Times 25546 –

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Jim’s on holiday so can’t do this one. I was meaning to ask for a sub, but in the end I found myself having to stay up all night for a new software release so it’s given me something to do in the meantime. Solving time 15:21, not bad for 3:30am! I learnt a couple of things too, e.g. the name of a yellow flower and what to call a female crab. Can’t be bad.

Across
1 PITTANCE – PITT (father and son PMs, a bit before Dickens’ time though) + ACE (one) around N (end of DickensiaN). What I’m earning tonight!
5 TEMPER – double definition.
8 TAG – GAT reversed.
9 GOLDILOCKS – GOLD + LOCKS around I. The name of two different yellow flowers, one a kind of buttercup. I’ve never seen it other than as the name of the porridge-stealing little girl.
10 CATARACT – CAR around TA (chaps volunteering) + ACT.
11 VOICED – INVOICED (made to pay) without IN (homeless).
12 OINK – hidden in “Who in Kent”, Berkshire being a breed of pig.
14 BENEVOLENT – BEN + [VOLE inside ENT].
17 SHOWJUMPER – JUMP inside SHOWER (rain for a short time).
20 NAME – E (drug) after N(oon) + AM (before noon).
23 WAY-OUT – double definition.
24 ECSTATIC – (catchiest)* without the H.
25 HAIR-RAISER – double definition, one of them cryptic.
26 SKA – ASK with the A moved to the end.
27 SNAGGY – (gangs)* + (def)Y.
28 ADHERENT – HER inside A DENT.

Down
1 PUT ACROSS – PUT (set) + ACROSS (sort of clue).
2 TIGHTEN – sounds like “Titan”.
3 ANGERS – double definition, the second of which is here.
4 COLD CREAM – COLD (far from) + CREAM (flower). I think “familiar” is there to denote the slangy meaning of COLD.
5 TEL AVIV – TV (box) around [I + V (vide, see) + ALE, all reversed].
6 MACMILLAN – CA (about) reversed + MILL, all inside MAN (staff). Harold Macmillan, Conservative PM 1957-63.
7 EASTERN – odd letters of “exam” + STERN (hard).
13 KOWTOWING – OWING (unpaid) after TWO K reversed.
15 EXERCISED – EX ED around (cries)*.
16 TRENCHANT – (in)TR(ay) + ENCHANT.
18 HEATHEN – HEN (female crab!) around A, THE (articles). Chambers mentions “the female of certain fishes and crustaceans” in the definition of HEN, but isn’t more specific than that.
19 UTTERLY – UTTER (say) + L(uck)Y.
21 ARTISTE – T(ime) inside (satire)*
22 STERNE – ERNEST (Hemingway) with the ST at the top. The new writer formed is Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy.

32 comments on “Times 25546 –”

  1. 16:52 … Much enjoyed. I benefitted from a few lucky guesses which turned out to make sense.

    COD .. VOICED

    Last in SKA, which happily takes me back to a time when I was really quite achingly cool (I’m sure I was) and hanging out in Coventry’s Tic Toc Club, one-time Mecca of 2-Tone … The Selector, The Beat, The Specials .. it feels like a lifetime ago.

    1. I went to see the Specials at Bridlington Spa a couple of years ago. It was the “dancingest” gig I’ve ever been to and I was in a minority of about 3% not wearing a Fred Perry polo shirt.
      1. Good man! I had forgotten the Fred perry polo shirts (in my response to ulaca below). I loved that whole movement – smart clothes, nice attitudes and yes, a lot of dancing. Glad to hear The Specials are still going strong.
  2. The name of the plant (aka Creeping Jenny I see) was a new one to me as well. Also the lady crustacean. But the really difficult bits were the MACMILLAN / VOICED crossers. Agree that the latter, once worked out, is a good clue.

    Linxit: at 4dn isn’t it COLD = “far from familiar”? Cold as in shoulder; lacking affection or warmth?

  3. After a PB yesterday, it was back to earth for me today, even if I had to squeeze this in between the kind of PR panics which the Hong Kong workplace specialises in, AKA storms in teacups.

    Took over an hour all told, I reckon, and managed to get two wrong, ‘far-out’ (must have been thinking of Sotira headbanging in Coventry) and ‘voided’, which, as others have said, was good, and too good for me.

    Though I am loth to disagree with McT(!), I agree with Andy’s parsing of ‘familiar’ (= informal).

    Edited at 2013-08-06 05:07 am (UTC)

    1. Good to see you on form as usual! My main reasoning here is that COLD has to mean far from something in particular: the object sought for example. “Far from” on its own won’t do. While “far from familiar” seems a perfectly good (quasi-)synonym for the “lack of affection” meaning.

      Not trying to start a parsing war but. Far from it!

      1. I’m so far from being among the flower of the parsing community that any war I take part in will be of the handbags at five paces nature, I fear. Having said that, I find myself sleeping with the enemy here, as ‘he was very cold to me’ does indeed pass the substitution test for ‘he was far from familiar with me’, where familiar means intimate.
    2. There was certainly no headbanging involved! There were a lot of smart suits and spats (the shoes, and occasionally the disagreements) on display at the Tic Toc (which, incidentally, had a Canadian maple wood sprung dance floor and a colonnaded gallery – which felt for all the world like a 1940’s dance hall).

      By the way, I started to type ‘Far out’ but stopped and thunk again.

      I’m afraid I’m with McT on the COLD of cream.

  4. After a racing start I thought this was going to be dead easy but I came a cropper and time started to run away from me. Sticking points were 26 and 27 which remained unsolved until the bitter end, and the whole NE segment where I struggled to get a foothold.

