Times 25549

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Quite a tricky pangram this, but after the initial shock had worn off I settled to my task and worked through it steadily gaining confidence along the way and eventually finishing in 50 minutes. I completed all but a handful of clues in 35 minutes but I was then held up by 22, 25 & 27 in the SW corner. Earlier I had lost time after writing SHOT at 16 which worked reasonably well in isolation but gave me wrong checkers for the down clues. I take some satisfaction that when I checked the Club forum at 01:30 there was only one submission, suggesting that some  early speed merchants might be finding it hard. If only I had solved on-line I could have been No 2 in the league table for a while – a very rare opportunity missed! On edit at 3:30, there are still only three all correct submissions.

* = anagram

Across
1 ALLURE – ALL (everyone), sURE (certain)
4 BLACK ROD – The Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod is the parliamentary official who’s best known for summoning the MPs of the House of Commons to attend HMQ in the chamber of the House of Lords as she officially opens a new parliamentary session. To “black” somebody is to bar them and “rod” is another type of bar.
9 PUNJABI – Phone, then JAB (box) inside UNI
11 TRIVIAL – TRIp (slip), VIAL (container of medicine)
12 RINGS – They circle Saturn, for example,  but not Earth
13 VERITABLE – REV (clergyman, reversed), 1, TABLE (item for Communion)
14 GOBI DESERT – BID (tender), treE all inside STORaGE*
16 DRAM – Double definition
19 SERF – Hidden and reversed inside reFREShed
20 MISADDRESS – MISs (female), AD (promotion), DRESS (clothing)
22 PROMENADE – ROME (European city), AND*, all inside PE (jerks, as in ‘physical jerks’)
23 SQUAW – QUAy (landing place) inside SW (Cornwall area). The Creek are native American people from the South Eastern states.
25 STIMULI – (1 LIST MU)* – On edit, it’s MU inside (1 LIST)* or maybe MU inside LIST*,1 (take your pick!) . Thanks to Ulaca and McT for the tweaks. I’m afraid any reference to soccer is enough drive me away at the earliest opportunity so I didn’t think much beyond getting the right answer.
26 TWEETER – Wide inside TEETER (move unsteadily)
27 TWOPENNY – OWT (anything Northern, reversed), PENNY (lady)
28 ASCEND – A, Celsius inside SEND (broadcast)

Down
1 ASPARAGUS – AS (like), PAR (standard), AnGUS (beef cattle)
2 LINEN – A sonnet has 14 lines so if one were to label each line according to letters of the alphabet starting at ‘A’ (why?), then the final part of the sonnet would be LINE ‘N’. I’m not sure if this is very inventive or too clever by half.
3 ROADSIDE – whO, ADS (notices) all inside RIDE (journey)
5 LITERARY AGENT – (EAGERLY, TRAIN, Time)*, The Bloomsbury area of London is noted for its literary associations.
6 CHINTZ – Council, HINT (tip), Z (unknown)
7 REIMBURSE – RUB (polish, reversed), inside REIMS, E (English)
8 DOLCE – Cellist inside DOLE (allowance). It means ‘sweetly’ in music.
10 INVESTIGATION – VehiclE inside INSTIGATION (prompt)
15 BARDOLINO – BAR, DO (fleece), LINO (covering on floor). A red wine from the shores of Lake Garda in the Verona region of Italy.
17 MISS WORLD – MISS (avoid), WORLD (earth). All very un-PC these days!
18 ODYSSEUS – SUES (takes action), SillY, DO (party) all reversed
21 DE LUXE – Daughter, fElL oUt, EX (old partner reversed)
22 POSIT – OS (huge) inside TIP (perk, reversed)
24 UNTIE – aUNTIE (relative). ‘Roof’ as the first letter of a Down clue is fair game.

27 comments on “Times 25549”

  1. Got the two long answers quite quickly; then spotted the possible pangram and both of these helped a great deal. LOI was SERF: utterly fooled by “one’s bound to land”. Though I did wonder whether the two meanings of DRAM are related. Does the slug of grog get its name from the 1/8 fl.oz. measure? I always thought it did; but, as ever, happy to be proved wrong.

