Times 25527 – Maybe you do need a weatherman….

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 65 minutes elapsed, about 30 solving

Golf: 5-hole playoff in Iowa

I’m making a bonus appearance tonight as a substitute for Ulaca, who is traveling this week. Usually, when I get a puzzle in a swap, it turns out to be a toughie, but this one was not too bad. My slow elapsed time was due to the exciting playoff at the John Deere, where 19-year-old Jordan Speith ended up winning and getting the last spot on the express jet to Muirfield. I hope he and his caddie remembered to bring their passports.

As a result of my rather casual solve, I wrote in a number of answers without bothering with the cryptics or much else, so I will now have to untangle a few of the clues as I compose the blog.

It is possible there is a very subtle political theme in the puzzle, but maybe it is just a coincidence. If there is, the setter is very restrained in his commentary compared to the sort of clues you might see in the Guardian.

Across
1 POPPET, PO(PP)ET. Alexander Pope, that is, so not an anagram, and not ‘moppet’ either.
5 UTOPIANS, after the Sir Thomas More work. Confusingly, ‘op’ makes an appearance in the middle of the answer.
9 TEAR DROP, TEAR + DROP in different senses. As Aphis99 has pointed out, the correct cryptic is an anagram of ‘predator’, the word below.
10 SORREL. I put this in from the definition without really thinking too much. It appears there is a line of high-class pens made by Christian Sorrel, but that can’t really be it, can it? Maybe I should have thought more, as the correct answer turns out to be CORRAL, CO(R)RAL, where ‘writing’ is one of the three Rs. Thanks to Sotira for this.
11 PREDATOR, anagram of DART + ROPE, with a rather literal-minded anagrist.
12 SELDOM, MOD(L)ES backwards.
13 SOBRIETY, anagram of TRIES BOY.
15 BENT, double definition. Bent grass, poa annua, or Bermuda can all be found on putting surfaces around the world.
17 PREY, last letters of [to]P [lawye]R [influenc]E [jur]Y.
19 VERMOUTH, VER[b] + MOUTH. A brilliant clue based on ‘gin and it’, where the literal is very fairly indicated if you can take the hint.
20 HOOPOE, HO(O)P(O)E. Another good clue, with the location of the inserted letters given in the clue.
21 NEPENTHE, N + E + PEN + THE. I believe this has been used before, but it’s not a chestnut yet.
22 IBEXES, IB. + EXES. In footnotes, ‘ib.’ is the usual abbreviation for ‘ibidem’, ‘in the same place’, while ‘exes’ is a rather unusually abbreviation for ‘expenses’ – at least that’s how I interpret the clue. Only a pedant would refer to these goats as ‘ibices’.
23 AQUATINT, A QUA([inciden]T)INT.
24 SANCTITY, SAN(CT)ITY.
25 TICKET, double definition, I believe. “It’s just the ticket” + the ticket you need to get into the art gallery. Competing interpretations invited. Phmfantom has pointed out that that this most likely refers to the ticket collector at a railway station, who takes your ticket at the barrier. If you patronize a train station, then your ticket will be punched on the train by the conductor.
 
Down
2 OVERRATE, the OVER RATE, which must be very slow for cricket matches to take so long.
3 PARODIST, PAR ODIST. The literal is a bit disingenuous, since a parodist is not strictly an imitator.
4 TURNTABLE, T(URN)T + ABLE. I did not see this right away, looking for a more obscure sort of record holder. ‘Old’ is not quite accurate either, since so many new turntables are constantly being introduced by optimistic manufacturers.
5 UNPARLIAMENTARY, anagram of A PARTY LINE RUN + AM (i.e. before PM).
6 PROGENY, PR(O GEN)Y.
7 ABRIDGER, A + BRIDGE + R, where ‘R’ can stand either for ‘rook’ or ‘regina’.
8 SOLEMNLY< SOLE(M[a]N)LY.
14 TRUMP SUIT, [go]T + RUMP + SUIT. If you could use living people, a more amusing clue would be likely.
15 BRAHMINS, BRAHM(IN [sounds like INN])S. I had to Google this for the blog, it’s a bit of CRS. ‘Brahms and Liszt’ = ‘pissed’.
16 NAPOLEON, expansion of ‘Nap’. A rather simple-minded clue that caused me to hesitate just for that reason. My own clue, entered in a cluing competition long ago, was “The emperor will continue to sleep without a sign”.
17 PHONETIC, PH(ONE)TIC, where the enclosing letters are an anagram of PITCH. Nothing to do with ‘phony tick’, as some might think.
18 EXCHANGE, EXC(HANG)E[l]. Another one where the cryptic was not very necessary.
19 VIOLENT, VIOLE([garde]N)T.

