Times 25357 – Nuts and Bolts

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I thought this was going to be an easy one as I raced away with the long anagrams at 4 and 11 and the partial one at 12 but my confidence was soon dented and I struggled with a word or two in every quarter, the NW being the most troublesome. In the end I needed 52 minutes which was rather on the slow side. There were no unknown words today and only a couple of meanings to look up before starting on the blog. I don’t expect to be around to deal with matters arising after mid-morning UK time as my Christmas Day has been moved to the 28th this year.

Across
1 BARBARY APEbusY inside BARBARA, PE (gym)
6 CAST – Double definition. Plaster casts are called ‘pots’ apparently.
8 MAINMAST – MA,IN,MAST. I wasn’t familiar with MAST as pig-feed. It’s the fruits of various woodland trees such as chestnuts.
9 TORERO – TORE (lacerated) + OR reversed.
10 LUSH – Double definition.
11 OCEAN LINER – Anagram of IN CAERLEON.
12 BANGALORE – Anagram of ALONG inside BARE (exposed).
14 BOULT – U (Uranium) inside BOLT (lightning). This is Sir Adrian Boult 1889-1983. I saw him conduct a number of times.
17 EAGLE – Hidden
19 OPPOSABLE – OPPO (friend), SABLE (black).
22 RAGAMUFFIN – A, MUFF (mistake) inside RAGINg (going off the deep end).
23 PLEA – Pastor, LEA.
24 EDDIEStEDDIES (bears).
25 HOT WATER – The definition is simply ‘trouble’ but the other angle is that HOT WATER is what one has inside a copper boiler.
26 ANTEdANTE
27 DUTCH BARNS – DUTCH (wife in slang) BAiRNS (kids).
Down
1 BUMBLEBEE – BUMBLE (the Beadle in Oliver Twist), BEEn.
2 REINS IN – Anagram of SINNER + I (current).
3 READ-ONLY – ADd-ON (accessory) inside RELY (bank). Great clue.
4 AT THE DROP OF A HAT – Anagram of POTATO FATHER HAD. Delightful memories of Flanders and Swann.
5 EXTANTsEXTANT (navigator’s aid)
6 CARNIVORA – CAR (wheels) then IV (four) inside NO (number), Right, Answer.
7 SURREAL – SURREy (county), cALl.
13 GALVANISE – VAN (vehicle), I’S, all inside GALE (air force).
15 THESAURUS – ESAU (Rebecca’s son – Genesis) inside anagram of RUTH’S. There’s a tongue-twister about Esau sitting on a see-saw.
16 TOP-NOTCH – TOP (spinner), NOTCH (nick). The definition is A1.
18 ABANDON – A,BAND,ON
20 BOLSTER – S (seconds) inside BOLTER (runaway). I’m reminded of the character in ‘The Pursuit of Love’ who is referred to throughout as ‘The Bolter’.
21 BUSSED – Sounds like ‘bust’

40 comments on “Times 25357 – Nuts and Bolts”

  1. Left-hand side quick; right slow. Had no ideas about pots and casts and thought it had something to do with pottery. Had no real insight into how 25ac worked; despite having used a copper in this sense. Couple of nice things to see in this puzzle:

    — Caerleon (11ac), home to the (to English eyes) vowelless Ffwrrwm. Honest. Will it ever appear in the Times?

    — Ragamuffin (22ac) which was taking second place in the Sydney to Hobart as I was solving.

    Is there an extra “in” in 13dn?

    Edited at 2012-12-28 04:29 am (UTC)

    1. Not sure about an extra “in”. The first is needed for enclosure of course and I suppose the force of a gale is “in (the) air” and that might account for the other. But it would work equally well without the second. Or perhaps it’s a misprint for “an” which would also work.
      1. Or maybe it should have been “brought in by in-air force”? Sounds rough though; and I agree, the second “in” isn’t really needed, especially as it stuffs the surface syntax up something rotten.
  2. Just over the hour for me with all sorts of fun in the NE, where I had ‘magical’ and ‘gringo’. Also wanted to put ‘gallavant’ at 13, even though the spelling (not to mention the wordplay) didn’t look right. In the end, I fouled up on the unknown MAINMAST (containing the unknown MAST), toying with the correct answer, which had the merit of sounding English, before ‘going with the cryptic’ and plumping for ‘mainmalt’. I suppose if porkies ate that, they’d not only fly but also trip out.

    Could anyone explain to me how exactly yesterday’s homophonic CAESIUM clue works? Can’t see it at all.

