Times 25541: Don’t fret

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 21:48

Taking a leaf out of Jack’s book, I decided to take this one as slowly as possible. But it wasn’t all that difficult. There’s still one I can’t parse (26ac) and await revelations from the “community” (yuk!).

And today’s news from down here is that News Ltd (the Australian Murdoch press) has ditched our leading setter bar none. Another good reason perhaps to beware?

Across

1. MADEIRA. MADE, I{sland}, R{ight}, A.

5. AGITATO. A, G{ood}, 1 (one), T{ime}, AT, O (=Oval). Let’s hope Australia has such a thing later in the month eh?

9. LEVITATED. Anagram: let TV idea.

10. PIPIT. P{iano}, I, PIT.

11. COLON{y}. Which can be used like this: to break a sentence.

12. RETALIATE. Reverse I LATER, ATE (scoffed).

13. PRE(POSSE)SSING.

17. AFRICAN VIOLET. I CAN (I preserve) + VIOL; all inside A FRET. One of the few fretted instruments I don’t play.

21. COPYRIGHT. COY (modest), RIGHT (sounds like ‘write’, to author) inc P for ‘power’.

24. THROW. TH{e}, ROW.

25. DEL(H)I. Today’s dead giveaway.

26. INITIALLY. Has to be the answer, but I have no idea how it works. All help gladly received.
On edit: see Jack’s first comment. L.A.S.E.R stood for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”.

27. SL(E)IGHT.

28. TANKARD. T{avern} + anagram: drank a.

Down

1. MALI(CE).

2. DEVELOPER. Two literals: real estate and photography.

3. INTENSE. ‘See’ and ‘saw’ are different tenses of the same verb. Liked this one best.

4. AFTERNOON. Anagram: a front one.

5. AUDIT. A, U{niversity}, DIT (Morse Code for E).

6. IMP,ALAS. The Chevvy of said name was always my favourite.

7. ALPHA. The key here is the ‘A’ (before ‘star’), where Alpha is the international radio sign for that letter. Then think: Alpha Centauri or Alpha Crucis, etc.

8. OUTWEIGH. Hear: out way.

14. SHINTOIST. Anagram: this is not.

15. INTER ALIA. A cryptic def. If we include ‘and others’, the class of said things is not exhausted.

16. BAR CODES. Another cryptic def.

18. CUR(L)ING.

19. LATVIAN. Anagram: valiant. “There was a young lady from Riga …”, etc. (Even if it is officially pronounced |ˈrēgə|.)

20. SWAYED. Hidden.

22. PULSE. Two literals.

23. G(R)IST.

62 comments on “Times 25541: Don’t fret”

  1. 14:56 … it might have been rather quicker had I not spelt “Today’s dead giveaway” as DHELI.

    Never heard of the lady of Niger.

    A pretty smashing example of an easier puzzle – INTENSE, COLON, SWAYED, THROW … good stuff.

  2. I’m sure I never set out intending to take a puzzle “as slowly as possible”! That would be a very strange thing to do, but it’s true I have resolved to allow time to appreciate the workings of each clue as I solve it unless this would involve looking things up along the way.

    Today I finished in 28 minutes so it was definitely at the easier end of the scale of difficulty.

    For some unknown reason I’ve always been under the impression that Madeira is a rich red wine so I looked several times at 1ac before writing it in and I’m pleased that misapprehension has now been corrected.

    At 19dn I missed the reference to the Lady from Riga completely and got myself embroiled in early 21st century economic terminology involving Baltic, and specifically Latvian, tigers, so thanks to McT for explaining that.

    1. My misunderstanding. Apologies. I meant not fretting about clocked times. Hence the title with its allusion to 17ac.
      1. No probs, I realised what you meant but having breached the 2-hour solving barrier twice in the past fortnight without any effort it amused me to think I might need to make a conscious decision to take as long as possible!
        1. Would one of those have been Anax’s tour-de-force on the weekend? Worth the whole year’s sub in my estimation … if you want solving time for your money.

