Times 25537 – A Welcome Relief

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Following events since last weekend it was with some relief that I solved a long answer (12ac) as the puzzle was printing off and realised that I was probably in for an easy time of it today. In the event I took 35 minutes whilst not setting out to break any records, but the last 10 of these were spent on 9dn where I had indicated 10, 4 in the grid instead of 9, 5. 16dn also caused a slight delay with its misleading use of “boxes” and unhelpful reference to “Daniel”. In all it was a pleasant solve and probably about as hard as I needed after a trying week.

* = anagram; ” ” = sounds like

Across
1 FUSE – US (our side) inside FE (strong metal – iron)
3 GANG OF FOUR – (RUN OFF AGOG)*  Lots of possible references here with Chinese communists and UK Social Democrats probably the leading contenders
10 REGARDS – RE (once again), GuARDS (defends)
11 THE PITS – Double definition
12 ONE OVER THE EIGHT – OVER (finished) + THE (article) inside ONE EIGHT (lunch and dinner times)
13 GLADYS – G, LADYS (woman’s)
14 PASTILLE – ILL (problem) inside PASTE (gum)
17 UNEARNED – U, NEAR (mean), DEN (study) reversed
18 CRACOW – A + C, inside CROW (black bird)
21 GRASSHOPPER MIND – SHOP (store) inside GRASPER (greedy type), MIND (take care)
23 EVASIVE – SAVE (but) reversed, I’VE
24 DISAVOW – (OVID WAS)*
25 TAKE TO TASK – TAKE TO (start to enjoy), TASK (job)
26 PROD – R inside POD (school)

Down
1 FURLONG – FUR (marten), LONG (pine)
2 SEGREGATE – (EASTER EGG)*
4 ABSURD – A + B (upper classes), “SIRRED” (addressed as knights)
5 GET AHEAD – GET A HEAD (fill vacancy at school)
6 FREE ENTERPRISE – (PEERS INTERFERE)*
7 OK’ING – 0, KING. Hard luck, Republicans, we now have three in direct line of succession!
8 ROSETTE – SETT (earth – for badgers) inside ROE (a deer, a small Eurasian deer…)
9 GRAVEYARD SHIFT – GRAVE (serious), YARD (distance), SHIFT (travel – at speed). I think of this as early rather than late.
15 LOCHINVAR – LO (see), CHIN (feature), VARy (change). The young one appears in Walter Scott’s “Marmion”.
16 DEFOREST – DEFOe (Daniel), REST (the others). Boxes are trees here.
17 UNGUENT – GNU (wild animal) reversed, TUNE*
19 WIDOWED – W,I, DO,WED (get married)
20 SPADES – Speak, PADrES (chaplains)
22 ALACK – A, LAC (member of RAF – Leading Aircraftman), K (thousand)

36 comments on “Times 25537 – A Welcome Relief”

  1. Could hear Jack sighing with relief as I went through this one. Seeing all 4 long answers in right off helped a great deal. Had to dredge up LOCHINVAR from deep memory and that was last in. Had also forgotten LAC as an abbrev. at 22dn.

    Slight double duty for “place” in 11ac? Or is “worst” on its own sufficient to signal THE PITS?

    And is there an homage to Giotto’s most talented pupil in the middle row?

    Slightly off topic: did anyone (apart from our esteemed commenting colleague) catch this?:
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/crosswords/crossword-blog/2013/jul/18/times-crossword-championship

    Edited at 2013-07-26 01:14 am (UTC)

    1. SOED has “the pits” as “the worst or most despicable example of something” so I don’t think “place” has to be part of the definition.
  2. Ta for that. I guess, in the Liverpool Echo, it would have been “LAST place to service a car?” — much closer to passing the substitution test. Ta-ra!
  3. I didn’t bother to parse the last three letters of LOCHINVAR (I can hear Tony muttering) and shoved in ‘Lochinver’ confidently having greatly enjoyed Lockhart’s Life of Scott not so long ago. Fine man – refused all offers of help when a dodgy investment ruined him, wrote like a Trojan to try and extricate himself and killed himself doing so.

    The most famous line from Marmion (he gave up writing poetry and turned to novels because he felt he couldn’t comptete with Byron) – ‘What a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!’ – provided the inspiration for the title of a modest (prose) effort of mine a few years back.

    45 mins – last in and COD to DEFOREST (tho’ I’d have been up in arms had the Daniel been a scientist I’d never heard of)…

    Edited at 2013-07-26 03:13 am (UTC)

  4. A couple of these I only understood post hoc, like 17ac and 21ac; I only got 21 because it had appeared here once (DNK then), and somehow it stuck in my memory, as so little does these days. DNK ‘LAC’. COD to DEFOREST.
      2. Everyone seems to get it but me – but, no surprise there. Is it anything to do with a putative Oirish pronunciation, or does it require UK-based knowledge I don’t have, or is it merely obtuseness?
        1. Can’t help you, I’m afraid, but thought I’d let you know it’s not just you; I’m completely lost in this section of the discussion.
        2. I think it comes from Star Trek. The doctor was played by one Deforest Kelly?
          1. Thanks, Jimbo. Absolutely no chance of this Trekophobe getting that.

