Times 25363

Author   daveperryPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 1:17:56 over two sessions

I’m rather struck down with this novovirus thing at the moment, so I’m not sure how much my horrific time is due to my overheated brain or whether this was a particularly tricky puzzle. I started it at midnight and worked at it for about 45-50 minutes but was getting nowhere, so I went to bed. I got up early this morning and tried again, and it did fall into place easier, but I still found it tough. Indeed, there is still one I can’t parse.

Anyway, I’d better get this done or I’ll be late for work!

cd = cryptic def., dd = double def., rev = reversal, homophones are written in quotes, anagrams as (–)*, and removals like this

Across
1 WELL I DECLARE = IDE in (WELL + CLARE)
8 mausOleum + PENS + EA (each = a head)
9 RENEGED = DEGENERATE with (AT + E) removed all rev
11 ELECTRA – rev hidden
12 SPLIT ON = (S + TON) about (PL + I)
13 NU + DIE – I wasn’t sure why ‘strippers’ was in the plural
14 WINE GLASS = (WIN + LASS) about EG (for one)
16 TROLL + EYED – A ‘troll’ in modern slang is someone who repeatedly posts annoying messages on the internet. Trolleyed is a euphemism for drunk.
19 TROOP = POOR (pants) + Tied all rev
21 END-USER = (UNDERSEa)*
23 tEMPtRESS
24 MAITRE D’ = MITRED about A – ‘got up as’ in the sense of ‘dressed as’
25 ON + ORDER – on and off (or leg) being the sides in cricket
26 OLYMPIC FLAME – cd
Down
1 WEEKEND = (E + KEN) in WED – ‘time for game?’ is the definition
2 LI(SET)TE
3 IN A BAD WAY – ‘poorly’ is presumably the definition, but someone else will have to explain the wordplay. It’s AD (puff) in I + NAB (run in) + WAY (road) – Thanks to ulaca
4 EMRYS = SaY fRoM bEd all rev – a Welsh christian name
5 LONG + LEG – A fielding position in cricket. LONG = ‘die’ in the sense of ‘I’m dying for a cup of tea’
6 REGATTA = REG (a number of cars, i.e. registration) + TA rev + TA
7 COME ON + STREAM – although it’s not a phrase I’ve ever heard of.
10 DANISH PASTRY = (IT’S SHARP AND + verY)*
15 NODDED OFF = N (new) + DOFF (shed) all about ODDEr (stranger briefly)
17 OLD GIRL = (DIG ROLL)*
18 LUST + RUM – a period of five years
19 TAPIOCA = IOC (International Olympic Committee = Games masters) in TAP (milk) + A
20 OVERDUE = OVER (deliveries, cricket again) + “DEW” (early drops) – ‘for picking up’ is the homophone indicator
22 RADIo + I – a bicycle spoke being a radius

51 comments on “Times 25363”

  1. 3: The parsing is AD (puff) in I + NAB (run in) + WAY (road)

    13: I took ‘with strppers’ to be the literal, as in ‘nudie show’.

    Edited at 2013-01-04 07:25 am (UTC)

  2. A few minutes more than Dave (82) and I had no excuses. I thought this was a terrific puzzle, with ticks against 7 and 19 and COD to RENEGED. (Well, it had to be being surrounded by ‘professional Welshmen’ every Tuesday!) TROLLEYED was new to me, which just goes to show how little I get out these days…The NW was the last to fall – I am ashamed to say that 1ac brought up the rear, as I just couldn’t think of anything beyond ‘well I never’.

    I thought ‘fielding character’ was a bit weird for fielder/fieldsman, and I wondered if the literal ‘to do as well initially’ wasn’t a little bit too clever for its own good, attempting to combine the literal aquatic with the figurative inchoate meaning but rather falling between two stools. Unless I’m missing something.

    Edited at 2013-01-04 11:48 am (UTC)

  3. A very similar experience to yours, Dave. I did it in one sitting but went over the hour by a good 10 minutes. It seemed to get harder as it went on.

    I missed understanding ‘pants’ at 19ac and the plural at 13, indeed I had NUDES there for a while as I want 100% sure of the French name.

    I’ve had enough Olympics for my lifetime so I could have done without two references plus an obscure fielding position.

    Glad not to have been blogging today; it was hard enough without added pressure.