          Edited at 2013-07-31 05:21 am (UTC)

          1. No, I took around 65 minutes on that one which I agree was an excellent puzzle. I think the first was on the Saturday of the previous weekend and then one of the weeklies last week. I could look them up but I’m trying to obliterate the memory.
  3. 28 minutes (I’m too simple to have more than one regime). I thought LATVIAN must be an oblique reference to the Baltic tiger economies, as I’ve only heard of that limerick with a lady from Niger, who seems more comfortable on a tiger to my ears. As for 5d, I took ‘code for E, it’s said’ to represent DIT, as in ‘IT’s after D’. The way McT parses it, I can’t see how the ‘it’s said’ can be accounted for.
    1. I just assumed that’s how you pronounce the single “dot” in Morse Code: as DIT. As opposed to the dash, which is DAH. When I did volunteer medical transport, I used to take an older Indian gentleman to hospital. The trips were long and he insisted on teaching me Morse Code along the way. First lesson: you pronounce the written or tapped DOT at DIT. We ended up tapping messages to each other on the dashboard of the car. I won’t go into details of the contents but!

      Edited at 2013-07-31 01:45 am (UTC)

      1. And there was I thinking that the whole point of Morse Code was to keep everything hush-hush. 🙂 I’m sure you’re right on the parsing, but mine has something of the ubercryptic about it, which I cherish.

        On edit: Paul has a cracker in the Graunie today.

        Edited at 2013-07-31 06:34 am (UTC)

        1. Chambers defines “dit” as “a word representing the dot in the spoken form of Morse Code. See also dah”. Pretty sure that’s the intended parsing. And no, I didn’t know that!
          1. My father was a radio operator in WW2 and he used DIT and DAH to describe the dot and the dash. My RAF instructor also used the same terminology when I learned morse
  4. 15:41, wrecked by another typo which was really easy to see after submission, but not before. Worrying: I’m considering ditching the paper Times, my preferred medium.
    This one felt like a quickie with mines. The NW was invaded almost unopposed but then odd clues kept detonating uncertainty.
    I took DIT to be the spoken form of · in Morse code, dah being the other. I felt slightly smug at remembering that · was E. I had no idea about the tiger rider, but couldn’t think of another anagram of valiant, so in it went.
    I’m sure the acronym explanation for INITIALLY is correct, but while solving I took the whimsical route of “in the manner of an initial L” and was prepared to come here and say how clever I thought it was to invent an adverb in this way.
    DKK MADEIRA is white, and recall that when much younger (and more innocent) I could not understand how anyone could be seduced by Michael Flander’s offer of cake. Wasn’t the young lady’s mother’s advice (with her antepenultiomate breath) “look not on the wine when it’s red”?
    CoD to INTENSE. Took ages for the penny to drop, long after the answer had been written in.
    1. Of course! As a lifelong F&S nut that’s where my only knowledge of the wine must have come from:

      Then there flashed through her mind what her mother had said
      With her antepenultimate breath:
      ‘Oh, my child, should you look on the wine when ’tis red
      Be prepared for a fate worse than death!’
      She let go her glass with a shrill little cry.
      Crash, tinkle! it fell to the floor.
      When he asked: ‘What in heaven … ?’ she made no reply,
      Up her mind and a dash for the door.

      Have we ever had ‘zeugma’ in a Times crossword?

      Edited at 2013-07-31 08:05 am (UTC)

      1. Were F+S alive today, of course, they would be castigated for presenting a song about the aggravated rape of an underage girl:
        “She was young, she was pure, she was new, she was nice,
        She was fair, she was sweet seventeen.”
        How times change!
    2. z8 – I had terrible typo problems for a year or so after switching to online solving. I’m starting to get better at it but only by forcing myself to take about 2 minutes to check through each puzzle, paying particular attention to the down clues, before submitting. I pretty much have to spell out every letter of every clue in my head, and even then the odd one slips through the net.

      There’s definitely something about a computer screen which affects the perception – I wonder, were those nice cognitive science people from the University of (Buckingham?) looking at solving mediums in their recent study of crossword solving?

      1. I shall persevere, though I do usually check before submitting. Down is harder than across. Nothing much more disheartening than discovering your 15 minutes not near the top of the leaderboard but trailing at the back several pages in. At least in those circumstances your shame eventually escapes to page 11.
        1. It’s intriguing, across being easier than down. I’ve noticed the same thing checking sudoku rows and columns.
          Is it hard-wired into the human brain? Or is it because our writing goes across the page, not down?
          Leading to other questions: Do Chinese, Japanese (and other downward script) speakers find it easier to check down answers? Or are they inherently handicapped in writing and reading compared with us, as the human brain is hard-wired to read crossways?
          Rob
  5. Pretty straightforward one today, other than not knowing either the limerick (only heard the Niger version, and even that was no Nantucket) or that viols have frets.
  6. 26 minutes. Can’t make up my mind how to parse audit: I’m surprised we may be expected to know the single dit; and “it” after D is more crosswordy somehow, yet it doesn’t seem quite right. I suppose “it’s said” confirms the dit. 15 doesn’t mean “and” but “among” others so unless it’s a class of corpses I don’t see how it works. Favourite here 17 just for the words, least so 13 same reason.

