Times 25,504

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 20 minutes

My thanks to Tim for swapping with me whilst I had a short break. I returned to find both the ill judged letter from The Times about the Crossword Club and the blog giving details of what is afoot. I read the 130+ blog comments with great interest and was affected by both the number and tenor of the comments. I had previously thought that I would not subscribe when called upon to do so. However that blog has forced me to reappraise the situation and I have decided that I will continue my membership and will continue to blog the puzzles for so long as I’m needed and am able. I hope that as many of my fellow bloggers as possible will follow a similar path.

This puzzle shouldn’t cause too many problems with its anagrams signalled loud and its simple wordplays and definitions.

Across
1 OHMMETER – (home)* surrounds MET then R(ule); instrument for measuring electrical resistance after Herr Georg Ohm;
9 EYELINER – EYE sounds like I – LINER=vessel; “okay” is padding; cosmetic used by ancient Egyptians and modern Punks;
10 MASS – two meanings;
11 CAPITAL,GAINS – CAP(IT-A(L)GAIN)S; values can fall as well as rise;
13 MISLAY – M-ISLAY;
14 FORESTER – FOR(E)STER; E M and C S;
15 DRAUGHT – two meanings; in US think checkers;
16 PHONEME – PHONE-ME; the bugbear of setters using homophones;
20 STRAW,MAN – N-AM-WARTS all reversed; in the UK think Aunt Sally;
22 MOMENT – hidden (gri)M-OMEN-T(hat);
23 OBJECT,LESSON – OBJECT-LESS-ON; about=ON;
25 DILL – D-ILL; used extensively in Polish cooking – not sure about “medicinal”;
26 ANECDOTE – A-N(ECD)OTE; E,C,D are musical notes; the life blood of celebrity magazines;
27 DING-DONG – D(o)ING-DO(i)NG; The Witch Is Dead;
 
Down
2 HEARTIER -HEAR-TIER;
3 MISCALCULATE – (claim a clue’s)* surrounds T(hink); what IBM did with Bill Gates, perhaps;
4 TRIPTYCH – TRIP-T(rend)Y-CH; altar painting;
5 RECTIFY – RE(CT)IFY; IBM had no chance to do this once they had signed away their interest;
6 CELLAR – sounds like “seller”;
7 ANTI – (c)A(n)N(o)T-(w)I(n);
8 PRESERVE – P-RESERVE; page=P;
12 ABSENT-MINDED – (best in damned)*; now why did I come to this room….?;
15 DISLOYAL – DI(SL-O-Y)AL; Heath to Thatcher; Thatcher to Major;
17 HOMESPUN – (posh menu)*; my favourite branch of philosophy;
18 MANDOLIN – M-AND-O-(NIL reversed);
19 INDEXED – IN-DE(X)ED;
21 MOTION – two meanings;
24 JEEP – J(E-E)P;

32 comments on “Times 25,504”

  1. Found this very easy, though it took me a while to parse 11ac. However although not hard it is nevertheless an elegant, economical effort.. thanks, setter. And welcome back, Jimbo. I in turn am away for a while now, walking in the Pyrenees, far from broadband. See everyone again in August, by when the sun will be shining, and The Times will have had a fit of remorse and an outbreak of efficiency…
  2. Almost as easy as Monday; I’ve got a bad feeling about later in the week. I’m glad to see Jimbo also wondering about the ‘medicinal’ bit. I don’t know Aunt Sally, but I was under the impression that it’s not the same thing as a straw man, and that ‘straw man’ is not dialect-specific. And didn’t we have PHONEME rather recently, and with a similar clue? On 19d, I wasted time trying to fit in ‘aye’ or ‘yea’ before coming up with the X. COD to 23ac, which also took me time.
  3. I am getting tremendously 12dn in my dotage, as I not only solved this puzzle but blogged it as well, forgetting that I’d exchanged weeks with my Tuesday co-tenant! Luckily it was a straightforward job on both counts, so it didn’t cost me very much of my morning.

    Anyway, 8:16 on the timer, and my view was also that it was, like yesterday’s, fairly simple (especially for the more experienced solver) but with some nice flourishes. I also found myself wondering if the setter was trying to tell us something with the surfaces of 3dn and 12dn…

    1. I read your blog before you deleted it, Tim. Did you have a third definition at 10ac? I was going to query it.
      1. On third examination, I wasn’t sure, as you can break the phrases up in several ways. I guess it depends if you read it “get together in congregation” as one definition, or two run together.
      2. I tossed around 2 or 3 but decided to opt for 2 on grounds of simplicity

        Glad you remembered last Tuesday, Tim!

  4. I went right to Jimbo’s clue-by-clue explanations without reading his introductory paragraph, but keriothe’s last line caught my eye. Let me add my thanks to Jimbo for hanging on; and I second his hope that other bloggers will do the same.
  5. 18 minutes, lots to smile about, especially DING DONG, OBJECT LESSON and MANDOLIN, with a side helping of an anagram being gently hinted at by the word “anagram”.
    Now I know what a STRAW MAN can be, today’s learning of something you’ve heard of but never bothered to understand.
    I had RHEOSTAT for 1ac initially, no parsing but pleased to remember something about resistance from schoolday physics. Physics is probably the one subject I wish I had taken more notice of as the gateway to the astro- variety. Sadly, it wasn’t that well or imaginatively taught and was just another O level. But I did remember rheostat. And OHMMETER, though the double M looks slightly odd even if it is necessary.
    Enjoyable stuff.
  6. Glad to hear you are in for the long haul too, Jim.

    24 minutes for this one with my customary delay at the end on a couple of answers, on this occasion STRAW MAN and ANECDOTE. I hate clues where one is required to pick a random assortment of musical notes as these can include the customary A-G plus additional German ones and tonic-sol-fa with all its various national spellings.

