Times 25362 – where’s Major Tom when you need him?

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 12:37 on the club timer after a night out and watching Australia not performing particularly well on the first day of the Third Test. Things went pretty steadily until I got to the two 15s and 8, which went in on a bit of a wing and a prayer, but the submission to the Crossword Club came back as all-correct so woohoo, hopefully I’ll figure out the wordplay while I write this one up.

Good news, I think I’ve got it all, we’re in action!

Rather enjoyed this offering, some nice sneaky wordplay and a few crafty definitions.

Away we go…

Across
1 C(cold),APT(suitable),OR(gold): nice charade to get us going
4 SCORCHER: H in (SOCCER)*,R
10 PROVIDE: I.D. in PROVE
11 RAM,PAGE
12 ANON: take the C off of CANON
13 CONTINGENT: G(a key with one sharp) in CONTINENT
15 FAN(cool),LETTER(character)
16 COBRA: first letter in Controversy, O(over), BRA
18 CREED: REED(thatcher’s growth) after C(conservative)
19 AMAZEMENT: A MAZE then sounds like MEANT. Despite it being called (on its own website) the most famous maze in the world, I had not heard of the Hampton Court Maze so had to get this from the definition
21 TERRACOTTA: (TREAT,ACTOR) – several options for the anagram here
23 O,DES(man)
26 OUT(misaligned),STAY(rope)
27 our across omission
28 SALARIED: (SERIAL,AD)*
29 SPHERE: first letters of Potato Harvest in SERE
 
Down
1 COP,RA
2 PRONOUN,CE: “one” is the PRONOUN
3 ODIN: hidden, reversed, &lit
5 CURATOR: A in CURT, then OR
6 ROMAN-A-CLEF: MANACLE(shackle) in FOR reversed – definition is “relation with a key”
7 HEAVE: end of oboE in HAVE
8 RE-ENTRANT: got this from definition but now I see it – RECENT without the C then RANT(rail)
9 REVOLT: T,LOVE,R all reversed – terrific clue
14 HEAD WAITER: anagram of A WHITE and A RED
15 FACETIOUS: FACET (aspect) and then PIOUS without P on top
17 BREADLINE: double def, one cryptic
19 ANODYNE: (ANNOYED)*
20 A,T,TIRE: the first T being the start of TEENAGER
22 RATE,L: if you’re in the US, this animal is making a bit o a comeback through advertisements as a honey badger
24 our down omission
25 BLIP: M away from BLIMP

25 comments on “Times 25362 – where’s Major Tom when you need him?”

  1. I thought I was heading for sub-20 minutes today and would have made it but for LOI 9dn which added an extra 5 minutes to my time. Still, sub-25 is an achievement for me these days!

    Didn’t care much for 3dn as I like proper definitions and even allowing that it’s &lit there isn’t much of a one here.

    I’ve solved the maze at Hampton Court. Apart from being one of the oldest it’s also famously featured in Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K Jerome.

    Edited at 2013-01-03 04:25 am (UTC)

    1. Jack, many thanks for your tip about downloading Opera browser and using it to access this site. I’ve just done that and it definitely improves speed of response. What a pity LJ doesn’t put such info on the “status” web pages.
      1. Glad it works for you, Jim. It’s supposed to be particularly effective with ISPs that LJ has identified as a source of attack. Mine wasn’t on the list, but even so it’s improved the response times and the pages actually finish loading, unlike Firefox.
  2. COPRA and RATEL unknown/unremembered, ROMAN-A-CLEF from definition, COD also to last in REVOLT. Needed CREED to get HEAD WAITER, having slapped in ‘wine waiter’. Similar experience to Jack, in fact – including reservations about the Norse god.
  3. Been a bit easy all week eh? So watch out Dave!

    LOI was REVOLT which, as George notes, is pretty good. Only other noteworthy is that 24dn appeared exactly as is in Saturday puzzle 25149 at 27ac.

    LJ’s still a bit strange. Taken me ages to get this posted.

    Edited at 2013-01-03 07:26 am (UTC)

  4. 17.22 and it’s still Christmas. To me ‘some Northern idol…’ is a neat enough double def. All pleasant enough if somewhat anodyne.
  5. 13 minutes with only a minor query over whether TERRACOTTA was necessarily a casting, but I guess it fitted the surface well enough.
    Last in, HEAD WAITER was going to be rotten CD of the day until I realised what a remarkable anagram it was and promptly raised it to top of the list.
    Nice to be back on TFTT after four days of inaccessibility, even with those strange gaps between entries. Glad it wasn’t just me and my computer – there was no way of finding out what was going on while the site couldn’t be found.
  6. Well, hello again. I too have been locked out because, Andy kindly tells me, my ISP was one of the ones that was causing problems. I really think LJ should tells us a little more on the “status” web page which resolutely went on saying “yes, there’s a problem” – not a lot of help!

    I thought this was reasonably easy – as they all have been so far this week. 20 minutes to solve with no real quibbles. I once got lost in Hampton Court Maze with a girl I rather liked but she mistook my intentions and never went out with me again – just another teenage trauma

  7. 8:46 on the club timer. So straightforward, but all perfectly clear and fair. Not sure I can see the problem with ODIN: seems like a perfectly good &lit definition to me.
    I used to go to Hampton Court quite often as a child, and went back to the maze for the first time in decades last year. It was a lot smaller than I remembered it.
  8. 17 minutes to finish this, rather faster than normal for me. Very straightforward. I did find it just a shade boring because so many of the cryptic devices were old hat (bra, fan,etc), but it’s difficult to set very accessible clues that are also interesting. Cryptically the most complex clue is probably 8dn, which I had to go back to after completing the puzzle to parse correctly.
  9. A perfect five minute puzzle just right for the first day back at work after a long break.
  11. Like others glad to be back after a few days locked out. My first sub 30 of the year (29.19) which but for 8d would have been 4 minutes faster. Thanks to George for explaining that. My COD was 9d but nothing really standout today.
  12. I’m a bit mystified why “roman-a-clef” can be defined as a “relation with a key”. Can someone help me with that? I’m familiar with the normal definition and am probably being a bit dim. Many thanks.
  13. About 25 minutes, ending with ATTIRE since I had to figure out that my AMUSEMENT at 19A was actually wrong. Not familiar with Hampton Court, so I immediately assumed it had a mews instead of a maze. That left me the entirely unlikely U?T?R? at 20D for some kind of clothing, so I had to find the error of my ways, which wasn’t hard to find after I reread 19’s definition of ‘surprise’. Overall though, a pretty gentle puzzle, I thought. Regards.
  14. A rather disappointing 8:41 for me. I got off to a good start, but then overhastily bunged in WINE WAITER (a better answer for the definition, but clearly much inferior for the wordplay), lost my stride and finished very slowly.
  15. Happy New Year everybody!

    Slow going for me today. Made the same mistake as Tony with Wine Waiter – only corrected when I got Creed.

    Copra, Roman-a-clef and Ratel from wordplay.

    Daniel

  16. 12:44, and I actually knew what I was doing as I did it, surprisingly, aside from 3 clues (6,8,15d) which I parsed post hoc. I’d forgotten about the maze at Hampton Court, but the definition was enough. I’ve never seen 6d hyphenated that I can remember.
    1. Roman a clef is not hyphenated in Chambers but is in the Concise Oxford.

      Incidentally, I’m not sure that a semi-literal translation from the French is very satisfactory as a definition since the English meaning is something rather different.

Comments are closed.