Times 25577: (Y)es, French art

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 23:44

Sorry this blog is up a bit late. So was I. But not too much trouble, especially on the left-hand side which seemed easier to me than the right. A few long anagrams aided the solve, and then there were the more complex parsings such as VICHYSSOISE — which I could barely spell, let alone clue. A smattering of European languages helps.

Across
1. MOONRISE. Anagram: is no more.
5. LOUVRE. L’oeuvre (the work), minus one of its Es.
10. DEFINITE ARTICLE. It’s not A (it’s THE). Made up of DEFINITE (sure) & ARTICLE (thing).
11. STEEL BANDS. Anagram: end bat less.
13. TYRO. The spelling included in ‘duTY ROster’; not the one in ‘sergeanT IROnically’.
15. NOT HALF. Two defs; the first being ‘exceedingly’.
17. MATISSE. Reverse IT in MASSE.
18. FOR,BEAR.
19. CANTINA. C{ocktail} & anagram: at inn a. (Or anagram: at inn; + A.)
21. RU(I)N. Where the I is the symbol for current.
22. CARABINEER. AB (sailor) & IN (home), all inside CAREER.
25. ANABOLIC STEROID. Anagram: does calibration.
27. OT{h}ELLO.
28. DISSOLVE. Reverse LOSS inside DIVE.

Down
1. MAD,I,SON.
2. {l}OAF.
3. RINGLEADER. RING (operas by Wagner); sounds like Lieder (songs).
4. SUTRA. Reverse US; reverse ART.
6. OATH. First letters of: On Attila The Hun.
7. VICHYSSOISE. HYSSO{p} IS; all inside VICE (failing).
8. EYESORE. YES & 0; all inside ERE (before).
9. PANDEMIC. DEM{ocrat} in PANIC.
12. EXTERMINATE. E (European); then {eleve}N in an anagram of ‘extra time’.
14. STINGINESS. I inside STING (smart) & NESS (head).
16. FORMALIN. Move the IN of INFORMAL to the end.
18. FARRAGO. RAG (banter) inside FARO (a card game).
20. A,BRIDGE. The ‘instrumental part’ refers to the bridge of a stringed instrument, and presumably not this; which can be part of a song.
23. ASSAI. More music: Italian for ‘very’; in allegro assai, for example. AS, SAI{d}. Anyone else looking for a composer?
24. WOOL. WOO (court) & {tria}L.
26. OIL. Even letters of ’sOcIaL’.

31 comments on “Times 25577: (Y)es, French art”

  1. 67 minutes. I struggled with this – a penance I suppose for getting up at an unearthly hour to watch England grind out an abysmal scoreless draw. As it happened, I missed the first half, but that didn’t help me spot NOT HALF, where I couldn’t seem to get past ‘not fair’, and was well stuck given my ignorance of preserving solutions until I gave myself a good talking to.

    A strange puzzle in some ways, with an unsignalled French word and a word I knew better in Spanish (carbinero) than in English. Not often I can say that…

    1. Would that be carabinero? Not a quibble; I’m seriously trying to improve my Spanish vocab. On my next flight with a Spanish airline, I don’t want to confuse the cabinero with a carabinero.
  2. I found this much from the same mould as Monday and Tuesday. Middle of the road, nothing too tricky, consistent 20 minute solve

    Certainly a smattering of French and Italian are helpful, particularly for 5A. The wordplay for 23D is very specific, particularly with checkers in place. 10A is not original and 25A went in from definition and a quick inspection of very obvious fodder.

    I think we are due a toughie

  3. I struggled a bit to finish this one and came in on the hour (parsing as I went) having dozed off momentarily a number of times along the way. I spent at least 10 minutes at the end stuck on CARABINEER, which I didn’t know, and ASSAI, which I did, after which I felt I was quite lucky to get away without resort to aids. I’d had a hold-up earlier over an incorrect spelling of VICHYSOISSE, corrected when I worked out the artist at 17ac, but I never did quite manage to crack the wordplay as HYSSOP was not a plant that leapt to my mind at the mention of “herb”.

    Nice to have LOUVRE instead of the so predictable “Tate” clued by “gallery”.

    Edited at 2013-09-11 06:01 am (UTC)

  4. Very pleased with my solving time this morning an early start due to an insomniac dog must suit my constitution.
    George Clements
  5. Got the anagrams pretty quickly and like jackkt ended up with Carabineer and Assai. Will get up early tomorrow for the expected hard one.
  6. A good challenge for a ‘middle of the road’ solver! Tested my spelling: VICHYSSOISE (unprompted, I would have written ‘vichysoisse’) and CARABINEER (I’ve always used ‘carbinier’ variant). I liked 10ac despite its apparent lack of originality; I was also grateful that the otherwise unknown FARO has come up with some frequency in these crosswords/blogs. COD: LOUVRE.

    Thanks, mctext, for the blog and the full parsing of TYRO (I’d missed ‘tiro’).

