Times 25336 No Sweat

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

My third in a row before my colleague Vinyl takes the helm for the three up to Christmas. This one was as simple as they come – the only unknown for overseas solvers is likely to be the Lancashire town that sounds as if Tim Moorey might have named it – with many to be bunged in straight from the literal.  And so to work (I’m reading Pepys at the moment). 21 minutes.

Across

1 VIOL+[orchesrtr]A – viol rather than viola being the instrument.
4 CAPRICCIO – CAPRI+CC+I[ntr]O – more music.
9 CATHEDRAL – C[hew]+A+THE+LARD reversed.
10 BONUS – SUN+OB reversed. 
11 BOBS YOUR UNCLE – not the world’s finest clue, methinks; the literal is ‘everything will be okay’, which means that the rest is referring to the possibility of American comedian Bob Hope being (or rather having been) your uncle. 
14 LILO – sounds like ‘lie low’; one of several good homophonic clues. My last in. 
15 PETROL PUMP – in case you think the setter doesn’t know how to spell ‘petrel’, the ‘picked up’ indicates the homophone. Good clue, which would be even better in Mephistoland, where you’d not get the enumeration.        
18 RAMSBOTTOM – computer memory, of course; I don’t know what it is about a name like this that makes me want to come out with my faux northern accent, with a few ee by gums and hole in ‘t’ roads. Actually, valley of the ram rather than his posterior, which I’m not sure I really wanted to know.
19 SNAG – ‘nags’ with the last letter moving to the front.
21 SCIENCE MUSEUM – niece*+MUSE in SCUM.
24 SKINT – KIN in S[ervan]T; ‘skint’ is slang for the state of being like Greece, Spain, Portugal, UK(?), USA(?), etc. ‘Skint’ itself transmogrifies in Cockney Rhyming Slang to ‘Boracic lint’ (a type of medical dressing), generally rendered as ‘brassic’.   
25 BEEKEEPER – I don’t quite see how ‘has-been’ translates to BEEKEEPER, as he keeps or ‘has’ only part of ‘been’ not the whole thing. Maybe I’m missing something. The crypticky second part of the clue hands you the answer anyway. 
27 DIFFERENT – DIE+F+F+RENT; die [for] as in long [for].
28 PIXIE – XI in PIE. Unhealthy food (question mark) as in ‘Who ate all the pies?’, as in them as you get in Ramsbottom with loads of MSG, additives, saturated fats, etc – not forgetting the mushy peas.
 
Down

1 VOCABULARY – V[ide]+OC(AB)ULAR+[injur]Y; hands up anyone who worked all that out during solve.
2 omitted
3 AYE AYE – ‘cos ‘Oratio ‘ad one eye you see, sir!    
4 CORPULENT – COR+[o]PULENT.
5 PILAU – LIP reversed + AU. My skittish side wanted to write in ‘dilau’ but I was having naan of it. 
6 IMBECILE – LICE reversed in [t]IMBE[r].
7 CONSEQUENCE – CON+SE(QUENC[h])E; a blacksmith quenches hot iron by plunging it into water.
8 OUSE – O[f] USE; a river in nearly every part of England, it would seem.
12 BULL MASTIFF – MA+STIFF following BULL.
13 UP A GUM TREE – the literal is ‘in difficulty’, the devious wordplay UP (raised) + A (alarm, initially) + GUM (mug reversed, or being repelled) + TREE.
16 ROOSEVELT – ROO+SEVE+L[ates]T, Seve being the golfer from Cantabria, Severiano Ballesteros, who died earlier this year.
17 ABSINTHE – AB(salt)+S[ucceeded]+IN+THE; our third nautical down clue. Was the setter a member of a navy band with a ram as a mascot, I wonder?
20 TUNE UP – T(UNE)UP. More rams… 
22 NOBLE – NO(isn’t he?’)+B[ringing]+L[aughter]+E[verywhere]; I flirted with NO for nitric oxide until I realised I was barking up the wrong 13. The six (or seven, depending who you listen to) noble gases are found in group 18 of the periodic table. I’m sure they could be named in parts of Barsetshire. The literal is He, the chemical symbol for Helium (thanks to docjd).
23 omitted
26 POX – OP reversed + X.

27 comments on “Times 25336 No Sweat”

  1. Not a lot of trouble, except a bit of pondering over “boy”=COR in 4dn and “court”=SEE in 7dn: both perfectly good of course. Very much enjoyed the “long division” L&S in 27ac.

    Ulaca: I think “Has-been” in 25ac is just a word/phrase that happens to “keep” (include) BEE; hence BEE-keeper??

    On edit: Vinyl probably has it better (below).

    Edited at 2012-12-03 02:24 am (UTC)

  2. Well, no sooner do we get a word for it than I suddenly get a plague of examples. 1dn in my Friday blog must have set the trend, for I can’t remember ever being so baffled by a clue on my watch before. Then today I was unable to parse 7dn, 8dn, 13dn, 22dn and 25ac correctly.

