brewer does not include “bee’s knees”, but does give “cat’s whiskers” and “cat’s pyjamas”.

    Edited at 2012-09-17 10:42 am (UTC)

  11. 32:13 … I found this curiously hard. Even the easy bits were hard. I’m sure vinyl1 is right about there being more than a touch of the barred in this one, which makes it not quite my thing.

    Of more pressing concern is vinyl1’s blog title, the significance of which I’m still trying to unravel.

      1. Ah, thank you. I did spot the Ravel (unhence my “unravel”) but I’d never heard of his Tzigane. Well done, you. And clever old vinyl1.
  12. DNF today with three unknowns (Blenny, Felloe and Gallimaufry) all eluding me. Struggled too to get Airfields and Tzigane. Not the easiest start to the week.
  13. Funny old puzzle. Romped along quite nicely with a mixture of the obvious and the “piece together bits of the answer from wordplay” game. Had to use a dictionary to verify FELLOE, BLENNY and GALL….Y 20 minutes after golf so not disgraced.
  14. This one stumped me and i had to look it up!
    interesting to think how it orginated
    57 minutes
  15. Came unstuck at 14 across where 10 minutes of staring led to nothing and I put in WELLIE on a hope and a whim. Oh well, there’s always the rest of the week.
  16. DNF here either, having to resort to aids for FELLOE and TZIGANE, neither of which I knew. Ouch. I got BLENNY from wordplay only, but I actually knew of GALLIMAUFRY. So I thought it a toughie, obviously.
  17. This puzzle was the bee’s knees and I’m quite surprised I finished it in just over an hour (I had to summon up courage to leave FELLOE in, and apart from that I didn’t understand PUBLISHER, nor had I ever heard of the BLENNY or the HUMBLEBEE, for that matter, but I convinced myself it must be the British version of BUMBLEBEE). Many devilish and amusing clues (AIRFIELDS and REMUS my favourites).

    Just an afterthought: the German word for a wheel rim is FELGE, and actually, that helped a little.

    Edited at 2012-09-17 09:12 pm (UTC)

  18. 36min 24 secs without aids.

    Didn’t expect to get them all right. Felloe, Tzigane and Gallimaufry all new to me.

  19. A disappointing 10:49 for me. No problem with any of the words, but I wasted time on 1ac (trying to think of a noun meaning “entertainments”), 17dn (trying desperately to make ROCKALL fit the clue – ROCK wasn’t bad, but try as I might I couldn’t make ALL = “not entirely superfluous”), 6dn (thought of TZIGANE, but then took a ludicrous amount of time to spot the anagram), and 4dn (just being slow). Feeling old and stupid. Again. (Sigh!)
  20. I knew all the words and fopund most of it easy, the main exception being TZIGANE for the reasons indicated in the blog. Not keen on “such entertainments” to define CINEMATIC – thought there was a hint of “in” doing double duty there.

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