Times 25,277

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
17:35 on the Club timer, but I suspect it wasn’t as difficult as that suggests. I feel very out of practice after a few weeks away from the daily cryptic, having been a) away on holiday (good); and, subsequently, madly busy (not good). Anyway, I was glad to get a reasonably straightforward and pleasant puzzle to blog, and found it very much a game of four quarters; NE and SW went in pretty quickly, followed by a long pause for reflection, then SE, and finally NW. Lots of double definitions in a puzzle which showed great economy.

Across
1 SPURGE – Sulphur + PURGE gives you a plant which lurks at the edges of my botanical ignorance.
5 PIPE BAND – BAN(outlaw) in PIPED(supplied).
9 FLESH OUT – FLESH(food) + OUT(revealed); verb, not noun, disguised by the surface.
10 RARELY – double def.; a beuatifully concise clue.
11 PUERTO RICO – (TOPCOURIER)*.
13 NANA – a rare venture for the Times into the internally referential clue, picking up MUM from 27; work by Zola.
14 RISE=”RYE’S”. Should that be whiskey rather than whisky? Disclaimer: I will claim actual expertise in beer, some knowledge of wine, but near ignorance of spirits.
15 INASMUCH AS – (MUSICHASAN)*.
18 FELT TIP PEN – FELT,T (repetitive at last) + CRIPPEN without the CRedit. Crippen’s wife-poisoning is over a century old, but for some reason he’s one of those criminals who lingers as a folk memory even today (well, in crossword land, anyway).
20 COCK – double def.; I flailed around with ROOK (wrong bird), RICK (not a bird at all) before alighting on the right one.
21 GILL – double def., a measure for your whisk(e)y and a northern valley.
23 ABSTEMIOUS – (IMESSABOUT)*.
25 LEAVES – another double def.
26 LAMASERY – MASER in LAY. Not to be confused with a place where llamas live.
28 HEAVENLY – [English kNight Left] in HEAVY.
29 MONODY – ploughmaN in MOODY.
 
Down
2 PILAU RICE – AURIC in PILE.
3 RESERVE – PRESERVE.
4 EMO – Elvis + MO; a sort of music played by various popular beat combos from the United States, m’lud.
5 PETRI – cryptic def. which brings back memories of all those failed experiments in biology O-level.
6 PERFORMANCE – MAN in PERFORCE.
7 BYRONIC – (INCORBY)* presumably indicating that one is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
8 NYLON – Nitrogen present in (ONLY)*.
12 ORIGINAL SIN – ORIGINALS,IN; theologically loose, but innovative, definition.
16 ASP – christmAS Pudding.
17 ACCOUTRED – Class in (EDUCATOR)*.
19 TEL AVIV – (VALET)rev. + Inveigh,V.
20 CAISSON – 1 in CASSON.
22 ISERE – IS ‘ERE, Alpine river of France.
24 SILLY – double def. The obligatory cricket reference to fox American solvers and others: adding “silly” to a fielding position (silly point, silly mid-on etc.) means that the fielder stays at the same angle relative to the batsman, but moves considerably closer to him (to the point where physical harm is a distinct possibility – there’s good reason for describing it as silly).
27 MUM – as in “keep mum”; cryptic def. saying “you want a synonym for tight-lipped, and it’s the one which mentions a family member”.

44 comments on “Times 25,277”

  1. No walk in the park for me. And I still can’t see a number of things:

    1. “Very well” = RARELY (10ac): though I can see why a rare steak may be seldom very well done.
    2. “Goose” = SILLY (24dn). Part of speech?
    3. “Relatively” = MUM (27dn). Ditto?
    4. “Is present” (8dn): where does this tell us to put the N; first or last; or does it not matter?

    Forgot the “by necessity” meaning of “willy-nilly” (6dn); only remembering the other meaning: “haphazardly”. And I’d never heard of Hugh Casson (20dn). AURIC (2dn) was also new to me and (as with the rocket salad the other day, reprised at 25ac), I’d hesitate to order pilau rice (alone) as a takeaway.

    Then, given that “dishy” is a bit of a liberty at 5dn, as is “Here monks” as the def. at 26ac, I’d say there were some unfair elements in this puzzle.

    Edited at 2012-09-25 01:05 am (UTC)

    1. Rarely = to an unusual degree of excellence. Goose and silly are both nouns meaning silly person. I took the N as following the anagram of ‘only’ because that’s the order in the clue but ‘is present’ probably justifies it going at either end.

