Times 25,584

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 20 minutes

Again, no idea who should be blogging this. Done in a hurry so help needed with 11A and 23A please and forgive any errors.

Best puzzle for some time I thought

Across
1 UP,STICKS – UPS-TICK-S; singular=S;
9 USER,NAME – (n+usa+mere)*;
10 TACITURN – ; (CAT reversed)-I-TURN; DW and his cat famously turned on Highgate Hill;
11 TOTAL,WAR – can’t see this one yet; on edit: (I)T(s)-(f)O(r)-(s)TALWAR(t);
12 PASSED,PAWN – PASSED-PAW-N; chess – a pawn on its way to be queened;
14 URDU – hidden (yo)UR-DU(ty);
15 FELT,TIP – advice=TIP; experienced=FELT;
17 MILKSOP – MILKS-OP; exploits=MILKS; event in (operating) theatre=OP;
21 ACME – craving=ACHE then change H=Henry to M=miles;
22 KICK,STARTS – KICKS-TARTS; love it!;
23 JUNGFRAU – can’t see this one yet; on edit: JU(N)G-FRAU(d);
25 INTREPID – (it+red+pin)*;
26 CO-DRIVER – COD-RIVER; the COD is a sea fish;
27 EXPEDITE – EX(P-ED)ITE(d);
 
Down
2 PLAY,SAFE – PLAY-SA(F)E; take part=PLAY; SAE=Stamped Addressed Envelope;
3 THICKSET – THICK-SET; reference “as thick as theives”;
4 CLUB – three meanings 1=society 2=member in black suit 3=bash;
5 SUNTRAP – SUN-TRAP; object to spring=TRAP;
6 WEST,INDIES – (i+witnessed)*;
7 WAXWORKS – WAX-WORKS; WAX=opposite of wane;
8 BEER,PUMP – BEE-R-PUMP; quiz=PUMP;
13 DRINK,DRIVE – sea=DRINK; campaign=DRIVE;
15 FLAPJACK – stew=FLAP; small bowl (in the game)=JACK;
16 LEMONADE – (meal+done)*;
18 KNAPWEED – KN(A-P-W)EED; soft=P; W from (blo)W;
19 OUTPOINT – (to put in)* surrounds “o”; best there is definition;
20 ACQUIRE – sounds like “a choir”;
24 ATOP – A(s)-T(he)-O(thers)-P(lay);

42 comments on “Times 25,584”

  1. Thanks for stepping in at short notice, DJ, for what I thought was the hardest puzzle of the last couple of weeks.

    11A Remove the shells (outer letters) of “iT’s fOr sTALWARt”. I’m guessing it’s supposed to be an &lit.

    23A N (tip of alpenhorn) in JUG (slang for prison) plus FRAUd

  2. Thanks for stepping in again Jimbo.

    31 mins but I needed aids at the end for PASSED PAWN. Chess terminology isn’t exactly one of my strong points, and from the checkers I couldn’t get “raised Cain” out of my mind even though I knew it couldn’t have been right.

    Even if I had been on top form I think I would have struggled to knock more than 10 mins off my time. My mind was so fuzzy that at 16dn, which should have been a write-in, I initially thought the anagram fodder was “mess + meal” with “done” as the anagrind.

    1. Like you Andy, I didn’t know the chess term and out of desperation after over 2 hours put in “raised cain” as my LOI and hoped, in vain, for the best.
  3. Not a great morning for me. But I finally got all the parsings. OUTPOINT was my LOI, but so well constructed it has to be COD as well. TOTAL WAR is fiendish. Put together, the double uses of “shells” and “boxing” are memorable. Hardest puzzle in ages.

    Many thanks to Jim for stepping in.

    Good news re David Stickley (Australia’s greatest setter). After being dropped from several pubications for “financial” reasons, you can now get his Weekly Stickler on line:
    http://www.stickler.com.au/

    Well worth a look. (And if anyone knows how to parse 7dn in the first offering, please let me know.)

