Times 25288

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic

A rather more challenging Monday puzzle, highlights of which were an excellent cryptic clue (9) and a weird Gaelic word which did for me (21). 35 minutes for all bar these two, a few more to get the long down and then resort to aids when I couldn’t quite believe that the unknown one could be what it turned out  to be.

If anyone has not tried Jumbo 1000, it’s not your average jumbo. Top notch, in fact, with exactly the right amount of theminess.

Across

1 MOPPET – MOP+PET; cross between a poppet and a muppet?
4 EMERSION – EMERS(I)ON
10 SEMICOLON – SE (Kent) + MI COL (intelligence officer) + ON; definition is stop. A kind of synecdoche as one of the home counties stands for the whole.
11 DRESS – double definition; it’s October and dress meaning ‘come into military line’ is already starting to take on a chestnutty flavour. 
12 ERA – ‘are’ reversed
13 ELABORATION – ELA(A ROB reversed)TION; the definition is ‘having added detail’, which is a gerund and therefore nouny enough for many, if not all, I suspect.
14 MOWGLI – MOW + GLI[b]
16 ENTREES – [stor]E + N[ew] + TREES; the question mark will save DBE-phobes from tearing out their remaining hair. 
19 FIRE+DOG – a ‘great’, AKA grate, support. If you think this is weak, all I say is, have a hearth…
20 MAYHEM – no need for the wordplay here if you have the checkers; for the record, it’s AY+HE in M.M. Governors as well as ambassadors are HEs apparently.
22 ORTHODONTIC – cordintooth*
25 omitted
26 EDITH – hidden; the Sitwells are one of Crosswordland’s most eminent families, even if youngest sibling Sacheverell rarely gets a look in.
27 EDELWEISS – WE inside DELIS all inside ES; I hope thou ‘art’ able to cotton on to the French bit.
28 TIGERISH – E in is+right*; hands up anyone else who was working around the Tamil insurgents? No, I thought not.
29 ADVENT – A(DV)ENT; there are other departments in most hospitals besides the ENT, but not always in Crosswordland.

Down

1 MUSSEL – LESS & UM reversed.
2 POMP+A+DOUR – bouffant hairdo favoured by among others Marie Antoinette when she still had a head and Elvis.
3 EMCEE – E[nglish] + ME around CE; verbal use of ’emcee’.
5 MIND OVER MATTER – MIND (object to) + MATTER (question) about OVER (past).
6 RADIANTLY – (RA + tinylad)*
7 ICENI – I + (IN+CE reversed)
8 NOSINESS – NO[i]SINESS; the most famous bearer of this epithet may or may not have been Aloysius but he was definitively ‘nosey’.
9 FLOATING VOTERS – cryptic clue and a jolly good one.
15 GODMOTHER – GO (correspond=match) + DM (Deutsche Mark) + OTHER.
17 EXECUTIVE – EX + E + CUTI(V[eal])E.
18 AFFOREST – offers+at*
21 WHISHT – WHIS(H)T; had nae the courage of my convictions to put this in.
23 omitted – this one you should have been inking out.
24 CAWED – sounds like chord; I wasted time muttering about yet another clue where I had to arrange a random selection of letters from A to G, but the setter, as so often, had the last laugh. 

38 comments on “Times 25288”

  1. No idea why, but I was left with 1ac and 1dn at the end and couldn’t get there without a break. Seems odd in retrospect; but it can happen to us all.

    Have to disagree on at least two points: the cryptic def at 9dn is terrible and the question-mark at 16ac will not save this quite hairy DBE-phobe from complaining. Lastly: not too happy with “remaining”=OTHER at 15dn.

    Grouch over … the other (remaining?) bits were fine and a welcome change from the usual Monday fare.

    On edit and re-read of the blog: took the “having” at 13ac as a linkword and the def as “added detail”.

    Edited at 2012-10-08 03:14 am (UTC)

  2. 30:54; no doubt it would have been a couple of minutes faster if I actually thought that CAWED sounds like ‘cored’. As it was, I toyed with ‘cored’ (now, THAT’s a homophone for you), wondering if it was Britslang for ‘died’. But most of the wasted time was with the 1’s, where in desperation I had OYSTER for a while; I didn’t actually twig to the ‘over’ in the clue until I’d submitted. Ironically, I threw in ICENI at 3d (‘I’, ‘church’, worry about the rest later); getting 7d was fairly strong evidence that 3d was wrong. At least I recognized ‘French art’ for what it was.
  3. 47 minutes, delayed past the half-hour by a couple in the NW including the long cryptic, and three in the SW. I worked out WHISHT from the wordplay and could hardly believe my eyes when I checked and found it in the dictionary.

    I’ve no problems whatsoever with OTHER for remaining. It’s in Collins with the example “I’ll read the other sections of the paper later”.

    I took ages to get started and then progress was slow but mostly steady though I did reach the stage a couple of times when I wondered if I would finish without resorting to aids.

    One of my blogs from last year was spammed incessantly yesterday by “jokes” in cyrillic script. In the end I put a freeze on further contributions to put a stop to it.