27 comments on “Times 25527 – Maybe you do need a weatherman….”

  1. 33:58 .. and I found it distinctly tough.

    10a is CORRAL, writing being one of the 3 Rs.

    Edited at 2013-07-15 02:17 am (UTC)

  2. Yes, tough going. And had no idea about how IBEXES worked. Thanks for that then. As for ‘revise’=TEAR (9ac), I’m still thinking.* Also had the feeling that the TICKET clue referred to trains.

    * On edit: see the next post for what’s really going on! Pass the pointy hat and I’ll stand in the corner.

    Edited at 2013-07-15 05:23 am (UTC)

  3. What, no mention of the charming device at 9ac? (where “Revise what’s beneath” means give an anagram of PREDATOR, directly underneath in the grid)
    1. Ah! Thanks for spotting that. Like Vinyl I was looking for two meanings; that led me to read “drop” as “what’s beneath”, leaving me to wonder about ‘revise’ = TEAR.
  4. A rare DNF for me, and that was even after extensive use of aids in the SE where I was left with three words outstanding.

    I eventually concluded that something must be wrong, the most likely being TRUMP CARD at 14dn where I couldn’t explain ‘businessman/card’ anyway. That I was unable to take the small step from TRUMP CARD to TRUMP SUIT I put down at best to tiredness or at worst to approaching senility, but at least now that I know the answer I can take some comfort from finding that “TRUMP SUIT” does not appear as an entry in any dictionary, both according to my own research and as confirmed by OneLook which gives its only listings in a Wikipedia article and the glossary to Beginner’s Bridge. This must account for Word Wizard and Word Matcher failing to come up with it when I eventually turned to them in desperation.

    Anyway, that error left me unable to solve 23 and 25 where I had wrong checkers in place, and 17dn where I really needed a checker or two to help with the second half of the answer having become fixated on ‘fake’ being PHONY or PHONEY.

    Other unknowns or forgottens today were NEPENTHE (got with use of aids), IB for ‘ibidem’, HOOPOE and I couldn’t bring BRAHMINS to mind with two of its checkers still missing.

    Like most others here I also didn’t understand TEAR DROP and to add insult to injury I thought POPPET almost immediately at 1ac but then wrote in MOPPET, another solution I had considered for a split second but rejected, so I was doomed from outset.

    On the plus side I was pleased to remember ‘BENT grass’ and I understood the ‘three Rs’ reference at 10ac.

    If this is how the week starts I’m glad not to be blogging Friday’s puzzle.

    Edited at 2013-07-15 09:47 am (UTC)

  5. I’m so glad someone here was able to figure out TEAR DROP. I bunged TEAR in without any understanding of the cryptic. I forgot to time myself but it took ages – about 45 minutes. Enjoyable though. Ann
  6. Good to drop in at the old oasis, even with its nightmarish Scylla and Charybdis touch. In Uganda the past six weeks, where I filled in many a traveller’s pause with a book of Telegraph GK crosswords, highly recommended. Gave up on 40 minutes with ibexes and Brahmins (nice) undetected. A good one to come back to. – joekobi
  7. A stunningly good crossword, I thought, taking 17’15” (I’ll be glad when I get my old watch back – the numbers on my mobile whizz by so fast it’s discouraging).
    An easy POPPET followed by the long ‘un (not fully parsed, didn’t twig the AM) was disingenuous, the rest causing both extensive head scratching and delight, with smooth surfaces abounding. UTOPIANS was my CoD until LOI BRAHMINS, “half drunk” indeed!
    A long time debating PHONETIC – surely a soundalike phony had to be in there somewhere, and I wish I’d seen the wonderful device for TEAR DROP and not just put it in with a query as to why TEAR=revise. And how nice to have a proper AQUATINT after the implausible AQUARELLES on Friday.
    TRUMP SUIT still looks a bit odd. Not impossible, but not a dictionary phrase as others have observed. Not helped in solving by imagining that the businessman was Donald and that I’d missed his obituary.
    NAPOLEON was a very generous clue in a sea of tricksiness, none the less welcome for all that.
  8. mctext certainly is on the right track, but with the installation of barriers, ticket-collectors are a vanishing species (were they ever know outside the UK?)
    1. Don’t get me started. I reckon the downfall of British civilisation will eventually be dated to the point where guards became “train managers” and ticket inspectors “revenue protection officers”.
    2. We have conductors who collect tickets on the MetroNorth Hudson Line I’m pleased to say. Thanks to Vinyl for parsing “brahmin” – it stumped me completely because I didn’t know the slang. As for the “Donald”, I too got in a rut with that for a while (wishful thinking on the part of Zabadak perhaps). Good puzzle. 18.53.
  9. Over 20 minutes for a really tough puzzle, where I was occasionally just stabbing around in desperation like a lot of other people, it seems.