    At 25 I had the same explanation as Mct, but I now agree with him that vinyl1’s version must be the right one. I’d also gone for the Nitrous Oxide at 22.I didn’t know QUENCH = cool and SEE for court is certainly tricky if not downright devious!

    My only comfort is that, unlike ulaca, I did manage to parse VOCABULARY during the solve (just to be on the safe side) although it took me a while which partially explains my 38 minute solving time for a puzzle where the grid itself was relatively easy to fill.

    Edited at 2012-12-03 06:06 am (UTC)

    1. Once I saw the sailor was safely on board, I moved on as I sensed a time was on. Incidentally, nitrous oxide (laughing gas) is N2O. This is one area of chemistry where I feel reasonably confident, as I need to write/edit a fair amount of transport-related stuff, where we typically stick with ‘nitrogen oxides’ for the pollutant.

      Edited at 2012-12-03 06:54 am (UTC)

  4. Well I found this quite testing. 41 minutes. I’m sure mctext’s first thought about hasbeen is right, a neat definition; can’t see the bee-n plural featuring though some crosswords allow tree-n. Out of sorts with this one, took all the wrong turnings, but as always good to fall over the line.
  5. 40 minutes. Can’t say I found it that easy, but thought it was a good puzzle nonetheless.

    Just one comment for the setter re 28: there’s nowt unhealthy about my rabbit pies, apart from the odd bit of lead shot.

    1. When I was with my brother’s in-laws in Orkney, I shot a couple of rabbits and the lady of the house cooked rabbit pie for lunch, which included two builders who were repairing the pier. I was sworn to secrecy by the cook, who told me that Orcadians would never eat rabbit because of myxomatosis. And so it was that the locals came back for second helpings of ‘chicken pie’.
    2. I have to say that when I got museum, I thought V&A, British and Natural History before I converged on Science with the help of the checkers. I’ve just Googled its picture and don’t think I’ve ever seen it before – and I did live near London for 28 years!

      Edited at 2012-12-04 01:28 am (UTC)

  7. 14:38 for an enjoyable Monday puzzle.

    Thsnks for the explanations for beekeeper, corpulent and consequence.

    Even with NIECE staring me in the face I still tried out BRITISH some time before moving on to SCIENCE.

    Beekeeper fitted in quite nicely with there being several Bs dotted around. Deliberate perhaps?

  8. A stroll in the park after labouring round a sodden, muddy golf course – the backs of my legs are killing me!

    Same queries as everybody else. Took the “bee” to be hidden in “has-been” – the alternative is completely out of character for this puzzle. Also raised an eyebrow at “landmark” for Science Musem, which I have visited many times and can recommend.

    1. Both can be expressions of amazement. “Boy, that was good!” or “Cor, that was good!”
  10. My usual hour plus a little and for me (as a non-UK person in several senses) with many difficulties (but of course RAMSBOTTOM just has to be a British place name, even if one has never heard of it). My last in was OUSE, after going through the alphabet and trying to fit Fs in until I discovered OF USE. SCIENCE MUSEUM also took a while because although I recognized the SCIENCE half, I kept trying to fit QUEENS in on the right. And for the BEEKEEPER I have the same question as everyone else. Now I shall celebrate finishing the puzzle by going off to eat a napple and telling my cat to avaunt himself (as I actually often do).
  11. 13:50. Straightforward puzzle, with quite a lot going in on definition, leaving the rather convoluted wordplay for later.
    I thought BEEKEEPER was just down to the fact that the word “bee” is in “has-been”: as others have said “been” seems a bit too obscure.
  12. About 20 minutes for this easy one, BUT(!), I was totally undone by 8D. I entered OISE, a reduction of ‘noise’, because I couldn’t see where to fit in the ‘f’. That’s after having no real problems with the more UK-centric ones. So I get the dunce’s cap today. Regards.
  13. Plodded through in 25 minutes, didn’t parse it all but correct on defs and checkers. Bob’s your uncle indeed. Still don’t understand BEEKEEPER logic. Mrs K helped by confirming Ramsbottom is a beauty spot in Lancashire. LILO made me smile.
  14. I’m still not sure about the explanation for the NO of NOBLE in 22dn.
    Is the following too far-fetched?:
    “isn’t he – the” = “is not he” minus “the”. NOT HE without THE is NO.
    1. The use of the dash as a minus sign is something I’m sure we must look out for, and older hands than I will know if it has occurred before. Indirect clueing of the type you posit is no longer permitted in the Times cryptic. As it happens, though quite irrelevantly under the circumstances, for me it is broken on the rock of the fact that the full form of ‘isn’t he’ would be ‘is he not’ rather than ‘is not he’.
    2. The explanation is a bit simpler I think. In these phrases:
      > He is such a gas, isn’t he?
      > He is such a gas, no?
      “Isn’t he” and “no” are synonymous.
  15. 11:03 for me. Like others I wasn’t entirely convinced of the SCIENCE MUSEUM as a London landmark, and I took “bee” to be part of “has-been”.
  16. ulaca and keriothe
    Many thanks for your helpful replies. Of course I could kick myself today!
    Stronon

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