  4. 48 minutes with two wrong so the run ends. Still can’t stand the Times acceptance of the childish pants, and missed lite and didn’t know the French girl, going for Lusette, and missed temptress and went for (the Victoria) Express, and generally trolleyed. Have thrown the Christmas tree out and look to the new year a sadder and a wiser man. Apart from which, grudgingly, I can see it was a good crossword. For some.
  5. Seems I did quite well at 33 minutes, but this was a struggle from start to finish – the fielding position was my first in but didn’t help much.
    A lot of “spot the definition” with no gimmes that I could see,apart from (perhaps) the not-very-inspiring CD at 26.
    I also had no idea what Pants was doing in 19 – I somehow derived the reversed poor from “need reversing”, which would have been fine had it been “needy”.
    I liked TROLLEYED and TAPIOCA, but struggled rather too much with the rest for an enjoyable experience.
  6. The best puzzle for some time that took 40 minutes of hard work.

    Two I don’t like. I don’t think “strippers” means NUDIE. Chambers gives “stripper” as a striptease artist and NUDIE as a film or magazine featuring nudity. And “time for game” does not mean WEEKEND. I had the feeling the setter was trying just a bit too hard.

    On the other side of the coin 12A is a model clue to illustrate both “lift and separate” and “ignore punctuation”. 3D is beautifully constructed with a clever use of “puff” and “run in”. And there are a number of other real gems.

    Well done Dave and hats off to the setter

    1. I think ulaca has the right idea. The definition of ‘film or magazine featuring nudity’ seems reasonably well covered if you take the definition to be ‘with strippers?’
    2. The setter interjects (again):
      There shouldn’t be a hyphen in this clue! Somehow one has crept into the proof and I’ve not spotted it. Apologies.
    3. I took this to be a reference to football. Not a subject I know much about, but isn’t there (or wasn’t there) a football magazine called When Saturday Comes?
      1. I don’t recall the magazine but you may well be correct

        I guess in the 1950s football was very much a weekend affair with the radio broadcast Sports Report at 5.00pm and Eamonn Andrews giving the results to all those pools hopefuls

        Today football is a 7 days a week game. I bet by season’s end Man U will have played at least one game on every day of the week.

        1. I’ll have to take your word for it on the football front, but if there is a strong association between football and Saturdays then I think it’s legit even if a bit out of date. After all if everything that was a little stale was excluded from these puzzles the setter’s armoury would be greatly reduced… and I’d be a lot better at them!!
  7. Told you yesterday that it’d be a bugger today, Dave! — after the easier puzzles so far this week.

    Pleased to finish under the hour with answers going in under more wings and prayers than a Gaudi cathedral!

    Then the construals! 1dn was a bugger, given that I thought the European must be a Wend.

    3dn: “poorly” as the def. was a nice distraction from the truth; as was “say” in 4dn. Someone has spent a lot of time trying to use standard vocab in a different way. Equally: “in new shed” (9 letters) at 15dn.

    Agree with Ulaca about 13ac: a nudie show (or similar) is a show “with strippers”. The setter, anyway, has to be cut some slack for giving us such excellent work.

    Anyone want to construe “to do as well initially” in 7dn? I’m still thinking about that one. Well = stream? In which case, this is a case where, following the cryptic, the “literal” is itself a kind of cryptic def. Or am I barking up the wrong geyser?

    (All mistakes here attributable to my necessary use of a Windoze box.)

    Edited at 2013-01-04 11:05 am (UTC)

  8. Tough and over contrived I felt. Never heard of EMRYS or TROLLEYED and thought LISETTE was weak. Clues with first names as answers I think are inherently weak.
    Re 7D, I thought the well in ‘come on stream’ was an oil well?
    40 minutes without EMRYS which I had to look up.

    Edited at 2013-01-04 11:03 am (UTC)

  9. 19 minutes for a terrific challenge. Not quite perfect (I had the same reservations as others about NUDIE – I was even wondering if this was a Henry Blofeld type thing, i.e. if one was in the nude one was strippers, my dear old thing), and I’m never madly keen on either concise or cryptic clues where the definition is effectively “A name” (and spent far too long wondering how EUROS might be parsed before spotting the comparatively simple solution); but overall I thought this was a highly inventive and entertaining puzzle.