    And it appears I’m also far from alone in having to hold my hand up at utterly failing to see what was happening in 9ac until I came here. The poor setter must be despairing at the idiocy of all these so-called solvers who failed to spot such a well-crafted (and, when you see it, obvious) device.

    1. I did see the device for 9a, probably thanks to looking at 9 immediately after solving 11, and with all the checkers in place. Problem was that it sent me off on a wild goose chase looking for more of the same, as well as looking for some kind of Nina along the lines of the PREDATOR/PREY pair.

      It also got me wondering if any setter has used the old band name The Teardrop Explodes as part of clue for PREDATOR… anyone seen it?

  10. Spent nearly 40 minutes and still failed. I also put in ‘tear drop’ on the basis that it really couldn’t be anything else, and missed the clever reference to the solution below.
    I misspelt ‘nepenthe’ and opted for ‘target’ at 25a leaving me to invent the word ‘phonetar’ for 17d on the assumption that pitch related to tar.
    I feel duly humbled and congratulate those who prevailed.
    George Clements
  11. Some interesting vocab in this puzzle though I was surprised at the TEAR DROP and TRUMP SUIT clues making it into a Times daily.
  12. 25 mins for all but the clue for BRAHMINS, which I looked at for a further 10 mins before I decided to resort to aids, at which point the penny dropped.

    Count me as another who wrote in TEAR DROP from the definition alone. There was some clever stuff here, but there were a couple of clues I wasn’t overly happy with. I didn’t like the lower case “nap” as short for NAPOLEON, and at 12ac I would have preferred to see the definition as “on few occasions” rather than “on a few occasions”, because the latter can sometimes mean the opposite of SELDOM.

  13. 49m. So I found this extremely difficult, and I can’t say I particularly enjoyed the experience. About half of it went in very quickly, but the rest was a real slog. And of course I failed utterly to see the device in 9ac.
  14. I thought this a terrific puzzle, a cracking start to the week. cod to 9ac, I do so love these “physical” clues.

    Nepenthe is more drug cant, an early version of E apparently..

    1. The card game napoleon is also a lower-case word, or at least it is according to my Chambers, so my quibble is still valid. Yes, I know I’m probably being too picky with the setter.
      1. There’s nothing to say that the answer (at least the “extented nap” part) isn’t all lower case.
        I do agree with you though: I think the card game is a bit too obscure. And I thought exactly the same about “on a few occasions”. I only didn’t mention it because I thought it would look like sour grapes!
  16. A slow solve today but a good sense of achievement when I entered the 29th answer and all without aids. Got 1ac on first look too which doesn’t happen often.
    Nice to see this grid, with its two ‘E’s and two fully-checked answers, make another rare appearance.
    The ingenuity of 9ac was completely lost on me.
    Last three in: Hoopoe, Brahmins and finally Ibexes.
  17. About 35 minutes, all correct, but by no means all understood. The 9A wordplay went over my head, and I couldn’t figure out why I had the wrong letters of the long anagram. My LOI’s were the disconnected TICKET and NAPOLEON, which I thought was too pat to be correct, but I entered it because it couldn’t be anything else. The setter really spiced up the supposedly ‘easy’ Monday puzzle. Thanks to him and vinyl, and regards to all.
  18. Wow – before breakfast I could get all but the four in the bottom left corner… came back to it after lunch and went for BRAHMINS and IBEXES mostly on them being the most likely words to fit. Pretty intriguing stuff, and I did not see the PREDATOR/TEAR DROP connection while solving.
  19. 18:38 for me, with all but three clues going in reasonably briskly. However, IBEXES cost me a couple of minutes, and then BRAHMINS took me simply ages (seven or eight minutes perhaps), with TEAR DROP holding me up at the end because I couldn’t bring myself to bung it in without understanding how it worked (another two or three minutes down the drain). All clever stuff, but perhaps a bit too much for a Monday.
  20. My clue was “The emperor has a sleep but only a short one too.” NAP-(S)OLE-ON(E)
  21. 58 minutes, wasting time in the NE at the end trying to find a word with a Z to complete the pangram! (Solved upon return from Okinawa – thanks to Jonathan for filling in.)

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