Times 25,564

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
15:56 on the club timer. The way you regard the tone of a puzzle is always a matter of personal taste, but in general I’m afraid I didn’t find today’s offering very congenial; more specifically, the fact that I was all correct was a matter of (appropriately) a coin toss on one clue, which I don’t think should be the case with the daily Times puzzle, so that coloured my opinion. There again, if this blog reveals anything about the variety of puzzles, it’s the not so startling fact that different people like different things, which is as it should be; this isn’t a terrible puzzle, or massively technically deficient, anyway, so perhaps I have just woken up in a grumpy mood, which has been compounded by my lack of green fingers.

Across
1 VERBALLY – BALL in VERY.
6 SALVER – L(pounds) in SAVER.
9 ADONIS – A DON IS, as in Juan or Quixote.
10 UNIVERSE – I inside UN-VERSE, which is a way of describing prose, if you’re prepared to entertain it.
11 SEAL – a self-referential clue, because seals live in the SEA, +Lake.
12 EYE CONTACT – cryptic def.
14 SAN DIEGO – SAND, I, EGO.
16 MIKE – double def.; this didn’t spring to mind immediately, as I used to work in an environment where the standard abbreviation was “mic”, though both are obviously fine.
18 TOSS – double def. and last one in; when I just had ___S, I was thinking ODDS, which may be what predisposed me to think first of DOSS when that became _O_S; luckily I didn’t allow myself to whack it in just because it fitted half the clue, and thought a bit harder.
19 MARINERS – 1 NERO in MARS.
21 MARIONETTE – (TEARMEINTO)* with a definition which plays on the aspect which distinguishes this sort of puppet from a glove puppet, say. I’m not sure the strings are really “high”, but we can all see where this is coming from.
22 JAPE – JUST + APE, where the higher primates are man’s evolutionary cousins.
24 KING SIZE – if you measure something, you size it; if you do that with a monarch, you “king size” it, so to speak.
26 GARBLE – RUPEES in (Clark) GABLE.
27 ANSELM – SAINT in AN ELM; Archbishop of Canterbury who was born a long way from there.
28 EUONYMUS – (MENUSYOU)*. If you’re as botanically illiterate as I am, you look at the well-signposted wordplay and to be honest, the possible alternative EUOMYNUS looks just as likely as the arrangement which turns out to be the right answer, so it’s a 50/50 ball as far as I’m concerned (ETA: see comments for another convincing-looking possibility which I didn’t even consider, so maybe not even 50/50?) Perhaps I am opening myself to ridicule by not knowing this plant, but Google suggests the only time it’s appeared in the blog is in the Club Monthly from July 2010; in that puzzle the majority of the vocabulary is extremely obscure, to say the least, but sotira, who was the blogger that day, describes EUONYMUS as “a bit of a crossword standard”, so who knows?
 
Down
2 ENDUE – U(=acceptable) in ENDED.
3 BANGLADESHI – (HANDBAGLIES)*.
4 LISTENER – double def.; those of us who solve on-line will be familiar with the Listener puzzle, even if we don’t attempt it personally, and I imagine the same applies to paper solvers. If you want an introduction to this puzzle (which is aimed at people who think the Mephisto is frankly a bit vanilla) this blog’s very own glheard tackles it most entertainingly in another place.
5 YOU’VE GOT ME THERE – double def.; I must confess I got completely the wrong end of the stick here, as the scenario I imagined was an empty taxi arriving, and me getting into it, where “You’ve got me there” would be completely inappropriate. Obviously it’s a playful suggestion as to what a passenger might say at the end of the subsequent journey, when they reach their intended destination…not that I’ve actually ever said “You’ve got me there” to a taxi driver, of course.
6 SPIGOT – GO in SPIT. I spent ages trying to work out how PIG could possibly be “fit” and SOT “a depth of earth”.
7 LYE =”LIE”. The club forum suggests at least one person thinks this homophone could be read the other way round, but I don’t see it myself, to be honest.
8 EAST COKER – [CELLO,OK] in EASTER. East Coker is the second of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Looking at this in retrospect, if your knowledge of poetry is like my knowledge of plants, you’re probably not too happy about this clue either.
13 TOM AND JERRY – (MATON)*, [JUDGE in DERRY]. I started by thinking this might be something like “cat and dog”, but it turned out to be “cat and mouse”.
15 ADORATION – [0,IT]rev. in ADO, RAN.
17 ARPEGGIO – (OPERAGIG)*.
20 INFIRM – IN(=burning), FIR(=wood), MARKS.
23 PILAU – (LIP)rev. + AU.
25 GEE – GEEK.