    Would never have got the wine at 15dn had “bar” not been in the clue.

    COD (among a very strong bunch of clues) to the “transfer list” conceit at 25ac. A top surface there!

  2. 27:53 … About three quarters of this in probably 7 minutes then the rest on the SW.

    I didn’t know the wine and decided it must be BANdolini or similar. It would have helped had I spotted the hidden SERF in my first few searches for a hidden word. STIMULI took an age to click. POSIT likewise. By the end I felt like I had solved two different puzzles.

    I was briefly at the top of the leader board so it seems I wasn’t the only one to run into difficulties.

  3. Found this quite straightforward, finishing in a rare sub-30 but tossing wrong at 16a to put in ‘gram’ rather than DRAM. Have recently been enjoying some very decent Bardolino Classico, so that was a write-in with a couple of checkers.

    A small tweak to the football clue: I think the force of ‘involved’ is to insert MU in the anagrist. COD to TWOPENNY.

    Edited at 2013-08-09 02:10 am (UTC)

    1. … Insert MU in an anagram of LIST … add I (“number one on”) — only slightly different from the way Jack now has it.
  4. Did the half-hour online, then, with something of a feeling of relief not to have to worry about time anymore, leisurely (sc. painfully) spent heaps of time finishing it. I can’t remember what my LOI was; probably half of them. I did, though, think of DRAM right away, but was sure the correct answer had to be something subtler; and I wasn’t prepared to find BAR in the solution as well as the clue. Whatever its etymology, SQUAW is a word that we could do without here, or anywhere.

  5. All correct, but a couple without fully understanding the wp: LINEN (too clever for me); SQUAW (didn’t know that Creek were Indians. Actually think I did, but I’d forgotten). Didn’t like that BAR was in the question and the answer at 15dn, it happens so rarely, and wasted time with ulyssees (sic) in at 18dn for a short while.

    Ended in about an hour with TWOPENNY, which I quite liked once I’d worked it out.

    Didn’t twig that it was a pangram, may have helped with SQUAW, but the Z, J, V went in easily.

    Many thanks for this fine crossie to setter and to Jack for taking the time to work it all out.

  6. 28 minutes for this tricky number. Slightly surprised by twopenny; twopenny-ha’penny more usual (and a nice line-filler). Also by prompt as noun for instigation. Entertained by the pedantry vinyl – all in a good, no, I can’t say it.
  7. A nice puzzle that ground to a halt for me on LOI BARDOLINO, which I hadn’t heard of and which took up roughly a third of my total time due to misparsing the wordplay in every way possible (CON for fleece, KO for floor, etc) until finding the right one.
  8. 16 mins, so this was another one that I was on the setter’s wavelength for. The BARDOLINO/TWOPENNY crossers were my last two in, and I’m annoyed with myself for taking as long as I did over the former because the wordplay is very straightforward. I was a little reluctant to accept bar=bar in a Times puzzle because that type of cluing convention is more usually seen in the Guardian and the Indy.
  9. Terrific puzzle – de luxe alerted me to the pangram possibility early on which made SQUAW and CHINTZ easier to spot. 12 minutes and BARDOLINO from wordplay alone
  10. Hi from Keef,
    as an ex-Landlord, I was interested to note the comments on “dram”, and to kill some time have just done some delving.

    I’ve noted that 100 luma = 1 dram in Armenian currency (632 to £ today)

    OED defines “slug” as
    “an amount of an alcoholic drink that is gulped or poured” – with no reference to size of method of pouring.

    “dram” comes from Gaelic, and just means a drink, with no reference to size or method of pouring, or restriction to spirits only.
    It presumably simply entered common parlance from the ordering of a whisky in a bar.
    And as we all know “dram” or “a wee dram” has become universally regarded as a “shot” of any spirit, not just whiskies.

