Times 25575 – Thank ‘Eaven for Leetul Pearls

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Another gentle Monday offering, with quite a few going in from the literals. No standouts and no complaints. 22 minutes, but one wrong.

Across

1 DISTINGUISHED – extinguished with the ex replaced by D + IS.
8 PAL+M
9 TILT HAMMER – metal trim* + H[eavy]; a heavy hammer used in ironworking, ‘though never by me.
10 SPECTRAL – SPECTOR (‘inspector’ without ‘in’) minus O to give SPECTR + AL (Capone).
11 ROUBLE – [t]ROUBLE for the Belarusian currency.
13 PRECARIOUS – RE (Royal Engineers) + CAR in PIOUS; the literal is hairy as in dangerous.
16 GIGI – GIG + I (i is the symbol for current); the film, directed by Vincente Minnelli, starred Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan. Me, I prefer Vincente’s earlier vehicle An American in Paris starring the great Gene Kelly.
17 BOAS – BOAS[t]
18 PERMAFROST – A in (described by, where describe means ‘draw a circle around’, so encircle; though the clue would make more sense to me without the ‘in’, as ‘Russian city, American poet describe a polar feature’) PERM (city to the west of the Urals once called Molotov, because, I suppose, ‘Perm cocktail’ doesn’t have the same ring) + (Robert) FROST ; now that David F. is dead, might it one day be clued as ‘wall-to-wall coverage from footlights to presidential suite?’ My last in.
20 BEREFT – BERET around F; according to Collins, it can indeed be made of felt as well as wool. I wonder what material this fellow’s was made. Either way, the cat probably did a whoopsie in it.
22 NAUTICAL – sounds like ‘naughty’ + CAL[l]; ratings as in sailors.
24 SCHOOLWORK – SCHOOL + [transfe]R in WOK.
26 ARUM – A + RUM; my lack of botanical knowledge had me inventing a spirit called ‘lum’. Well, it sounds vaguely like the sort of being you might find in the ether.
27 STEPPING STONE – ST + EPPING’S + TONE.

Down

1 DUAL PURPOSE – real soup pud*.
2 SUMAC – SUM + AC (2-letter crossword actuarial shorthand); had this the other day  as a reversal of Camus.
3 INTERCROP – price not r*; a word I’d never heard that sounds as if it ought to be a word, and indeed is, meaning a crop grown between the rows of another crop.
4 GALILEO – sounds like ‘galley’ (abbreviation for ‘galley proof’) + LEO.
5 ICHOR – ICH (German for I) + OR (other ranks; 2-letter crossword veteran) for Greek gods’ blood.
6 HAMBURGER – GRUB + MA reversed in HER to give the minced beef roll.
7 DEE – DE (‘of French’) + E[nglish] for rivers in Chester and Aberdeen respectively.
12 LEGISLATURE – the literal is ‘parliament’ and the wordplay is LEG + IS + LATE around UR (2-letter crossword cradle of civilisation).
14 CASSEROLE – the literal is ‘cooked food’ and the wordplay the somewhat intricate AS + S (‘served at first’) in CE ROLE (‘part of church’, as in the part played by church).
15 SEAQUAKES – the literal is ‘convulsions in the main’ and the wordplay the somewhat intricate A QU (‘a question’) plus A K (‘a king’) inside SEES (‘notes’ – because the word is palindromic, it can be put ‘about’ fodder in a down clue right way up or upside down).
19 RUN DOWN – double definition, where the less familiar transitive (‘reduce in size’) sense of ‘run down’ is being used rather than the more common intransitive (‘decline’).
21 TULIP – U[nion] + L (pound) in TIP for a plant I have heard of.
23 IDAHO – hidden.
25 COS[t]

41 comments on “Times 25575 – Thank ‘Eaven for Leetul Pearls”

  1. No under-10 for me today. Skipped through the top half which had all the clue-types I like. The lower portion I found more difficult; particularly the “somewhat intricate” wordplays noted by Ulaca at 14dn and 15dn. Strangely, my last in was BEREFT which I must have looked at for a good couple of minutes. As Vinyl says, easy. But with a few traps for even old players.

    20ac: Ulaca, you need quotation-marks around your URL to make it work as a link.

    1. Thanks for the tip, McT, but to no avail. I’v not had a problem with links here before, and I tried the same ‘string’ (sans quotation marks) in blogger and it worked fine.
      1. You can also just highlight the string for the link and click the link icon when in the LJ Visual Editor; then enter the URL in the dialogue box.