            Edited at 2013-07-27 03:51 pm (UTC)

  5. 15’27”, including time spent OKing the entries, during which that still looked wrong.
    At 22, I satisfied myself that AC for aircraftsman, which I knew, with an unusual L for one (Roman numeral?) culled from the rest of the clue was entombed in A K. Doesn’t quite work, perhaps, but it kept me happy and in this game you don’t have to show your working. It made up for not being allowed to spell Kraków properly.
    The nice ‘n’ easy but amusing THE PITS gets my CoD.
  6. 27 minutes…but fool, fool…with get cheap (steal?). Why bother to parse when you have the answer? Regards, the pits.
  7. Enjoyable 15 minutes, done in 2 blocks, the second of which started when I managed to rid myself of the concept of a CATERPILLAR MIND (no, me neither), and got an ‘in’ to the blank SW corner. I expect I’ve seen LAC before, rather than the much more obvious AC, but I ended up crossing my fingers and deciding it must be right even though I couldn’t see where the L came from.

    Edited at 2013-07-26 12:04 pm (UTC)

  8. About time you had an easy one Jack. I also thought of you as 1A and 3A went straight in.

    Not much to say about this one. That last “one” in 22D is both misleading and I suspect surface padding whilst “strong” is not needed at 1A. However, the rest is so straightforward that these minor things present no real problems.

    1. I agree with you, Jimbo, about the misleading and redundant “one” in 22D. Also – where is the definition? “Alack” is an expression of surprise or regret that someone in mourning might indeed utter – and no other answer was possible – but how does it equate to “I mourn”? No one else seems to have been troubled by this, so I’m almost certainly just being dim. Would you be so kind as to enlighten me?

      Otherwise an enjoyable puzzle – I too like 12A and also 19D.

      1. I took the definition as the expression of regret you have described, so “alas” or “alack” might be interpreted as “I mourn” or “I’m sorry” (e.g. for you).

        Edited at 2013-07-26 01:24 pm (UTC)

        1. Thanks Jack. Within seconds of sending my earlier reply to Jimbo, I had what the French call an “esprit d’escalier” moment when it occurred to me that we are dealing with here is the convention that the crossword setter can refer to himself (herself?) as “I” or “me”, so “alack” becomes an expression of sorrow by the compiler, the “I” of the clue. Is that how you read it? That seems to me the only way that the clue can be parsed satisfactorily.
  10. A pleasant end to the week. Didn’t know GRASSHOPPER MIND, LOCHINVAR or the LAC in ALACK. Also held up by assuming that “boxes” in 16D indicated a container.

    COD to 12A, despite the length.

  11. Chuffed this morning – completed in 14m 36s. Fastest for a long time, and close to a personal best.
    George Clements
  12. 14 mins mid-morning.

    The GANG OF FOUR/FREE ENTERPRISE crossers went in immediately and that opened up the whole RHS for me. Once I had the checkers for the last word I entered ONE OVER THE EIGHT without bothering to parse it, the UNEARNED/UNGUENT crossers opened up the SW including the previously unknown GRASSHOPPER MIND, and when GRAVEYARD SHIFT went in the rest of the puzzle fell into place. ALACK was my LOI from the definition alone because I didn’t know the LAC abbreviation.

    I liked z8b8d8k’s suggestion for a future DEFOREST clue.

  13. I was pleased with my 35 mins completion but this would have been far improved were it not for my entry of free eenterprse at 6 down early on. 21ac, me?

    Rob

  14. 21:20 .. most fair flew in but I ground to a halt with two problems, one nearly causing self-destruction by typo:

    One was my LOI – GET AHEAD – which I still don’t really understand. Are we saying that it’s “secure a headship”?

    My self-inflicted wound came from typing in UNGNUET, which made 23a an unlikely U_A_I_E. I devoted at least 5 minutes – seriously toying with UNALIKE – before thinking to check the crossing letters.

    I really need a handy aide-mémoire along the lines of “Weird orthographic paramaters? You’ve probably messed up.” If someone can come up with something just a tad snappier, I’d be grateful.

      1. I get that, but where’s the equivalence with “fill vacancy at school”? [excuse me for being thick, which I sense I am]
        1. I think your word-blindness comes from seeing it from the POV of the applicant rather than the governors, or whoever it is who chooses heads these days…
  15. An enjoyable 6.03 – have never been a fan of OKING – it appears all the time in cryptics and I groan each time it does.
  16. LOI: spent several minutes trying to make REMOTEST work, having rejected DeForest, the inventor of the triode, as obviously irrelevant. Eventually had to resort to an aid to find other possibles for checkers, and saw how clue needed to be parsed.
  17. I stopped the clock at 12m, but then saw I hadn’t solved 15dn, started it again and finished in 15m. This enables me to say that I spent three minutes on one letter. I’ve never heard of LOCHINVAR and it took me that long to see the wordplay and put in the right vowel at the end.
    Straightforward apart from that. As Jimbo says 22dn doesn’t quite seem to work but I just bunged it in from the definition.
  18. A relief after the struggles of the last few days. Almost a personal best at 15 minutes. Didn’t know LAC but it was easily guessed from the definition. Ann
  19. About 20 minutes, no real problems except not knowing what a LAC is. It had to be ALACK so it went in anyway as my LOI. I don’t remember ever seeing GRASSHOPPER MIND before either, but the wordplay was quite clear. I’m a fan of concise clues, so my COD is GLADYS. Regards.
  20. Hopeless! I wasted simply ages trying to fit EVASION into 23ac and EG into 16dn, giving me a miserable 11:04 when I thought I was heading for a decent time. Absolutely no complaints though, in particular 22dn (ALACK) seems just fine to me.

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