Times 25581 – And today’s blogger is….

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 21 minutes

Music: Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, Colin Davis/LSO

…er, me. I thought it was my turn, but somehow I have gotten into my mind the idea that I had blogged last week. A quick check of the calendar, however, confirmed that it was my turn, and a check of the site confirmed that it was Ulaca who blogged last week.

Tonight’s puzzle is pretty easy, I hope; after the reaction to my comment last week, and my struggles with the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday puzzles that everyone else found easy, I have concluded that I am just not the average solver. Perhaps, at least, everyone had a good time.

You will note that vinyl is playing again in my humble abode. After a considerable wait, I have now got in my rack a new Herron VPTH-2, which I highly recommend to all who still find that vinyl beats all the other formats.

Across
1 PETERSHAM, PETER + S[swigged] + HAM. I was not actually familiar with the “thick corded ribbon used to stiffen belts, button bands, etc.”, but the cryptic is quite helpful.
6 LOCUM LO + CU + M, i.e. a ‘locum tenens’, the sort of thing you would hear in the 19th century when your doctor went on vacation and staffed his office with a substitute.
9 ORATION, O[pe]RATION. Sometimes the theatre really is the site of dramatic performances, but often it is not.
10 NASCENT, [musicia]N + A SCENT.
11 FETES, sounds like FATES. It is not ‘Fates’ because of the position of ‘say’.
12 ETYMOLOGY, anagram of GLOOMY YET.
13 CURIA, C(UR)IA.
14 GLADSTONE, [commendin]G LAD’S TONE. A variation on a chestnut.
17 CHARLATAN, CHAR + LA + TAN.
18 PRESS, double definition. I confess, I had never heard of such a thing until I read Dubliners.
19 INSINCERE, IN + SINCE + RE. The Royal Engineers have a lot to answer for.
22 RESIT, RES(I)T. Not a great clue, since ‘rest’ only approximately = ‘lie’.
24 EPISTLE, E PI(ST)LE.
25 INTENSE, IN + TENSE. My first in, and if we were still omitting, this would be omitted.
26 LOYAL, (-r+L)OYAL, a simple letter-substitution clue.
27 SUGAR BEET, anagram of BUT + GREASE.
 
Down
1 PROOF, double definition, referring to printer’s proofs.
2 TRATTORIA, AI (ROT) TART, all upside down.
3 REINSTALL, REIN + STALL, a chestnut.
4 HUNTER-GATHERERS, HUNTER + GATHER(ER)S. ‘Hunter’ refers to a particular style of case on a pocket watch, and by extension to the watch itself.
5 MONEY LAUNDERING, jocular double definition, a very feeble clue.
6 LASSO, LAS + SO. ‘The Spanish’ is not always ‘el’!
7 CREDO, CRED, i.e. street ‘cred’, + O. The literal is a literal translation of the Latin ‘credo’.
8 MATEYNESS, anagram of AMNESTY around ES.
13 COCHINEAL, sounds like COCK’N’EEL in some dialects, YMMV.
15 SUPERSTAR, SUP[p]ER + RATS upside down.
16 OBEISANCE, OBE + ???????. The answer is obvious enough, and put in from the definition and ‘OBE’, but now that I look at the cryptic I can’t decrypt it. Your turn!
20 SHINY, SHIN[d]Y, more often called a ‘shindig’ in the US.
21 NATAL, T[ime] in an anagram of ALAN.
22 THEFT, THE + F[a]T. Not the paper, anyway.

49 comments on “Times 25581 – And today’s blogger is….”

  1. 16dn: Take the NU from NU,ISANCE (drag); replace wth OBE.
    13dn: A COCHIN is a breed of chicken.

    (Jack beat me to it by a minute!)

    Edited at 2013-09-16 01:13 am (UTC)

  2. Took me a while to get into this; neither of the long answers were obvious and I needed a few crossing letters to get there. Re LOCUM: the term is still used here — and possibly in the UK? I heard it used just the other day. It tends to mean the substitute quack who will visit after hours. Of course, getting one so to do is another matter.
  4. I was going back to cover COCHIN, Mct, but you beat me to it. My first instinct was vinyl’s take on it but then I looked it up and found a fowl I never heard of. This was fairly easy stuff which I completed in 25 minutes including most of the parsing along the way.

