Times 25557 – A genial social game of…..

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 22 minutes

Music: Niamh Parsons, Blackbirds and Thrushes

Tonight, I went for a good time and a quick solve, and got one. More than half the answers were put in from the literals, and I will figure out the cryptics as I do the blog. The puzzle was not necessarily entirely easy, but experienced solvers will find certain repeating clues that are practically write-ins. The two long ones fell quickly, and from there it was mostly a matter of just filling in the grid.

Close readers of my blogs will have noticed that the music for the past 3 blogs has been CD, since none of these albums is available on vinyl. There is a reason for this, but right now I will only say that my new Cambridge 351-C is quite good for an inexpensive CD player, and is producing fine sound in my system…..for CD, of course.

Across
1 ANTIPERSPIRANTS, anagram of PATTERNS IN PAIRS. Experienced solvers always suspect there is a trick in the literal in this kind of clue.
9 TRAVELLER, double definition, ‘travel is broadening’….although I suspect it is not if your sole concern is making sales.
10 MAGIC, MA(GI)C, where ‘server’ is another mildly deceptive literal.
11 WATSON, cryptic definition, although Dr. Watson never really did anything medical in the Sherlock Holmes stories…he said confidently.
12 THROTTLE, double definition.
13 RUBBER, double definition, where again ‘bridge section’ looks suspicious to experienced solvers.
15 SLYBOOTS, STOO(BY)LS backwards.
18 SERIATIM, anagram of SATIRE + I’M.
19 BRUNCH, B(R)UNCH, this time the literal is rather a giveaway.
21 ADHESIVE, anagram of HEADS + I’VE.
23 FATHOM, F + AT HOM[e]. An ‘at home’ is an old-fashioned expression that still survives in crosswords.
25 DRAMA, DR + A[dministering] M[ild] A[naesthetic].
27 PENSIONER, PEN + IS backwards + ONER. The pound note is no longer in use, of course.
28 MISAPPREHENSION, anagram of ONE SIN PERHAPS, I’M. A gift from the setter.
 
Down
1 ANTIWAR, hidden in [milit]ANT I WAR[ned].
2 TOAST, TO A ST, and not to a DD or a RR.
3 PHENOMENA, P(HEN OMEN)A, a frequently-used clue (and answer).
4 RELY, R + ELY, another beginner clue.
5 PORTHOLE, PORT + HOLE sounds like WHOLE.
6 ROMEO, cryptic definition, an allusion to the radio alphabet where Romeo and Juliet are immortalized as letters.
7 NIGHTGOWN, NIGH + T(G)OWN.
8 SUCCESS, SUE(CC)ES + S, where CC stands for ‘carbon copy’, which is apparently still available in email clients.
14 BIRTHDAYS, cryptic definition which I saw at once…must be my age.
16 BARBARIAN, BARB + ARIAN, or BARB, ARIAN if you being insulted by some rude fellow from the 5th century.
17 PIT VIPER, PI(TV I)PER, another one that easily goes in from the definition alone.
18 STARDOM, TSARDOM with the two first characters reversed.
20 HOME RUN, HOMER[un]. I guess the ode to Hank Aaron was not as full as some might have wished…. Where HOMER is a short version of HOME RUN
22 SHARP, S + HARP, another popular clue.
24 HANOI, H(A NO)I, I believe, although it might be H(A N)OI.
25 INCH, anagram of CHIN. The evident answer, although in what sense ‘inch’ = ‘nose’ is not clear to me. Audience-participation time!

33 comments on “Times 25557 – A genial social game of…..”

  1. 17dn is surely a bad attempt at an &lit. The syntax doesn’t work and snake charmers don’t deal with such beasts.

    The cryptic defs at 9ac and 14dn are as bad as they get. And the one at 11ac isn’t much better. As for the UN in 20dn: I still don’t get it.

    Very sluggish this morning given that our esteemed blogger found so many chestnuts under today’s tree.

