Times 25587 – One from the Nursery Slopes

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Nothing much to hold folk up here, so long as non-sporty types are sufficently clued up on their sweaty types in the scrum. I did this online at home while Typhoon Usagi petered out and managed a possible PB of 13:36, earning myself 6th place on the leaderboard at the time. Should have got me Canon out for posterity…

Perhaps I could give a shout-out to Sunday’s Jeff Pearce if anyone’s missed it and has time on their hands. Not hard, but very elegant.

Across

1 INFORM+AL[l]
5 HANSOM – H[enry] + MOANS*.
9 EXERCISE – double definition.
10 D[ALL]AS – city of shoulder-pads and big hair.
12 THOROUGH+FARE
15 [w]INNER
16 LOOSE HEAD – the loosehead prop (wearing 1) is usually slightly less fat than the tighthead (3) and is distinguishable from his mate by having one ear (the left) that doesn’t look like a cauliflower.   
18 PROFESSOR – PROCESSOR with C changed to F; only one I didn’t parse while solving.
19 RADON – ADO in RN (our, i.e. Brits’, sailors).
20 INDIANAPOLIS – IN + DIANA + POLIS[h].
24 TRIVET – [restuaran]T + RIVET; my last in.
25 AGAR-AGAR – A GAR is a fish and AGAR-AGAR (or simply AGAR) is jelly from seaweed used in kitchens and crosswords.
26 DIKTAT – KID reversed + TAT.
27 FRONT ROW – FRONT (promenade) + ROW (paddle); Collins ‘paddle 13’ has ‘to row (a boat) steadily, esp (of a racing crew) to row firmly but not at full pressure’. Those fat blokes in 16 together with a hooker comprise the front row of the scrum. Must be fun, if a bit cramped.

Down

1 IDEA[l]
2 FLEE[t]
3 RACEHORSE – cryptic definition and not that bad; a jumper is a horse that has to negotiate fences or hurdles as it gallops round wearing its owner’s colours.
4 AUSTRALASIAN – ALAS in AUSTRIAN for a native of Port Moresby taken in by the anti-freeze in Tyrolean wine?
6 AWASH – A + W + ASH.
7 SALSA VERDE – SERVE SALAD*; foodies will have heard of this, which rules me out.
8 MISLEADING – MIS[s] + LEADING (first).
11 RUMOUR-MONGER – R[elatives] in MORGUE MOURN*.
13 PINPOINTED – PIN (nail) + POINTED (sharp).
14 IN GOOD NICK – an &lit; NICK is slang for prison, and IN GOOD NICK is an idiom meaning ‘in good condition’ or, of a sportsperson, ‘in good form’.
17 EARLIER ON – [alsac]E + LORRAINE*.
21 ARE[N]A
22 IGOR – hidden(-ish); Ruddigore is by G&S, while Prince Igor is the excellent Russian composer Alexander Borodin’s best known work. Smart chap, Borodin – he was also a chemist and a doctor.
23 D+RAW – ‘take out’ as in ‘draw blood’.

27 comments on “Times 25587 – One from the Nursery Slopes”

  1. Good time Ulaca! Solved this from the SE to the NW; so from quite easy to a little bit harder and with the two 1s last in.

    Not a lot of queries except for “head of department” for PROFESSOR. While I have been both (Head of School actually) and simultaneously, in my experience most professors shrink from (= “shirk”) such mundane administrative tasks so as to be able to continue their obscure (= “important”) researches. The exceptions are the “professors of administration”, but they tend to get the title by virtue of becoming Deputy Vice Chancellors or similar drones. You can tell them by their synthetic suits and over-use of aftershave (the men) or their shoulder pads and brooches (the women).

    Oh and … on edit: is 14dn actually an &lit; or is it two defs, the second punning on the first?

