Times 25324 – Cilla Rides Again

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Well, this one is definitely not your average Monday offering. Quirky, outrageous in places – notably 25 ac – but always fun even as it flirted with the borders of acceptability. 80 minutes for me, with a query at my last in, 13 ac. Time will tell if I am right…        

Across

1 HOPPING MAD – ‘He’s not a happy bunny’ means ‘He’s hopping mad’, so this passes the substitution test, even if the part of speech issues may trouble some (especially those who don’t allow question marks carte blanche).  
6 SPAT – double definition.
10 T+ROUSER; Yoda-speak for ‘take for oneself’, a verbal use of trouser unknown to me but  well known to investment bankers, allegedly.
11 BLOSSOM – B(LOSS)OM[b]; ‘wanting’ indicating this is the required or desired answer as well as smoothing the surface.
12 HINDSIGHT – HIN(D+SIGH)T.
13 SPOOL  SPOIL– ‘loops’ reversed; well at least I reckon so, as a spool may ‘have’ material – fish, weed, old boots – dredged up from the water. – as Jack points out, it’s LIPS (borders) with nothing = O inside, all reversed. According to ODO, ‘spoil’ is ‘waste material brought up during the course of an excavation or a dredging or mining operation’.
14 PASH+A – I am too young ever to have had a ‘pash’; experienced in Dorsetshire, perhaps? 
15 DIRTY WORD – DI(RT)Y+WORD; simple when written out like that, but nothing like as simple when you’re convinced ‘right’ = R.  
17 INSULATED – INSUL(A)TED.
20 HAPLY – LP reversed in HAY; the definition is ‘maybe once’. Super surface.
21 SALVO – S[ucceeded] + oval*; cunning combination of anagrist and anagrind.
23 omitted. 
25 LORELEI – mmm….here we have the Scouser’s way of saying ‘lot of’ (AKA lorra, by extension LORE, as pronounced here) + LEI (sounds like ‘lay’ – thanks to Jack again: it’s actually ‘sounds like “lie”‘); homophones indicated by ‘telling’. Rageous out!  
26 LEAGUED – LE(AGUE)D
27 YE+AH; the definition is ‘informal agreement’.
28 CROSS+DRESS [rehearsal] – I once acted the part of Antonio, the human plot-relation app, in Twelfth Night. I had to say ‘Put up your swords!’ but failed spectacularly, as I couldn’t do it in a non-hammy way.   

Down

1 HIT+CH.
2 PROGNOSIS – IS preceded by PRO+G+NOS.
3 ITS A SMALL WORLD – double definition, one astronomical (‘small rocky body orbiting the sun’), the other tongue in cheek (‘Isn’t it a small world – you and me meeting like this?’).   
4 omitted; ask if you’re parking up the wrong tree.
5 ARBITER – A+R[eal]+’bitter’. The homophone passes muster on both sides of the Atlantic, no?  
7 omitted.
8 TUMBLE DRY – TUM+BLE[d]+RY. ‘Cause to get agitated in warm air’, indeed…
9 GOES BY THE BOARD – double definition, and a rather crafty one.
14 PRIESTLEY – PRIES (+yet* with L inserted). 
16 OPPORTUNE – up+pronto+E*.
18 TUBBIER – ‘but’ reversed + BIER; the definition is ’round a bit more’, as in ‘She’s round a bit more than before’, on some asteroid in the galaxy, at any rate. 
19 DOUGLAS – DO+UGL[y]+A+S.
22 omitted.
24 DODOS – DO+DOS (sounds like ‘doze’); the first ‘do’ doesn’t sound like ‘doe’, while the second does, but that doesn’t matter, as rules have been broken not. The definition is pretty weak, notwithstanding, I fear.  

36 comments on “Times 25324 – Cilla Rides Again”

  1. Well this was a turn-up for a Monday! I took 6 minutes to find my first answer and I’d have been in full-blown panic mode if it had been my day to blog. In the end I completed it in 56 minutes and didn’t need to resort to aids although it was a pretty near thing on a couple of occasions when I ground completely to a halt.

    I felt there were a few places where some indication of the outrageous nature of the clues might have been been in order, for example ROUSER = alarm-clock might have been eased by a question mark.

    I don’t know what “wanting to” is doing in 11ac or “having” in 13ac, which btw is SPOIL – LIPS(borders) with 0 inside (so empty) all reversed.

    In 25ac the second part sounds like “lie” (story). In German, with EI/IE it’s always the second vowel that gets pronounced.