    Edited at 2013-07-31 08:53 am (UTC)

    1. I’m not sure I understand your objection to 15 but the way I read it was that inter alia indicates that you are not listing a category or class exhaustively.
      Not to be confused with inter alios, of course. I know this because it’s an error a certain type of lawyer seems to relish correcting in someone else’s drafting.
  7. 20 minutes for this one with two little problems. The tiger reference meant nothing to me so just guessed from anagram fodder and checkers.

    I don’t like 1A. MADEIRA is any fortified wine made on the island and comes in four main types according to sugar content and grape used. Change “white” to “fortified” and the clue is accurate.

    I thought 7D ALPHA was rather good.

    1. I agree with you as already mentioned, but to be fair to the setter the grape varieties in the four main types are all white.
      1. We both have more than a passing interest in wines that most others do not share. I don’t think it fair to expect solvers to know the colour of Madeira grapes. I think common, everyday usage should be the yardstick and by that standard Madeira is, as you have said, surely best described as fortified wine.
      2. If he relied solely on the usual sources white is the only colour mentioned (in Chambers and COED – Collins doesn’t specify). However it’s interesting that the illustration on the Madeira Wine Wiki page shows it as red. Perhaps the colour might have been better avoided altogether in the clue.
        1. The illustration on the wiki page is white wine. It goes that brown colour because of the process by which it’s made, which includes heating and oxidation.
          But I agree with you!

          Edited at 2013-07-31 01:20 pm (UTC)

  8. 14m for this. Mostly easy but slowed down by a few tricky ones.
    It’s slightly odd to describe MADEIRA as a “white wine”. There are dry white examples but it’s usually fortified, and I’m not sure I’d describe sherry this way.
    I didn’t know viols had frets. I do now.
    I didn’t know the limerick so 19dn went in with a shrug. Glad to see the Times widening its range of literary sources!
    Thanks for parsing ALPHA: I didn’t have a clue. The phonetic alphabet always seems to catch me out.
  9. 24 mins which would have been considerably quicker but I completely, and in retrospect inexplicably, blanked on the IMPALAS/ALPHA/AGITATO crossers in the NE.

    I couldn’t parse INITIALLY or LATVIAN even though the answers were fairly obvious, so thanks for the explanations.

  10. 17 minutes after finding some inventive ways to muck things up at first (DEHLI for DELHI, thinking COPYRIGHT while writing COPYWRITE, which in turn led me to think the sport was BOWLING, which seemed odd…) so most of the problems were user-generated.

    I had no idea what was going on with the tiger, though. I wonder how often it happens that the setter and editor nod approvingly and put in a reference they both think is pretty clear-cut, but which practically nobody* on the solving side seems to recognise? On the flipside, 3dn was a device I’ve never seen before, but when the penny dropped, I really liked.

    *I appreciate this assumption is based solely on comments here and elsewhere from a small and unscientific survey sample, and may be completely wrong.

  11. A first-class puzzle, I agree. Forgive my ignorance, but, as a matter of interest, how do you know it was by Anax?
  12. I’d heard the limerick long before I knew that Riga was a real place which didn’t rhyme, but the later version, substituting ‘Niger’ (French pronunciation: ​[niʒɛʁ], English pronunciation: /niːˈʒɛər/ or /ˈnaɪdʒər/) doesn’t work either.
    I think ‘white’ is a misleading description of MADEIRA, even though technically correct.
  13. Enjoyable puzzle, definitely on the easier side as it only took me 30 mins, even though the parsing of several solutions eluded me. Thanks to all for the explanations of ALPHA, LATVIAN, INITIALLY and AUDIT. Re the last, the simplest explanation – that DIT=Dot=E – must surely be the right one, but I rather like Ulaca’s ultra-cryptic parsing. INTER ALIA stretched the concept of the cryptic def to breaking point, but on reflection was still fair. INTENSE and COLON were excellent.
  14. 24 minutes and learnt a new Limerick, although for me RIGA rhymes with EAGER and not tiger. CoD the SEE-SAW one.
    1. I was just about to make the same point, though I suppose it nearly works in French. I tried Wiki to get the pronunciation, in case I’ve been wrong all along, and apparently it’s pronounced “Dave”.
  15. 8:15 – I did have to come here to find out the significance of the rider on the tiger.

  16. Small point, but the parsing of this one should be pi(pi)t, with the pi ‘in’ the pit, not before it.

    Doesn’t affect the answer though!

