Times 25,576

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
13:04 on the club timer. While that’s obviously not the sort of time which would make me feel lightning fast on most daily puzzles, the uncrowded leaderboard so far suggests I was definitely on the right wavelength for this one (several familiar on-line solvers have also made a mistake, so we may find out if there is one clue in particular which has tripped lots of people up; edit: comments here and on the Club messageboard in fact suggest a combination of 9ac, 3dn and 15dn). More importantly, I thought this was an elegant puzzle, where any gaps in my knowledge were filled perfectly fairly by the wordplay.

Across
1 CHAMPAGNE – CHAMP, [Norway in AGE].
6 OILER – reverse hidden answer in awaRE LIOn’s; I knew OILER as a ship which carries oil, but not this definition, though it wasn’t a great leap, especially as the type of clue is well signposted.
9 IN BUD – IN(=popular) BUDE. Very tempting to write IN BED into those checkers without thinking, I wonder if this is where those errors came from?
10 UNDEFINED – UNDER without Runs, FINED(=given punishment).
11 BEEHIVE – cryptic def. Luckily there isn’t a hairstyle called an “anthill”.
12 SIRLOIN – [Right, Left, OI!] in SIN.
13 GOOSEBERRY BUSH – cryptic def., the place where babies were traditionally discovered in a time of euphemism. Possibly left there by a stork.
17 PRESENT PERFECT – PRESENT(=here), (REP)rev., as in repertory theatre company, EC(=city) in FT(=appropriate newspaper for the City). To be technical, the tense of a verb which is used to to express a past event as something which still pertains in the present (“I have been solving crosswords for longer than I care to remember”); informally, the football pundit’s tense: “Let’s see that replay, Ron”. “Yes, Tony, Gazza’s knocked it into the channel, and the boy Lineker’s made a good run and absolutely smashed it home, near post.”
21 ASSUAGE – (US)rev. in A SAGE
23 GINSENG – [N,S, EN(French for “in”)] inside GIG. A small rowing-boat as well as one of the numerous horse-drawn carriages which regularly appear in Crosswordland.
25 PRIMITIVE – PRIM, [Versus in 1 TIE]. Someone who is not very developed, hence naive.
26 SCUBA – Son, CUBA.
27 ROGUE – Garden in ROUE. I didn’t know the horticultural definition, but again the wordplay makes it an easy leap. Nice surface.
28 RED CARPET – REDCAR(racecourse in the NE of England), PET(=favourite).
 
Down
1 CRIBBAGE – [RIB(=bar), Boozers] in CAGE.
2 AMBLE – Mark in ABLE.
3 PODGINESS – POD(=school, as in a gathering of marine creatures), (PRESSING)* without the PR.
4 GRUYERE – counteR in GUY, rEtRiEd.
5 END USER – (RUDENESS)*.
6 OFFER – OFF(=cancelled), E.R. The epitome of concise clueing.
7 LANGOUSTE – [Good, OUST] in LANE. I knew langoustine because I’ve eaten a few in my time, but not this similar shellfish, though once more I was pretty confident from the wordplay.
8 RODENT – DEN in ROT.
14 ONRUSHING – ON(=further), R.U.(=game), SHINGLE minus the last two letters.
15 BERING SEA =”BEARING SEE”, where “court=see” in the romantic sense. I checked my memory extra carefully for the spelling of BERING, making sure I didn’t confuse it with the Barents Sea (both cold and Northern, but a long way apart).
16 STAGNANT – [TAG(=label)in Sn(=tin, chemically)], ANT(=soldier).
18 NEEDIER – KNEE, DIYER minus the Year.
19 PIGFEED – [Good, Fe(iron, chemically)] in PIED(=”in two colours”).
20 JASPER – JA(=German for “yes”) + (REPS)rev.
22 ABIDE – BID in A&E. What was once “Casualty” is now “Accident and Emergency”.
24 EQUIP – Ecstasy + QUIP(=crack). Another concise clue with a great surface.

29 comments on “Times 25,576”

  1. Must have taken around 35 mins, not helped by scribbling in Sausage and Rouge and getting obsessed with Sonar. The SE corner was the eventual hold-up.
  2. Straightforward solve L to R, T to B, no hold ups or queries. 15 minute stroll in the park.

    Interesting Tim that you see a connection between “shooting” and “in bed” – you’ve clearly led a colourful life!