      1. Ta – ’twas the S/C transformation I couldn’t see. (In my defence, I did a search for ‘caesium’ in yesterday’s blog & comments, and this didn’t turn up your (fine) analysis.)
  3. I would have been quite happy with my 21:40, if I had actually finished in that time, but 1ac escaped me; totally opaque to me. I thought (think) that ‘pot’ in 6ac was a verb. And I think we’ve had ‘mast’ before; anyway, I liked the clue. It was nice to see BANGALORE as the correct answer, since I’d chosen it recently when ‘Singapore’ was. I was clueless as to 25ac, depending on checkers; similarly with 3d: having O_L_, and the hyphen, I was confident of the answer, even though I’ve never known what the term actually means (my IT knowledge is about the level of the pointy-haired boss’s in ‘Dilbert’, who is surprised when he sends a fax and the paper remains where he put it).
    1. Since it’s just you and me chatting, my most embarrassing IT moment was when I told the secretary at the university where I was working at the time that there was something wrong with the computer, as every time I entered my password I just got a bunch of asterisks.

      Incidentally, ‘cast’ in the verbal sense would involve molten material, metal typically, would it not, while verbal ‘pot’ refers to making stuff from clay?

      Edited at 2012-12-28 06:24 am (UTC)

      1. I’d thought of that afterward; one throws a pot rather than casting it, and casting involves a mold. But on the other hand, I don’t seem to find (in the SOED, anyway) ‘pot’ being used as a noun meaning cast.
        The pointy-haired boss also has trouble when his cursor freezes when the mouse reaches the end of the pad. He calls tech support (Dogbert), who suggests moving the desk. I can say with pride that I recognized that as a joke.
        1. I meant to say in the blog that I had been unable to find justification for pot/cast in any of the usual sources, however a quick google brought up the apparent fact that in the medical profession plaster casts are referred to as “pots”. I’d no idea about this myself but it was all I could find and there may well be an alternative explanation that the setter had in mind.

          Edited at 2012-12-28 06:49 am (UTC)

            1. Thanks.

              On another matter,is anyone else using Firefox 17.0.1?

              Whenever I open LJ these days the rotating green “loading” indicator on the webpage tab churns away incessantly indicating that the page is not fully loaded. This doesn’t affect my use of the site in any way but it’s starting to irritate me and I might be more relaxed about it if I knew I was not alone in experiencing it. Has anybody got the same, or similar with another browser? It seems okay when I use IE but I hate IE.

              Edited at 2012-12-28 07:05 am (UTC)

              1. Does this using Camino (a Mozilla/Firefox variant) on the Mac sometimes. Then I have to shift to the horrifically complex Chrome to avoid it. Relaunching the original browser (which is a pain) usually helps. But not always.
              2. I get the same. It does affect me since I don’t like to leave the tab open with it doing something…
    2. Somebody once refused to fax me an invoice as it was “her only copy of the document, so she needed to keep it”. No, she wasn’t joking, and no, I was unable to explain to her satisfaction how the process would provide me with a copy while magically leaving her original intact. Fifteen minutes of my life I’ll never get back…

  4. A 60 minute DNF as unable to work out 5d which wasn’t that hard if I’d remembered jimbo’s lift and separate dictum. Nor did I get 9a as I was trying hard to make RING the anagrist but unsurprisingly failing. However a good puzzle overall with some interesting clues and my COD to 14a for the neat surface. Thanks for blog – though I had got 25a I couldn’t see why!
  5. Another slog for me today. 25 minutes of working away and making steady if unspectacular progress.

    Far more irritations than grins. Pot=CAST is surely an obscure usage that reduces a 3 word clue of a 4 letter word to a guess based on “shed” and checkers. 25A simply doesn’t work for me. The strange additional “in” at 13D which, whatever it’s meant to be, is very confusing. And the awful homophone – yet again!

    Interesting to read people confessing their ignorance of technology. I wonder if Tony S will give them a small lecture of admonishment.