  4. Fiendish, I’m sure it’ll be Rogan or Grimshaw. Took… bloody ages, an embarrassingly long time.

    Some really excellent stuff here, my personal fave the TOTAL WAR one. Such device always reminds me of the ridiculous

    Up at farm, big man beheaded bird (9)

    clue of yore, but there were others in this dramatic Thursday accomplishment.

    Many thanks to the stand-in blogger and the setter.

    Chris

  5. Thought it was going to be a quickie as I got 1ac and several of the downs from it on first reading (rare occurrence) but no, a toughie, and I needed a solver to get the last few, and then this blog (thanks, Jim) to understand the cryptics. All the same, quite a sense of achievement as the penny dropped on many.

    Hadn’t heard of the chess expression, didn’t really see why the CAT should be turned as well as DW, but I guess they both turned, didn’t know that the COD was a sea fish, so didn’t see the cryptic. Had “sunspot’ and “passed down” in for quite a while, but then figured SUNTRAP. TOTAL WAR was a total mystery (the expression and the cryptic), and JUNGFRAU as it was the only word I could think of that fit. Phew.

    2. The Murray cod is a river fish (often found in the Murray river, unsurprisingly) so for Aussies a cod is a river fish.
      Rob
  6. About 24 minutes for all but J.N..R.U. Even sleeping on it (the clue, not the mountain) didn’t help. I suppose it was gettable from wordplay but the reversal of the components [the FRAU(d) indicated before the JU(N)G ] made that extremely tricky if you had never heard of the Jungfrau, and I’m pretty sure I hadn’t.

    Very nice puzzle, though. I especially liked USERNAME for the false trail laid by “logging in northern USA”.

    Thanks for stepping in, Jimbo.

  10. I agree with Sotira – I knew I didn’t know…. 24 mins for all but the second bit of 12a and 19d. Well we did keep saying there was a toughie on the way so I suppose we get what we ask for!
  11. Well over the hour. Most of the top went in quickly but ACQUIRE gave a strangely placed U which led to that corner and the rest. LOI WAXWORKS.

    Thanks Jimbo for stepping in.

    Edited at 2013-09-19 02:31 pm (UTC)

  12. Yes a lovely puzzle that delayed me well into a second hour. Entries to the leader board in the early hours suggested that others found it very hard too but I note since then that the Hares have turned up en masse and taken over.

    Didn’t know KNAPWEED or OUTPOINT, both in the SE, yet I found the RH much easier than the LH and finished it in quite a respectable time. LOI was PASSED PAWN which I vaguely knew but couldn’t bring to mind until every checker was in place.

    Edited at 2013-09-19 11:26 am (UTC)

  13. I found this very hard indeed: it took me nearly 40 minutes to do all but 23ac. I don’t know how long I stared at that one but I couldn’t get anywhere near it. If anyone who (like me) hasn’t heard of the mountain managed to get this from the wordplay I’ll be extremely impressed.
    A shame because I was really enjoying myself up to that point.
    Thanks again for stepping in Jimbo. It’s becoming a habit!

    Edited at 2013-09-19 11:33 am (UTC)

  14. 50 minutes. Thought it was going to be a half-hour solve, but PASSED PAWN took a while to work out and then I got stuck with JUNGFRAU /FLAPJACK. High quality puzzle, I thought, with a wide variety of ingenious clues. Ta very much, Setter.
  15. Had all but 12a in 20 minutes and like Andy all I could see for it was raised Cain. Despite not being able to justify it, and having considered paased for the first word, raised Cain is what I eventually wrote in about five minutes later.

    Jungfrau from checkers and what I supposed was a slightly iffy def, “up here?”. I tried several variations of optim- something at 19 until I finally saw it. I’d have expected out-point to be hyphenated.

    A very enjoyable and well-constructed puzzle. COD to waxworks, thanks to the setter and to Jimbo for the blog.

