Times 25,426 – Of Alice Bands And A Fez

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 15 minutes

Our run of relatively easy daily puzzles continues with this pleasant, well constructed but straightforward puzzle. The Chinese “hanzi” may be a tad obscure and Tommy Cooper will probably not be well known outside the UK or even to younger solvers (who may also not have used the toast maker).

Across
1 FEROCITY – (cry if toe)*;
5 WASTER – WA(S)TER; to water is to dilute;
9 MICHIGAN – M(I-CHIN(g))AN; I-CHING is an old set of Chinese symbols (not a text message!);
10 VACUUM – VAC-U-U-(da)M; Hoover started like as a product name but came to mean the task itself;
12 SNOOD – S(N-O)OD; in scientific circles nitrogen=N and oxygen=O; a loose shift or a girl’s signal to The Liver Bird;
13 TOUCH,DOWN – to ask for money is to TOUCH (slang); not working=DOWN; land is the definition;
14 MALNUTRITION – (UN or militant)*;
18 MAIDEN,FLIGHT – miss=girl wearing 12A=MAIDEN; steps (in stairs)=FLIGHT;
21 OUT,OF,TRUE – OUT OF T-RUE; time=T; warped perhaps;
23 BLASE – B(L)ASE;
24 HERBAL – hidden (ot)HER BAL(ms);
25 WHITE,LIE – cryptic definition; “does my bum look big in this?”;
26 RICHLY – R(I)C-H(o)LY;
27 STUD,BOOK – another cryptic definition;
 
Down
1 FAMISH – F-AMISH; the AMISH are a sect originally from Switzerland;
2 RECKON – (w)RECK-ON;
3 CHILDCARE – (circle had)*;
4 TOASTING,FORK – TO-A-STING-FOR-K; when bread was bread an old device for making toast infront of an open fire;
6 AWASH – A-WAS-H; my golf course for most of the last 12 months;
7 TEUTONIC – T(EU-T)ONIC; T from T(rusted);
8 RUMINANT – RUM-IN-ANT; I liked the “perhaps”;
11 JUST,LIKE,THAT – two meanings, the second being the catch phrase of fez-wearing Tommy Cooper 1921-84;
15 INHIBITED – IN-HI(BITE)D; one wearing 12A perhaps;
16 SMOOTHER – two meanings, the first a refernce to woodworking;
17 HISTORIC – HIS-TOR-I-C; I=island; C=cape;
19 FALL,TO – (float)* surrounds (apri)L;
20 BEDECK – BED-(n)ECK; to pet=to neck=to snog (all slang for kissing);
22 FRAIL – F-RAIL;

36 comments on “Times 25,426 – Of Alice Bands And A Fez”


  1. Got stuck in the SE today, which wasn’t helped by putting in bland at 23ac (no, I didn’t understand the reprobate bit, either, but thought jaded could stretch to bland). Haven’t heard of a STUD BOOK, and although I’d thought of several different meanings for log, I didn’t think of that meaning for dams!

    Everything else quite straightforward. SNOOD remembered from a puzzle a couple of days ago.

  2. Didn’t find it that straightforward, after a slow start getting round in 29 minutes; but in retrospect it’s all fair enough. I wondered about the meaning of ‘fall to’ though.
  3. Nothing special here really.
    Jim, isn’t a TOUCH a person you try to get money from? (13ac).
    Thought the cryptic defs (25, 27c) were pants.
    1. You’re right about TOUCH

      You might think that about these cryptic definitions that one solves from checking letters with a groan – I couldn’t possibly comment

    2. I think touch in this sense is both verb and noun.

      As in the old music hall joke:

      “Can I touch you for a tenner?”

      “For a tenner, you can….”