  3. Got there in the end: but SW completed only a long coffee break. Held up by ROGUE and ONRUSHING. Knew ROGUE as an unwanted (usually self-sown) plant (i.e. a weed), but not as a diseased plant. Thanks for the blog, Tim.
  4. A fair bit of trouble with this one, especially (and ironically) in the SW. Parsing trials scribbled all over the page. At 9ac, I thought a plant IN BED could indeed be shooting. Knowing less about Cornish geography than CJ from Eggheads, I assumed BEDE must be a resort. Then I remembered:

    There was a young lady from Bude
    Who went for a swim in the lake     …
    Etc.

    At 23ac, I hadn’t heard of GIG as a boat, though N and S had to be in there somewhere. An equal unknown was ROGUE for ‘diseased plant’ at 27ac. And, post-solve, I find it’s a bit loose: “an inferior or defective specimen among many satisfactory ones, esp. a seedling or plant deviating from the standard variety” (NOAD). Watch out: it can also be a verb meaning to remove such plants.

    12ac: OI for ‘look here’ — come on!

    In the Down clues, despite being a CRIBBAGE tragic, it was hard to find that ‘bar’ meant RIB. And the dubious homophone at 15dn was cringeworthy. AE for ‘accident and emergency’ (casualty) also took a bit of seeing (22dn). And ‘DIY-er’ (18dn) is a word outwith my vocab.

    13ac may be one of the few (just) passable cryptic defs of recent times. Though I’m sure that old wives know very well where babies come from!

    Edited at 2013-09-10 10:06 am (UTC)

  5. 15 mins. I was quite pleased with this time and didn’t see it as quite the stroll in the park that Jimbo did. I found the bottom half easier than the top half, and the NW corner was the last to fall.

    I suspect that the mistake some online solvers may have made is to have put “pudginess” at 3dn. It was my LOI and I flirted with it myself before I parsed the clue properly and went for the correct PODGINESS.

    I didn’t know that definition of ROGUE but the wordplay was clear enough.

  6. All looked straightforward to me, though perhaps Andy above is onto something re 3dn. I didn’t notice the alternative..
  7. 37 minutes parsing as I went, but with one mistake at 15dn where I neglected to consider alternatives to BARING SEA. I’m concerned that 6ac was my LOI despite “hiding in retreat” being part of the clue. Must remember to engage brain before solving in future.

  8. I did find this pretty easy apart from several minutes to spot and parse PRIMITIVE at the end. 17:13 on the clock, but…

    I was one of the one-mistakers with an inexplicable PUDGINESS at 3d. The more inexplicable because the the text window I use as a scratchpad is still open this morning and the word PODGINESS is still there from where I worked out the clue last night. Curiously, I’m typing this comment in that same Textedit window on my Mac and the auto-spellchecker is red-lining PODGINESS but is quite happy with PUDGINESS. Go figure, as the people who coded the spellchecker would very likely say.

  9. 43 minutes, finishing in the NE with LANGOUSTE, where I needed all the checkers as I could probably have spelt it in a dozen different ways.

    Never heard of gooseberry bush in this connection.

    Edited at 2013-09-10 09:44 am (UTC)

  10. 15D tripped me up on what was otherwise a reasonably straightforward solve. With the choices of BERING (which I’d always thought rhymed with herring) or BARING (which I’d never heard of but which fitted the wordplay), I plumped for the latter. This caused a wry smile when I saw the solution, as recently I’ve made a few errors by, in situations of doubt, choosing my “knowledge” over the wordplay but in this particular case decided to go for the wordplay instead.
  11. I had no problems with the gooseberry bush – as I always say when picking them ‘why any baby would risk being born under such a vicious prickly plant is a mystery!’. 8.10 but with one wrong – I too was pudgy rather than podgy.
    1. From purely circumstantial evidence, I speculate that I was actually born under a grape vine. probably cabernet sauvignon..

  12. I checked my memory extra carefully for the spelling of BERING, making sure I didn’t confuse it with the Barents Sea (both cold and Northern, but a long way apart)

    I, on the other hand, bunged in the invented BARENT SEA and failed utterly to reconsider the spelling when “correcting” to BARING SEA.
    PRIMITIVE was my last in and took ages to see. I didn’t have a clue about GOOSEBERRY BUSH but it seemed the only possible option.
    22m after all that. Not my finest solve.