    In the UK the measure for a spirit for licensed premises wasn’t formalised in law until 1962, when a standard single became 1/6 gill or 1/5 gill in Scotland. A gill being a 1/4 pint.
    That Act also allowed 1/4 gill measures.
    Then in 1995 the Europhiles sneaked in the change to 25ml & 35ml, along with decimal bottle sizes, so in the now standard 70cl bottle of spirits, you get 28 x 25ml shots.

    1/8th of an ounce (or fluid ounce) is a DRACHM, an apothecary’s measure, which is pronounced “dram” and often mis-spelt as such.
    So given that 1 pint = 20 fl oz, you’d get around 200 shots from a 70cl bottle.

    Other historical measures that caught my attention:-
    * sack or bag (3 bushels), quarter (8 bushels), chaldron (36 bushels) and load (40 bushels)
    * from NE – beatments (a quarter of a peck), kennings (2 pecks) and bolls (2 bushels)and chaldRon
    * pin, firkin, kilderkin, barrel, hogshead,puncheon, butt, tun
    (4.5 / 9 / 18 / 36 / 54 / 72 / 108 / 216 galls)

    Keef

    1. Thank you for the expert research.

      Misers will be especially pleased to know that they can legitimately meet a guest’s request for a “wee dram” by producing a small glass of water!

  11. 22m for this, properly helped by the pangram, which is a first. Another puzzle where answers went in from definition with wordplay half understood at best. My LOI was DRAM, and it took me an age to see it. I didn’t know it was a measure, and there are so many possibilities for those checkers.
  12. A very long time for this, complicated by the cricket and a neighbour who called just before each wicket fell. After yesterday’s chat about surfaces, the clever Gareth Bale headline was a real distraction for this Tottenham supporter.
    Maybe not noticed by everyone, but the use of ‘communion’ to indicate TABLE is a nicely observed free church nuance – compare eucharist or mass and altar.
    Found this tough, but not annoying. CoD to that footie clue.
    1. This is from the Book of Common Prayer:

      Then shall the priest, kneeling down at the Lord’s Table, say in the name of all them that shall receive the Communion this prayer following.

      We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness…

      1. No argument, of course, just a matter of flavour in churchmanship. Like many people, I’ve been both Church and Chapel, and table/communion has more of the flavour of the latter.
  13. On the whole an excellent puzzle. The only weak clue, I thought, was 2D, LINEN, unless we are all missing something. I parsed it in the same way as Jack and, like him, also wondered why one would label each of the 14 lines of a sonnet in the order of the alphabet. The classic Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains followed by a rhyming couplet with the rhyme scheme: a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g. So, in alphabetical terms, the last part of a sonnet would be g or g-g, not n.
  14. I found this on the harder side, about 35 minutes, and at the end I had to look up the Official usher, so a technical DNF. If I had guessed with all the checkers I would have been choosing between Black Rod, which looks more likely, and Block Rod, which doesn’t, but fits the wordplay to me. But I thought it was a very good puzzle, although tricky with ‘jerks’=PE, ‘tip’=’perk'(?) and the unknown usher. On the good side, SERF, TWOPENNY and the celestial body. Regards.
  15. 12:34 for me. I found this quite tough but plodded slowly through until I was left with 16ac and 15dn.

    I initially thought of GRAM for the former but couldn’t make anything of it. However, DRAM seemed a bit weak, so I wasted time searching for a still better alternative.

    The only word I knew that would fit 15dn was BORSALINO (I have a rather nice Borsalino hat which I bought before a work trip to Helsinki one January), but that didn’t seem to match the clue in any way, so I settled for BARDOLINO based purely on the wordplay, though the fact that “bar” appeared in both clue and answer left me feeling decidedly nervous and I was relieved to find it was right.