    Edited at 2012-11-19 04:14 am (UTC)

  2. 15:14, superfast considering I didn’t know what the hell to make of 13ac or 25ac; LORELEI went in on checkers and definition, SPOIL went in on checkers and a prayer. On the other hand, Ulaca’s omitted 3 of the most eminently omissible clues in some time. We had TROUSER quite recently, which saved me a heap of time. And didn’t we have HOPPING MAD recently as well? On edit: Anonymous Derek reminds me that I had the same problem with 13ac: What’s the definition? ‘dredged-up material’?

    Edited at 2012-11-19 05:31 am (UTC)

  3. DNF due to 13ac. Jackkt’s parsing makes perfect sense, but I don’t see any definition of SPOIL that works.

    Derek

  4. Done on buses and trains sans iPod. But definitely difficult for a Monday. Almost undone by SPOIL and HAPLY in the end. Laughed out loud at LORELEI; both as a fan of Apollinaire’s La Loreley and as an expat Scouser. (Not a combination frequently found, I suspect.)

    Edited at 2012-11-19 09:40 am (UTC)

  5. Somewhere around the 20 minute mark discounting interruptions – I’d have liked a more accurate time for this rather quirky (irritating? amusing?) offering.
    There are setters who would have been happy to leave 8d as a first half CD, so I suppose we should be grateful to have the cryptic second half, but first sight provoked a “What the…” in this solver. Many clues solved in part initially, especially the long ones: I had ITS A ??? (put in your own asterisk, the grid can’t) and GOES ??? for much of the solving time.
    Others needed laborious working out of the cryptic to justify the stab at an answer: HINDSIGHT, PROGNOSIS, DIRTY WORD, PRIESTLEY. I didn’t feel safe until I’d sorted the whole clue out, unlike other occasions when you know the answer’s right and stuff the cryptic.
    I also had several stabs at spelling LORELEI even after I got the Cilla connection. Jack’s reminder of how German spelling and pronunciation is done is timely.
    The two chief amusements – HOPPING MAD and BLUBBERED for joint CoD just for providing light relief.

    Edited at 2012-11-19 09:50 am (UTC)

  6. Quite tough for a Monday, though the last couple of Mondays haven’t been exactly a breeze either. LOI 13A, due to initially assuming I should be taking some letters out of the word for borders rather than putting one in.
  8. 17m, but with LORALEI. I think I knew how to spell it, but Cilla must have been messing with my subconscious.
    Generally I found this a little bit annoying, the setter stretching a bit at times with obscurity (“spoil” and “pash”) and some rather loose definitions, including both halves of 3dn.
    I was also puzzled by 9dn. Is “inspection team” supposed to be “board”?
  9. Well I really enjoyed the 21:59 it took me to complete this. 3d was actually my favourite clue. Although 13 was my LOI I had no doubts about the answer once I’d figured out the cryptic as we (my work) have targets related to the amount of spoil from excavations that ends up in landfill.

    “Pash” has come up before: a quick google search throws up results in 2011, 2010 and 2009.

    The Cilla clue and tubbier were notable among the other clues I particularly enjoyed.

  10. Maybe the best Times puzzles are the ones where, even though definitions and perhaps even aspects of the clue-work can be disguised, you can say ‘yes, that’s fair, and I was fairly had’. Here, things were rather strained in a number of clues as noted by other contributors, and it really slowed me down. About 75 minutes for today.

    Many thanks to blogger and puzzler.

    Chris Gregory.

  11. I apologise for sending this message here but I cannot get it to be accepted on the Forum.

    Has everyone who subscribes to the Crossword Club been informed that there is no longer an annual sub of £24.99 and that the cheapest way now is £17.33 per month? This outrageous and I would welcome any enlightenment on what can only be termed as gross extortion.

    Carole Howell: Fermo, Italy

    1. It takes a bit longer to get results, but an email to:
      custserv@the-times.co.uk
      will generally work.

      I note that the Club main page reads:
      “New memberships
      We are currently making changes to our site so are temporarily unable to accept new members. If you would like to join, click here to send us an e-mail so that we can let you know when we are ready”.

      Hope this doesn’t mean that we are all going to be subject to the monthly payments Carole mentions. If so, it’s the end of my solving and blogging career.

      The only other hint came in a recent exchange with “custserv” where they/it said:

      “we plan to update [our] payment process in the future, so that the renewal date and the payment dates are the same”.

      This to avoid the confusion that has arisen for some subscribers whose renewal and payment dates have got out of sync. But it may foreshadow a move to monthly payments perhaps?

      1. Thank you to everyone for your advice. I will probably spend the whole morning doing battle. Jack – when I tried to submit I kept being informed I had not filled in the message,but I had!