    1. Martin, are you sure you don’t mean carabinier…or carbineer? Slippery customer indeed, this lexical item!

      I also bunged in TYRO without looking beyond the first bit. Seems like the word began life with an ‘i’ and then went all up market (Hellenised?) in the Middle Ages.

  7. 14 mins after being held up at the end because I hadn’t bothered to parse the soup and had misspelled it the same way a couple of you had also done on first pass. I only arrived at the correct spelling when I saw that 17ac had to be MATISSE and 19ac had to be CANTINA.

    I thought this was going to me a much trickier solve because on my initial read-through of the across clues my FOI was 25ac, but the bottom half fell into place pretty quickly after that, and I steadily chipped away at the top half.

  8. My experience much the same as that of others above. A not too difficult but enjoyable puzzle. One quibble: the solution to 14D was accessible enough from the wordplay but it wasn’t clear to me how STINGINESS was adequately indicated in the clue as the kind of behaviour required.

  9. Oh dear. There’s such a thing as over-thinking and I did it with 13a, eventually changing it to TYPO though never entirely knowing why.

    About 17 minutes plus another 5 spent rethinking and ‘correcting’ TYRO.

    COD .. the anagrammatic performance enhancer. I probably need some.

  10. ref meirosemike – how STINGINESS was indicated

    not behaviour of the kind –

    my extrapolation was KIND as in generous

    Would have been 100% if only my fingers had been connected to the brain after watching Red Socks beat Tampa Bay.

    1. Thanks keef_lawrence. You make much better sense of 14D than I managed to. I might still query whether “kind” is a very exact synonym for “generous” in the latter’s sense of the opposite of “stingy”, but would have to accept that it’s a word of such elastic meaning that in the right context it could be so interpreted. And, of course, as the setter doubtless intended, it makes for a deceptive surface reading.
  12. Agree with Jimbo (again!) 19 minutes, same times and genre as Monday Tuesday, heads down for the tough one soon. LOI DISSOLVE / ASSAI.
  13. 32m today so about average and an enjoyable, steady solve, similar to yesterday. Slowed a little by bunging in EPIDEMIC but 10a was familiar enough to highlight the error. I even was able to parse TYRO so must be improving. Could do without the much expected toughie though.
  14. 16m. I really enjoyed this.
    I wondered when solving if some might find VICHYSSOISE a bit unfair on the basis of double obscurity. It’s hard to gauge how common or otherwise words are when you know them. Mind you I had to parse the very clever TYRO to be sure of the spelling.
  15. 10:54 here, so definitely on the easy side. With just the C in place early on I was trying to justify COCKALEEKIE for 7dn, wondering whether KALE or LEEK could be classified as a herb. Soon gave up that idea when I had a look at 5ac. 🙂
  16. Tough enough for me. 30 minutes by my trusty alarm clock. I started doing the puzzle online a week or so ago when my printer was kaput but, although I came in under 30 minutes and found the experience enjoyable, I’m glad to be back working from a printout. When I was working online I found it very difficult to resist the temptation to use aids, especially for longish anagrams. The little icon for Chambers Crossword Solver kept trying to entice me away from the paths of righteousness. All that is now behind me… I knew which soup was intended at 7d but needed all the checkers for the spelling. I wasted time trying to justify NOT FAIR at 15a and OUT at 2d (I saw “expelled” in the clue, thought LOUT for “stupid chap” and didn’t bother to parse the rest. Then I had to look for an alternative to DEFINITE to go in front of ARTICLE! Georgette Heyer helped again with FARO. Ann
  17. … and that wrong one was the ‘i’ I had as the second letter of TYRO… Thought it looked odd at the time. As did ‘vichissoise’. Doh!

    All others ok, not a lot else to say at this late stage…

    Edited at 2013-09-11 07:17 pm (UTC)

  18. Interesting the dispersion (on many puzzles, but especially today) on who finds it easy and who finds it tough. I rocketed through this one (for me, that means less than an hour); I couldn’t get Fusilier and Grenadier out of my mind, which meant that I couldn’t get Carabinier into my mind.
    And McT, I did. After I ran through all the Italian composers I could think of I decided it must be a librettist – and gave up until I got the checkers in place.
    1. Delighted someone else understands some statistics. I can’t agree with the view that after a few puzzles that a few people found easy that there must be a hard one on the horizon.
      A statistics nerd!
      1. Statistically weak, I agree. However, take the human element of editors and setters into account, and…
  19. I seem to have turned up on the wrong day, but I do sympathise with poor ulaca: the second half was FAR worse than the first, which is saying something.
  20. I see there’s nothing up today. Do you need a volunteer? I’m extremely amateur and it took an embarrassingly long time for me to decode a couple of the clues, but I’m game.

    Edited at 2013-09-12 02:14 pm (UTC)

  21. Was in USA when this one came out and only got round to solving it over the past couple of days.
    27/30 in the end with Louvre, the unknown soup and Ruin missing.

Comments are closed.