Times 25,582

Solving time 25 minutes

Perhaps a little harder than of late but still not a really difficult one. The cell may cause some problems I guess. All in all a reasonable puzzle.

Across
1 GANYMEDE – G(ANY)MEDE; satellite of Jupiter, largest moon in our system (oh – and as this is The Times – Zeus’s lover);
5 TUAREG – TU(ARE)G; the Berbers of North Africa;
9 AGA – (p)AGA(n); as in Khan not cooker;
10 CONSTRAINED – CO(N-STRAIN-E)D; E from (tumbl)E;
12 COAT,OF,ARMS – (a from ascot)*; posh badge;
13 PLEA – P(au)L-E(mm)A; grisly clue;
15 PATHOS – PATH-OS; OS=Ordinary Seaman; one of Aristotle’s rhetorics;
16 CHATTER – C-HATTER; about=circa=C; HATTER makes hats (probably in Luton);
18 CLANGER – CLAN-GER(man); reference slang phrase “drop a clanger” – old fashioned management-speak; ;
20 NELSON – two meanings 1=Admiral who has his own square 2=wrestling hold;
23 TRAP – (s)TRAP;
24 GET-UP-AND-GO – (gag done)* surrounds TUP; “mate with ewe” a bit of a giveaway!;
26 MERCHANDISE – (medicare + nhs)*;
27 EAR – (b)EAR;
28 NUMBER – NUMB-ER; ER=Edward Rex;
29 AGITATED – AG(TATI reversed)E-D; D=departs (train timetables);
 
Down
1 GLANCE – G-LANCE; arm=weapon;
2 NIAGARA – (AGAIN reversed)-RA; falls is well hidden definition;
3 MACROPHAGE – MAC-ROP(HAG)E; son of in Gaelic=MAC; type of cell found in blood vessels;
4 DENTAL,SURGEON – (also need grunt)*;
6 URAL – hidden reversed (tin)U-RAL(ucsavoidrac);
7 RINGLET – R(INGLE)T; as worn by proper girls of the wandering kind;
8 GOD’S,ACRE – (AS-DOG reversed)-C-RE; reference “man’s best friend”; caught=C (cricket); on=RE; a boneyard;
11 TIME-CONSUMING – cryptic definition;
14 PARLIAMENT – PAR(LIAM)ENT; the Diet is Japanese Parliament;
17 SCOTSMAN – S(COTS-M)AN; William Wallace 1270-1305, with Andrew Moray, hero of Stirling Bridge;
19 ANAGRAM – “meatballs” is well known anagram of “stale lamb”;
21 ODDMENT – O(DD-MEN)T;
22 CONRAD – C(ON-R)AD; Joseph Conrad 1857-1924; Pole who didn’t become a plumber;
25 SHOE – S-HOE; S=spades (cards); a last is a tool used by a cobbler;

46 comments on “Times 25,582”

  1. Agreed, a bit harder. And you got me Jim: a fair bit of trouble with MACROPHAGE. In fact, I even thought MIC-ROPHAGE might do given that MIC is the genitive (and plural) of MAC in Gaelic. (Does it ever get into surnames though? Micawber?)

    Didn’t know that “meatballs” and “stale lamb” combined to make a chestnut. So I was impressed by this one.

    MicText

    1. Don’t know about “Mic”. I believe “Nic” means “daughter of” so some scope for evolution to Mic over the years from either Mac or Nic.
      1. In Scots Gaelic, a phrase such as “mother and sons” would be:
        Màthair agus mic
        So that’s “mic” as the plural of “mac”. Will try to make the genitive work if I can. Watch this space. Working from dictionaries here. But MAC-RO… is obviously right. No question.
  2. More enjoyable than some of late, but I had a couple of blanks left at the end, including the unknown (but gettable) TUAREG, and the unknown, (but more tricky) MACROPHAGE.

    I haven’t been doing crosswords nearly long enough to have come across the meatballs ANAGRAM, which I thought was very inventive!

  3. Under half an hour. Very succinct clues, I thought. Held up for a little while by the three-letter Turkish commander, which I thought must be BEY. I confess that my knowledge of the TUAREG comes entirely from Rowan Atkinson.
      1. Thank you, Jack. Last time I posted a link using HTML tags (following Jerry’s advice) it avoided the spam box. Didn’t work this time, though.
    1. I can’t see or hear TUAREG without thinking of that ad, either, John. Rowan Atkinson has a wonderful way of finding the poetry in a single word.
  4. 48 minutes parsing as I went. DK MACROPHRAGE or TUAREG but got them from wordplay.