    Edited at 2013-09-16 01:15 am (UTC)

  5. 25 minutes, but without the parsing of OBEISANCE and the alternative ‘fowl’ parsing of COCHINEAL. Spent 3-4 minutes on my last two, SHINY and INSINCERE, the latter getting my COD for its nice use of ‘as’ and its misleading (to me) use of ‘displaying’ as literal fodder rather than link word.
  6. Identical experience to vinyl both in terms of time and difficulties with parsing! Thanks to those who have filled the gaps.

    8dn: I was surprised to find that, according to online ODO and Chambers, MATEYNESS is the primary spelling and ‘matiness’ is only an alternative.

  7. Yes, still waiting for the toughie.. still, I enjoyed this effort.
    I am relieved to learn of the existence of the cochin, like most chickens, the dodgy homophone would never fly..
  8. 12’36” on my return from Thailand, where I took a break from solving, partly because I can’t enter the competition grids on a tablet. Internet access, on the other hand, was impressive. Perhaps it shows cultural naivety even to think of being surprised.
    A gentle crossword to come back to. A vague memory of the chicken saved me from misspelling COCHINEAL (2 Cs?), and you can add me to the list of those wondering where isance came from, there being no contained Greek letter of my acquaintance.
    26 was briefly LEGAL, which satisfies the wordplay but has a big ? against the definition.
    It was a LOCUM, who recently bizarrely prescribed a large dose of Valium for my blood pressure. Stressed, moi?
  9. Nice’n’easy, and even so with a certain humour. 13.38. I’m with the cock’n’eel brigade. I visit a trattoria in a crossword far more often than in (un)real life. joekobi
  10. A happy bunny with my time this morning, and was pleased that I managed to parse ‘obeisance’ before consulting the blog. I actually found the Times 2 harder today as there was a ‘tropical bird’ of which I had never heard.
    Still waiting for the toughie.
    George Clements
  11. 12m. This was mostly very easy, in spite of a few unknowns (PETERSHAM, the fates, the hunter watch, “shindy”). I got stuck at the end with two left:
    > 16dn where the answer seemed clear but for some reason I was nervous about putting it in without understanding why.
    > 13dn, which is one of those clues where the setter has decided it’s clever to clue one obscurity by reference to another. Fortunately for me the dye was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t decide whether to put COCHINEAL or COCCINEAL. The former looked more “right”, but the latter (which I must have got from the French “coccinelle”) seemed to fit the homophone better. In the end I couldn’t make the homophone work either way (unsurprisingly, as it clearly isn’t one) so I went with what turned out to be the correct spelling.

    Edited at 2013-09-16 08:41 am (UTC)

    1. Petersham (in the plural) came up as recently as July in 25524.

      You won’t be surprised to hear that you didn’t know it then, either.

  12. 11 mins with an unparsed OBEISANCE my LOI. I thought there were too many answers where no attempt had been made to hide the definition in the clues, such as COCHINEAL, LOCUM, CURIA, SUGAR BEET and ETYMOLOGY.

    As far as today’s concise is concerned and the comment George Clements made, I had to use aids to get the tropical bird. I’ll look out for it appearing in a cryptic at some stage.

    1. was in the Bank Holiday Jumbo of 3 weeks ago. It clearly made a great impression on me as I got it wrong this time too.

      Edited at 2013-09-16 10:28 am (UTC)

      1. There wasn’t a BH Jumbo in the dead tree version of the paper three weeks ago as far as I can recall, but even if there had been I can’t guarantee I would have remembered the bird.

  13. All ok, with definitions being clearer than cryptics in many cases (COCHINEAL, OBEISANCE, HUNTER GATHERERS, INSINCERE). Thanks vinyl and others for the explanations.
  14. Pleased with 13:02 this morning but needed the blog post-solve to justify cochineal and obeisance. Thanks for the analysis!
  15. A leisurely 20:16. I have always been a bit iffy about cochineal (the colouring agent, not the pronounciation) since learning at school that it was made from crushed insects.
    Still working on the tropical bird.
    (Later – got it now. Will remember (hopefully!)

