Times 25563 – That depends on the meaning of ‘it’…..

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 65 minutes

Music: Old Blind Dogs, Fit!

I had all but five in 33 minutes, and all but one in 46, but the last one was a killer. Since I had called my mother before starting the puzzle, the only thing left to do was to take a shower, which I did. Then it gradually came to me, and it turned out that my initial impression of the clue was right after all….I knew it would be that gosh-darned reindeer! However, ‘antelope’ definitely didn’t fit, and a reindeer is not an antelope anyway.

This puzzle was a strange mix of instant write-ins and head-scratchers. So many went in from the definition and the enumeration, and yet I was still left gazing blankly at the remainder. Getting the big ones right away was not as helpful as it usually is, and there were more than a couple of misleading clues. There are still one or two that I don’t understand, so I may have to call for assistance.

If you are surprised to see me tonight (or tomorrow, as the case may be) I have traded off again in hopes of giving a stinker to Ulaca. I definitely enjoyed this puzzle, which has many excellent clues, even though it was a bit difficult.

Across
1 CAP IN HAND, CA + P + IN HAND. Accountants are chartered in the UK, but certified in the US, giving CA over there and CPA over here.
6 SNIFF, double definition. A perfect clue for ‘slight’, but I could not make it fit into the space.
9 RAN AT, hidden in [fo]R A NAT[urist]. This one gave me more trouble than it would have if I had looked more carefully the first time.
10 TOP BANANA, TOP + BANANA[s], with ‘finish off’ in the sense of ‘apply the topping’.
11 BECAUSE IT’S THERE, anagram of BE SURE + AESTHETIC, an ex post facto anagram for me because of the definition and enumeration.
13 EQUIPPED, E[nvoy] + QUIPPED, and NOT an instruction to remove ‘HE’ from a word meaning ‘armed’ to get ‘gagged’.
14 RECOIL, REC + OIL.
16 BITCHY, B(ITCH)Y….I’m a bit surprised this was seen in The Times.
18 RUN FOR IT, RUN F(OR)IT.
21 LINE ONE’S POCKETS, LINE(ONE + SPOCK, ET)S, another clue where the cryptic was quite superfluous.
23 INTER ALIA, IN + T[aking] + ERA + AIL backwards. A write-in from the definition for me.
25 OLDIE, [s]OLDIE[r]. This was the one that I couldn’t see, but while writing the blog for this clue I suddenly get it.
26 HOP IT, H(OP)IT, another write-in.
27 YAKETY-YAK, YAK + anagram of TRY + another YAK. Surprisingly straightforward.
 
Down
1 CAROB, CA ROB, where CA is an abbreviation for ‘circa’, so ‘not exactly’.
2 PANIC BUTTON, anagram of TIP ABOUT CNN. When you see something like CNN in a clue, it is probably part of an anagram.
3 NO TRUMP, TON turned backwards + RUMP. Although this is not a DBE, I think the subclassing here is a bit extreme. Yes, The Rump is an example a parliament, but…
4 ANTLERED, AN(-g +T[ime]L[eft])ERED. A brilliant letter-substitution clue with a hidden literal that may stump many solvers, as it nearly did me.
5 DEPUTY, D(EP)UTY, where EP is PE flipped over, instead of a record, for a change.
6 STARTLE, STAR + T[a]LE. Another rather devious one, this was a tough corner to me.
7 IDA, I[s] D[e]A[L]. A rather vague literal, but the answer is obvious enough. Not a good clue, IMHO.
8 FLAGEOLET, FLAG + E[nergy] + O + LET. You have to lift and separate ‘nothing allowed’ for the clue to work. We are talking beans here, not Renaissance woodwinds, in case you’re wondering.
12 ECOFRIENDLY, E(anagram of FORCED IN)LY, where ‘fences’ is an enclosure indicator. I’m afraid I again ignored the brilliant cryptic and just wrote in the obvious answer.
13 EMBELLISH, [h]E(MBE)LLISH. A fine surface – “Stop ringing that bloody gong, or I’ll pop you one!”
15 HUMPBACK, HUMP + BACK in various senses. Not a very PC answer, but there you go.
17 HOOF ROT, anagram of FOR H TOO, where ‘H’ is the betting-sheet abbreviation.
19 FACE OUT, F + ACE + OUT.
20 MEDLEY, MED + LEY. I put this in from the definition, but didn’t see why ‘straight line’ = ‘ley’. Here’s the answer in the Wiki. My brother swam this as a child, although he was primarily a butterfly specialist.
22 SLEEK, S(L)EEK. Yep, ‘bears’ is an inclusion indicator.
24 TAP, TAP[e].