      (Fill in your own punch-line)

      1. Just that the clue says “Someone asked for money …”. Hence nominal in this particular case.
  4. Yes we did just have it. I don’t think it’s a shift so much as a sort of netted Juliet cap into which the hair is stuffed. I had to wear one once as a bridesmaid and wasn’t pleased.
    In NY the Social Register (to which I do not belong or subscribe) is known as the Stud Book. 18 minutes.
  5. I actually have a 4dn somewhere, I am tempted to dig it out, as there is no toast as good as toast done on an open fire…

    Nice & straightforward today, hope it’s the same tomorrow 🙂

  6. 40 minutes with STUD BOOK unknown although my major hold up was BLASE, my LOI. Nice puzzle.
  7. 23 minutes, so either not firing on all cylinders or just not in tune. Puzzled longest over 5ac, trying to make thin=water, until light dawned and adjective became verb. FRAIL at 27 gave similar pause.
    I can’t deny a sense of disappointment over the two SE CD’s: you strain to work out the wordplay only to discover there isn’t any.
  8. Pleasant enough 12 minutes. Glad that I restrained myself from going with RACILY, realising it was one of those “I know it doesn’t really fit but now I’ve filled it in (somewhat prematurely, I now realise), I am practically incapable of visualising any alternative word that does fit” types of answers.
  9. Don’t really have a time, the plumber turned up to sort out my kitchen sink. I don’t think I’ll give too much information.

    Tommy Cooper is also famous for dying on live television. If you want to be macabre then i’m sure it is on youtube.

    I just went and looked at his Wikipedia entry and it doesn’t even mention “just like that” except as the title of a movie. What’s with that? When he was at the top of his game everyone knew that phrase.

    1. Aged 12½ in 1973 I had a limerick read out on Ray Moore’s Radio 2 Saturday show (winning a book token in the process).

      You were given the first line and had to send in a completed limerick.

      This was it:
      There was a magician called Matt
      Who once used a fez for a hat
      His act was real super
      Just like Tommy Cooper
      And he did all his tricks “just like that”

      How I was never asked to be Poet Laureate on the back of that I’ll never know.

      Edited at 2013-03-19 12:53 pm (UTC)

      1. Apologies for the very late post, but I’ve fallen a bit behind and only just come across this entry whilst looking for the definition in 19d.

        I suspect the Prime Minister and Her Majesty were a bit wary of giving Yorkshire another go at the Laureateship after the disaster that was Alfred Austin (aka Banjo Byron), not to mention Ted Hughes. And there was your eschewal of all things highbrow to consider, in your attempts to become the People’s Poet of Pateley Bridge

        Precocity’s first name was Penfold
        Tho’ on Tristan he wasn’t quite Isolde
        “That guff makes me sick
        Give me limerick
        My fortune’s in rhino not Rhinegold”

  10. About 22 minutes with 1 mistake. That’s two days running I’ve been nowhere near the wavelength, or maybe just off form. Today I had an inexplicable ‘toasting fire’.

    I have two snoods (to which the response should probably be “How charming! We used to have a miniature schnauzer”). They’re very useful if you live on Canada’s windy Atlantic coast. Anyone still unsure of what manner of thing is a snood should do a quick search of Google images.

  11. Even easier than yesterday’s, taking under 20 minutes to complete. At times the answers flowed one after the other.

    The cryptic grammar of 20 seems faulty. “X before Y loses head” means that X loses the head, not Y, so the wordplay leads to EDNECK. I suppose ‘before’ could be taken to mean “in front”, referring to the placing of BED, in which case the grammar’s fine works, though ‘before’ is then redundant.

    I thought the cryptic definitions were OK and I rather liked the anagram at 14.

    2. Seems fine to me. I’m reading it as “Part of garden (goes) before pet (that) loses (its) head”.
      1. I don’t really see how “pet loses head” can be read as “pet that loses its head”. “Pet losing head” could be so read, and would make the cryptic part perfectly grammatical (though the surface would suffer somewhat).

        The Crossword Centre’s Message Board (http://boards2go.com/boards/board.cgi?&user=dharrison)has a recent thread in which the faulty grammar of one of last weeks clues is discussed, not entirely dissimilar from this case.

        1. Unspammed.

          I was trying to put it in a context to illustrate my point but evidently I failed. I honestly can’t see a problem with “pet” = NECK and “loses head” as the instruction to remove the first letter. Before that is “part of garden” = BED.

