Times 25326: A most unattractive old thing

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 21:08

Hope this is the last Championship puzzle I have to blog for a while. Didn’t find this terribly hard. No omissions as the puzzle’s been around in the public domain for quite a while now. Would prefer a fresh number rather than having to blog a now rather old one.

[Note time of posting. 8:00 WST = 12:00 UTC. Is this now a record?]

Across
 1 INDICIA. {Clive of} INDIA, inc CI (101). Signs in general; or, in particular, the bulk-mail stamp substitutes that nearly did for philately.
 5 ALCOCK. L{eft} inside A,COCK. Cock: to turn up or to one side. I shall refrain from jokes about Sammy Davis Jr.
 8 DISPLEASE. DISEASE (complaint) inc P{ai}L. Def: put out.
 9 SLING. Two meanings.
11 TEENY. Two meanings.
12 COSTA RICA. COST (price paid), A{f}RICA.
13 RADIATOR. Two meanings.
15 BIFFED. Reverse FIB (story), FE{u}D.
17 IN TOTO. IN (wearing), TO{ron}TO. Where Dorothy hid her stash.
19 COSECANT. C{l}O{i}S{t}E{r}, CAN’T.
22 APPALOOSA. APPAL (dismay), O{ver} x 2, reverse AS (when).
23 TITAN. IT (the very thing) inside TAN (colour).
24 END UP. {s}END-UP.
25 TOSCANINI. TOSCA; then NI{obe} loses her honour (OBE) twice.
26 GYPSUM. GP (doctor) inc Y; SUM (amount).
27 SEA SLUG. S{pac}E, A, SLUG (bullet).
Down
 1 INDETERMINATE. 1, anagram of END, TERMINATE (end).
 2 DI’S,TEND. Def: balloon.
 3 COLEY. COLE (Porter); {railwa}Y.
 4 AT ANCHOR. Sounds like ‘a tanker’.
 5 AVERSE. AVERS (states), {agre}E.
 6 CAST ASIDE. Anagram: ass{o}ciated.
 7 CAITIFF. CAI{n}, TIFF (disagreement).
10 GRAND,STANDING.
14 ANTELOPES. Anagram: opens late.
16 MOLASSES. {g}OL{d} inside MASSES.
18 TEPIDLY. Anagram: {w}ild type.
20 ANTHILL. AN,TH{r}ILL.
21 BOTTOM. Reverse: MOTTO (saw), B{achelor}.
23 TRA-LA. Included in ‘AusTRALAsia’. (See title).

41 comments on “Times 25326: A most unattractive old thing”

  1. Should have completed within 30 minutes but got delayed by a couple of unknowns and answers crossing them, namely CAITIFF and APPALOOSA. Also I can never remember the less common functions so COSECANT took ages to come to mind. A lot of it was very straightforward though. I hadn’t seen this one before but I sympathise with those that had, and the duty blogger in particular. Didn’t the Club used to give us an archive puzzle as a bonus on these occasions?

    Edited at 2012-11-21 01:13 am (UTC)

  2. Well, what will the Times crossword editor serve up next? After Mr Quirky and Mr Meoldcock, today we get Mr Bowler-Brolly, as fine an example of a traditional puzzle as you could hope for. Very few of the answers could be entered without working out the wordplay (as I found to my cost when chucking in ‘timidly’ at 18dn) or without a sprinkling of checkers, and the unknowns/unfamiliars (for me, INDICIA, COSECANT, APPALOOSIA and CAITIFF) were all eminently gettable from the wordplay.

    COD to my last in BOTTOM ahead of the empty pail and the creature from outer space.

  3. 33:48, well over 10′ of that devoted to staring at the screen trying to make 6d and 19ac appear, after finally guessing that there was an Alcock aviator. DNK Alcock, of course, or COLEY, or INDICIA (and wasted time by throwing in ‘indices’). COD to TOSCANINI, with SEA SLUG a runner-up. Good fun, which it wouldn’t have been if I’d been there.
  4. 19m. I found most of this very straightforward, but got bogged down in the SE corner for no reason I can see now. I didn’t realise this was a championship puzzle (the iPad doesn’t tell you) but I did notice that it was rather fine.
    I saw my first ever live performance of Twelfth Night last night, which will be helpful for future crosswords. Must get to a production of The Merchant of Venice.
    1. I know it’s a dumb question, but how do you get the keyboard to come up on the iPad after accessing a puzzle? We borrowed one recently and I had a go but came up short.
      1. Not a dumb question at all. I have tried too but as far as I can tell the club site doesn’t work with iPads, which is a ridiculous state if affairs. I have a subscription to the paper and download the whole thing on the Times app.
    2. >I saw my first ever live performance of Twelfth Night last night,
      >which will be helpful for future crosswords.

