Times 25359 – Where’s Patrick Moore when you need him?

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Back with a bang after my holiday in England, despite the effects of a combined assault from the common cold and jetlag, clocking up a rare sub-30, if only by the narrowest margin, but with one wrong, as I now see. May I say what a great pleasure it was to meet up with seven of the crossword fraternity, including both landlord and sublandlord of this board, during my stay. It remains for me  to wish all setters, bloggers, commenters and lurkers very best wishes for the coming year, the first four hours of which I will ineluctably be around to see in.

Across

1 YOR[I+C]K – alas! for anyone who doesn’t know this character well. (Okay, Hamlet never said the last word.)
5 STAR+WA[R]S – not especially chewbaccy: was = WAS. 
9 BETTER HALF
10 LYNX – double definition (dd), ‘though neither is particularly brilliant: the cat is the good looker (boom! boom!), while links golf (rather than links on its own) is played by the sea. My last in.  
11 W[EIGHT]ED – weighted/loaded as in to the benefit of a particular group; the conceit here is your crew (rowing EIGHT) on board, i.e. inside, join (together), i.e. WED. 
12 UN+SEEN – the literal is ‘lurking’; ‘a Parisian’ = UN, and SEEN sounds like scene, as in ‘Mephisto’s not my scene’.  
13 RHEA – (dd) Titan/goddess who was the daughter of Gaia and Uranus, and Saturn’s second largest moon. I plumped for her sister Thea (or Theia), who has the advantage of being Greek for ‘goddess’, but the considerable disadvantage of possessing no lunarly essence, despite having a daughter Selene (AKA Luna) who was indeed the Moon goddess.          
15 NONSENSE – anagram of ‘son seen’ round N.
18 APPEARED – (dd) I tinkered with a gay meaning before the light dawned.
19 DO+PE
21 omitted
23 LACE+RATE – perhaps I should have omitted this one instead…
25 S+TAG – super surface, conjuring up memories of the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart partenrship, responsible for such hits as ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ and the song adopted as an anthem by Manchester City, ‘Blue Moon’. Strangely, none of their many musicals are particularly well known today among non-aficionados. The same cannot be said for the Rodgers and Hammerstein partnership, which had a whole string of early hits, including Oklahoma!, South Pacific and The King and I, before suffering something of a slump in terms of public acclaim for most of the 1950s. Their last collaboration turned out okay, however, especially after Julie Andrews had got her teeth into it.     
26 COVER+POINT – a key fielding position in cricket, graced over the years by the likes of Learie Constantine, Colin Bland, Paul Sheahan, Clive Lloyd and the guy who fielded with the coat-hanger still in his shirt, the nutty Derek Randall.
27 C+HANDLER
28 omitted 
 
Down

2 omitted (hidden)
3 INTEGRATE – [harveste]R in an anagram of ‘a gent…tie’.
4 KA[RA]TE – the shrew is Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew.     
5 omitted – this groanworthy offering wouldn’t be out of place in a Christmas cracker.
6 A+F+FLUENT
7 WILTS – well, WORCS and WARKS wouldn’t work. dd featuring an abbreviation of the southern English county wherein the beautifully named Devizes – the place that launched a thousand limericks (some of which are clean) – is situated.   
8 RUNNERS-UP – a tongue-in-cheek cryptic definition of no great art, unless I am missing something. 
14 HOP+SCOTCH – I was trying to persuade myself that ‘undecider’ was a word for embarrassingly long. 
16 EIDERDOWN – red + i.e. reversed and then set on DOWN. Mmmm.
17 PROTOCOL – anagram of ‘poor colt’.
20 SCURRY – the literal is ‘race’ and the small is S, but I don’t quite see how ‘groom in short horse’ stands for ‘curry’, as curry means to groom a horse with a curry comb, and I don’t see where what I take to be the abbreviatedness (if that is the force of ‘in short’) comes in. Thanks to galspray, we all now know that scurry driving is a horsey pursuit in which a person first strips off the bicycle bit from a London pedicab – if he can part it from the maniac who’s driving it – harnesses a Shetland pony to it and then attempts to drive the contraption through a dozen pairs of cones. As the whole exercise takes around a minute, I will grant the setter that this is indeed a short horse race. More here if you’re agog and aghast  http://www.scurrynz.co.nz/
24 omitted

37 comments on “Times 25359 – Where’s Patrick Moore when you need him?”