    Didn’t know REIFY or the required meaning of DRAUGHT.

    1. I actually considered the “three letters between A and G” interpretation and rejected it initially when I couldn’t come up with a word to fit ADEF???E or A?EFG??E. But of course there’s nothing in the clue to suggest the notes have to be consecutive.

      Edited at 2013-06-18 08:21 am (UTC)

  7. 28 minutes, so a rare sub-30 for me. I like the expression ‘ding-dong’ and should use it more.
  8. 13m. Straightforward apart from a few at the end.
    Hold on, what day is it?
    Today I got stuck on DISLOYAL/MOTION/ANECDOTE. I thought 21dn might be MATTER and just couldn’t get it out of my head.
    Unknowns: MISLAY meaning something other than “lose”, and the fishy meaning of DRAUGHT.
    I’m not sure about the US aspect of STRAW MAN: I hear it all the time. I’ve also heard “Aunt Sally” used in exactly the same sense, although this meaning’s not in Chambers.
    Dill is also very common in Scandinavia, where it’s used to turn salmon into gravadlax. According to Chambers it’s a carminative.
    One quibble: shouldn’t it be “profits” in 11ac?
    Glad to hear you won’t be leaving us, Jimbo.

    Edited at 2013-06-18 08:16 am (UTC)

      1. I’d say a capital gain is a profit, capital gains are profits. Not really a big point: of course a picky accountant would tell you that they’re not the same thing at all.
      1. I don’t think it does.
        Chambers has three definitions:
        1. To lay in a place not remembered
        2. To lose
        3. To lay or place wrongly
        If I put something in the wrong place, but remember where I put it, then I have mislaid it in the third sense, but not in the first two. This is the meaning I didn’t know.
        1. My apologies: my internal dictionary conflates 1 and 2 and didn’t know 3. However it’s defined, I’m pretty good at it.
          1. My internal dictionary was the same. My skills in the field are second to none.
  9. Didn’t know the fishy DRAUGHT, and REIFY was a dim memory from last year (Indy?), but this was otherwise a quick solve.

    DING-DONG is a favourite of the BBC text commentary team, who have used it in the context of a variety of sports including tennis, golf, cricket, and no doubt others.

  10. Another quickie today, another just over 30mins for me. Didn’t get the “M and O” bit of MANDOLIN, so thanks for that clarification. Also, didn’t know the second meanining of DRAUGHT, or REIFY.

    LOI: the pesky hidden, MOMENT

    Much appreciation that you’ll be staying on to blog, Jimbo!

  11. Dill water – aka gripe water – used to be in my grandparents’ nursery bathroom cabinet. I think it was administered to colicky babies. 16 minutes with a pause to make sure I had the Y and the I in the right place in TRIPTYCH. Very glad to hear you’re persevering Jimbo.

    Edited at 2013-06-18 09:23 am (UTC)

  12. I too hope that bloggers will continue if they can. I’m exclusively a dead-tree solver (though I’ll usually partake of the freebie Guardian and Indy offerings online, the latter being very good more often than not), and so these pages are extremely useful to me, and avery enjoyable read. I make no comment as to The Times’ attitude in all this, of course.

    20 minutes today, a puzzle that had its moments whilst perhaps not tickling my general cruciverbal fancy.

    Many thanks and best,

    Chris G.

  13. 6.40 for me, helped by the fact that so many of the clues seemed like ‘old friends’ (well it makes a change from calling them ‘chestnuts’).
  14. 19 mins post-lunch after a busy morning. I’d like to think I would have solved it much quicker earlier in the day because, as quite a few of you have commented, there were a lot of straightforward clues.

    I had CAPITAL GAINS fairly early on, but then took way too much time over FORESTER, PRESERVE and ABSENT MINDED. My LOI was RECTIFY, mainly because if I had ever come across ‘reify’ before I had forgotten it.

    Although I had parsed ANECDOTE the same way as Jimbo and was pretty sure that ‘story’ was the definition I still had my fingers crossed.

  15. 17:58 .. I thought this was going to be sub-10 but then I ran into a roadblock in the shape of MOTION/ANECDOTE, where I had snookered myself with ‘motive’. It took me a while to sort that out. I also didn’t know the fishing sense of DRAUGHT.

    And I had no idea there were two Ms in OHMMETER. I suppose it makes sense, now I think about it.

    Bravo, jimbo, for staying aboard. Life wouldn’t be the same without a bit of Dorset thunder.

  16. No real holdups, but some entries submitted on ‘hit-and-hope’ basis. I interpreted ANECDOTE as perhaps ANE=one, then C,D (back TO) E. and MANDOLIN from the definition. so thanks for those.
    I knew STRAW MAN from political discussions, where an opponent will claim to refute you by demolishing an argument which you had never put forward.
  17. A reasonably straightforward and enjoyable puzzle. I’ve nothing useful to add to the comments above, but I won’t let that stop me from joining the chorus of hallelujahs that has greeted Jimbo’s assurance that he won’t be jumping ship. Bravo indeed!
  18. About 20 minutes all told, ending with ANECDOTE. Overall, not very hard, except a few extra minutes to unravel DISLOYAL, STRAW MAN, and the rest of the SW area. Regards.
  19. Did this in breaks during pub quiz last night, and everything seemed to fall into place nicely then, I think I’ll recreate the circumstances again tonight! I originally had something else in for OHMMETER but can’t remember what. Very nice surfaces today I thought.
  20. 10:01 for me. I’d have posted quite a decent time but for 26ac, which took me simply ages – and I wasn’t too taken with it when I finally parsed it correctly.

    I had 10ac as three definitions.

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