Times 25431 – O Tempora O Mondays

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Just 25 minutes, so pretty straightforward, with just a stinglet in the Yunnan corner. Not that I’m complaining…

Across

1 A+R+GO – might have been used by 4dn if Jason was feeling generous.
3 SPEARHEADS – parade+shes*.
9 CONQUER – the fruit of the horse chestnut, also called ‘horse chestnut’, is also called a ‘conker’, especially by little boys who boil them in vinegar, punch holes through them, string & knot them and then swing them like maces in latter-day knightly combat. Does one get an ASBO for doing it nowadays?
11 OARSMEN – I tried in vain to work out the wordplay, as it’s just a cryptic clue, referring to the fact that in some rowing boats chaps (or lasses – or both) sit on either side of the vessel to balance it. Or think Charlton Heston in Ben Hur if you prefer.
12 IM+MODE+STY – ‘the writer’s’ = ‘I’m’ as in ‘I’m/The writer’s coming’.
13 EASE+L – if a supporter’s not a bra, it’s probably an easel.
14 AFTERTHOUGHT – hidden.
18 ATHLETES FOOT – decent cryptic clue.
21 H[O]ARD
22 LEMON SOLE – I’m more familiar with people than things as ‘lemons’ = ‘wretched blighters’.
24 WAIVING – my penultimate; to waive is to give up your right to something and to wave is to flourish something, as in flourish it aloft.
25 omitted – Crosswordland’s favourite artist, non?
26 REL[EG]ATION – I had ‘delegation’ for a while; I’d call it blogger’s nerves if I didn’t do it all the time.
27 PLEA[t]

Down

1 ARCH+[r]IVAL – nice start to the downs.
2 GUNSMITH – sun+might*; ‘up’ in arms as in, well, ‘arch in arms’…
4 PARIS – investment as in siege.
5 AGONY AUNT – anagram of a+young+[m]an, with the ‘m’ of ‘man’ replaced by the ‘t’ of time, + T[ime], with ‘badly’ doing the job of the anagram indicator. on edit – thanks to Penfold
6 HORSE CHESTNUT – one of the official colours of an equine is ‘chestnut’, and very beautiful they are too.
7 ALM[O]S+[concer]T – ‘virtually’ is the literal.
8 SINGLE – the literal is ‘one’, and I’m supposing that the wordplay should be parsed as ‘entering little burn we have lake’, but since I invariably make a horlicks of such clues, I’m not staking anything on it.
10 UNDERSTUDYING – the wordplay is lovely but rather incidental, I feel; UN+DE (the French bit) + RSTU (the 4 letters in order bit) + DYING (keen bit).
15 HALF-LIGHT – HAL[t] + FLIGHT.
16 CO[LOSS]AL
17 ET CETERA – anagram of create + [th]E + [verdic]T; literal is ‘that reduces length of sentence’. on edit – thanks to Nonnie
19 SHOWER – double definition, the first very literal and the second informal, as in a sergeant-major bawling a group out as a useless shower.
20 DANIEL – my last; a semi &lit, I think. Anyway, it’s an anagram of a den i l[eft].
23 MA[MB]O – a Latin American dance similar to the rumba; they wanted to call it a ‘mamba’ but that space had already been taken by the herpetologists.

47 comments on “Times 25431 – O Tempora O Mondays”

  1. 30 minutes dead, again. Re 22ac I think there’s an expression “to be sold a lemon” meaning sold something bad, and “fish to eat” seems a very strange choice of definition although undoubtedly that’s what a LEMON SOLE is. Not over-keen on the four consecutive letter idea in case it encourages more of the same. Nice start to the week.

    Edited at 2013-03-25 01:38 am (UTC)

  2. Not the easiest Monday … but that was also true of last week’s. Needed a lie down to work out the parsing of UNDERSTUDYING. And with gaps in the Delta Quadrant at the end, had to play with “abnegation”, “obligation” and “abrogation” for 26ac before seeing the obvious (“say” in “relation”). Then the last were WAIVING and SHOWER.

    Isn’t SHOWER a Terry-Thomas-ism? Or am I thinking of some other chap?