  1. 12:37, a nice way to end the year, after a week where things went wrong all too often. I was wondering about SCURRY, where ‘Small groom in race’ would have sufficed; I wonder if the setter changed his clue midway and didn’t edit. I rather liked 8d; certainly the closest to a COD today. And of course I didn’t know 26ac; with the checkers, I was pretty sure, but had to check my dictionary before putting it in. Happy New Year, Ulaca, and everyone else.
  2. I’ve no solving time for this one as I fell asleep at one point and completely lost track of it. But actually it was DNF anyway because I needed aids at 13 to complete the grid. My best guess had been “Thea” but having looked that up and found it wanting there was little point in delaying the inevitable cheat because there are dozens of satellites/moons and probably hundreds of goddesses but none I could think of that would have fitted. I now think it’s unlikely that I have met either before as I’d surely have retained the memory of an alternative to ‘rhea’ as a flightless bird.

    I thought 10ac was pretty awful and the first part of 5dn was somewhat forced and without any redeeming merit.

    Rodgers & Hart produced some wonderful songs, generally more sophisticated work than the second R&H pairing, and many of them survive in the Great American Songbook. ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ underwent a revival of interest in recent years having been featured in Alan Bennett’s play (and later film) ‘The History Boys’.

    Edited at 2012-12-31 10:00 am (UTC)

    2. I much prefer the first R&H to the second. Having been unable to avoid hearing some of the songs, you can count me in as a member of the group who have never seen – and have no intention of ever seeing – The Sound of Music!

      Surely the revival of interest in B, B and B must have dated from Hannah and her Sisters, where it was sung by the parents!?

      1. Well, yes but I did say “in recent years” and “Hannah” was 20 years previous to the film of “History Boys” so there was plenty of time for it to have fallen off the popular radar again. As far as I’m concerned it’s never been off mine!
      2. The first half of The Sound of Music is a delight (‘I have confidence’, ‘Lonely goatherd’, ‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’, ‘Edelweiss’; ‘Do-re-mi’ too is brilliantly done – you really should try it). Goodness knows, I had to watch it often enough when my daughter was growing up! On the other hand, I am still not certain I’ve ever seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs right through in English, as my wife bought the Cantonese version of that for little Natalie/Ji Yu!
        1. I’ve just bitten the bullet and watched Do-re-mi on YouTube. It was more than enough for a lifetime! I’m probably handicapped by being allergic to Julie Andrews; but since I don’t like any other Rodgers and Hammerstein musical either, I don’t feel I can blame it entirely on her.

          De gustibus …

          1. Good on you, Tony! I think you have to be watching it with a kid who veritably delights in it to get the full effect. Of all the songs that my various choirs – in this case, the Welsh male one – sing, my absolute non-favourite is ‘Nothing like a dame’. Makes me want to spew a la the Little Britan character played by David Walliams.
  3. Ulaca, a scurry is a type of horse race (who knew?).

    Jack, I also opted for Thea, which is nearly correct!

    Happy new year to everyone. Promises to be a memorable year, with nine Ashes Tests to look forward to!

  4. 10 LYNX – double definition (dd) ………….. I get the links bit …. but I don’t get the “the cat is the good looker”

    Grateful of any help

  5. 1) lynx-eyed= having excellent eyesight
    2) Since they evidently use ponies (the link says Welsh, not Shetland but), it’s a short horse race twice over.
  6. Pretty easy today, though a hold-up at 10 and 13 stretched my time to 25 minutes. 13 had to be THEA or RHEA and I plumped for the latter in the end without being at all sure if it was a moon. I thought the clue to 10 was awful; the equation of “Good looker” with “One having good eyesight” is dubious and needs a warning question or exclamation mark at least.
    9 rather gave the game away using “beer”. I immediately thought of “better half” and initially thought the wordplay might be some sort of adaptation of BEER.
    There were enough pleasing surfaces to make it a pleasant solve.
  7. 14.05 but with Thea, after considering Rhea but going for the more goddessy. Mostly too undemanding, and the neat ‘good looker’ caves in to a lazy surface. As for the surface of 5 dn. …
    1. For what it’s worth I withdraw and apologise to the setter for my comment on this clue – I didn’t think of a lynx playing. New Year Resolution: look a bit longer before leaping into blog with all-too-common foot-in-mouth ailment.
  8. I wrote some comments, and they appeared twice. I deleted one of them, and both completely disappeared.. I *hate* Livejournal!