    Edited at 2013-08-09 10:24 pm (UTC)

  16. Came to this puzzle late due to a busy start to the day, but completed on 31m 11s, which isn’t bad considering that others found it difficult. My sympathies to z8b8d8z – although I have lived in Northumberland for more than 32 years, I was born and spent my early life in Tottenham, so I know the anguish of following the Spurs.
    George Clements
  17. Note to Keef, who may be wondering why his lengthy comment posted here late at night was deleted (by me):

    It’s a very clear policy on this blog not to discuss prize puzzles (which include Saturday and Sunday ones) until the answers are revealed in The Times the following week (at which time you will see the relevant blog post appearing here). Occasionally contributors make vague reference to those puzzles beforehand but are careful not to reveal actual solutions (and definitely don’t type out entire lists of them).

    You may be slightly confused about how this blog works – it’s not a race to see who can put up a list of answers first. If you’re interested in blogging for TfTT you should probably get a LiveJournal account (free), become a regular here and then volunteer your services for blogging duties. If you follow the site for a while you’ll see how it all works.

    Edited at 2013-08-10 02:48 am (UTC)

    1. Hi Sotira: Just catching up after a w/e away and saw your post. Apparently Keef’s prolix comment is still there (it lost me at paragraph 2), unless there was another equally long one that you deleted. Despite the best efforts of myself, Magoo, Retiarius and Barracuda to explain to him what the etiquette is re posting times, comments etc. on the Club Forum he hadn’t yet seen the error of his ways (as in clocking in ahead of Magoo) as of Friday. I hope it registers soon.

      Edited at 2013-08-11 08:41 pm (UTC)

      1. Yes, there was a second comment that simply listed all the answers to Saturday’s prize puzzle 25550. Sotira got to it before I was aware of it but as originator of this blog, I received a copy by email so I saw it later. I’ve no idea what it hoped to achieve.
        1. My sincerest apologies to all,

          Although I’ve been doing The Times crossword for many, many years, it is only since I recently became semi-retired on health grounds that I’ve been able to have a go at it “fresh” (cos I have trouble sleeping), instead of at “unwind time” when the pub had finally shut, and often my mind wasn’t up to it (ok, cos I’d had a few).

          Regrettably it never crossed my mind about it being a Prize Crossword, with related implications. Personally I’d never bothered to submit a single crossword in my life – until recently.

          I fully accept this admonishment – ignorance is never a defence, and I should have shown better common sense.

          Is there somewhere I can go to see all the rules?
          I don’t want to fall foul of any of you, I only came upon you about a week ago, and have thoroughly enjoyed your excellent blog, which is why I did the mini-exposition on DRAM, plus listing a few more esoteric words that I thought might be of interest to people, should that compiler go further down that route.
          If that’s a No-No as well, I promise I won’t do that again, either.

          I’m not a twitter, or facebooker – I leave that sort of thing to my kids and grandkids. But if you want my e-mail address, let me know; I won’t put it on here now – just in case it breaks the rules (that’s intended as a tongue in cheek LoL).

          regards, Keef

          NB – got 1 wrong when I submitted earlier, wondering if 18d is S or Z?

          1. We are a self-regulating community, where the ‘golden rule’ of internet forums applies. Sometimes, therefore, the thread for certain days will seem to have been lifted from Tristram Shandy, with digressions, discussion of minutiae, etc.

            I like to think of this website, as opposed to some others perhaps, as a place where adults get together and talk. We don’t always agree, but we’re remarkably free from an exclusive, ‘inner ring’ mentality. Having said that, as in any real-life interaction, you’re probably just being prudent if you ease your way in. 🙂

          2. Keef, as far as I’m aware the only rule you broke (albeit unknowingly) was to disclose answers to a prize puzzle before the competition had closed, something I remember being admonished for myself when I first came here – not that I went quite as far as putting up ALL the answers! Your contribution re DRAM was fine.

            It may be worth remembering that new contributions to blogs more than a day or two old will probably only be seen by the originator of that blog (in this case me) and, if you have clicked Reply to a comment, by the poster of that comment who will get an email notifying them that something has been added.

            I hope you will stick around and continue to enjoy TftT. If you are planning to contribute regularly I hope you will sign up for a free Live Journal account. One advantage would be that then if anyone clicks Reply to any of your postings you will get an email notification drawing your attention to it.

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