      Edited at 2012-09-25 01:31 am (UTC)

      1. Thanks for that one. Now I suppose a silly goose is also a silly silly?

        And now I’ve looked it up in the Mac Oxford, I find:

        RARELY, 2 archaic unusually or remarkably well: you can write rarely now, after all your schooling.

        So thanks for that too. Though I doubt I’ll be adding such a comment to my students’ work in case they misunderstand and assume I’m saying they shouldn’t bother!

        Edited at 2012-09-25 02:39 am (UTC)

  2. Too many answers or meanings outwith or on the very borders of my knowledge so I needed aids to polish off the last few once the hour was breached. Not helped by a stupid error on my part confusing 11ac with Costa Rica and writing in PUERTO RICA. Didn’t know EMO, ISERE, GILL the ravine, COCK the pile of hay (or dung), MASER or CAISSON. Was convinced I was looking for a batsman at 24 so came up with SELBY with BY for ‘near’ but couldn’t explain ‘goose’. ACCOUTRED was handy as it came up only a couple of days ago. Not convinced that ‘Scottish’ is justified at 5ac without perhaps or question-mark.

    Edited at 2012-09-25 10:30 am (UTC)

  3. 20:07, with too many going in on a wing and a checker; a couple of them still unparseable to me until I came here (LAMASERY, PERFORMANCE, FELT-TIP PEN). I didn’t like PETRI, since it seemed like a giveaway; ditto for RISE. And I only knew ‘ghyll’; are they the same?
    1. To quote A. Wainwright (in A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, Book 3: The Central Fells): “GHYLL or GILL? Properly GILL, according to the best authorities. GHYLL is a poetical affectation: it is too well established at Dungeon Ghyll to be altered now, and is accepted in a few other cases, e.g. Stock Ghyll, Ambleside.”

      Edited at 2012-09-27 12:17 am (UTC)

  4. Mac Oxford has this:

    USAGE: Is it whiskey or whisky? Note that the British and Canadian spelling is without the: e, so that properly one would write of: Scotch whisky or: Canadian whisky, but: Kentucky bourbon whiskey or: Irish whiskey.

    So the sans-E would seem to fit with rye. (Cue our expert, Uncle Yap.)

    1. According to the fountain of all knowledge Wikipedia (not Yap Suk), ‘rye whiskey (sic) can refer to either of two types of whiskey: 1) American rye whiskey, which must be distilled from at least 51 percent rye; 2) Canadian whisky, which is often referred to (and labelled as) rye whisky for historical reasons, although it may or may not actually include any rye in its production process.’

      Of course, for the definitive authority, one need look no further than here.

        1. Fair enough, Kevin, but I don’t think I’d be able to sing the Punch Brothers at Karaoke. Don McLean, on the other hand…well, only the other day, on the occasion of our 20th wedding anniversary, I took the wife to Causeway Bay and did my cover vesion of the Don McLean classic.

          Fortunately, the great man’s still alive, otherwise there might well have been considerable turning in grave.

          1. Them good old boys were drinking whisk(e)y and rye, of course, which is at the heart of my question, in that I vaguely thought that scotch is whisky, and rye is whiskey, and never the twain shall meet…
            1. In fact, Scotch is whisky, Irish is whiskey, and rye is a plate of egg and chips.

              Edited at 2012-09-25 08:30 am (UTC)

          2. If you watch carefully you can invariably observe people thinking that maybe American Pie wasn’t such a good Karaoke choice at around the 7-minute mark.
            1. I never watch the screen – know the lyric by heart and all that. 🙂 So what happens at 7:00? Not allowed to keep us on tenterhooks, you know…
                1. Actually, I think I lost it around then before coming back in strong a la Mr Bean and his Hallelujahs with ‘the father, son and holy ghost’ bit.
                  1. I’m sure it helps if you know the song well. With those less familiar you tend to get a haunted look as they begin to suspect they’re caught up in some sort of candid camera gag where the song never ends.
                    For the avoidance of doubt I’m not knocking it: it’s a great song of course, I just wouldn’t pick it for Karaoke. Mind you I have only done Karaoke once in my life, and that was under extreme duress. At least I managed to avoid having to sing by doing A Boy Named Sue.