    It also struck me as a good example of a modern puzzle, which uses up-to-date vocabulary (up to a point – even Boris Johnson doesn’t refer to the government being in power for a lustrum). I can see why some people don’t like modern usages such as “pants”, but I far prefer a crossword landscape where that definition shares a grid with the equally modern “troll”, or other now-commonplace words such as “app” which I’ve noted making a debut in the last year or so, especially if their appearance means we are edging out the wretched Beerbohm Tree and Al Capone…

    1. I don’t mind modern usages as such. App and troll are fine. But pants is…isn’t…hell, if a little infantilisation’s part of the game, it’s not going to stop me playing it. Yesterday at an amateur dramatic society’s reading/acting out of a pantomime we all had to sing about five verses of’Old MacDonald had a Farm’ (average age about 50, no-one under 25). It’s tough.
  10. This was a splendid puzzle that took me a full hour to solve. I thought it was going to be another easy one after I solved 20, 25 and 26 as the sheet was coming out of the printer.
    Near-faultless clues, several of which took some teasing out, and plenty of deceptive phrasing. “With strippers” seemed fine to me given that ‘nudie’ may be an adjective. I had some reservation about a different clue, but I’m not going into that.
    It’s difficult to pick out one COD out of so many good clues, but 24 is brilliant with its “got up as bishop”.
    ‘Lustrum’ was completely new to me and I needed a dictionary to confirm.
  11. I looked at the blog to try to understand the relevance of this. Can any of you kind folk help?

    Thanks, Tony D

    1. It’s a tricky clue to unravel, but I liked it…

      Did welsh: definition (remember capitalization means nothing)
      backs: reversed
      go downhill: DEGENERATE
      kicking out at English: remove AT,E from the reversed DEGENERATE

    2. “Did Welsh” is the definition for RENEGED. Backs DEGENERATE (go downhill) without the ATE so also getting to RENEGED.
  12. Glad to see I wasn’t in the minority finding this hard, 31 minutes while watching the Australian middle order have a hardish time against the Sri Lankan spinners.

    Got off to a bad start by confidently putting in OLYMPIC TORCH at 26 (cryptic definitions grumble growl), but then lots of question marks as the game played out. IN A BAD WAY and WEEKEND from definition, EMRYS, COME ON STREAM and SPLIT ON from wordplay. Glad it wasn’t my turn today – well done Dave!

  13. 27:35 .. my second day back on the puzzles after a couple of weeks of cold turkey.

    The little fortress of TROOP / TAPIOCA / EMPRESS / ON ORDER took some breaking into at the end. I don’t mind ‘pants’ but is it in danger of becoming another ‘bra’?

    A lot of smart clues. DANISH PASTRY, RENEGED and COME ON STREAM all COD candidates for me.

    1. Don’t hold out on us Sotira – did you get the shakes and have to be locked in a padded room?
      1. The first few days were the worst. I would wake up ‘solving’ Christmas carols – you know the kind of thing: is ‘Good King Wenceslas’ an anagram of ‘disengage snow lock’? (Yes, it is.) But sherry helped. And then on New year’s Eve I was introduced to absinthe (really, so help me – good grief, how on earth did Baudelaire and Hemingway ever get anything done?). But I forgot about crosswords completely. For a while.
  14. thanks chaps. I took the definition as “did” and got carried away with memories of Barry and Phil etc.

    Tony D

  16. I think this is in fairly general use as (of, say, a factory) to start production. I thought “to do as” was perhaps a link from wordplay to definition.
    1. It’s a bit more precise than that because the phrase originated with oil wells but has been applied (figuratively) to other settings. I took “do as” to mean “serve as”. On this interpretation “do as well initially” is quite a precise definition of COME ON STREAM.

      Edited at 2013-01-04 10:35 pm (UTC)

      1. Actually scratch that. On reflection I think it’s just “to do as [an oil] well [does] initially”, which is even more precise.
        1. Thanks, I’m sure you are right. I was aware that the phrase originated with oil wells though I did not spell that out in the comment, with the (figurative) usage coming later – almost a cliché. And, yes, as you say, it’s all the definition, rather than a link as I suggested.
  18. The most difficult puzzle for some time. A real challenge only completed in my case with resort to aids. I thought MAITRE’D, RENEGED, COME ON STREAM, OPEN SEA and SPLIT ON were all very clever. I shared the dissatisfaction with NUDIE expressed by several above, but I guess it just about works on Ulaca’s reading – i.e. “with strippers” as the def with “nudie” here being used as noun-adjective that could be applied to anything involving striptease performers. “Time for game” was a bit loose as the def for WEEKEND, but the ?, I think, makes it permissible. All in all, an excellent puzzle.
  19. Whilst I read the blog most days, I rarely comment given that I usually do the crossword in the evening these days, and all angles are covered long before then.