    Re 24dn: it has to be HOI around A & N. Chambers has HOI as the attention-attracting sound. Not impressed though.

    Almost nothing to admire in this puzzle. (Since Jim’s away, I thought we needed a substitute grump.)

    Edited at 2013-08-19 01:11 am (UTC)

    1. Mctext, I’m glad you said it. I was going to make some similar grumpy comments but desisted as I thought that perhaps it was just me on a Monday morning.

      14dn – don’t children have birthdays too?

      As for 20dn I assume it’s just that “homer” is short for a home run.

      Edited at 2013-08-19 02:05 am (UTC)

      1. Thanks. I think I understand it now. Not the best clue I’ve seen in the Times though.

        Edited at 2013-08-19 02:58 am (UTC)

  2. So much of this went straight in but then I got stuck, not knowing SERIATIM or PIT VIPER and quite unable to think of SLYBOOTS.

    Vinyl, you need 1ac in the plural. An inch and a nose are both short distances (as in “win by a nose”) or they can both mean to move slowly and cautiously.

    Edited at 2013-08-19 12:30 am (UTC)

  3. It was a relief, after last week’s series of mistakes, to slide through this one; but not much of a pleasure. I suppose one could be impressed by the 2 15-letter anagrams, but nothing much else. I’m afraid I don’t quite get 20d: Is it simply that HOME RUN is ‘cut short’ by, arbitrarily, 2 letters to get HOMER? As it is written in the Talmud, feh!
  4. Hi,

    INCH as per jackkt, my rationale was:-

    you “inch along” in a queue,
    and
    you “nose your way” through the traffic

    Baseball (been watching it all week on BT Sport)
    HOMER is indeed a home run
    as it can also mean a homing pigeon, so watch out for the compiler using that meaning.

    18D – gave SHAH DOM a consideration as the Imperial Office, with “a twist” being that it wasn’t STAR DOM, but fortunately went with the obvious.

    regards, Keef

  5. I’m not trying to cross horns with our “substitute grump”, but I agree with our “esteemed blogger”.

    I watched a program on Nat Geo not so long ago, where an Indian snake doctor/charmer was bitten by one of his own snakes – a Pit Viper – and died before any serum arrived. All in front of the cameras!

    Wiki says that the preferred snake for Indian snake charmers is any Cobra, but lists Russel’s Viper, Carpet Viper and Horned Desert Viper – all of which are Pit Vipers – among the other snakes frequently used.
    Rattlesnakes, Moccasin & Fer-de-Lance are also pit vipers.

    Incidentally, the program said that the playing of music by the piper did nothing – snakes are deaf.
    It’s the movement of the pipe that holds the snake’s attention.

  6. 19.18. I enjoyed this, a fair exchange between setter and solver, more a romp than a training session on Exmoor in a storm, in the Monday tradition and no discredit to it.
  7. 13 minutes or thereabouts. Got to get my analogue watch back from repair. It took a while to realise that the answers I was wary of because they were too bloomin’ obvious were correct: stand up BIRTHDAYS, WATSON, ROMEO and THROTTLE. A puzzle where most of the clues look as if they might be cleverer than they are might – for that reason – slow down the experienced solver.
    I liked TRAVELLER and TOAST. I spent a little time wondering whether INCH and nose might share a geographical connection too, completing a trio of interpretations. Probably not.
  8. I’m with Jack in finding this an enjoyable puzzle – the clues complained of seem to me to work perfectly well. Admittedly, I was on the setter’s wavelength and (unusually) recorded a Jimboesque “stroll in the park” time of 25 mins. I imagine there will be some very fast times from Magoo and Co. I too liked TRAVELLER and TOAST.
  9. Three missing today: Rubber, Seriatim and Birthdays. Thanks vinyl1 for filling in those gaps and for explaining the wordplay for Stardom. Didn’t know Slyboots but the wordplay was clear.
    Liked GI Joe and his computer, and Toast.
  10. 16 mins and pretty disappointed that I didn’t get under the 10 min mark.