  12. Toast made with REAL crusty bread on a glowing red fire, then slathered with real Welsh butter! YUM!
  13. I found this less straightforward than Jimbo, today’s blogger, and am impressed by his 15 minute time. There were some tricky cryptic definitions, I thought – e.g. FALL TO = “need handling” at 19 dn and the amusing WHITE LIE, which unless I’ve missed something combined a cryptic def with an &lit at 25 ac. In the case of the latter, I wasted much time trying to discern some complicated wordplay with WHIT supplying (sort of) the “small” bit of the clue.
  14. I’m also down in the thirties when it comes to solving minutes for this nicely concise offering, and a fan of RUMINANT, so that’s my CoD.

    Speaking of fan-dom, I was and am a huge Cooper nut – his walking onto a set was usually enough to crack an audience up.

    This bloke said to me, I’m going to chop off the bottom of one of your
    trouser legs and put it in a library. I thought, that’s a turn-up for
    the books.

    1. Lovely one; it brings back the whole TC genre of double entendre. I went around for days after he died saying “Jus’ like that.” And what do we have that passes for humour now? ‘Mock the Week’ camera jollity with little wit. A salute to the old boy, smut and all.
      And it’s his birthday today (as it were 92).

      Edited at 2013-03-19 01:02 pm (UTC)

  15. 10 minutes – although now I want some hot buttered toast!!

    You do start to wonder what sort of diabolical crossword we are going to get soon after all these days of lulling us into a false sense of security.

  16. A relative struggle at 25:54.

    At 9 I mentally left the USA after discounting Maine, Missouri and Mississippi and started thinking of sovereign states. What a schmuck.

    I has most trouble in the SE corner though with bedeck eventually unlocking things once I’d got to the right sort of pet (i.e. not an animal or a term of endearment).

    1. When I was in the first grade, we not only had to pledge allegiance to the flag every day (it’s that sort of country, you know), we also had to recite a credo which included our expressing belief in the US as a group of sovereign states. That none of us knew what ‘sovereign’ meant was evidently not an issue.
  17. 44 minutes, so par for me, but thought the “pet” in 20 was “peck” rather than “neck” – a rather more restrained type of kiss.
    JUST LIKE THAT was a real gimme for those of us who grew up with Tommy Cooper.
  18. 44′, with a lot of the solving taking place in a 5-minute chunk of otherwise wasted time. DNK Cooper, of course. Irritatingly, I did know the I Ching, or Book of Changes, but didn’t know what to do with it when it first surfaced to consciousness. I also persisted in taking the definition in 1d as ‘Keep food’, and tried to make sense of ‘freeze’. I liked the Biercean definition of WHITE LIE. COD to 2d.
  19. 9 minutes, this was a pretty quick romp with everything going in completely understood for a change.
  21. Just scraped in under the 40m by 11 seconds. So I found this a bit testing. I think though it was more a failure to read the clues properly – as our esteemed blogger might say with ‘lift and separate’! – rather than any fault of the setter. I was irritated to take ages in getting to TEUTONIC which therefore gets my COD vote. Like others delighted to be reminded of TC – I do hope it was a tribute for his birthday.

    Edited at 2013-03-19 07:09 pm (UTC)

  22. For some reason my brain practically never seems to function properly on Tuesdays, and I struggled to a miserable 12:39. I stupidly bunged in SPARSE for 5ac on the grounds that it fitted the wordplay, in the vain hope that it might somehow be twisted to mean “prodigal”. And with the initial T in place, I wasted further time trying to justify TANDOORI OVEN for 4dn.

    I also dithered over SNOOD, not convinced that it was “loose” or that SOD = “top soil” (without any mention of grass). (Or have I completely misunderstood the clue? I’m not sure where your “loose shift” comes from.)

    I think 25ac is probably a reference to the definition of a lie (sometimes attributed to Adlai Stevenson): “an abomination unto the Lord, but a very present help in time of trouble”.

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