    Edited at 2013-09-23 04:04 am (UTC)

    1. I pondered DD-ism but ruled it out as you* serve a sentence in a nick rather than a good one.

      * Not ‘you’, McT, I hasten to add, on edit. Your having moved from Liverpool to Australia I take to be of no relevance… 🙂

      1. But you* serve a sentence in (a) good nick if you’re well cared for there. Hence my diagnosis: two defs with a retro-pun in the second. (Oh no … not another parsing skirmish. Please! I shall put my handbag away.)

        * Not you Ulaca!

        Edited at 2013-09-23 04:51 am (UTC)

  2. Nice to start the week off with one like this. Two DNKs, LOOSE HEAD & IN GOOD NICK, but in both cases the wordplay (along with a bunch of checkers) made it pretty easy, although 14d was still my LOI.
    Who names typhoons, anyway? In Japan we just number them–no. 18 last week; I think ‘Usagi’ was no. 19. And whatever 18 was called, it didn’t begin with a T, which makes the nomenclature the more puzzling.
  3. 34 minutes at my own pace. Didn’t know LOOSE HEAD but got it from wordplay. Failed to understand how the cross reference worked. Nice puzzle to start the week.
  4. 26.15 after some time tying to dredge up an eight-letter word for 27, forgetting the 5,3. Then 23 fell. The sauce unknown. I’ve always liked the long term for a street, redolent of old times.
  5. 9:36 on the club timer. I’m at home because someone has decided that the people of South West London can do without trains this morning, which is nice of them. Easy puzzle, not much to say really. AGAR AGAR went straight in: it’s appeared quite regularly of late. In the crossword, that is: I’ve never encountered it in real life.
  6. 18 minutes, including an interruption from the postman who had posted through the wrong door.
    I seemed to remember a famous murdered gossip (though the name escaped me), which blinded me pro tem to the generic answer and the anagram potential.
    LOI were the two 1s, though I’m not sure why. Not solving either straight off rang alarm bells, quickly silenced by the relative simplicity of the rest, assuming you know your Rugby. Quite liked the Mills & Boonish plot outline at 20.
  7. Trivet LOI. As a proud exponent of the dark arts of the 27A for about 30 years, I welcome us getting a mention and yes, it had its moments. I always think of a nick as a police station but I see that it can be what it is here.
  8. 21 minutes. Rather too easy for my liking. Like keriothe I recognized Agar-Agar immediately from its frequent appearances in recent weeks.
  11. 10:55 so no real problems although I initially wrote GATE as the last 4 letters of 12 thinking we might be looking for a specific street in York say with “gate” somehow being linked to the ticket price for a sporting event.

    1 down was my first in but 1 across almost the last.

  12. I’ve been working through puzzles I missed when I was on holiday and their corresponding blogs and I came across the debate in late August on whether or not a treasurer is a finance expert. It’s a pity this happened while I was away since I’m well placed to comment as I’m actually two treasurers.

    On the one hand I’m treasurer of our local scout group. That involves arranging payments, banking cash and cheques, producing rudimentary annual accounts and sorting out a float for the coconut shy at the village gala. None of this makes me, or requires me to be, a finance expert.

    On the other hand I’m also a treasurer by occupation. That requires me to manage financial risk for the company (interest rate, foreign exchange, liquidity & refinancing risk etc) as well as to take responsibility for cash management, investor and bank relationships and various other bits and bobs related to “real” money rather than finance as it applies to accounts and reporting.

    The corporate treasurer is a very common role in larger UK firms. The profession got a bit of publicity recently when Justin Welby became Arch Bish as he used to be treasurer of an oil company.

    My professional qualifications required me to demonstrate a working knowledge of, among other things, the workings of financial markets and banks, how economic events impact interest and exchange rates, how to price and value bonds and derivative instruments such as interest rate swaps and options, interpreting yield curves etc. There were also meaty elements of corporate finance, financial analysis, taxation, international cash management, trade finance and so on.