    I never heard of GOLDILOCKS outside the fairy story. Unfortunately I do no now remember meeting SKA before, but only in Crosswordland where so often I come across new words and instantly forget them. I toyed with STA here for ages (requeST+A) wondering if this might be a legitimate abbreviation for ‘sonata’.

    COED lists ‘hen / female crab’ along with lobsters and salmon.

    Edited at 2013-08-06 05:36 am (UTC)

  5. 36 minutes with the last ten on voiced. The little word at the end or beginning still darts past me all too often (as for a time with 14). I enjoyed the snaggy quality – seems a useful word – of this one. Surely McT is right on 4 – a stone-cold certainty for me. Good to make the acquaintance of the flower in 9. I may well have known it in my first decade, as a child of the countryside, before I urbanised my life away.
  6. SKA got me – never heard of it – did not even get close. So one little letter was my demise.
  7. 4 down : COLD CREAM

    We reasoned this on from the letter pattern

    COLD … as in ‘far from’/remote/removed/distant
    but can’t see the CREAM-FLOWER connection – and still can’t!

    Is it:
    (a) flow-er (a watercourse);
    (b) name of a particular flowering plant;
    (c) variety of colour of a flowering plant

  8. Much enjoyed this crossword. Clues 11ac and 12ac both flowers of the setter’s art..

  9. Bought the Times early this morning as my dog decided it was time to rise before 6 a.m. Consequently, I had an earlier chance to tackle the puzzle over morning tea and finished it in 20m 29s. Not fantastic, but good for me.
    George Clements

  10. Didn’t know the flower at 9ac, nor did I really think about the flower at 4dn, but managed all correct in under 30mins, so another quickie for me today.

    Last two were on the same line: CATARACT (unknown falls, worked out from wp), and VOICED (couldn’t parse it, so it went in with a ?).

    Also didn’t know the female crab. No surprise there, though.

  11. Couldn’t solve anything in the top half on first pass and then put in SHOTPUTTER for 17A. Recovered from that then was held up by VOICED for my LOI. Parsed COLD CREAM in the same way as McT. I liked OINK, which I think had an unrelated though equally good clue the last time it appeared.
  12. One wrong today – a guess at Sca for Ska. Couldn’t make anything of that clue so thanks Andy for parsing it. Voiced too… that went in with a question mark. Clever clue.
    Made things difficult in the NW corner by putting in Get Across at 1dn and only when nothing came to mind for G?T?A?C? at 1ac did I revisit it.
    Found the NE corner the most difficult and if I’d not got Goldilocks from wordplay might not have cracked it.
  13. 16 mins. Count me as another who didn’t know that the porridge eater is also the name of a flower, or that a female crab is a hen, but both were solvable from the wordplay, although HEATHEN was my LOI. I had no problem with SKA even though it was never one of my favourite genres, and I saw VOICED once I realised I wasn’t looking for a homophone.
  14. I raced – well, raced by my standards – through the first three quarters of this and was hoping for a really fast time but then got bogged down in the top RH corner with the GOLDILOCKS, VOICED, MACMILLAN intersection resisting solution. In the end about 45 mins. I join the growing band of those for whom GOLDILOCKS as plant was an unknown. For a time I had GOLDSMITHS, on the grounds that at a stretch this could be defined as “a plant making metal”, even though there was no discernible way that the cryptic parsing could be made to work. Common sense eventually prevailed. I’m with Mctext on the interpretation of “cold” in 4D.
  15. Did bottom half pretty quickly (<15min), then stuck for a while. till decided 4d had to be COLD (as per McT) CREAM (couldn’t see why, so thanks ulaca). Then NW fell, and finally NE as soon as I got 5a, with 11a LOI over five minutes later, purely from the definition. I did eventually see how it works, while reading the post-submission comments.
  16. 15:10 for me. I gained some time by throwing in goldilocks on a whim with just the L and C checked but then lost it all again by throwing in get across at 1d despite not seeing where the get might fit in. It was only after I’d exhausted my list of Prime Ministers whose name begins with G (Gladstone, er…) that I spotted that pittance would fit nicely.
  17. 22m, with the top half taking a lot longer than the bottom.
    I enjoyed this a lot: it was tricky but never just because of obscurity and I found myself going down several blind alleys: trying to get an anagram of “bolts” into 9ac, deciding the rodent was going to be a mole, that sort of thing. And trickiest of all, trying to make 11ac a homophone of something meaning “made to pay” meaning “homeless”. A very good clue indeed.
    I’m another in mctext’s camp on 4dn.
  18. On the setter’s wavelength today. 20 minutes is a very good time for me. I had to guess the last across clue from the checkers because I forgot to print out the second page! Fortunately, *D*E*E*T doesn’t leave you with many options. I’m another who hadn’t heard of the yellow flower. Ann
  19. Yesterday’s post swim PB was not repeated. Post swim today I did the crossword in 11 minutes. Like Penfold, I too went through Prime Ministers beginning with a G before realising that I had the first word in 1d wrong.
      1. Nope! Looking at a list of them now, it is surprising how many prime ministers I have never heard of!
  20. About 15 minutes, ending with VOICED. That’s a good clue, but I’ll vote for OINK in a squeaker. Sorry. OINK is very well hidden, I thought. Same other solvable problems re hens and flowers as many others, but no real hold ups. Regards.
  21. 7:54 for me – rather slow to get VOICED as my LOI (despite having parsed the clue more-or-less correctly first time through), and then finally wasting time on my final check-through parsing MACMILLAN when the answer couldn’t really be anything else.

    All in all a most enjoyable puzzle. Interesting to note that crypticsue appears to have found it much more difficult than yesterday’s, whereas I found it about the same!

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