        Carole H

  12. Carole – something’s badly amiss so you were quite right to send up distress rocket. When I have my annual renewal problem I always end up calling the main Times number and getting put through to the crossword subscription dept. and I must admit it always gets sorted out. I’m in New York so I won’t attempt to give you the number because it’s sure to have the wrong preliminary digits, but you can get it off the main Times website.
    I think Jackkt here at tftt is the real expert however.
    1. Not really an expert, I’m afraid, but I have had problems renewing in the past. I think you have given Carole the best advice, to ring up and query it.
  13. A puzzle of two halves for me, the LHS fell in quickly and the RHS struggled and I needed help from crossword solver dot org. Not convinced about ‘WORD’ for message in 15 ac, and never seen HAPLY before. A tricky 30 minutes for a Monday. Liked 18 dn, ’round a bit more’ indeed.
  14. A real Bovril puzzle that I went off right from the start with the wretched hopping bunny and it continued to grate my teeth from there on. My niggles have all previously been highlighted and the pleasures were few and far between.

    I’ve no idea if they had pash in Dorset in the days of my youth since I grew up behind the bicycle sheds in London, where there was pash aplenty – I’m pleased to say.

  15. Just over the hour, with the last 20mins spent on PRIESTLEY, as a result of having BASHA at 14ac. This seems to work just as well, with BASH as in ‘bashed neeps’. Hard work, but very entertaining.
  16. I really enjoyed this puzzle, in particular the laugh-out-loud Lorelei and the excellent Tubbier, Douglas and Dodos. I had one missing at the end – Haply. FOI Garaged. Dirty Word, Tumble Dry and Spoil were my last three.
  17. No time to post due to taking time to watch a TV program in mid-puzzle, but I’d guess it was 45 minutes all told. I think everyone would agree that this was a highly unusual experience. Thanks to ulaca for the helpful link explaining in part what was happening with the Liverpool word in LORELEI, which I, as you might expect, had never heard. (BTW, we pronounce the ‘biter’ in ARBITER the same way as you suggest.) PASHA from definition only, as well. LOI was SPOIL, where I thought of ‘shoal’, but persisted til I understood the wordplay (in the same way Jack did). Regards.
  18. Unlike Jimbo, I thought HOPPING MAD was a good joke, similarly BLUBBERED, and both the long down clues – IT’S A SMALL WORLD and GOES BY THE BOARD – were excellent. But I agree with some of the other niggles mentioned above about clues which, as Ulaca nicely puts it, “flirted with the borders of accceptability”. For example, the redundant “wanting” at 11ac, blatant padding to make for a smoother surface read, and the two outrageous defs at 10ac (“for oneself, take..”= TROUSER, which stretches normal syntax to breaking point, and “alarm-clock”=ROUSER, which, as Jack says, surely warranted a question-mark). But, all in all, an unusual and enjoyable Monday puzzle.
    1. No-one’s answered my question above, so presumably it was just a daft one, but as an enthusiast for GOES BY THE BOARD, can you explain it to me? I understand the “is ignored” bit, and I’m assuming “passes” is “goes by”, but I don’t understand “inspection team” = “board”. Am I just reading it wrong?
      1. I took “board” here to be used in the sense of a group or team of people before whom you might expect to appear to be interviewed (inspected) for, say, a job.

          1. You raise an interesting point, but two things strike me as perhaps being operative here. First, the setter could have used a phrase such as ‘strategy team’ or ‘monitoring team’, which would perhaps be more accurate but would lose much in terms of the smoothly deceptive collocation ‘pass inspection’. Second, since the Board of Directors are typically responsible for internal controls and connected transactions, this provides a sufficient element of ‘inspection’ to justify the descriptor.
            1. If it’s supposed to refer to a board of directors then I’m afraid I think this is an absolutely awful definition. A board runs a company: an inspector doesn’t run anything. I had assumed some sort of official body of inspection, but couldn’t find any evidence of such a thing commonly referred to as “board”.
              1. I’ve certainly heard the term “inspection board” and that was good enough for me when solving. I can’t recall the context though. Something in eductaion perhaps.
                1. I had a similar sort of vague sense, but couldn’t find any evidence that the words “inspection” and “board” are closely associated, in a dictionary or elsewhere. So at best it’s a bit loose.
  19. 9:50 here for a most enjoyable start to the week. Absolutely no complaints about any of the clues.
  20. It’s after midnight so no time for any useful comment. This was a struggle. I got there in the end but was unhappy with the definition at 15a and the ghastly word at 26a. Lots I didn’t really like. 55 minutes. Ann
  21. I thought this was a terrible puzzle with weak definitions and some awful clues with sentences which could only exist in crossword land (5d, 8d, 18d etc). And would anyone anywhere use the words ‘leagued’ or ‘haply’?
    A lurker.

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