44 comments on “Times 25,564”

  2. A real mix of vocab in this one. Lots of time at the end spent on SPIGOT (I only knew it as a tap, and didn’t know that meaning of SPIT), EAST COKER (fitted the wordplay but I didn’t know the poem), and EUONYMUS (not heard of it but happened to throw in my lot with the correct arrangement of letters). Looks like the latter cropped up in the Indy just over a year ago, with (helpfully) only the first 6 letters clued via an anagram.
  3. 24.35. I didn’t know euonymus and did know East Coker and see both as perfectly valid. (For the former the n and m felt more likely that way round.) The only slight query I have is with the easy-going Mike, who no doubt is related to Ida of yesterday. Last in seal, staring me in the face. No CoD but the sense of a well-crafted piece of work with some neat angles to it.
    2. Fair enough, double def. is probably the wrong term because there’s no such thing really as “king sizing” with that meaning, but I didn’t really like “Use ruler to measure” equalling “Put a word meaning ruler in front of a word meaning to measure”. In any case the intention is crystal clear.
      1. Oops! Fell into the old ‘delete one, delete them all’ trap again. Was just saying that Mike’s ‘man’ was more substantial than Ida’s ‘for whom’.
  5. I didn’t share Tim’s problems as I’ve met dear old EUONYMUS before, several times. It doesn’t appear so often these days I suspect. For the same reason I knew EAST COKER and wrote it in from definition and the first “E”. Not wholly convinced that SAVER equates to “no spender”. Many people manage to do both. I suspect ANSLEM may turn out to be the real obscurity.

    I thought it a workman like puzzle that provided a steady 20 minute solve.

  6. Good and challenging puzzle. MARIONETTE and YOU’VE GOT ME THERE were excellent, I thought. It was useful, at least for me, to be reminded of the “in”= “burning” device at 20D so soon after its recent appearance – a usage I’ve never encountered in real life, but clearly one of those bits of cryptic xword language that one needs to be aware of.

    Thanks for explaining SPIGOT, Tim. I’d forgotten that meaning of “spit”.

    1. I suspect “in” for burning has fallen out of use with the demise of the open coal fire. As a youngster one of my household chores in the evening was to “keep the fire in” by adding coal as needed.
      1. Interesting thought. I too am old enough to remember open coal fires, but don’t recall anyone saying “keep the fire in”. Was it a regional usage, do you think? My main memory is of my father getting the sitting-room fire to “draw” by covering the wire-mesh fireguard with a double-page from a (in those days) broadsheet newspaper which somehow caused air (and flames) to be sucked up the chimney. (To this day, I’m not quite sure of the science behind this effect, presumably something to do with creating a vacuum. No doubt you can enlighten me, Jimbo.) It certainly produced a roaring fire, but it was not without its hazards. I can still hear my mother’s shrieks as my father very nearly set the whole sitting-room on fire on one occasion.
        1. No idea if it was regional – London if it was

          The fire warms the air above the fire which rises up the chimney, sucking in air from the room to replace it. By using paper to block most of the fireplace the incoming air is forced to enter via the bottom of the grate and up through the fire itself. This increases the intensity of the fire and the whole process feeds upon itself. Your dad didn’t get the paper out of the way soon enough!

          1. That describes the process at work very succinctly and clearly. Thanks, Jimbo. I guess the RAF and USAF, under “Bomber” Harris’s direction, exploited much the same principle to rather more monstrous effect in the incendiary bomb raids on Dresden and other German targets towards the end of WWII, the bombs being dropped in a pattern designed to suck in fire from the peripheries to the centres of these cities.
  7. Oh dear…

    Didn’t get EYE CONTACT (doh!), nor SPIGOT, but that’s more understandable, since I don’t think I ever knew the meaning of the word, and the wp was tricksy …

    Couldn’t parse MARINERS, and didn’t know the lit ref for EAST COKER. Did know EUONYMUS – have several in the garden, they’re very easy to grow!