47 comments on “Times 25563 – That depends on the meaning of ‘it’…..”

  1. Liked the anagram at 11ac. I parsed CAROB with the C for “circa” and the A from that in the clue. Had no idea about “fatigue” = DUTY in DEPUTY (5dn) and still don’t quite get it. Equally unknown was FACE OUT, not within my vocab and had to look it up to find it means “endure” (e.g., the storm) and hence the verb “brave”. All that pretty much accounts for my slow time.

    And the answer at 15dn reminded me of J.W. Howard’s comment on the Japanese whaling controversy: “… not the hunchback”.

    Slight typo in the blog: at 27ac, the anagram part is “yet” (not “try”).

    Edited at 2013-08-26 02:09 am (UTC)

    1. I think we can account for fatigue = duty from a phrase like ‘fatigue party’, where the plural is reduced to the singular as a modifier.

      Agree with you on parsing of CAROB, where I was just pleased to stop and think and not put in ‘carib’, which was my first thought.

      1. Thanks for that. Now I see that Chambers includes “fatigue-duty” (with or without hyphen).
  2. Bit of a disaster for me, some of it self-inflicted. 37 minutes or so but with a mistyped YAKETT-YAK.

    My biggest problem was with EQUIPPED/EMBELLISH, particularly parsing the former, but a couple of tentative answers proved wrong and hard to unravel.

    I’ll concede defeat to the setter. But, as Michael Clarke must keep telling himself, there’s always next time…

      1. I think Michael Clarke gets a bad press. He made yesterday an exciting game and it was no fault of his that bad light stopped play. Off the field he always handles himself with pleasant dignity and he is a better captain than Ponting, who was only (fairly) successful because he had a far better team around him than had Clarke.

        But perhaps that is irrelevant to Times Crossword 25563.

        1. For what it’s worth, I agree with you. But then a lot of people in cricket are now getting a bad press. The press, and fans, around the game are starting to sound a lot more like those which surround football. I was following Friday’s play on the BBC website’s text commentary, but turned away from it because of the sheer ignorant stupidity of a lot of the comments. I then turned to TMS and I wasn’t much happier with what I was hearing there. How we miss you, CMJ!
  3. Similar experience and comments to Vinyl, save for the fact that I had to resort to aids on ‘dancer’, even after deducing that it must be Rudolf’s friend. I think in the end I was done by the fact that the literal is ‘dancer, for example, so’, and kept trying to account for ‘so’ in the wordplay. Brilliant clue!

    Edited at 2013-08-26 01:47 am (UTC)

  4. Back after hols, and was pleased to finish this all correct, no aids, but, as vinyl, ANTLERED took me just over the hour mark. I too got the reindeer ref early, but took an age to work out the cryptic.

    A couple of unknowns here (DUTY, RUMP, LEY), and a couple of unparsed (EMBELLISH, CAROB). Some good clues (e.g. SLEEK, EQUIPPED), and one not so good (IDA).

  5. At 10A I thought TOP was probably in the sense of kill = finish off, rather than applying the topping. “He topped the spy”. Meaning 10 of the verb in my iPhone version of Chambers.

    When I read your preamble I assumed your LOI was 8D as it was for me (well 6A and 8D pretty much together). I spent a long time looking at those, especially since I wasn’t convinced IDA was right (surely there was more going on in the clue, but apparently not).

  6. 64 minutes which seems to be about par for my course at the moment.

    Didn’t know CAROB, didn’t like IDA, didn’t spot the anagram at 17dn as I took it as a double definition – if FOOT ROT can affect sheep, goats and cattle, then why not horses too, I reasoned. Didn’t know that LEY lines were necessarily straight.

    I think we had a discussion about FATIGUE(s) not long ago but can’t find it, nor remember whether that was about the chore/duty meaning or the clothing soldiers wear in the process. Like ulaca I had to resort to aids for 4dn despite getting the reindeer reference even before I finished reading the clue the first time.

    Edited at 2013-08-26 06:38 am (UTC)

    1. Did you have something different for BITCHY? The issues I had with this clue was whether or not sheep had hoofs/hooves?
      1. Yes, sheep have hooves. But my problem was that the infection in sheep (infectious pododermatitis) is always called FOOT ROT: search ‘hoof rot in sheep’ in Google and all links refer to foot rot. Reluctantly entered hoof rot only after entering BITCHY.