                    Edited at 2012-09-25 09:40 am (UTC)

                    1. It’s not just songs that get murdered in these (Asian) parts. People in the Phillipines have become so browned off by tuneless renditons of My Way that to perform it is to risk becoming a statistic.
  5. I don’t see a problem with the adverb ‘realtively’, as this modifies ‘tight-lipped’ and that phrase, like, the target word, MUM, is an adjective. A ‘silly’ has come up at least once in the relatively recent past.

    I think ‘dishy’ is very good, and my problem with the ‘here monks’ clue is not that this phrase is being used to cue a place where monks live – that much was obvious to me early doors – but that a) once you’ve got the LAY you have an unknown word (for most) of the pattern M—R (okay, probably M—ER) and b) many people are not going to get the ‘s’ from the crossing CAISSON, because they’re are not going to know Casson and get CAISSON in the first place. In the setter’s defence, ‘lamasery’ is definitely guessable, especially after you’ve looked it up…

    Overall, I too found this puzzle rather irritating in places – as indicated by the fact that I threw in the towel after 57 minutes – particularly the SE, where we had three potentially unknown words crossing (the two afore-mentioned) and COCK (where I chucked in ‘rick’ until going to aids to get the monastery and the chamber).

    It’s nice to have another French river to add to the usual suspects – and I loved the pseudo-homphone (close enough for me) that clued it – and the ‘silly’ clue was clever too, but I wonder whether such arcane knowledge as is required here is ‘saved’ by the fact that you have three of the five letters in each word, including the first. Probably, but there just seemed too much unknown stuff in one half of one puzzle to really satisfy.

    1. So the first definition of the double-def. is … ? And what part of speech is it? There is no way I can see that MUM = “relatively”. Though I can see MUM = “relative”.
  6. Is it really a double definition? I parsed it as ‘tight-lipped’ = MUM with ‘relatively’ as the tongue-in-cheek element that provided the crypticity while also smoothing the tie-in with 13ac.
        1. Hmm … still not impressed with the clue. If it’s a cryptic def., that’s more support for my general dislike of them.
  7. 19 minutes, which felt about right, especially doing it the hard way, SE to NW. MUM first in, prompted by 13 which was as far as I got without being able to enter anything. ABSTEMIOUS because it was close enough and looking like an anagram to catch the eye. LAMASERY OK but I needed to cryptic to correct my spelling.
    GILL was left ’til last, and a partial guess based on the measure, which I knew, not the unrecognised valley.
    Puzzled by “rarely”, concluding it was a sort of portmanteau clue, with “seldom” doing double duty. Pleased to find here that it wasn’t.
    CoD to FELT-TIP PEN for the discredited murderer device.
    I thought the 3’s were particularly tricky today: EMO if you’ve not really heard of it, MUM for reasons stated, ASP because, well, does it “secrete” poison? Just as well it was itself secreted.
  8. Good to see some straight talking from Keriothe. This puzzle is a poor overall offering for all the reasons already given. Obscurity, loose and even incorrect definition (ASP), DBE (Scottish players, Jeeves), some train wreck surface readings (18A).

    Very difficult to solve without a dictionary. One becomes irritated whilst solving it and that surely is not the overall objective?

    1. In what way is “one secreting poison” an incorrect definition? (Malcolm – I’ll get round to registering one day)
        1. Ah, I hadn’t realised you had made up your own definition. Chambers has ‘to form amd emit by means of bodily functions’ which is certainly what an asp does as regards poison.
  9. I liked the nudge to seminary in 26 despite the difficult maser to confirm the right answer: it seems a reasonable technical word. No problems with any of the clues except solving them, in a stop-start 39 minutes. An enjoyable piece of work.
    I would add however a slight unsureness as to the need and indeed function of ‘repetitive’ in 18.

    Edited at 2012-09-25 11:07 am (UTC)

  10. 38m.
    There’s nothing I enjoy more than a puzzle in which the setter manages to create something challenging through wit and creativity, rather than resorting to obscurity.
    I absolutely hated this. For the reasons given by ulaca above the CAISSON/LAMASERY crossing is particularly bad but I thought GILL was also awful. We can all look up obscure meanings of familiar words in Chambers but it doesn’t make for enjoyable clues. Why not just write “measure” and be done with it?
    Harumph.
    1. For the record, I didn’t find any of this even remotely obscure – though admittedly as a northerner, I’m perhaps more likely to be familiar with GILL (meaning ravine) than someone from the south. I should add that none of this knowledge has been acquired simply through solving crosswords; on the other hand it may well have helped that I’ve lived a little longer than you.
  11. 25 fairly snappy minutes which was a relief after an embarrassingly sluggish effort yesterday.

