Times 25,289

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
9:59 on the Club timer, for a nice, middlingly difficult puzzle, which I solved pretty steadily after a slowish start. I don’t think there was anything too obscure, but as ever, we shall soon see what the hive mind thinks.

I was glad of an easy one, as I’ve continued to be kept away from the daily puzzle, and thus this place, by being relentlessly busy with work. Luckily (for some values of luck), I have manflu a cold today, so I’m not leaving the house, and have time to spare to write this. Here’s hoping I can find time to return to more regular comments in the near future without having to get ill again first…

Across
1 MANICURE – MAN(fellow) 1 CURE (kipper as a verb).
5 EARWIG – double def. One earwigs by eavesdropping, or tapping a phone.
9 CALL SIGN – G(key) in CALLS IN. I worked out correctly that Air Force One is not a particular plane, but the call sign given to whichever plane happens to be carrying POTUS at the time.
10 SPURGE – Power in SURGE. Hmmm. I last blogged exactly two weeks ago and 1 across was SPURGE (with a different clue, of course). I think all of us (especially those who’ve been doing this puzzle for mumblety-mumble years) accept that there will inevitably be some words which recur quite regularly, but a fortnight is a bit too quick, really.
12 IMPRESSIONISM – (REPMISSIONIS)* + Mass.
15 TRAIN – Time + RAIN.
16 RESIDENCE – R.E. + SIDE + Note + C.E.
17 STOPWATCH – TOP in SWATCH. Took me a good while to realise it was a measuring instrument rather than a musical one.
19 ASHEN – AS HEN; a hen is not just a female chicken, but a female lobster, and indeed octopus.
20 WINDOW SHOPPER – WINDOWS,HOPPER with clever use of “browsing” to complete the surface.
22 HARROW – Hard ARROW. If Eton doesn’t fit, this is the next place on the list.
23 PARTISAN – PART IS A boNus.
25 RASHER – (SHARE)* + Right.
26 ADHESIVE – HE in [ADS I’VE].
 
Down
1 MACKINTOSH – (THICKMASON)*.
2 NIL – (IN)rev. + Loch.
3 CISTERN – Cold,I on STERN(hard).
4 REGISTRATION – (IGOINRESTART)*.
6 APPLIED – APP(bit of software) + LIED(invented). The branch of a science which isn’t purely theoretical.
7 WORKMANSHIP – WORKMAN + Small + HIP.
8 GOER – Grand Old E.R. Know what I mean, eh, say no more, nudge nudge?
11 HOUSE HUSBAND – HO(hey) + USE(draw on) HUSBAND(budget). I’m presuming it’s an &lit. i.e. the house husband draws on the (household) budget to run things domestically? Rather than “I do” meaning “I am one who ‘does’, as housekeepers are said to? At first I thought there might be some weak connection with saying “I do” in order to become a husband in the first place, but I don’t think that stands up.
13 PLAY ON WORDS – PLAY ON (use) WORDS (argument, as in “have words”).
14 RE-ENTRANCE – (TENNERCARE)*.
18 WINSOME – WIN(success) + SOME(not a little).
19 APOSTLE – POST in ALE.
21 CHAR – the lesser-spotted triple definition.
24 SKI – SKIlls.

33 comments on “Times 25,289”

  1. Not much to say about this one. Very straightforward 15 gentle minutes with quite a few cliches in the clues. Guessed the lobster and got EARWIG from checkers before seeing the tap=listen in on phone calls connection. The rest was a steady left to right, top to bottom
  2. My iPod timer came in with 9:58 exactly. I was so chuffed to beat the 10:00 after seeing the economical clues coming off the printer.

    There will be those who object to PC=WINDOWS at 20ac. As a Mac user I would too. But now I have to assume that there may be a “Windows|hopper” as such. But what would they look like? (Maybe they should hop into the Mac world?)

    Also refused, at first, to believe that “kipper” could be a verb (1ac). Cf “kebab” not so long ago. Both are OK though.

    Now the ashen-faced mctext (19ac) will open up the world of lobster language. I have learned that a female lobster is indeed a “hen”. And, in the process of finding out, the Goog also tells me that:

    • a lobster weighing less than a pound is a “chicken”.
    • a lobster with no claws is a “pistol”.
    • a “kitchen” is the first chamber of a lobster trap; followed by the “bedroom” or “parlour”.

    Let us hope no setters are reading.

    1. Oh dear, now that’s TWO meanings for the word “kitchen” I have to remember. The other being the percussion section in an orchestra, of course. I don’t think there are any others.
      1. There’s the adjective:

        (of a language) in an uneducated or domestic form: kitchen Swahili.

        US Oxford

  3. 15:43 .. which felt, and was slow. By I was distracted by a seal swimming below the balcony here in Cornwall. We communed for a minute. Turns out seals are useless at crosswords.

    Anyone warming up for the Champs right now consider doing a few paper solves and then posting typing times, just to make Magoo think he’s got something to worry about. But I’m sure everyone taking part is far too honorable for such skulduggery. It was the seal’s idea. They’ve got no scruples, seals.

  4. Pleased to be all correct today after yesterday’s defeat (23/28). Held up at the end by Winsome (for which I thought initially the answer started with S for Success) then Partisan and LOI Apostle.

    Re Char: triple definitions seem extremely rare. No doubt somebody could say when one last appeared and what the regularity is but I’d guess no more often than once every few months. Have we ever had a quadruple definition I wonder?!