    Mark I

  17. It’s Sunday’s puzzle that is being referred to and Dean Mayer (Anax) is identified as the setter.
    1. Thanks. I didn’t know that Dean Mayer was Anax. Sunday’s cryptic was indeed also a first-rate puzzle.
  18. That’s the collective sound of the limerick reference and the too-clever-by-half CD at 15 going over my head.

    Otherwise a nice puzzle, completed in 15:45. I made the connection between Morse/E/dot/dit quite quickly so no issues there.

    I got held up at the end by impalas (I’d considered ???ALAS but of course no words look like that) and agitato, where my lack of classical music training, and belief that oval might be EGG and time ERA, had me dreaming up brand new notations like ALEGGRO and AGERATO.

    I wouldn’t even know which end of a viol to blow into, never mind whether it has frets, which makes it just as well that the plant (unusually) went in on def and checkers alone with wordplay only considered post-solve.

  19. You know you’re going to have a good brain morning when you confidently write in SANG,R,I,A and think “it’s more commonly made with red wine, isn’t it?”.

    Recovered from that and got there pretty quickly with only a shrug for INTER ALIA and LATVIAN.

  20. Celtic Tiger saved me just about, some dim recess of memory, and INTENSE was just great. Pretty good easier level puzzle this, and even though I was slurping black coffee – it was necessary, though not a WUNIS moment – and stuffing toast in, I coasted in after about 25 minutes. INTER ALIA I had to guess, but by then it couldn’t really have been anything, er, other.

    Thanks mctext
    Chris.

  21. 30/30 today. Steady solve except for hold-up in NE corner – Pipit, Alpha and LOI Impalas my last three in.
    Thanks mctext for explaining African Violet, Intense, Audit and Latvian.
  22. About 20 minutes. I liked INTENSE very much, but no idea here of the limerick. I threw it in from the anagram only. Everything else went in pretty easily except I didn’t fully understand the parsing of INTER ALIA, but didn’t want to stop to force it out of the clue. Regards.
  23. Hello All,

    I live in NY and have been doing The Times cryptic in the NY Post for the past year or so. The puzzle in the Post comes out around 10 days after original publication so I’m always way behind you guys. Finally broke down and got an online subscription today so was able to do the puzzle on the same day. And completed the puzzle correctly for the first time ever!

    I’ve greatly enjoyed this blog and just wanted to say thanks to all who contribute.

    Mike from NY

    1. Welcome aboard, Mike. And congratulations! (I wonder if it’s more motivating when you know the puzzle is the same one everyone else is doing)

      Hope to hear plenty more from you.

        1. I’m not from NY but welcome to the club (Dorset is down south to the west of the island at the very bottom). Don’t hesitate to ask if you need help or don’t understand anything
    2. Hi Mike! There’s Kevin, Vinyl (distinguished blogger) and me all in NY. Have a look at the club forum while you’re on the official site and don’t hesitate to join in, here and there. P.S. We also have our local tri-state correspondents over on the Forum, including “Bayonne” who I continue to hope may actually be Frank Langella.

      Edited at 2013-07-31 08:07 pm (UTC)

      1. Thanks, Olivia. Glad to hear there are others from NY who may be as equally lost as me with some of the UK place names and slang.
      2. I think there may now be more people from New York on here than from London!
        1. Or Canada, eh?
          Welcome Mike. In addition to those Olivia mentioned, I think kevingregg is from NY also.
  24. You must be Donald Swann’s nephew, who made the same mistake about Madeira and cake, according to MF on the record after the song.
  25. From one relative newbie to another, welcome to Mike from New York. As a monoglot, culturally insular Englishman, who has quite enough difficulty in solving, or trying to solve, the Times puzzle, I am in total awe of solvers from overseas who manage to complete the puzzle without the lifetime experiences garnered by living in Britain, and this is even more true when applied to those for whom English is not a first language
    As for today’s puzzle, taking it steadily, ala Jack, I completed in 18m 36s, but, like many others was completely mystified by the parsing of ‘Latvian’.
    George Clements
  26. I wasn’t really on the ball, and struggled to a slightly disappointing 10:03.

    Despite knowing the 19dn limerick perfectly well, I didn’t put two and two together and wasted time wondering if Latvia was supposed to be a tiger economy. I’ve no objection to the non-rhyming of “Riga” and “tiger” though – after all it’s arguably better than

    Little Tommy Tucker
    Sings for his supper;
    What shall we give him?
    Brown bread and butter.

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