    The Cassons lived 3 doors down from us in London years ago and my father was gleeful when his opinion of the Casson oeuvre was seconded by Private Eye in its annual Casson award for the “worst building of the year”.

    Well-known US army song by Sousa features caissons rolling along.

  12. OK apart from 18, where I recognized Dr Crippen but just couldn’t see what “repetitive” was doing; it could be omitted with a slightly different parsing of the clue.

    LAMASERY is not a word I have met before; I wonder why. Only know ghyll, not GILL, probably because of the famous pub used by walkers and climbers in the Lake District.

    Whenever I see PIPE BAND I think not of Scotland but of Dagenham. (Just a picture; I shan’t inflict the noise of those diuretic instruments on you.)

    Edited at 2012-09-25 07:48 pm (UTC)


  13. Agree with previous contributor that it is hard to see how “relatively” can be “mum”. Say no more. And is IV at 19 down really a foreshortening of inveigh? Also feel the cross-reference between Zola’s masterpiece and “mum” is tenuous. And ‘emo” is a style of popular music? Esoteric, maybe. Aslog of a solve. My congratulations to those who clocked sub-30 minute times.

    Enigma

  14. DNF as I didn’t know ‘cock’, ‘Casson’ or ‘lamasery’. Had to guess ’emo’, ‘gill’ and ‘Isere’, all making for an unsatisfactory hour until I gave up. Unlike others, I actually thought 18ac a good clue – never seen the ‘repetitive at last’ device before, and enjoyed the discredited Crippen.
  15. A bit of a slog. I “finished” in 41 minutes and came here to check my answers. Then discovered that I had E*O at 4d. I’ve never heard of EMO so would have had to google it anyway. I didn’t think a knowledge of Hugn Casson was essential for 20d. There’s been lots of TV programmes about bridge building/oil rigs and suchlike for CAISSON to become familiar. It’s technical but, for me at least, not as obscure as SILLY in the cricketing sense. (Incidentally, many thanks for the explanation in the blog – I always thought it was a silly expression but now, at last, I have an idea what it means.) Ann
  16. About 20 minutes for most, but needed aids to finish at LAMASERY, GILL and to see why SILLY was correct, although I considered some cricketer name Selby also. So altogether about 35 minutes. I didn’t know the same list of things as others (with the addition of SPURGE), and I’d read the recent book about the Crippen case (called Thunderstruck), but had utterly forgotten the name. I got that from the definition. I thought ISERE was good though, although I first wrote in ‘YSERE’, so I guess I can’t argue whether it’s obscure. And if arugula in its masquerading guise as rocket hadn’t been explained to me a few days ago, I wouldn’t have figured out LEAVES either. If I had to pick something I liked, beyond the ISERE, it would be the dishy scientist. Regards.
  17. DNF.

    Defeated by flesh out, emo, cock, caisson and lamasery.

    Most of the rest went in quite quickly.

  18. 7:21 for me. I’d had a perfectly rotten day, spending the morning waiting for a bypass operation, and then being told at lunchtime that it was being postponed (shortage of ICU beds), and finally being sent home (along with at least two other patients) without being given a date for readmission. As I’d spent a bad night beforehand, I was feeling dog-tired, but thought I’d have a bash at this puzzle on the offchance that it might cheer me up.

    It did! This was a delight from start to finish. No problems apart from my usual slowness of wits with a few clues, but even then I now find (from the club timer) that I finished ahead of Magoo. (Woo-hoo!) Thank you, setter.

  19. Well given the circumstances, if this puzzle cheered you up then it was clearly the right puzzle at the right time and I hereby withdraw all complaints. All the best.
    1. Thanks for that generous comment, which I’ve just read after writing a perhaps rather acerbic response to your earlier one. I think this was simply one of those puzzles where being older (and a northerner 🙂 helped.
      1. You’re most welcome. I think it was just one of those puzzles where it helps to know absolutely everything. For obvious reasons, I don’t like puzzles like this, and you do 😉

Comments are closed.