    Although the anagram fodder was cleverly put together I got the two long answers almost immediately. As has been said above, some of the answers were write-ins for the experienced solver, but I’m of the opinion that there should always be the occasional crossword that less experienced solvers have a chance of solving, and this puzzle fell into that category.

    I had the most trouble in the SW where I took much too long to see the RUBBER/BIRTHDAYS crossers, and then PIT VIPER and SERIATIM were my last two in.

  11. A bit tough on my namesake. Amongst other things, he brought Lady Frances Carfax back from near death, treated the Engineer’s Thumb (or lack of it) and diagnosed Mr Jefferson Hope with an aortic aneuryism etc
    TonyW
    1. Why tough on him? I took it simply to mean that he dealt with two kinds of cases, medical as a doctor, and investigative as Holmes’s sidekick. Nothing derogatory surely?
      1. Jackkt, I was responding to Vinyl1’s suggestion that the good Doctor never really did anything medical in the Sherlock Holmes stories.
        TonyW
        1. Apologies, Tony. I’m a bit slow today as demonstrated by needing aids to finish off a puzzle that everyone else found easy.
  12. 14 minutes needed the wordplay to get SLYBOOTS and got HOME RUN without seeing the wordplay. 3 cryptic definitions seems a bit much to me.
  13. 8.30 – SERIATIM being my last one in. I too wasn’t sure why only people over the hill have birthdays.
  14. 28:07 .. I’ll settle for saying this wasn’t my favourite puzzle of late. But I did like PHENOMENA and PORTHOLE.
  16. After 2 crossword-free weeks building sandcastles with grandchildren this was a welcome Monday style return, I had no problem with the setter’s work and finished in 20 minutes having looked up LOI SERIATIM (which crosswordsolver did not know). Some corny clues yes but also some HDs. Pedants and grumps need to lighten up!
  17. 18m. I did most of this quickly but then got thoroughly stuck with six left including the unknown SLYBOOTS and SERIATIM and PIT VIPER, which was my last in without understanding the wordplay.
    The point about 14dn is not that only old people have birthdays: the clue says “getting over the hill”, i.e. ageing, a process that starts at birth. Still, not my favourite clue ever.
    I was invited to an “at home” a few years ago. It wasn’t held at the hostess’s house, but at a posh club in St James’s. Rather confusing.
  18. About 30 minutes, mostly due to not believing some of these could be accurate. LOI TRAVELLER, for example. BIRTHDAYS, WATSON and RUBBER fell in that category too. My only real difficulty was the close to unknown SLYBOOTS. I agree that the 15 letter anagrams were an admirable achievement (though they were both write-ins for me). So I thought it a bit out of the ordinary, but it didn’t make me grumpy at all, just, well, puzzled. Regards.
  20. 8:18 for me – slower than it should have been, but at least not a disaster.

    There seems to have been a lot of bellyaching about this puzzle, but I enjoyed it. It seems entirely suitable for a Monday Times cryptic.

  21. This was the clue word in an Azed competition about 11 years ago (remembered because it was my first HC, something I didn’t find out until a year or so later when I discovered the Azed Slip). It doesn’t match any of the published clues so I wonder if the setter was one of the HCs and regurgitating the clue.

    I’m in the camp that says yes perhaps this was on the easy side but many of the criticisms are a bit harsh. The only one I definitely disliked was the CD at 14dn, which seemed very feeble.

    Edited at 2013-08-19 10:28 pm (UTC)

    1. By an amazing coincidence I came across “slyboots” again this evening, used by Woody Allen in his 1975 film “Love and Death”. Not sure I ever met it before this morning.
  22. 25 down ‘inch’ could refer to the horse racing ‘nose’. An inch being the smallest winning margin

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