        Standard HTML works only in the HTML Editor on LJ. The format is (with bracket substitutions):

        [a href=”URL”]string[/a]

  2. about 15 mins for all except permafrost and another 10 mins for that. I’d never heard of perm and since permafrost is permanently frozen soil there is certainly none at the north pole and under all the ice at the south pole I think there is only rock.

    And I was trying to drag up a half remembered russian city (which turns out to be Pervouralsk) that felt like it would fit if I could only remember it. It doesn’t, although it is close enough it wasn’t an insane idea.

    1. US Oxford & ODO have:
      “a thick subsurface layer of soil that remains frozen throughout the year, occurring chiefly in polar regions”.

      Edited at 2013-09-09 02:33 am (UTC)

      1. Beat me – couldn’t get out of my head that the polar regions are round the poles, and don’t have soil… do they? Just ice and snow? I tend to associate permafrost with vast tracts of Siberia, Canada, Alaska, none of which I’d call polar.
        Also completely ignorant of all US poets, except Poe.
        Rob
  3. I didn’t find it that easy but might have made it under 30 minutes if I hadn’t stopped to parse as I went. However I failed the explanations on two counts as I didn’t understand GALILEO and I was on the wrong track completely with PRECARIOUS having decided that ‘goody-goody’ = PRECIOUS which left me with AR as an unknown form of military transport.

    Didn’t know PERM despite my Russian origins, nor INTERCROP.


  4. Yes, all very quick, except for PERMAFROST, where I had a blank, neither knowing the Russian town nor the American poet. I guess if I’d looked at it for longer I would probably have got it…

    PS My parsing for PRECARIOUS ran along the same lines as Jack’s… Oops.

  5. Thanks, ulaca, for the full parsing of PRECARIOUS, CASSEROLE and SEAQUAKES.

    I struggled to get going with the across clues but once I had turned to the down clues, everything flowed fairly easily. LOI: BEREFT. For some reason I had initially persuaded myself that ‘deprived’ = ‘fed 0’ and was looking for some way to justify FEDORA (‘felt cap’) as the answer.

    One advantage I seem to have compared to many contributors to this blog is a (distant) rural, farming background. So INTERCROP was no problem. (However, the list of disadvantages is much longer …!)

    1. I toyed with fedora as well on the basis of fed 0 which I thought was rather clever (except it wasn’t). I even wrote it out under the grid to to see if that would help justify it.
  6. Easy for me too today, especially the top half. In this grid making 1A a giveaway ensures a fast time for about 50% of the puzzle. 15 minutes to solve.

    Can’t get my mind round that first “In” at 18A – suspect it’s padding to improve surface reading – which I solved from definition (even though, like Paul, I associate PERMAFROST with Norway and Siberia more than the poles).

    No real standout clues today.

    1. I suspect this is the occasional instance of an initial link-word. “x in y” is normal. But “in x, y” crops up now and then. Didn’t bother me at all.
  7. 18m. I found this pretty tricky. Quite a few unknowns (TILT HAMMER, Perm, INTERCROP, “galley”), some less-than-everyday terms (SUMAC, ARUM, ICHOR) and some decidedly tricky wordplay.
  8. I’m gutted that other people found this puzzle so easy. I thought that there were some tough clues, and unfamiliar solutions, such as ‘seaquakes’ and ‘intercrop’, so I was preening myself that I had crept in under 20m, only to find that I was really pretty slow. Such is life, more of an Eddie the Eagle than Usain Bolt.
    George Clements
  9. 14 mins and I didn’t find it quite as easy as some of you seem to have done. If I had seen 1ac straight away my time would have been a lot faster.

    PERMAFROST was my LOI after I got the final checker from INTERCROP because, like Jimbo, I had been thrown by “In” at the start of the clue, and I had also been trying to think of something truly polar rather than just north of the Arctic Circle. The INTERCROP and TILT HAMMER crossers were both solved from the wordplay, although there were certainly a few clues where the definition was immediately obvious.

  10. My LOI, too – I was trying for PO…….E, to give some polar location or phenomenon – and also think of permafrost as being subarctic, rather than polar.