    Found this one tough, but fair.

  8. Glad Jim knew EUONYMUS — I even had to look back at my answer while typing the word just now. Has it been in a daily before? (Tony will know.)

    Didn’t know that a SPIGOT was a plug. I always confuse it with FAUCET which is a tap — probably from listening to Joni Mitchell far too much. [This is a “spot the song” trivia question.] Then I had to do the bloody parsing. Finally found the strange meaning of “spit” and then “fit” for GO, as in:

    x goes with y
    x fits with y

    By contrast EAST COKER was well within my ken. Read it. It’s good. But not as good as LITTLE GIDDING. In fact all four of the Quartets are worth a look. As Tim so wisely says: “different people like different things”.

    1. These are very much worth a look. I’ve quoted from one (The Dry Salvages) at a little length elsewhere in these pages. They stand with Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura as a scintillating philosophical reflection in poetry.
  9. … if I had to title today’s puzzle/blog it would be a tribute to Marc Zaharovich Chagall, my companion in the naive surrealist movement:

    Ian sees Roan’s cat o’er Vass

    They’re all hidden in there if you look.

    Edited at 2013-08-27 10:31 am (UTC)

  10. 19 mins, but with an incorrect EUONYSUM at 28ac (my LOI). I probably did the Indy puzzle in which EUONYMUS appeared but I don’t remember it. I checked my Chambers post-solve and entered the correct answer in the paper before I came here, but that doesn’t count.

    EAST COKER was solved from the wordplay, and that led me to MIKE. I thought LYE could have been clued less ambiguously. Even though the wordplay leaned towards LYE and I got it right it wouldn’t have completely surprised me if it had been “lie”. I thought un-verse for prose in 10ac was extremely clunky.

  11. 32.18

    Never heard of Euonymus but got lucky, and like Sherlock, will now do my best to forget it. Spigot brought a smile. In the classic Pete and Dud sketch, the name of the one-legged actor auditioning for the role of Tarzan was Mr Spigot.

  12. 25m, but with EUONYSUM, so Tim your assessment of 50:50 is kind to the clue. In fact I think you’re generally kind to it: I think it’s absolutely dreadful. SPIGOT isn’t much better, and the wordplay for EAST COKER suggests EAST OCKER. At least there are some checkers there to put you right.
    One to forget.
    1. I think you’re rough on the clue: not knowing the plant, and others do, and at least one other sussed out its most likely spelling, is the only reason for the judgement as far as I can see. Spigot as plug not tap seems OK and the minor definitions rather neat. I shall have a problem now not thinking of East Coker as East Ocker, but ‘contributed to’ as ‘set before’ rather than ‘in among’ again seems natural enough. I think you might cut the setter – or yourself – some slack.
      1. Among those who didn’t know the plant, most seem to have got it wrong. Solving it correctly is a lottery and I just don’t think there’s any need or excuse for clues like that. So yes, in my view, dreadful.
        “Plug” for SPIGOT seems have caused quite a few problems, although it didn’t hold me up for long. I don’t mind one slightly arcane reference like this but combined with the very obscure “spit” I think it’s too much. Again, there’s no need for it.
        The “contributed” is superfluous and misleading in the wordplay for 8dn, and in my view EAST COKER is sufficiently obscure to merit something clearer, even if the checkers will get you there if you don’t know the poem. I have the advantage of having studied Eliot at school and university but I don’t think this sort of knowledge should be required any more than the names of obscure plants. This was more or less a write-in for me but I try to be an equal opportunities moaner.

        Edited at 2013-08-27 01:17 pm (UTC)

        1. It would be a pity if the Times were to eschew it, and we were never required to dig in slightly obscure parts of the garden.
          1. Well I certainly agree with that. But these puzzles are supposed to be cryptics, not just general knowledge tests, so where the answer is something obscure (like that plant) I want the setter to give us a dependable alternative route to it.
        2. I can’t see “spit” as any more obscure than all those cricket words we have become used to. It’s a fairly well-known gardening term.
          1. Fair enough: cricket terminology seems to have a particularly privileged position in the Times crossword!