  5. 13m today. Nice and easy, and would have been under ten minutes but for APOSTLE and PARTISAN. No idea why they took me so long, particularly as I was immediately on the lookout for this meaning of “pale”.
    I was wondering why CHAR was specifically brown tea, so thanks for putting me straight on that one Tim. And get well soon… or perhaps not.
  6. Having been done for by ‘whisht’ yesterday, I was determined not to be skewered by 10 across today, and my patience was rewarded, even if it took me up to 42 minutes. (On coming here, I found we had SPURGE a fortnight ago, which means I probably need a few days in bed.)

    I had no idea that Air Force One was a call sign rather than an aircraft. In gridiron terms, a game of three quarters, with the NE last to fall.

    1. Thanks Keriothe & Ulaca. From reading the comments for that puzzle I see I solved “See” – but I don’t have any recollection of it!
  8. 25 minutes, so a jump for joy is in order today especially after a very slow start which caused me to abandon trying to find my first answer in the top half and looking for easier pickings elsewhere. Things improved rapidly after that.

    Re 12ac, I wonder if we have ever had an anagram before where 58% of the anagrist was in the correct order to start with!

    SPURGE was a bit fortunate, coming up so recently, like DRESS yesterday.

  9. very enjoyable six minutes. I wonder if there is more spurge these days in cryptics than there are in gardens!
  10. Like keriothe, APOSTLE and PARTISAN took me far too long. Otherwise everything fell into place quite quickly. There have been some rather evocative airline call signs over the years…Clipper for PanAm, Empress for CP Air and Speedbird for BA to name but three.

  11. Today’s simple solve put me in good humour. Why did the lobster blush? A: Because he saw the salad dressing! The male lobster is called a cock, and his teeth are in his stomach.

    Enigma

  12. Some of you guys are VERY fast! I was just under 20 mins for today, which I’d been thinking might be quite good. Wrong. Anyway, AS HEN was one I nabbed prety quickly as it’s always split up like that, but glad to get some easy starts really in all the corners.

    Thanks Tim btw – loved your ‘hive mind’!

    Time to buzz off,

    Yours
    Chris Gregory.

  13. Printed this off last night, pretty exhausted, solved in a daze and saw it was only 8 minutes. Didn’t quite get HOUSE HUSBAND but it couldn’t be anything else with the checking letters.
  14. 20 minutes after a slow NE. I like the Windows hopper. And thanks for the nudge nudge Tim; I might even get converted to the Python. Interesting essential n in 23.
    1. I feel rather the same – and I stayed up to watch the first episode on BBC2 in 1969 – but Eric Idle is always good value.

      Ulaca

  15. I wasted a lot of time looking for special meaning in the down clues where the question marks didn’t indicate the end of a sentence (8d & 14d) but I was looking for difficulties where there were none. Can anyone explain the absence of capitals on “she’d” (8d) and “tenner” (14d). I didn’t enjoy this much. I prefer a more chewy puzzle even if it takes me twice as long. 34 minutes
    1. I didn’t spot this and it’s interesting that it has taken this long for somebody to mention it. Because of the incorrect spacing that precedes the question marks (also in 11dn) I suspect these are typographical errors.

      Edited at 2012-10-09 03:57 pm (UTC)

      1. I assumed these were typos, as there appears no reason for them otherwise. To be fair, these things happen less often in the Club version than they used to, but are hardly unknown, which is why I didn’t think it worthy of comment. Can anybody who does the paper version confirm if they appeared in print as well?
        1. I’ll pick up my paper tomorrow and have a look. Paperboys/girls are a thing of the past around here but the newsagent keeps it for me. It’s raining today and I don’t fancy the walk. Since I’ve been printing out the crossword I don’t feel the same urgency to collect the newspaper as I used to. I decided they were typos – but they did throw me for a while. Ann
        2. Be thankful you don’t do it weeks later in ‘The Australian.’ We have neither dashes or question marks, just incongruent phrases run together in an ungrammatical mess. As well as other typographical errors in the clues – first space is missing on the second line of every multi-line clue.

          Rupert will be first against the wall etc.

  16. 11 min 46 secs.

    My best time since I have been solving the crossword regularly again.

  17. About 20 minutes for a pleasant if not too challenging puzzle. LOI for me was STOPWATCH, since I had PLAY AT WORDS which had to be corrected before I could finish. I thought HOUSE HUSBAND a bit odd, and over here we don’t call a toilet tank a CISTERN, at least as far as I know, but the wordplay wasn’t subject to any other interpretation. Regards.
  18. Pleasant straightforward solve. I liked PLAY ON WORDS. As in the case of quite a few others, it seems, APOSTLE was my LOI. Took me far to long to spot the “pale”= “post” possibility.
  19. 16:32. 21d and 25ac struck me as giveaways, for which, mind you, I was grateful. I started 11d with ‘purse strings’, which I thought was pretty clever, until I noticed the ‘Hey’ problem; not to mention how it conflicts with every crossing clue.Puzzled for the longest time about the parsing of RESIDENCE until I remembered RE, but wasn’t confident about it until now.
  20. Late addition as only just solved this AM after too much work of late. Finally a sub 30 at 27.20 and pleased to see ASHEN was correct even if I didn’t know why! Thanks for blog explaining such obscurities as ever.
  21. Until I came here I thought the key was ‘ign’ and thus that the clue was badly constructed. I now see the error of my ways.

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