    In summary, if one of my colleagues took it upon himself to suggest that being company treasurer didn’t make me a finance expert he’d get a slap.

    1. Yes, but you’ve also illustrated the point I was making when I started the debate i.e. that if you were only the first sort of Treasurer you wouldn’t have to be a finance expert and therefore the clue was making an assumption that is not always the case.
      1. Doesn’t that happen all the time, though? In today’s puzzle, for instance, the FRONT ROW can also be a place in the theatre, and IGOR is also a hunchback in a movie.
  13. 17:21 for me which is certainly one of my quickest so I must have been on the setters wavelength. One mistake though as I bunged in a C instead of an F in 18a in my hurry to set a good time. Was nice to see a couple of rugby references as I played for a few years at Felixstowe RUFC and Orwell RUFC though never anywhere near the front row!
  14. This was a breeze until I got to the last clue, 17d. In my haste I’d marked the word separation in the grid as “2,7”, rather than “7,2”, as it should have been. I spent some time thumbing through Chambers, looking for two-word phrases which had “el” or even “eo” as the first word, before the light dawned. More haste….etc, etc.
  15. 10 mins and very straightforward. PINPOINTED was my LOI after TRIVET.

    I should have got 10ac must faster than I did because it was only last week that I noticed that one of the channels was showing the excellent “Das Boot” again, so the fact that “die”, “der” and “das” are all German for “the” should have been fresh in my mind. Wrong. It was only when I got the “s” checker from MISLEADING that I saw it.

  16. 15 minute stroll in the park after excellent round of golf. My approach to the 16th just missed hitting a deer that bolted out of the rough and across the fairway. Must find out what the rules say I should have done if I had hit it. All much more interesting than the puzzle.
  17. Didn’t get to this until some breaks in work but managed to breeze through it in two quick breaks. PROFESSOR from definition and FRONT ROW from it being the only possibility that came to mind, so sigh of relief there.
  18. After some time (months) i finally completed a puzzle without aids. Firstly can I say a big thank you to all who post here – your insights are improving my solving. Hence while many of you will have found this easy, for me it was good to do a whole puzzle.. My LOI was 3d. Having spent (lost) a lot of my student grant at the gee gees (happy days, government please note education is more than the direct qualification) I thought it was the jockey who wore the colours. I may be wrong of course.
    1. Many congratulations – and here’s to many more. That’s an interesting point you raise about colours. Oxford Dictionaries Online appears to hedge its bets rather about this, writing (4) ‘an item or items of a particular colour worn to identify or distinguish an individual or a member of a group, in particular a jockey or a member of a sports team’, followed by the example ‘it was Devon Loch’s first victory in the colours of his royal owner’. I think usage lets the setter off.

      Edited at 2013-09-23 03:33 pm (UTC)

  19. Not so easy here, due to having no idea about rugby terms and thus having to solve LOOSE HEAD from wordplay (not tough) and FRONT ROW because it would fit. But my real hold up was IN GOOD NICK, my LOI, because I’d never heard the phrase. I did guess it correctly, though I was unconvinced I had a correct grid until coming here. Overall, about 30 minutes. COD to TRIVET, clever. Regards to all.
  20. Late to the crossword today as my local newsagent has closed. I think this may become a common occurrence with more people accessing news and other interests, currently served by specialist magazines, online. I suppose, if no other nearby businesses take up selling newspapers, I shall be obliged to take up one of Mr Murdoch’s subscriptions, but I deeply resent being obliged to make payments by variable direct debits.
    Pretty straightforward puzzle.
  21. 7:45 here for a straightforward start to the week. I’d have been faster if I hadn’t (like one of the Anonymouses above and several Times Crossword Club members) wasted time by misreading the enumeration of 17dn as (2,7) and trying to make something of EN ???????.
  22. A reasonably easy solve, but got stuck in the SW by dint of putting “in good form” at 14d, without reading the clue carefully. Assumed “form” required a sentence.

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