Times 25455 – Wish I could say it was a typo

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
22 minutes, but with one wrong. Nice, gentle start to the ‘daily’ week. I’m adopting the ‘Leave none behind’ protocol from now on, so every answer will be given (hopefully, the right ones).

Across

1 SCORNFUL – anagram of ‘of runs’ round C[rater] + L[ake].
3 EN BLOC – NB in COLE (old word for cabbage – survives in coleslaw, indirectly if not directly).
10 DEFINITE ARTICLE
11 TIPSTER – TIPS+TE+R[edcar]; interesting one this. Redcar is a racecourse in Yorkshire, but the use of tout to mean tipster (for a little slice) is limited so far as I know to N. America. In England, it refers to a furtive looking man who speaks out of the corner of his mouth the single phrase ‘Anybody wanna buya ticket?’
12 SCARLET – CARL (Zeiss) in SET; Herr Zeiss was a 19 C maker of optical instruments and founder of Carl Zeiss Jena – the company not the football team (which is how I’d heard of him).
13 MISPRINT – easy if you know that literal means, in printers’ parlance, the misprint of a letter; not so easy if you saw it in a puzzle recently, made a mental note of it and then completely forgot it. I put ‘pinpoint’, knowing it was wrong but also knowing I could look at the clue for another ten minutes and not get it.
15 F+EVER
18 TIGHT – double definition, the first as in a tight corner.
20 TROMBONE – ROM in T-BONE; ‘travellers’ pop up in Times crosswords from time to time – watch out also for Roma, and, if the setter is particularly adept, Romany and Romani.
23 UP+STAGE
25 PER[S]ON+A
26 GOLDEN RETRIEVER – eventer girl rode*; pretty easy anagram given the anagrind ‘bothered’ and the definition.
27 EL NINO – anagram of ‘online’.
28 CHARTRES – R[eliabl]E in CHARTS.

Down

1 SE+DATE – Kent is prototypically south-east in crosswordland.
2 OFFSPRING – OF+F[ine]+SPRING.
3 NONSTOP – N[oon] followed by ON+ST+OP, the literal being ‘done without interruption’; more common with a hyphen when used as an adverb, perhaps, but when used as an adjective quite natural as one word.
5 UTTER – double definition, where positive means utter = downright as in ‘positive disaster’. Liked this one for the prosodic twist, if that makes any sense.
6 NOT HALF
7 LOCAL – A+COL (reversed) + [spel]L; I always think of a col as just a pass, but technically it’s the lowest point of a ridge connecting two peaks.
8 CREATURE – curate* + RE.
9 FALSETTO – SET-TO following FAL[l].
14 IN THEORY – IN (elected) followed by HE[r] in TORY.
16 VAN+CO[U(ruguay)]VER – I wasn’t suckered by this one for long, though Montevideo did flash through my mind.
17 STRUGGLE – another dd, I reckon, with pains being used as in ‘take pains’.
19 TRADE-IN – another anagram (trained*).
21 BARRIE+R
22 M[ADR]AS – Chicken Madras was the Chicken Tikka Masala of the 70s.
24 SALON – hidden(ish).
25 PITCH – P+IT+CH; this confused me at first, as ‘in front of’ would seem to indicate that the ‘it’ goes before the ‘p’, which would give ‘itpch’; if I have parsed this correctly, the ambiguity of ‘in front of’ means that it could go either side of the ‘p’. It confused me to the end, it seems, as mctext has a far more plausible explanation: lift and separate ‘in front of’ so that ‘it’ goes in ‘P…ch’, where ‘P’ stands for ‘front of Presbyterian’.

28 comments on “Times 25455 – Wish I could say it was a typo”

  1. 15;49 .. easier puzzle, but a model of economy. Much enjoyed.

    Bit of frowning required for both the EN BLOC/CREATURE and FALSETTO/MISPRINT pairs.

    Thanks, ulaca. And I think the ‘Army Ranger’ policy could catch on.

    COD … ,the…

  2. Thought this was going to be a stinker when I saw the short clues; but not so. A few re-thinks in the SW where I wasn’t sure that STRUGGLE could be right; and I’m still not sure it quite works. Nice try though. Last one was also MISPRINT where I was looking for some means of referring to A=>I; though I thought TYPO early on for the … um … literal.

    On the parsing of 25ac (PITCH), I’d do it this way: IT goes in P (“front of Presbyterian”) and CH (“church”). Lift and separate “in front of” ??

  3. I definitely needed something this easy on the brain today. Slowed down by looking for an -ous word at 1ac for a while, and by flinging in ‘in sync’ at 5ac, although the dearth of Y_C__ words soon convinced me of the error of my ways.
  4. 34 minutes with a few hold-ups along the way. I wonder if I was the only person immediately to think of “dyslexia” at 13 and “castrato” at 9? 5 was my last in where the literal wouldn’t come so I was reduced to working out wordplay and trying to think of a plant to fit C?L?E having assumed that N alone accounted for “note” in the clue. COLE is hardly the first thing that would come to mind from the definition “plant” anyway.