      And for past ones. For instance, you should now be in a position to solve this clue from the 1977 London B Regional Final – which, I’m afraid to say, scuppered my chances that year: “Vice held dagger of this (4)”.

      1. Er… perhaps I wasn’t listening hard enough. No, I blame Mark Rylance.

        Edited at 2012-11-22 12:37 am (UTC)

        1. You’d have had listen very hard to catch it. I’ll probably include the answer in a future blog entry (see “Other crossword sites” alongside) as an illustration of the sort of clue that simply wouldn’t occur nowadays. (Since this week is turning out to be every bit as exhausting as I’d feared, my blog is almost certain to remain on hold this coming Sunday, but I’m hoping to resume it on the following Sunday.)
  5. 29 minutes, after stuttering at the end on tra-la of all clues. I liked this, a little demanding, not too quirky. I’d recommend ‘As You Like It’ after ’12th Night’ keriothe, including the film where they’re all on bicycles, but maybe you’re familiar with it already. Whatever you do, don’t watch the Jonathan Miller film of ‘Merchant’ – induces claustrophobia.
    1. I’m more familiar with As You Like It, although I haven’t seen it for about 20 years. My other blind spot is Othello.
    1. Carole, as mentioned on that thread I have now started a discussion about this in the General club forum and I would suggest you post full details of your circumstances there and field any comments and suggestions that other posters make. I put up the original info you provided but then people came back with comments that I was unable to take any further.

      Edited at 2012-11-21 08:59 am (UTC)

      1. Jack: is it not strange that several of us go to some lengths on this site and elsewhere to deal with the anonymous contributor’s problems and yet that person does not respond to us here?

        (Maybe I’m just grumpy today: major dental extraction plus a pile of exam papers to mark.)

        1. Yes, I can’t quite work out what’s going on here. She did come back a couple of times on the original thread and someone called Carole (presumably the same person) has since made two abortive postings on the thread I started in the forum containing nothing but a quote from somebody else’s contribution. If there’s a genuine problem I don’t understand why the circumstances can’t be expressed clearly and concisely so that it can be dealt with. I think I might duck out of this one now, although I would be interested to find out about any changes for when my sub runs out in March 2014. But hopefully all will have become clear by then! Sorry you are feeling a bit down today.

          Edited at 2012-11-21 11:44 am (UTC)

  6. High quality but somehow uninspiring puzzle. It was a question of working through paying close attention to wordplay – right up my street and finished in 20 minutes but doubt I’d have made that time in a competition.

    I wonder, will someday somebody not have heard of Neil Armstrong? John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew the first transatlantic crossing just after WW1 – a fantastic achievement at the time