    Anyway I liked the crossword… HNY to all

  9. The RHEA clue is an interesting one: presumably RHEA is the only 4-letter moon not named after a goddess. Not sure I’d have wanted to check up on that had I been the editor.
    I’m still wondering why a highwayman would say “Two bears” (!)
  10. 9 minutes but a DNF as I too had THEA rather than RHEA which I only knew as a flightless bird. Apart from that it was very enjoyable.

    Happy New Year to All.

  11. 13:21 here, held up at the end for a minute or two by 10ac – kicked myself when I got it! I briefly considered HERA (former name of one of Jupiter’s moons), LUNA (our moon) and THEA (not a moon as far as I know) for 13ac, then got 14dn and decided it had to be RHEA, who I knew was also a moon of Saturn. I’d never heard of the short horse race either, so like others I had a few misgivings about that clue.

    Happy New Year everybody.

  12. Thanks for the blogs. Really enjoying them and they have certainly helped me to solve more – though not enough!
  13. I originally had Thea but checked with Google and corrected it. Can someone enlighted me about 8d? I can’t see the point of “us” at the end of the clue. I’m obviously missing something here. 40 minutes. Ann
      1. Really? If so, it’s needlessly confusing and a bit lame, I reckon. ‘They’re as good as gold’ would have done the same. Have we seen ‘us’ being used like this before, as purely a marker of plurality? I still feel I must be missing something with 8dn.
  15. Looks like there’s a grass-roots project to name a moon THEA, as that’s what I went for as well.
  16. Happy New Year to all. I’ll take a DNF since while I had RHEA, my lack of cricket knowledge meant I first tried COVER MOUNT for 26 before looking it up and finding the POINT man. Ooops. About 20 minutes for all that. Best to everyone.
  17. A rather fraught 9:14 for me.

    I wanted 13ac to be HERA, which seemed a plausible name for one of Jupiter’s moons (indeed the moon now named ELARA was apparently once known as HERA). At least RHEA seemed obvious once I’d got HOPSCOTCH.

    I rashly bunged in BUCK for 25ac, not reading the clue properly and thinking of Buck Rogers.

    And I hadn’t come across SCURRY as a “a short sprint race (horse-racing)” (to quote Chambers), but fortunately there wasn’t really any plausible alternative.

  18. But probably too late. I suspect that the “links” at 10ac refers to the course itself; the type of course that runs by the shore. Chambers tells us: “hence a golf course, orig one by the sea”.

    The family matriarch, Great Aunt Edith, played golf every day of her life in Scotland. She was adamant about correcting me on the distinction between a golf links and a mere golf course. I can hear her voice now (somewhat reminiscent of the original Janet in Dr Finlay): “A links is always by the sea, wee laddie, by the sea”.

    1. Sure, ‘a links’ is a course by the sea – I’ve played a fair few myself, and have left the balls in the rough to prove it – but how to get that from (any part of) ‘that’s played by the sea’ is the problem.

      Edited at 2013-01-01 08:35 am (UTC)

      1. I see it as being, one plays a course, so when one plays a links one plays it by the sea, hence the links is played by the sea.
        Happy New Year to all. Haven’t had much time to post recently due to pressure of work. Regards John
  19. This puzzle appeared in the Nyok Post for 9 January 2013.

    The Times is very careful about ambiguous clues–those that yield two answers. This, however, is one, I argue:

    “Moon” = “buttocks” = “the A” (as in, “He’s a real pain in the A—“) = “Thea” = “goddess”

    That’s how I doped it out, and I’m sticking to it!

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