    1. Indeed it is. T-T as Major Hitchcock in the Boulting Bros ‘Private’s Progress’ (1956) and ‘I’m All Right Jack’ (1959).

      This has all come up here before as recently as last year at 11ac in this puzzle http://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/812560.html , and again in comments under puzzle 25126.

      Edited at 2013-03-25 07:08 am (UTC)

    2. From the British movie “I’m All Right Jack” Terry-Thomas describes the striking workers as: “A shower, an absolute shower”
  3. I was held up by 4d, which I couldn’t solve until I’d got 9ac, which took me a while, as ‘conker’ isn’t in my vocabulary. I also had trouble at 24ac, where all I could think of was ‘ceding’, leading me to wonder of ‘seeding’ could mean ‘flourishing’ (seedtime?) in some way. Couldn’t make any sense of SHOWER, but figured it had to be correct; my experience of sergeants-major is exiguous to the max. I thought of UNDERSTUDYING without working out the wordplay, and once I did, I thought it was a pretty ugly clue; I mean, what does it mean? But I did like 2d and 16d, and 9ac once I caught on.
    1. learn (a role) or the role played by (an actor): he had to understudy Prospero. —NOAD.
      1. Sort of pointless to reply now, but I knew what ‘understudy’ means; my question was about the clue: as I recall, the surface reading made no sense to me.
  4. Kevin is, I am sure, referring not to the meaning of the word itself but to the whole clue, the, as it were, micro-story it contains. It is pretty cumbersome. Theatre of the asburd, perhaps? 🙂
  5. 14m.
    A couple here (8dn and 23dn) where the containment indicator seems to indicate the opposite of what’s required.
    Why not “staggeringly, I left a den”?
      1. I agree it’s fine, but the setter seems to have mangled the surface reading to make the wordplay work, when it works just as well unmangled.
          1. Sorry, my brain appears to have stopped.
            In 23 the wordplay suggests something meaning “doctor” inside something meaning “dance”.
            1. I don’t read it that way.

              MAO (Chinese leader) introducing (containment indicator) MB (doctor). Definition: to dance (MAMBO vb)

              Edited at 2013-03-25 11:39 am (UTC)

              1. Yes I realise that’s how it has to work, but I find this use of “introducing” rather awkward, whereas “introducing x to y” is entirely clear.
  6. Slow and ending with whining not waiving so one to forget for me. Unthinkingly going for depot (hoard) and seeding utterly botched that corner, and with those two finally cleared, whining put the kybosh in. You win, setter, you win.
  7. A number of clues here where the setter has largely ignored the surface reading – as if time to polish the first attempts ran out. It starts as early as 9A and culminates in 10D which is a train crash of a clue.

    15 minutes for a slightly mechanical solve with nothing really standing out as either difficult or cleverly clued.

    1. Personally, I though 9 ac OK. 10 dn was an odd clue. The wordplay was extremely ingenious and clever but the surface reading, apart from the definitional bit, was complete rubbish.
      1. 9A is rather like 20D and a few others – it reads like something a non-english speaker struggling to speak english would say
    2. After Boris’s interview yesterday, R4 is now talking about such things as a bicycle crash not a car / train crash… I agree, it’s a bit clumsy.
  8. Straightforward Monday fare, 17 mins. No doubt it is possible to make 8dn work as a clue, but I can’t seem to manage it. Also not fussed about 10dn (poor surface), but otherwise some very good stuff..
  9. Nothing enormously exciting in this one, though I spent a good 3 or 4 minutes staring at 24A before making it my LOI.
  10. I quite liked this one over 19 minutes with a lot of time trying to convince myself that WHINING/”wining” was correct for 24 until the penny dropped. It does sort of work.
    I agree with Keriothe on the DANIEL clue: the word order seems unnecessarily bizarre. But then I’ve recently been reading Edgar Allan Poe’s Barsoom novels, where almost any word order will do.
    Does AFTERTHOUGHT qualify for the longest “hidden” (if only barely) in crossword history?
    UNDERSTUDY put me in mind of the legendary (it’s in Ripley) story of Hue (the artist Charles-Désiré Hue perhaps) who, when arrested in Pecu sent a simple message back to France: O-P-Q-R-S-T. This was correctly translated as “Au Pecu, arresteé!” (“Arrested in Pecu!”). I’d like it to be true.
  11. All but WAIVING and ARCHIVAL today. Agree some of the surface defs were cumbersome, and took some unravelling, but mainly a good solve.
  12. 11:46 for pleasant enough, if traditional Monday-ish fare, apart from the astonishingly long hidden word.
  13. 8 letters required here, create +t =7 another e required. must be th(e) verdic(t)
    1. Agreed.