    1. Hadn’t heard of the gooseberry expression either, nor the 19th century slang from which it apparently derives (as per Google).
      1. I meant to correct my entry above, because it seemed unclear that I was quoting Tim (the picture seems to have interfered with my “blockquote”). However I didn’t have time, because I had to rush off for a meeting with a man called Mohn. Yes, really.
        Funny old world.
  13. I’m usually just a lurker on here, and I always appreciate the clarity this blog can bring to a tricky solve. No problems today finishing in about 40 mins, which is about average for me.

    However I feel the need to comment on “Odd job man” = DIY-er. For me these two are anything but the same. An odd job MAN seems by definition someone who is paid to do other people’s odd job’s….whereas a DIY-er (assuming the word exists) is surely someone who does their own jobs, rather than getting someone in.

    I’m probably being picky as in the end the clue was easy to solve and I could see what the setter was getting at, but I’ve seen similar issues (e.g. pluck vs strum) spark debate on here in the past, so am surprised it hasn’t raised any eyebrows.

    Dave B

    1. It’s a fair point, if not necessarily clear-cut (is it ever?). When I first saw the clue, without looking at checkers, my first thought “Hmmm…is this something like HANDYMAN without the Y?” Obviously it wasn’t, but I was clearly thinking along the same lines as you, i.e. that we were looking for a workman, not an enthusiast.

      On the other hand, I guess it works OK if you think of a DIY-er as “someone who does odd jobs around the house”. And as you say, the ultimate test in such cases has to be “Does this stop anyone solving the clue?” though this shouldn’t (and obviously doesn’t) preclude comment.

      Besides, if you can’t be picky about language here, then where can you be?

    2. I read it as a surface misdirection. Though “odd job man” as a phrase has the meaning of someone paid to do someone else’s jobs, if you ignore that standard meaning and simply read it as 3 words, i.e. a man doing odd jobs, then it also fits the description of a DIY-er.
  14. 35.24 and for once all correct. Though by means a stroll in the park for me I did have a steady solve and delays were all of my own making. Thanks for the blog as I was struggling to parse some of these.
  15. Not a quick solve, but I got there without aids, though I failed to parse present perfect. By the way, I have been unable to access the blog on my iPad today and have had to resort to a library computer.
    George Clements
      1. For the benefit of those who only look at this part of LiveJournal and don’t see service updates, they have been the subject of cyber-attacks recently. As they put it, “…Over the last few days, access to LiveJournal has been unstable – some people have had difficulty accessing the service, pages were loading slowly, and some weren’t loading at all….”

        In other words, you’ve probably just been unlucky.

  16. I shared Vinyl’s experience in finding this much more difficult than most seem to have done. Struggled to a correct completion but only with resort to aids. Topicaltim’s time of 13.04 mins is mind-bogglingly quick. Not my day.
  17. About 25 minutes, but with PUDGINESS. Never heard of podginess, nor of A&E to mean casualty at ABIDE, my LOI. Not to mention the GOOSEBERRY BUSH. COD to the succinct OFFER, very well done. Regards.

    Edited at 2013-09-10 05:04 pm (UTC)

  18. This was a real struggle for me – several answers had to go in reluctantly without parsing, so thanks to Tim for explanations.
    My LOI was 22d, as I couldn’t see where FIR could come from, to make the tender stomach AFIRE. Eventually I had to resort to Word Matcher to see if there was some other A>E word that I’d missed !
  19. … and that letter was an ‘a’ as the second letter in BERING SEA, which I’d heard of, but never really seen written.

    All others ok, but couldn’t parse SIRLOIN (thinking ‘lo’ was see, couldn’t work out IR for both hands) or the tense (thought ‘by’ gave the ‘per’ bit of ‘PERFECT’, so had too much clue!), so thanks for those.

  20. Thank you for taking the trouble to respond to my comment. This evening everything is working fine on the iPad. Just for information, I am no longer a member of the Times Crossword Club, so I don’t solve online – I buy the print copy and just access the blog, which I enjoy very much, and I appreciate the assistance I receive when I (not infrequently) have difficulty in parsing a solution or – whisper it – when I cannot solve a clue at all.
    Regards,
    George Clements
    1. I am not a member of the Crossword Club either but I do get my copy of The Times online, which gives me the opportunity to do the xword there, with a timer. I do find though that after years of the paper version on a daily commute, , I miss being instantly able to scribble out a possible anagram.

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