  13. 17:11 .. No problems today. And I did get a kick out of YOU’VE GOT ME THERE, unlikely as the image might be (these days, I imagine most people’s words to a taxi driver on reaching their destination would be “How much???!).

    If I said in July 2010 (thanks, Tim, for digging up that hostage to fortune) that EUONYMUS was a crossword standard then it must be true. But admittedly Google, which also never lies, doesn’t entirely support the assertion. Still, EUONYMUS does feel like one of those familiar unfamiliars to me.

    1. When I Googled it this morning, of course, what I thought I was going to discover was a comment posted by me six months ago saying I’d never heard of it, and it was ridiculous to expect me to remember all these obscure plants. This happens quite a lot (and not just with plants, obscure or otherwise) which may suggest crosswords aren’t as much of a hedge against my brain deteriorating as I might hope…
  14. 34 minutes including time taken to parse as I went along, so this was my most successful solve for a while. I didn’t know the poem or the plant but both seemed fairly straightforward from the wordplay and informed guesswork in the latter case.

    I knew ANSELM as a saint rather than an archbish, having lived in one of his parishes for a while, so the answer leapt out at me before I took time to dissect the clue.

    “Highly strung” could just mean strung from above as opposed to puppets that are operated using rods from below. Or perhaps it refers to the high number of strings involved.

    I think if I were to say anything along the suggested lines to a taxi-driver on arrival at my destination it would be “You’ve got me here” rather than “there”.

    My very first thought at 13dn, with no checkers in place, was “cat and mouse”, so at least I was thinking in the right area.

    Edited at 2013-08-27 10:30 am (UTC)

  15. 11:04 for me. Probably because I knew the plant and East Coker, and had no excuse for not knowing the Archbish, living where I do! My hold up was with sorting out the anagram in 21a.
  16. Oh what a fate for such a nice motor-cycle, and for me who DNF today. Bloody awkward puzzle I think, though fortunately, and believe it or no, I’ve just this last month reread not only Four Quartets, but The Wasteland (which is a lot better) AND The Prelude. And The Rime. And Kubla Khan. And what EUONYMUS is doing in a daily, albeit The Times, is a mystery.
    1. Reading the Quartets rather put me off Mr Eliot, but I’ll give the Wasteland a go on your recommendation. Am enjoying Wordsworth via a watching of Rumpole on Youtube. The Prelude features strongly in the Play for Today episode that kicked the whole thing off in 1975. I almost understand it when Leo McKern recites it too…
  17. Did this late last night and found I wasn’t on the setters wavelength at all, had to put it down and have a text conversation before coming back, spotting EAST COKER and getting there – did guess the right anagram for EUONYMUS somehow. SPIGOT from definition.
  18. It’s brilliant, The Prelude. I prefer Romantic poetry to anything else written I think, with the possible exception of The Iliad (by virtue of its being the first work of literature…. arguably!).

    Enjoy The Wasteland.

  19. Oh man! About 45 minutes, and gave up and looked up the plant after realizing I could make up a few different plantish looking words with the letters available. I actually got EAST COKER from the wordplay and checkers, and then looked it up too, it appearing as unlikely as the variations on the plant name. Sorry, but I had never heard of it before, Philistine that I must be. So I’m beaten by the setter today, although in my view he had to resort to only rarely used pages of his dictionary. I did enjoy the taxi gag, though I agree it’s not something anyone would say upon alighting from the cab. Regards to all.
  20. 9:02 here for another enjoyable solve. Let’s hope those who are whingeing about EUONYMUS and/or ANSELM and/or EAST COKER and/or whatever else they hadn’t heard of before will remember them for next time.

    Although I couldn’t think of the “taxi” answer first time through, I was pretty sure I’d come across a similar clue before – and there it is in No. 24,634 (4 September 2010): “One’s acknowledgement to carrier on arrival: I’m stumped! (5,3,2,5)”. Great minds … (or the same setter).

  21. I had never heard of this, but my real objection is to the clue: what “contributed to” is doing in there I’ll never know.

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