    Jim, you have spelling error at 2dn.

  5. Enjoyed this one, with the unknowns CONSTRAINED (this meaning of it), MACROPHAGE, and GODS ACRE going in on wordplay. COD to SCOTSMAN. But why would anyone make meatballs from stale lamb when they could use best llama instead?
    1. Or blest lama?

      I managed to read Victory`s for Victorious but that didn’t hurt. And liked 1D.

    1. Translation: Jock Wallace was a very succesful Scottish professional footballer and subsequently manager of Rangers. He is now in 8D so would be eligible – but this is the Times, after all.
  6. Found this quite tough, coming home in 83 minutes, with unknowns GODS ACRE and MACROPHAGE last in. At least, a Classics background helped here, as it did with 1 across. Clear COD to NIAGARA.
  7. I had MICROPHAGE, which was the one I happened to know. I assumed that a ‘phage’ was some Gaelic witch and her son would be a little phage. Ridiculous, now I come to think of it.

    Nice puzzle, though. Only major hold-ups were in the SW, where SCOTSMAN and ANAGRAM took a long time to click.

    COD .. GOD’S ACRE

  8. 25 mins, but with the same one wrong as sotira. However, I went for “machophage” on the basis that mac=son, hop=bound, and hag=witch, and I stupidly ignored the fact that there was an “e” on the end unaccounted for. If I had thought about it for a couple of minutes longer I might have found my way to the correct answer, but I’m using the excuse that because I didn’t have a great night’s sleep (I think I’m coming down with a cold) I wasn’t at my best.
    1. I love the idea of a machophage – a white cell that thinks it’s tough but is really just afraid of its feelings.
  9. That’s more like it. A leisurely 45 minutes to solve this one, so a welcome step up the toughness ladder, though, as Jim says, not really hard. 3 took me a while to work out. My last in was 19,which I should have got far earlier.
  10. Ingenious puzzle. I seemed to be on the right wavelength and completed in around 35 mins. But at that point I had MICROPHAGE at 3D, purely on the assumption that “cell” was likely to be the def and I had a dim memory of a kind of cell ending in “…PHAGE”. Further, the ROPHAGE bit could be made to fit the “witch apparently bound” wordplay but it was still impossible to explain MIC. A check in the dictionary also failed (unsurprisingly) to confirm the existence of MICROPHAGE. The possibility of MAC= Gaelic “son of” finally dawned. By then I had probably added another 15 mins to my time.
    1. You are as ever, Sotira, quite right, as I have discovered on further investigation. But, oddly, “microphage” doesn’t seem to be in either of the two dictionaries I consulted, though both have “macrophage”.
  11. Undone by the Gaelic.

    I couldn’t shake the idea that the cell was CAGE which meant the definition was “son of Gaelic”, witch was MA (no offence, Mum) and I needed a word meaning “apparently bound” to fit ?O?H to go in my cage. Thst got me mac?o?hage so I wasn’t a million miles away.

    I also had TEAM at 23 on the basis that belt and steam both mean to move fast and a boxer’s corner is where his team is.

    Earlier on I ignored the enumeration at 4 and tried to make the driller something sergeant, although the leftover letters of O,N,D,L and U weren’t terribly promising.

    COD to chatter for “top fashion designer”.

  12. Thought that I had completed in very good time but found that I had got Macrophage wrong. Coincidentally, on almost the same basis as Andy. I saw ‘hop’ for ‘bound’ and shoved in ‘machophage’without checking the wordplay. Will I never learn?
    By the way Bigtone, I am again unable to get today’s blog yet on the iPad though it’s readily available on this library computer. I have come to the conclusion that somehow at Livejournal the iPad version of then blog is made available later than the Windows version, but I’m no computer techie so I don’t know for sure. Or could it be something to do with the Safari browser?
    George Clements
      1. Tried to send a detailed reply to you and bigtone53 and got a message saying that the comment had been sent marked as spam. Don’t understand but hope that our leader can unsparing it.
        George
    1. George,

      No problem here on iPad this morning, although sometimes I have to wait.. Like sotira, I get there though Safari.

      28:03 with interruptions. Not yet the hard one we are expecting.