    Edited at 2013-09-16 02:09 pm (UTC)

  16. 10 minutes and was also thinking COCK’N’EEL so maybe the majority will win over sense. PETERSHAM from wordplay
  17. Another easy puzzle taking this very average solver no more than 22 minutes, though I confess to being defeated by the wordplay to 16. Things are getting a bit boring. Hope things toughen up a bit this week. I may regret saying that, of course.
  18. 18.06 so an easy one by my standards. No standouts for me but I appreciated the blog as couldn’t see logic for 16d nor 20d. I did remember PETERSHAM from its last outing too. My 7th all correct in a row leads me to expect disaster is just around the corner! The triumph of experience over hope!
  19. 9 mins for me. No 1 Son’s partner is from N Ireland so I had no trouble with the press, it’s what she calls the airing cupboard! I did know the chicken but agree the homophone isn’t quite right. Anyone else remember the days when this substance was used to colour red Smarties?
    1. Yes, here in Ireland a ‘press’ is any cupboard (‘the kitchen has a ranges of presses’). The airing cupboard is referred to as the ‘hot press’. I remember on first coming here reading estate agents’ particulars and having no idea why every room in a house had a ‘built in press’. I’ve never heard the expression used in the UK, though.
        1. It does get used in the UK: we have something at home that was sold to us as a “linen press”. I hadn’t encountered it before then.
  20. Dyste is tempting fate I’m sure, but I’m inclined to agree with him/ her. There’s a variety of pretty puzzle that sometimes appears, full of splendid wordplay and quite easy, but this wasn’t it. Mind you, I’m always up for a fight on a Monday for some reason, and I rarely get one out of any daily.

    Thanks Vinyl and setter.

  21. 12:35, same inability as others to work out obeisance which made me slightly nervous about press.

    At 13 I knew how to spell the crushed-bettle colouring but, despite having chickens, hadn’t heard of the fowl.

    Petersham remembered from its last outing, shindy vaguely familiar from some recent cotext, curia and fetes entered with a bit of a mental shrug.

  22. Easy puzzle. Didn’t know the chook at 13D but solved from definition and C?C anyway. All rather straightforward and pedestrian.
  23. I’m no cryptic expert so apologies if this is a dumb question but why does current = i in one of the clues. I tried googling but couldn’t find out why/ Thanks
  24. I is the symbol for electric current in physics. It gets used in cryptic puzzles quite a lot.
  26. Help please: I see the isance, but why drop the NU? ‘Greek character out of drag’ I’d get, but ‘in drag’? Otherwise, a nice start for the week, though substantial difficulty with the unknown Petersham (now learnt), due to knowing Buckram and having a false checker from banged-in but un-parsed Cafeteria.

    Vinyl, I envy you your amp. Envy.

    1. Paul, The theory is that a nuisance is a drag, and that nu is the thirteenth letter of the Greek alphabet.
      1. I get the nu and the nuisance – I’m just missing what says to disregard the nu bit, keeping only the isance. The only reading I could make would have kept the nu, and ignored the isance.
        1. “Honour for Greek character” tells you to replace a Greek character (nu) with an honour (OBE).
          1. The penny drops. Doh. Looked right past the for. I guess it wouldn’t be fun if I didn’t get fooled from time to time, but…
            Thank you, BigT and keriothe both.
  27. About 20 minutes, but not understanding the parsing of OBEISANCE and thinking that 13D was, as vinyl says, cock’n’eel. Pretty easy overall. Regards.
  28. A miserable 8:42 for me, with the last 2-3 minutes spent agonising over OBEISANCE. I was convinced that the Greek character was going be to SAN, but just couldn’t see how “drag” = ICE. In the end I had to come here to find out what was going on – and kicked myself, particularly as I hadn’t been happy with the way “for” was superfluous in my parsing of the clue!

    I’d also wasted time trying to fit NOSEGAY into 10ac, and had a brainstorm over 4dn (which should have gone straight in), making a bad start to the week.

  29. I found this disappointingly easy. Probably about tge second time I’ve solved a Times cryptic in one session without pausing. I prefer to be obliged to think.

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