        Dancer, of course, would also have had hooves but as far as I can see, would also have suffered from FOOT ROT and not HOOF ROT.

      2. No, I had BITCHY at 16ac and HOOF ROT at 17dn. The error in my original comment was caused by looking up one disease name in Wikipedia and getting redirected to another, as described by Martin above, thus addling my brain.

        Edited at 2013-08-26 09:11 am (UTC)

        1. I had foot rot and spent an age trying to fill B-T-F-, my LOI, before the penny dropped, and I agree HOOF ROT is not the usual name for the condition. Otherwise a respectable 30 minutes for a harder than usual Monday offering.
  7. 29:18.

    A past colleague of mine (you might be reading this AE) once pointed out that if you are trying to solve a partial with a U in it, it is always worth trying a Q before it. This certainly helped me here.

  9. enjoyable puzzle, which I thought avarage difficulty though 4dn took me time to find.
    I also thought top = kill = finish off in 10ac
  10. I too struggled with -u-p-a-k, my last in. While I got carob I have no idea about (a)rob and the mug etc. though it’s at once apparent to the rest of the world. Can someone put me out of my misery? (Don’t all shout at once.) 30.05 and I feel like one of those things running around and among meaningless poles at Cruft’s.

    Edited at 2013-08-26 08:52 am (UTC)

    1. I parsed it as CA (about) and mug (as in steal from in the street with violence) for ROB
      1. I think it’s actually C (about – not exactly), A (a), ROB (mug).

        Edited at 2013-08-26 09:14 am (UTC)

        1. Ah, mug as rob, thanks. Put off by the “a” (accounted for now) and the elision carried by “that”. Amazes me I get any clues at all.
          1. If “not exactly” is CA the “a” in the clue is superfluous. If it’s C it’s not. I think it has to be C.
  11. 13 minutes for everything except HUMPBACK, which I struggled with, even after I got the BACK bit, for an additional 5. Maybe it was the PC element, now that “handicap” has become dubious for describing something which impairs function. I suppose if it had been clued with a cetacean reference it might have been too easy.
    Definitely a wavelength puzzle, taking a while to get started and used to the style of twisty definitions, of which I submit “Dancer, for example” as a prime example. You don’t just have to get the Clement Clarke Moore reference but also that it’s looking for an adjective. The wordplay on that one took some sorting too, so perhaps CoD as the clue you’d least like to explain to beginners for fear of putting them off for life.
    I wondered whether sheep are hoofed, but then remembered my scripture lessons. Of course they are, they just cleave them, which is why we can eat them but not horses (unless we’re French or Tesco customers).
    Did the number of multi-word answers make this at least a bit easier?

    Edited at 2013-08-26 08:55 am (UTC)

    1. Isn’t it pigs that have cloven hoofs [hence treif] and cows and sheep (and horses) that don’t [hence kosher]?
  12. So glad to see others found this a tricky solve – 21.14 for me with the HUMPBACK being the last to fall and only then after I did the working through the alphabet trick.
  13. My experience was uncannily similar to Vinyl’s. My LOI was also ANTLERED. Like him, my gut response was that “dancer” was a reference to reindeer, though it quickly became clear that “reindeer” itself couldn’t be the answer, and I too tried desperately to make “antelope” work. Even after twigging that G had to be replaced by TL and that some representative part of the reindeer’s anatomy was probably involved, the penny still took an age to drop. I can’t remember when it last took so long to solve a clue in which I had early on correctly identified all the cryptic references. Doh!

    I agree that 7A (IDA) is feeble. Thanks to Vinyl for explaining that “gong”=MBE at 13D, which I failed to parse properly..

  14. 16 mins so I was definitely on the setter’s wavelength.

    I managed to see most of the trickier definitions fairly quickly, although some answers, such as CAP IN HAND, BECAUSE IT’S THERE, TOP BANANA, and INTER ALIA went in straight from the definition. The excellent ANTLERED was my LOI, and I agree that the clue for IDA was pretty poor compared to the rest of the puzzle.

    I thought of the more familiar FOOT ROT for 17dn but couldn’t parse it so I left it until the final checker from BITCHY led me to HOOF ROT.

  15. 16:44. I admit I was a bit disappointed that I solved it so quickly as I found it a delight from start to finish (with the possible exception of Ida).

    I had a similar experience to Z8, taking a while to tune in to the setter’s style but then spotting the definitions quite quickly. Antlered was one of my first half a dozen or so in. Humpback my LOI too but I only struggled with it for half a minute or so.