    Edited at 2012-10-08 06:07 am (UTC)

    1. I’m a bit surprised at the number of people unfamiliar with ‘whisht’; somehow or other, it’s in my head as a cliché Scottishism, along with ‘och, aye’ and ‘hoot, mon’.
    2. How did you discover the spam? I assume you didn’t sift through loads of back posts one by one?
      1. No, I’m not quite as sad as that…yet! When I have created a blog I get email notification every time somebody adds a comment. I assume this can be controlled by changing one’s LJ settings but I’m still using whatever defaults were already in place. I find it quite useful in the normal course of events provided one doesn’t mind the deluge of notifications on blogging days.

        Edited at 2012-10-08 07:25 am (UTC)

        1. Thanks for that info. I knew not about the email notification option. But I’m not sure I could handle 30-50 emails on a blogging day. As the great Eric Bogle writes: surely there must be something better (in the way of spam detection). Maybe just close everything off after 24 hours from when Tony has posted?
          1. I wouldn’t want that because I’ve known several contributors over the years brought into the fold through commenting on out-of-date puzzles.
            1. That was me several years ago now! Maybe the option to close off anon posts after a certain time? If anyone’s keen (as I was then) it’s not hard to get an LJ account and, thus, become account-able. (Even if you do end up later with a stupid username!)
              1. No more stupid than mine! Everything I tried had been taken so I ended up bunging in rubbish until I found something that hadn’t. I looked into changing it later but they don’t make it easy, unless things have been improved in a subsequent update that I don’t know about.

                Edited at 2012-10-08 08:41 am (UTC)

                  1. Thanks for this. It’s useful to know but as long as I’m blogging TFTT I’ll leave things as they are. If I’d known this back at the start I’d have done something about it.
          2. email notifications is not as big a problem as all that Alec, as Gmail helpfully concatenates them, (mostly) into a thread (assuming you have gmail set that way)
          3. there is also the advantage that you can delete a spam post direct from the email without having to go to livejournal at all..
            Not to mention that you do occasionally get real, readworthy comments weeks or months after the original post, which otherwise I would never see..

            Edited at 2012-10-09 11:53 am (UTC)

  4. Delighted to see whisht once it had settled in. Maybe from attempting to read Walter Scott a long time ago; or could it have been what was her name? Mary? on Dr Finlay’s Casebook. I’m with mctext on 9 I’m afraid; the surface hardly inspires and the cross bleats at one to make it out. There’s a novel I read once in which a hapless student translates firedog as chien de feu in a French exam, but I can’t remember its name. 25 minutes.

    Edited at 2012-10-08 07:56 am (UTC)

        1. Janet: I think I’ve got heartburn doctor.
          Dr Cameron: Dinna be silly Janet and take yr tit out of the porridge.
  5. A steady 20 minute start to the week with only a bit of teeth grinding at 16A DBE followed immediately by “boxer say” in 19A. Usual thoughts on those cryptic definition clues that can only be solved from checkers and generate a huge groan as the proverbial penny drops. Interesting to see DRESS reappear so soon – watch out for PINK tomorrow!

    Forgot to add for bar crossword solvers, this week’s AZED is good value

    Edited at 2012-10-08 08:40 am (UTC)

  6. From the Lampton worm
    Whisht! Lads, haad yor gobs,
    An Aa’ll tell ye’s aall an aaful story
    Whisht! Lads, haad yor gobs,
    An’ Aa’ll tell ye ‘boot the worm.
  7. 45.04 and another here who couldn’t get 1a and 1d for some time. I also took about 10 mins to get started with 24d my FOI. No standout clue for me today.
  8. 26m. Quite tricky for a Monday. Couldn’t quite believe WHISHT but put it in anyway. Thought the CD for FLOATING VOTERS a bit groan-worthy. Very unsure about “great-sounding support”. Is that sort of thing even allowed?
    Having said all that, I enjoyed this.
  9. This type of hidden definition is used by some of the Guardian setters from time to time, but I don’t remember seeing it used too often by Times setters.

    Andy B.

  10. Well I must say it grates on me. In addition I found THAT cryptic definition extremely painful, but Monday was not without its quanta of joy.

    Many thanks for an amusing blog and commentary today.

    Cheers
    Chris Gregory.

  11. Done in by FLOATING VOTERS, a term I had not heard of, and once I figured it was a cryptic definition (though there was a likely set of letters for an anagram, there was no L), I kind of lost interest. I went for FLOATING JOKERS after thinking of CLEANING TOWELS, GLEANING VOWELS and BLOATING HOMERS. Oh well, maybe tomorrow
  12. Finally getting back to this blog after a summer away. (Still a puzzle behind, but it’s a start!)

    I found it all pretty easy but was stuck at the end with the SEMICOLON / FLOATING VOTERS cross. I do believe that SEMICOLON was one of those British clues I’m fated to never get. The only part of the charades I got was “cricket side” = ON. I must try to remember ‘Kent’ = SE in the future. Are there other such place names I should be on the lookout for?

    The other one I missed was WHISHT. I understood the wordplay and wrote it down, then rejected it as not looking like an English word. Looks like I was wrong!

    1. As you can imagine, there is much debate over what exactly constitutes the ‘home counties’, which basically may be taken to mean counties encircling London. The phrase itself is, if not identical with, then certainly similar to the ‘south east’.

      The major contenders from the south-east (Kent) clockwise are: Surrey, Berkshire (Berks*), Buckinghamshire (Bucks), Hertfordshire (Herts) and Essex. It should be noted that Middlesex exists in a kind of limbo, although the county council was abolished some years ago.

      * abbreviations in brackets

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