    Therein lay my surprise that no-one commented on “landing” as an inclusion indicator in 12A. The wordplay was first rate, especially for the misleading punctuation, but having got the answer first and then backed out the word play, I was slightly unsure about why landing implied “surrounded” or “included.” I can see the “catching” idea as in a fish, but somehow there was no suggestion of “in the middle” or “inside”.

    Given that it has not been mentioned so far, I assume most people were wholly happy with it??

    1. I think “catching” is a reasonably common containment indicator and the Chambers Crossword Dictionary flags it as such. Then land=catch is also completely standard, as you say for fish. So the extension to “landing” for “catching” is not huge and I certainly had no problem interpreting it as such.

      Sorry we don’t hear from you more often!

    2. I find myself saluting yet another inclusion indicator that seems to work. It’s as if the net is s–ton and pli is landed in it. (Speaking of fish, I like the red herring of the olde-worlde surface.)
  20. Crossword of the year! Marvellous work
    Absolute brainacher with some great novelties. Good to see it irks a few gnarly experts when you have to work too hard for your gridfull…
  21. ‘Nudie’ is an adjective so a ‘nudie’ show might be a show ‘with strippers’
    1. Good to hear from you setter and thanks for taking the trouble to explain

      Your knowledge of these matters far exceeds my own – which at my age is probably just as well

  22. First puzzle of the year for me and I struggeld so much I thought I must still be under the influence. So I’m pleased this was as hard as it seemed. Couldn’t get nudie, lustrum or weekend so thanks to Dave – and in his condition too! Hope you recover soon.
  23. Answered only 13 clues all day. Enjoyed the clues I did get though. The puzzle could have used a few more cricket references just to really get up my nose! Thanks for the blog

    Edited at 2013-01-04 06:16 pm (UTC)

  24. That was a hell of a puzzle. It took about an hour but it is one of those that reminds you why we do these things in the first place. Thank you setter, very much, and a tip of my hat to Dave for explaining all this. Best for some time, though I had no idea of SPLIT ON (a UKism?), which went in as the only thing that fit, and NUDIE may be an adjective over here, but if so, it’s not too common. Those slight quibbles were overwhelmed by the audacity of many of the other definitions and wordplay. ‘Did Welsh…’ and ‘mitred’ as ‘got up as bishop’ are fabulous. Best to all, setter especially.
  25. DNF which is the norm for me, though I did finish yesterday’s puzzle.
    Thanks for the explanation of RENEGED.

    regards
    Adrian

  26. Glanced at Dave’s headline at work today and knew I was in for a long evening based on his solving time. Gave up a short while ago after an hour with five missing (Come On Stream, Open Sea, Undie, Maitre’D and Lisette). Lots to enjoy elsewhere. Compliments to Dave and the setter.
  27. Got to this very late after a very long day, and finished it in 22m, so clearly I was on the right wavelength. I didn’t enjoy it very much but I think that’s just because I’m tired: it’s just the sort of puzzle I usually enjoy.
  28. 16:46 for me, going quite well at one point, but then struggling with the last few clues – I seem to be a bit lacking in stamina these days.

    Lots of clever stuff, though I felt 1dn (WEEKEND) and 7dn (COME ON STREAM) were perhaps straining things just a little. No objection to 13ac (NUDIE), though.

  29. 63 minutes with aids and a number of guesses. Not so enthusiastic as others – hard yes but often because of vagueness or obscurity: ‘for one’ – WEEKEND only in the vaguest sense a time for a game and LISETTE was not a good clue for reasons others have pointed out. And is a DANISH PASTRY ‘a sweet’ or just generically sweet? But then variety is the spice of life and I guess setters have to find some means to slow the regulars down. I wonder how long it will be before I actually enjoy this sort of puzzle?
  30. A very tough NW corner, but an excellent and enjoyable puzzle – one of the very best in recent weeks, with some lovely innovations (Did Welsh, got up as bishop, Games masters, more than one spoke to name a few). Thank you setter – you must have invested a lot of time in crafting these clues.

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