      Also, in the explanation for 5d, the T comes after the anagram rather than replacing the M in the fodder which is just dropped.

  14. An average Monday thirty-minuter for me. There’s some discussion of 8 and 23 above. There’s nothing wrong with the wordplay in either, even though the containment is ambiguous prior to getting the answer. In 8 “little burn entering lake” can be read as “entering lake into little burn” (it’s the implied solver who has to enter L into SINGE). 23 is similarly structured. It would be faulty if ‘mamba’ were a noun only, but it’s also a verb, and has to be here.
  15. I agree with you, dyste, and while I’m not so sure about one or two constructions it was an okay solve for a Monday.

    28 minutes, enough for 7 boiled eggs.

    Chris G.

  16. Slightly worried that ulaca subscribes to hardening conkers before playing. This is generally perceived as cheating and for this reason, many conker championships use random (ie not own) conkers, the emphasis being on technique.

    TonyW

    1. I knew it would be contentious as I was writing it. The 1971 Papplewick Conker Competition would be the stuff of a Stephen King 1,000-pager if he was given the story. It would make Carrie look like a vicarage tea party.

      Edited at 2013-03-26 02:18 am (UTC)

  17. 12:03 despite a slow start. Not much to add to what has already been said.

    I thought 20 a fine clue until Keriothe pointed out how it could have been so much better.

  18. Very enjoyable apart from 24 which was my last and where I went with ‘waiting’ and ‘weighting’ which seemed nearly as good (although a stretch on the heard element).
  19. But isn’t it the setter’s job to deceive? ‘Entirely clear’ is not in his remit.

    For the record, ‘introducing’ is on the list of containment indicators in the recent editions of Chambers.

    1. Sorry I’m not making myself very clear. I’m not arguing that the clue is at fault. Just that the containment indicator seems to indicate the opposite of what’s required, because the required interpretation is more awkward than the alternative. I agree that the fact that it’s more awkward doesn’t make it invalid.
      Exactly the same comment applies to 8dn in my view.
  20. All but CONQUER in 15 minutes, then the penny dropped., As one who had many a 99er and bruised knuckles in days of yore, it should have dropped sooner. I gather Health & Safety have now outlawed the practice or insist on visor, body armour, helmet…
  21. One missing today (Waiving). I found the rest straightforward except for Archival, Conquer and Et Cetera – all of which took a long time to get.
    Nice to see my name in print (20dn)!!
  22. About 30 minutes, help up by CONQUER, and the WAIVING/SHOWER crossing pair. I didn’t know of the sound-alike horse chestnut pods, so it went in from definition alone, and it simply took a while to find the WAIVING/waving homophone, after which SHOWER went right in. The second meaning there was another unknown. I am quite fond of horse chestnut trees myself, except for the continuing chronic reference to them as ‘chestnuts’, to which they are not even related. Beautiful blooms right around Mother’s Day in this latitude, staggeringly(!) evident at the main entrance to Fordham University in NY. The tree is an import to this hemisphere, I think. We call the native version the buckeye. Regards to all.
  23. Have to agree on the boiling of chestnuts in vinegar is cheating.
    Leaving them to harden in a dark drawer then stringing them with a rawhide does the trick.
    “Conquer/conker” sometimes reminds me of the punch line Frank Muir
    used in one of his stories on the program My Word…..She Conks to Stupor.
  24. 6:06 here for an enjoyable, straightforward Monday solve. Solving at that pace (a gentle trot) I thought the clues were all just fine, and looking back over them again now, I can’t get too worked up about any of the supposed deficiencies, though I suppose the editor might have done better to step in and adjust 20dn (DANIEL).

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