    I was left with some doubts over nuance of meaning but these have all been dispelled now.

    Edited at 2013-04-22 05:25 am (UTC)

  5. Fastest time EVER (I think), 20 mins, but with the same error as ulaca. I, too, knew I could spend time looking at it, but wouldn’t come up with anything else.

    Couldn’t properly parse EN BLOC, and wasn’t altogether sure I wasn’t missing something with STRUGGLE. Was also confused by the wp for PITCH.

  6. 10m. Nice gentle Monday one. Some of them felt a little loose (“labour pains”, for instance) but that’s not such a bad thing.
    1. I did an Araucaria over lunch and it made this look like Anthony Eden in winged collar and Ascot.

      Edited at 2013-04-22 07:06 am (UTC)

        1. My way of expressing a fondness for the starchy old Thunderer and its “Ximeneanism”.
  7. Rattled through this in under 10m, with slight pauses for struggle and for 5ac, not having come across cole before. But it sounded plantlike, cole/kohl/kale and all that.
  8. Thoroughly enjoyable Monday a.m. solve. LOI & COD: MISPRINT. I must admit that, initially, I thought the answer was a little disappointing for such a good clue: so, particular thanks, ulaca, for the explanation of ‘literal’ which added the missing dimension.
  9. 8:01 for what struck me as a perfectly-pitched entry level puzzle; at the easy end of the scale but requiring just enough pause for thought that answers weren’t flying in without any conscious solving process taking place.
  10. 18.24, happy enough with that. Liked jackkt’s dyslexia moment at 13. Not sure what ‘valuation of’ is doing in 19 dn. Held up by 10 for far too long. A nice number, not too demanding, not without its moments.
    1. In an otherwise admirably laconic set of clues, it does seem comparatively verbose. The only thing I know about valuation of your trade-in is that it’s always an order of magnitude lower than you thought it was going to be.
  11. Not much to say about this one – a straightforward puzzle with some elegant concise clues. I had no sticking points and was buoyed by solving 1ac the moment the puzzle appeared from my printer. FOI Scornful, LOI En Bloc.
  12. 13 minutes, but not feeling like an easy run, perhaps because so many clues had no gimme Thesaurus connections. STRUGGLE, for example, was by no means the obvious synonym for either “labour” or “pains”: perfectly fair, but not an immediate connection. Likewise “cole” for “plant” in 5 – I’m not that good on plants, but “think of a plant” would not produce cole even a long way down the list. Again, perfectly fair, but only really gettable working backwards.
    I join with others for whom MISPRINT was last in, and just that teeny bit disappointing, looking for a wordplay that meant change A for I. It manages to be a rather clever &lit which nonetheless evokes the sense of “oh, is all it is?”
    Commendation for a set of clues that suggests Calvin Coolidge has joined the setting team.
  14. Most of the puzzle completed in 20 minutes, but 5,8,9 and 13 took another 10 minutes to crack.
    Nice Monday puzzle.
  15. Managed to avoid inserting my own misprint, but my time is way down I’m afraid, at about 30 minutes. Not really sure why, as this was nicely put together and doable.

    Thanks to all concerned.

    Chris G.

  16. 11:23 with creature, scarlet and falsetto last to fall.

    Is creature a nasty DBE or are we in idiom country? Probably the latter as no-one has thought to mention it.

    1. Chambers gives: “creature…a human being, in this sense often used in contempt or compassion…” Not sure if that answers your question!
  17. Nice gentle start to the week, with lots of economic and enjoyable clues. I particularly liked DEFINITE ARTICLE. 24 mins for me.
  18. This was a fairly gentle one, I thought – I set a new personal best of 7m 14s. TROMBONE, FALSETTO and MISPRINT were the last three to fall in.
  19. I was also close to a personal best at just less than 10 minutes. I probably would have had it but for entering IN SYNC, and having to correct it when realizing Y?C?? wasn’t going anywhere, as the other Kevin already related above. LOI was BARRIER, with no other hold ups. Regards.
  20. 12 minutes – thought I was in for a flyer, but was scratching my head a little in the Yankee corner, not knowing Zeiss – it took me so long to get SCARLET that I figured out EN BLOC from wordplay, CREATURE from there, and that made SCARLET my last in.
  21. 6:54 for me. For some reason I had difficulty finding the setter’s wavelength, and made heavy weather of several straightforward clues in what was (or should have been) a nice easy start to the week.
  22. 30 minutes for me which is a personal best, so very happy with that. Enjoyed the puzzle and the blog. Thanks Ulaca. The Literal clue makes more sense with the explanation. I wrote in MASALA for 22dn without thinking until I saw it written down and noticed there was no medic in MASALA but there is in MADRAS. Last 2 in were MISPRINT and then UPSTAGE. John

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