  16. The toughie has arrived. After an hour and ten minutes I still had 12 and 19 to fill. I guessed 12 began with PASSED but couldn’t see what followed, so used an aid to get an expression that I didn’t know. As for 19, any attempt to solve it was doomed as I’d carelessly entered MILKSAP instead of MILKSOP.
    Lots of inventive and deceptive clues to admire. The only one that jarred for me was 2, which has a very clunky surface.
  17. Well I’m glad it wasn’t my turn to blog (it will be next Thursday) because after getting past the tricky JUNGFRAU and INTREPID clues, I was stuck with 12 across and nothing would come – I also went with RAISED CAIN
  19. Had to dig deep and came up short as others on the unknown chess phrase, also putting in ‘Raised Cain’. Might have done better, as I was caught out by PAW = hand/limb the other day as well. Thanks to Jim for stepping in again and to the setter for a torturously enjoyable workout.
  20. Just about half an hour altogether but I got a call in the middle (not the person from Porlock) to say the second grandson had arrived safely. It had a terrible effect on my typing and I wound up with 3 unforced errors. Still, a great day!
    5. Congratulations Olivia. I can’t believe you’re a grandmother of two already. It seems like only yesterday that you were running around London in your micro skirt.
      1. Thanks guys – great to hear from you all. Busy day.

        Edited at 2013-09-19 08:33 pm (UTC)

    6. Congrats Olivia. Nice to know that there is someone else around from the Sixties. Hope Mum and baby well.

      Edited at 2013-09-19 09:02 pm (UTC)

  21. By far the best and hardest puzzle in a while. Some fiendishly ingenious wordplay – especially PLAY SAFE, TOTAL WAR and JUNGFRAU, and some beautifully disguised defs (e.g. ACQUIRE=”come by”). Loved KICK STARTS – might once have been thought a bit risque for The Times, but let’s have more.

    Many thanks to Jimbo for stepping in.

  22. Kicking myself for not getting passed pawn (a pawn that has no enemy pawns in front of it on the same file or on an adjacent file) despite knowing the term for 60 years. Incidentally, a Google search reveals that there are river cod in Australia, e.g. the Murray river cod.

    Edited at 2013-09-19 05:27 pm (UTC)

  23. Agreed that this was the toughest puzzle in quite some time, and I needed aids to finish with the unknown JUNGFRAU. Everything else eventually fell in, but over an hour was needed. Great definitions and misdirection, so thanks to the setter, and further thanks to Jimbo as blogger of last resort. Regards.
  24. At last! A puzzle to exercise the grey cells after several where the answers just went in. Intelligent clues, nice wordplay, and a huge grin at 22 Across. All the clues were fair, and all the words accessible without recourse to dictionaries, which has not been the case recently. More like what we expect from The Times – Thank You, Setter!
  25. 28:14 for me – with the last 10-15 minutes spent on JUNGFRAU, which I knew perfectly well but just couldn’t see (and trying to get it from the wordplay proved a lost cause). I’ve found in the past that 2n-letter words formed from pairs of n-letter words give me a hard time, but keep forgetting to try that breakdown. Eventually JUNGFRAU leapt out at me, but perilously close to my 30-minute cut-off point.

    What’s so annoying is that I found the setter’s wavelength straight away but then lost the plot and struggled even before I stalled on JUNGFRAU.

    I too liked KICK STARTS – apart from the enumeration which surely ought to be (4-6). And although PASSED PAWN went straight in as an easy win, for me “man” explicitly excludes pawns.

    All in all though, a most ingenious puzzle.

    Edited at 2013-09-19 10:25 pm (UTC)

    1. Welcome Ian – hope to hear much more from you with presumably a Scottish angle on things?
  27. Tough but fair. Delighted to get JUNGFRAU, couldn’t get past OPTIMIST at 19, and gave up on 7, 9 and 12. I’d rather DNF a toughie than breeze an easy one.

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