    Edited at 2013-09-09 11:10 am (UTC)

  11. A relief to get a relatively easy Monday offering after a run of challenging puzzles, particularly Saturday’s and Sunday’s. PERMAFROST was my last in, as for Ulaca. Can the preliminary “in” not be justified as simply indicating that the “polar feature” is to be found “in” the combination of the “Russian city” and the “American poet” surrounding “a”? It also, of course, helps the surface reading. TILT HAMMER and INTERCROP unknown to me but get-able from the cryptic clues. Some tricky wordplay – e.g. SEAQUAKES, HAMBURGER and CASSEROLE – but which, as others have noted, it was seldom necessary to unpick fully because the defs were too obvious. An enjoyable puzzle none the less.
  12. 16:20 .. I certainly wouldn’t class this as a simple puzzle at all. Some gimmes, sure, and a few that didn’t need parsing, but there were plenty which did require some thought.

    If you didn’t see PERMAFROST straight off, that errant ‘In’ could easily send you off on a journey down roads less travelled in search of half-remembered Russian cities. You weren’t alone, paulmcl, trying to find your way to Pervouralsk. In the end I ran through my short list of known American poets and was saved by Frost.

  13. By the by, in today’s Concise one of the solutions seems to be the same word as the relevant clue. A first for this particular gaffe? Or is it an elaborate joke that has gone over my head?
  15. I certainly didn’t find this “ridiculously easy” as a whole, though there were a number of easy clues, so my time of 33 minutes should have been shorter. Fortunately SUMAC and ICHOR were known to me, but I needed a few more checkers before I got 1a. SEAQUAKES, my last entry, also took me a while to get. The only unknown element was the Russian city, but the link between ‘polar’ region’ and an American poet was so transparent that PERMAFROST went in as soon as I had the S from 12.

  16. I found it easy, except for Ichor and Arum which went in from the wordplay as guesses. In a new regime of attacking the long ones first, Permafrost was my FOI, direct from the poet and the (not exactly correct: replace Polar with Arctic and I’m fine) literal. I’m glad I didn’t have to start that one from the parsing end – I can see how it would be a poser.
      1. Yeah. Thanks MC. I think we’re being picky. Pernickety. If it were my clue, I’d change it, but then I saw it right off so I’m not whining. Plus, from the setter’s perspective, ‘polar’ has the pleasing possibility of sending us off looking for an S or N, and ‘arctic’ is overly explicit.
  17. Oh for an RM with a black hairstyle eaten by a pest. I was well and truly done for by PERMAFROST, and had to wait until all my crossing letters were in before chancing it.

    Enjoyable Monday solve, slowed down as described (if that’s the right word), taking around 25 minutes.

    Thanks setter and Ulaca.

  18. 16:58 so about average difficluty (certainly not “easy” for me).

    LOI permafrost here too. Knowing neither city nor poet made it tricky as all that was left of the wordplay to help me was A. The only polar feature I could think of was sastrugi (sp) and it was only when I decided that the unknown intercrop had to be right that the P led me to permafrost. I was still expecing the construction to be A inside a poet inside a city. Is there a city called Perst and an American poet called Michael Frobisher whose name is shortened J-Lo style to M-Fro?

    Tilt-hammer and sumac were unknown as well, and ichor only vagualy familiar.

    COD would have gone to fedora for fed 0. Is that a first, awarding COD for a non-existent device?

  20. 14:28 here, INTERCROP and TILT HAMMER were my only unknowns, the latter being my LOI as I left it as T?L? HAMMER till the end, without realizing it was just an anagram until I went back to it!
  21. I did the same: “Eliot, Whitman, er…”
    In the end I got it by staring at it until a word that fitted the checkers popped into my head.
    1. I suspect most people know some Robert Frost, even if they don’t know they know it – The Road Not Taken (“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/
      I took the one less traveled by”) especially. Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening is a bit of a standard, too (“And miles to go before I sleep,/
      And miles to go before I sleep.”).

      I think I was introduced to Frost by wise-cracking detective Spenser, who has a penchant for quoting poetry.

      1. I’ve never been properly introduced to Frost, so I don’t think I knew he was American. Mind you there are several poets I know perfectly well to be American who didn’t occur to me either.
  22. Under 20m for sure but interrupted on the way. Will my family ever learn?

    The top half went in very quickly with the bottom half dragging me down.

    1. Wikipedia does: “She became an international success based on her extreme vocal range, which was said to be well over four octaves”

      .. you would also do better to give a name. “anon” seldom counts for much hereabouts

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