    1. As mctext says, I normally leave admonishment for scientific/technological ignorance to you, Jim. (I have occasionally been known to raise an eyebrow when it comes to literary ignorance though 😉
  6. A mildly dispiriting 30 minutes, not helped by putting 15d where 13d should be and making the latter even more incomprehensible than its prepositional superfluity already made it. The clue would have worked perfectly well without “brought in by”, and as it stands makes no surface sense.
    1ac was going to be vegetable rather than animal, and in 1d I expected the Dickens character to be the whole answer. CAST on the basis of “shed” alone. BOULT was FAUST (lightning=fast) for a while, for the conductor of experiments or something.
    Bumblebees never looked like social animals to me, as they always seemed to be flying around on their own. Now that I think about it, that’s ridiculous.
    AT THE DROP OF A HAT should make this Flanders and Swann reminiscence day.
  7. Well this seemed fairly straightforward to me, but then again anything would after ploughing through Anax’s Xmas special and then all those historical efforts.. it’s like going for a run wearing weights (I imagine) and when you take them off, you are floating on air..
  8. 46 minutes, held up on the easy ones, not least hot water at the end, where I was hunting for an 8-letter word h-t–t-r and not seeing top=spinner was beginning to reject top-notch and almost entertain hoodster. I finally see and hear my old humming-top, the earliest toy I remember, now. I suppose cast could also be the verb to shed as in clothes (cast ne’er a clout) or a skin. I’m sure the second ‘in’ in 13’s a misprint and shouldn’t be there at all. Liked the pairs of Barbary Ape/Dutch Barns and bumblebee/thesaurus somehow.
    1. Of course! The most satisfactory explanation so far. If I’d thought of that I’d never have queried it in the first place.
      1. But as far as I can see that still doesn’t solve the problem of ‘pot’. Or am I being obtuse?
        1. I think the most straightforward way to take it (cast) is as in my Concise OED: (noun 5a) ‘an object of metal, clay, etc., made in a mould’. After all a pot is of clay or metal.

          Edited at 2012-12-28 01:20 pm (UTC)

  9. An interrupted solve but probably about 20 minutes altogether with the application of some Tippex in a couple of places on the RH side,which really shouldn’t have been necessary as it was all fairly obvious. I’ll blame post-Christmas brain disorder!
  10. Might have known I was cruisin for a bruisin. Waltzed through the Anax Christmas special (even though I’d no idea who Gillian McKeith was and would have preferred it to stay that way) and the golden oldies on Boxing Day, only to get careless on this one. Blithely tossed in “tithe barn” without stopping to parse. Fixed that and then made a horlicks with “top nitch”.
    Esau always reminds me of Alan Bennett’s hairy brother in Beyond the Fringe.
    1. Re the Gillian McKeith clue. I live on Swansea Bay which at one time (not now, thankfully) was heavily polluted with sewage. There was a local joke on the lines of: “Do you swim in the bay? No, I just ** ******* *** *******.”
  11. From Ben Goldacre’s talk as part of the Uncaged Monkeys tour I saw a year or two ago: “Gillian McKeith, or – to use her full medical title – Gillian McKeith”.
  12. I rather enjoyed this and thought 6 down was exceptionally crafty (and confirmed CAST, which I was not keen to pull the trigger on). HOT WATER went in with a shrug and MAINMAST from the definition. BOULT from wordplay, but it sounded familiar.
  13. Slow but steady. HOT WATER was a rather despairing guess. I didn’t see the other meaning of copper straight away in spite of the fact that my mother had a copper boiler in her backyard wash-house. I remember the ceremonial weekly lighting of the fire underneath. (I also remember the heavy wooden mangle. I had to mangle the sheets after school on Mondays.) An enjoyable 37 minutes – the puzzle not the mangling. Ann
  14. About 25 minutes, not knowing mast as pig feed, throwing in CAST from ‘shed’. Not familiar with a ‘copper’ as a kettle or boiler, and I expect ‘oppo’ as friend has appeared before, but if so I forgot. Otherwise, sort of middle of the road, and I enjoyed CARNIVORA. Regards and Happy New Year.
  15. 8:57 for me, held up at the end by dithering over CAST. Apart from that (oh, and the spurious extra “in” in the clue for 13dn, which I failed to notice until it was mentioned here), I found this a pleasant, straightforward solve.

    Edited at 2012-12-28 10:26 pm (UTC)

  16. I found this pretty straightforward, finishing in 25 minutes, a relief after the struggle I had with Thursday’s. I didn’t waste time wondering about CAST; I just cast it in and hoped for the best. It was a help to get 1a and 4 straight off.

    Re 16, I used to be very relaxed about X’s for X has, but I’m less so now in certain contexts, as here. Off-hand I cannot think of an analogous phrase to justify interpreting “Nick’s spinner on…” as “Nick has spinner on…”. It’s not as if the surface is all that great to justify the awkwardness.

    I liked “Shuffle along” for the anagram fodder in 12.

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