    COD to 21 for the brilliant definition coupled with the Spock/ET device.

    Many thanks to the setter.

  16. It’s not often that a puzzle produces a near unanimous commentary on this blog but this one seems to have succeeded.

    I managed to avoid the CAROB torture by solving straight from C???? and “chocolate”. Thought HOOF ROT one of the easiest clues in the puzzle and wrote the answer straight in from easy anagram. Grimaced at IDA and was left with Dancer as my LOI, knowing it had to be the reindeer.

    20 pleasant minutes

  17. 17m. Quite a lot bunged in from definition with wordplay worked out post-solve, except CAROB, which I couldn’t parse, so thanks for that. As mentioned above though I think it has to be C not CA.
    “Duty” the only unknown today, but it didn’t cause me a problem once I had the checkers.
    Like others ANTLERED was my last in: a clue that could have held me up for ages but luckily I saw it reasonably quickly.
  18. 16 minutes with an experience that mimicks a lot of what has been said above. I think at some point you just look for tricky definitions, so ANTLERED went in pretty early. A number went in without seeing the wordplay – OLDIE, CAROB, NO TRUMP, HUMPBACK and I needed the wordplay to get HOOF ROT and FACE OUT.
  19. Not a walkover, but not terribly hard either, though I did spend 40 minutes on it at a leisurely pace. Some very nice clues, with the anagram for 11 and the disguised deletion in 25. The clue for IDA was the exception; like others I thought it a weak clue, but the rest more than made up for it.
  20. About 40 minutes, ending with CAROB, which I didn’t know as chocolate. I finally saw the right meaning of ‘mug’, and parsed is as C, ‘a’ from the clue, and ‘rob’. I also didn’t know ‘ley’ or MBE=gong, so those answers went in from the definitions alone, for the most part. A very entertaining puzzle, so thanks to the setter, with ANTLERED getting my COD nod (IDA, not so much). Regards, everyone.
  21. Didn’t time myself today, but completed in a reasonable time. I agree with others that the clue for 7d was disappointing, but also felt that 24d was weak, unless I’m missing something.
    George Clements
    1. Not sure if you are missing something, George, but it seems to be a standard clue format with two ways to the solution. Firstly a straight definition (tap = draw on, a resource, for example) and secondly via some wordplay (tape = stick, ‘with no point’ so remove the E for East as in a point of the compass). It may be a bit dull compared with some of the excellent clues today but it’s by no means downright feeble like IDA in my opinion.

      Edited at 2013-08-26 10:17 pm (UTC)

  22. 13:16 for me after another slow start before I realised that the clues were trickier than usual for a Monday puzzle and suddenly found the setter’s wavelength.

    Like others, I struggled with HUMPBACK, worrying that I might be imagining a meaning for a word I’m more used to being a kind of whale. However, after working through the alphabet I couldn’t think of anything better and decided to take a chance. (Phew!)

    1. I had another look at the IDA clue, to remind myself of it, and was slightly bemused by the reaction to it as “feeble”. I make no claim for it as any sort of a clue of the century, but am at a loss to see why people think it “feeble”. I suspect the reason is the definition “for whom”, but even then I can’t say why that should be so objectionable.
      1. For some reason (simple accident perhaps?) I received this as a reply to my comment.

        Anyway, I absolutely agree with the setter: this is a perfectly satisfactory clue. In fact I thought this altogether a most interesting and enjoyable puzzle; and, as an experienced Times crossword solver, I found absolutely nothing to object to in it.

          1. But this is!

            I’m clearly missing something here. Which Ida are we talking about, in the real world? I’m not sure you’re referring to a fossilised primate skeleton by that name, even if it was bought in instalments…

            1. Not sure I understand the comment about skeletons, but we aren’t talking about any specific Ida here. We don’t need to.
              1. Belatedly, thanks.

                I’d assumed someone specific was in mind, and the best I could do was find a story about a fossilised lemur or something that had been dubbed Ida in honour of the daughter of the academic who’d arranged to buy the fossil from a private collector.

                Seems an odd way to honour one’s daughter.

  23. Liked the precision of unexpected definitions today:
    “charged” = ran at
    “big cheese” = top banana
    “reaction to being fired” = recoil
    “secretly make ready” = line one’s pockets
    “fighting fellow” = soldier
    “provided to press in emergency” = panic button
    “Dancer, for example, so” = antlered (saw it quickly, unlike many)
    “with glossy coats” = sleek.
    All Times crosswords have similarly enjoyable examples, but there
    seems to be many more than average here.
    Rob

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