    1. You just reminded me of an anecdote I read years ago in the SF Chronicle (Herb Caen’s column, so of course it has to be true): A middle-aged man was standing in line to see Oliver Stone’s “JFK”, and asked his companion the inevitable question, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” At which the teenage boy in front of him turned around angrily and said, “Thanks a lot! Now you’ve spoiled the ending!”
    2. Fickle fame. Yes it’s strange how Alcock and Brown have faded whereas Lindbergh some years later stole their thunder. 24 minutes so I’m surely out of the running. As if.
    3. I think that’s unlikely. After Neil Armstrong’s death in August I heard a commentator on the radio say that the first moon landing was the one event in the 20th Century that people would remember in the 30th.
        1. Unspammed. It’s definitely the “a href”-type links from unpaid accounts that are sending messages to spam. (See keithdoyle’s post below, unspammed by Jack.)
  7. Had to check up on meaning of CAITIFF and had MORASSES until found it was not a word and corrected things. Otherwise a fine and enjoyable puzzle in 40 minutes including various small interruptions. My CoDs COSECANT and TOSCANINI.
    I like the JFK story, thanks kevingregg.
  8. Top-quality puzzle – which is also to say it was on my wavelength. Just under the hour for me. The good stuff has already been mentioned above. The potential definitional obscurities were accessible by close attention to the wordplay, always a mark of a good cryptic. Nice job, setter.
  9. Found this considerably harder than the first puzzle in this prelim, having to put in CAITIFF on wordplay alone and then staring at 19A for several minutes with tolerant, covenant, and forecast all refusing to either fit the clue or leave my brain.
  10. Just for fun, and because I couldn’t really remember any of the answers, I did this again today,and found it probably took longer than it did in the competition. There must be a zone one enters where the puzzle only exists in the moment of solving.
    I DID remember stumbling over APPALOOSA, entering CAITIFF simply because I knew it was a word but not how it connected to cur, and that BIFFED was my last in because I couldn’t be sure until I had worked out the wordplay.
    Alcock and Brown are very much amongst my heroes: the image of Brown (I think) climbing out onto the wing to chip off the accumulating ice lives long in a Boys Own memory. I suspect that flying their Vickers Vimy was a much more difficult feat than it appeared on flight simulator, plus I could crash into the sea and not get wet.
    1. Sir Arthur Whitten Brown spent the last 30 odd years of his life in a flat about 500yds up the road from where I now live. There seems to be no proper memorial to him here in Swansea – only a plaque on the wall of the flat, and even that was erected by the local flying club not the council. I think Lindberg stole the honours because he was American and they seem to do heroes better than we do! Ann
  11. DNF today with Toscanini (thanks mctext for explaining the Ni(obe) Ni(obe) wordplay), Molasses and Cosecant all missing in the SE corner. Caitiff from wordplay – an unlikely looking word.

    Made things difficult for myself by putting 24a End Up in at 23a and then trying to make the Atlas clue fit 24a E?D?P!! All told, a bit of a struggle and not my best performance…

  12. 21:29 after a very fast start. After that every clue seemed to take an age to work out regardless of the addition of additional checkers. Gypsum, bottom, Toscanini (at least the Tosca part), titan, grandstanding, caitiff and biffed were notable among those that vexed me.

    I’m surprised at all the problems with cosecant. I can still remember all the relevant opposite/adjacent/hypoteneuse combinations from ‘O’ Level maths mnemonics.

    Based on the 2 puzzles so far I still think I’d have preferred to have been in prelim B.

  13. I do the puzzle on an iPod every day. To enter an answer, slide your finger across the location of an answer in the grid (or double tap a written clue). The bottom third of your screen now becomes a keyboard. The dark x symbol top right allows you to make corrections (or jump to the end of the entry and space back – useful for entering part solutions like …ing at the end.
    Also, as a recently retired maths teacher, cosecant seemed obvious to me.
  14. Sorry – just realised you are solving the puzzle in the Crossword Club – I do it using the Times app on my iPod, so my (probably obvious) set of instructions, as well as being somewhat patronising (sorry) probably won’t work.
  15. This was fun. Took exactly 30 minutes but the last 6 were spent on the BOTTOM/GYPSUM crossing. They look obvious in retrospect. I originally had INDICIES because I thought the INDIES could also go with Clive. It was only after struggling with 4d, where I was looking for a 2 letter word beginning with S, that I revisited 1a and noticed the spelling mistake. We had APPALOOSA a while back and I had an interesting discussion here with other people who had read the book and seen the film and appreciated the oevre of Robert B Parker. Good to see ALCOCK honoured. Never heard of COSECANT but the cryptic gave a lot of help. Ann
  16. Took about 40 minutes, and I thought it a good puzzle. LOI was COSECANT after finally realizing the ‘can’t’ was part of the wordplay, not the definition. Needed wordplay to solve the unfamiliar CAITIFF, BIFFED, COLEY, and (sorry, Jimbo) ALCOCK. A very well put together puzzle, I thought. Regards.
  17. I made the mistake of tackling the three puzzles from the secondary preliminary when I was already a bit tired, and I could feel myself flagging by the time I’d finished the first puzzle. I should have waltzed through this one – as ulaca says, it’s “as fine an example of a traditional puzzle as you could hope for” – but in circumstances struggled to a miserable 10:40.

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