      Edited at 2013-09-17 02:27 pm (UTC)

      1. Tried to send a detailed reply to you and sotira but got a message saying that it had been sent marked as spam. Hope our leader can unspam it, and also understand the nonsense message I sent which says ‘unsparing’ instead of unspam due to unchecked predictive text. Mea culpa.
        George Clements
  13. This is one of those grids which tends to fall into discrete sections. After SW done, a few scattered solutions left me struggling to see how to get further – tried SARGENT at 4d (homophone needed from enumeration).
    Eventually remembered TUAREG, so NE corner fell, then 1d was way into NW, and finally seeing 11d got me going at SE. So a matter of fits and starts for me, with 27a LOI, as couldn’t think of any appropriate transport.
    At 3d, the witch meant I needed some sort of -PHAGE, but MAC didn’t occur to me till much later.
  14. Did this during a few breaks at work, couldn’t quite get it last night. Didn’t get the full wordplay for GANYMEDE or CONSTRAINED, MACROPHAGE from wordplay.
  15. On boring car rides when we were children my sisters and I used to sing “Lavabo Italy Ganymede Underwear”, with embellishments, to the tune of “Carry me ackee go Linstead market” until the parents could bear it no longer. I was another microbiologist for a while but the one I had the most trouble with was “Ural” – couldn’t see it for looking. 18.54.
  16. I had fewer problems with this than with today’s Concise. A steady solve with no major hold ups. I could have been faster if I’d bunged in some of the obvious answers just from the cryptic. But working the clues out is the aspect of these puzzles that I find most satisfying. I had MACROPHYTE for a while. It looked like it ought to be a real word. Similarly my original spelling of 5a was TAUREG. I needed the river at 5d to put that one right. 27 minutes. Ann
  17. 25m. I thought this was a first rate puzzle, even if I was very tired when I solved it and so struggled a bit. Like crypticsue my last entry was the A in MACROPHAGE, and it took me a few minutes on its own. My instinct was to bung in an I but fortunately I resisted. GOD’S ACRE my only other unknown.
    1. This is one of those crossword conventions. A runner can be a river (as a river is described as running) and the Ural is a river, as well as being, in the plural, a mountain range.
      Hope this helps,
      George Clements
  18. Hello sotira and bigtone53,
    I am sorry that I must be a bore about my iPad, but here is what happens. I connect to the Times for the Times site, which shows the ‘latest month’ calendar page. Until recently, from early in the morning the current day’s date has been underlined and I have been able to select it and access the day’s blog and comments. Recently, however, the current day has not been underlined until much later in the day, so I have been unable to select it and, therefore submit my twopennywoth of contribution until much later in the day. On the other hand, if I follow the same procedure on a computer running windows – such as the ones at the Lit. & Phil. Library in Newcastle which I regularly haunt – I can access the blog with.no trouble. Also, later in the day, like now, the iPad works just fine.
    Apologies again, but thanks for your interest.
    George Clements
    1. George,

      I do not get involved with the calendar. If I need to update, I use the ‘Recent Entries’ link at the top left of the TftT site. When it updates, the website box at the top colours from left to right but it often just stops on the way. It seems to get there in the end.

      I have usually finished the xword on my iPad by 0900 and then go to the TftT site. Apart from the stoppages mentioned above, I have always managed to get there.

      It occurs to me that for various reasons, some blogs recently have not come in until later in the day and as you cannot comment on a blog that is not there, this might explain some things

      Good Luck, Tony

      Edited at 2013-09-17 05:59 pm (UTC)

    2. Hello George. Not much to add. The iPad tends to cache whatever it can for faster access so you’re probably seeing a cached version of the calendar or page. As Tony says, tapping Recent entries should give you the latest post at the top of the page (or just tapping the main site title).

      There is a Live Journal app which works fine but it a bit basic in appearance.

  19. 26 minutes but with a dumb microphagi, knowing that wasn’t singular. And that after the last five minutes on it. The one stinger in a friendly swarm. Liked the anagram, also mohn’s improvement. – joekobi
  20. Not too tough, about 20 minutes, needing the wordplay for MACROPHAGE and GODS ACRE. Finished in the SE where putting GET UP AND GO together took a few minutes since I was slow to see the ‘tup’ wordplay. Once I did, I agree with Jimbo that it was pretty obvious all along, and I was being dense. LOI was ODDMENT. Regards to all.
  21. 7:34 for me – which I’m not too unhappy about (for once), given how tired I was feeling. Like falooker I was momentarily tempted by MACROPHYTE, but thought of MACROPHAGE almost immediately. Nice puzzle.

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