Times 25680

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I solved all but seven clues in the top half within 30 minutes then ground to a halt for 20 minutes. Having eventually cracked 7dn the remaining answers fell like nine-pins. I had a lot of little niggles about various clues but I’ve kept most of them out of the blog in case it’s just me being over-picky. I may add comments in the conversation later if others bring any of them up.

Across

1 BAGPIPES – BAG (appropriate), PIP (just defeat), thanE, S
6 BUCKLE – Double definition
9 SCAR – SCARe (spook)
10 DRAMA QUEEN – Anagram of MERE AND + QU (question) + A (answer)
11 SANDALWOOD – SAND (polish), AL (gangster), WOO (court), D (daughter)
13 ALSO – Hidden and reversed. ‘Influenced by spin’ is the reversal indicator and ‘shrinks’, apparently, the containment indicator though at the moment it seems a bit of a dodgy one to me.
14 EGG TIMER – Cryptic definition
16 ONE-OFF gONE-OFF (having rotted)
18 OLD MAN – LD (lord) inside OMAN (place of sultan)
20 IN MY BOOK – Anagram of NOOK BY MI with ‘shady’ as the anagram indicator
22 OPAL – O (ring), PAL (familiar)
24 BEHIND BARS – BEHIND (supporting), BARS (blocks)
26 MARTIAL LAW – AIT (island) inside W (with), ALL RAM (maximum force) all reversed
28 IDLY – I (one), cYcLeD reversed
29 OLD VIC – O (ball), LD VIC (various Latin numbers). Why not just various English letters while we’re about it? One of London’s most famous theatres.
30 SCYTHING – SC (Civil Service reversed), torY, THING (obsession)

Down
2 ARCHANGEL bAR, CHANGE (money), L
3 PERIDOT – I + DO (provide) inside PERT (fresh),
4 PEDAL – Sounds like ‘peddle’ (deal) plus it’s what you do when you press with your Oxford shoe
5 SEA – SEAm
6 BOARD ROOM – BOARD (get on), MOOR (fix) reversed
7 CRUSADE – AS (so) reversed indicated by ‘lofted’  inside CRUDE (rough)
8 LEEDS – LEE (sheltered), DS (Detective Sergeant, someone from the law)
12 OGREISHhOG (Cockney swine) + anagram of SHIRE
15 MONT BLANC – MON (day) then LAN (network) inside TBC (To Be Confirmed)
17 FLOOR PLAN – Cryptic definition
19 MOLOTOV – MO (doctor) then OT (Old Testament, books) inside LOVe (affection)
21 BABYISH – BY (past) + Indiscretions inside BASH (attempt)
23 PEARL – P (pennies), EARL (British count)
25 NEWSY – NEW (not used), SaY (state)
27 LES – LES (Parisian’s the)

50 comments on “Times 25680”

  1. 19:10 .. I could see where there might be a niggle or two, though nothing in it bothered me. But then, I seemed to be right on the wavelength and enjoyed solving this.

    Last in BAGPIPES (once PEDAL clicked and the second P appeared).

    COD … EGG TIMER which just made me smile.

    1. BAGPIPES also my LOI though, just like SKYLARK yesterday, the first thing that unhelpfully sprang to mind was PANPIPES.
    2. Didn’t particularly like either BAGPIPES or PEDAL, but on closer reading the definitions “that Scottish play” and “work with press from Oxford” look reasonably clever and cryptically misleading, which is the point of a cryptic crossword, no?.
      1. I liked both BAGPIPES and PEDAL. In fact, I liked the whole crossword. Maybe you meant to reply to someone else!
  2. Sluggish today, with the NE hard to crack until DRAMA QUEEN made sense. Last in was the hard-to-find reverse-hidden in 13ac. Bugger!

    Might have been quicker without over-pondering actual cryptic (wordplay) components that were, of course, not there in the CDs (14ac & 17dn).

    Slight typo Jack:”shire” in 12dn.

  3. thanks Jack,
    must admit didn’t/couldn’t parse martial law, “all ram” = maximum force???? Not heard that before.
    In the 60’s frequently went rowing/canoeing/sailing with Sutton Grammar’s CCF naval section at TS Neptune on Raven’s AIT on the Thames somewhere near Kingston.

    A faux pas has ruined my little run – can’t believe I mistyped SCAR, but that’s done me in.

    1. I too learnt to canoe in the CCF, but in the frozen north where I was sent away to school. But I spent a couple of summers on Raven’s Ait, not far from where my parents lived in Wimbledon. Happy days they were indeed – I’d forgotten all about them until I read your post.
  4. Utterly off the wavelength today, coming home in 4 Galsprays, with LOI LEEDS. My travails in microcosm may be demonstrated by 20, where I was close to convincing myself that I didn’t know the expression ‘on my kibo’.

    Liked both of the CDs (especially 14) – and thought ALSO was nearly brilliant (if something shrinks, is it the middle bit that’s always left?) – but wasn’t so keen on the &litish OPAL or PEDAL.

      1. Yes, on reflection maybe it’s intended more as an instruction to get smaller by removing the ends rather than as a traditional containment indicator. But then I’m left with the thought that getting smaller by shrinkage does not normally involve chopping bits off.
        1. It doesn’t in the sense of natural shrinkage, but “shrink” has also the meaning “to make smaller” as in “they plan to shrink the workforce …” Nasty, I agree 🙂
  5. I thought this was a good work-out though like jackkt I had a few minor reservations.

    I found it very hard going at first, and got just a handful of answers (mostly in the SE corner) when I was called away to a meeting and lunch. I picked it up again on returning and finished without a problem. Very odd!

  6. Like Jack and others parts of this niggled me. I felt the setter was trying just that bit too hard and sometimes not succeeding. For example “that Scottish play” as a definition for BAGPIPES. I don’t think OPAL really works and share Jack’s misgivings on OLD VIC – “various Latin numbers” is just lazy clue making as far as I’m concerned. And whilst 14A EGG TIMER is reasonable 17D FLOOR PLAN is weak. All in all slightly disappointing after a run of good puzzles.
    1. I agree with those niggles. I see what the setter was getting at with “Scottish play” but it doesn’t really pass muster as an acceptable def for BAGPIPES. As for “press from Oxford”=PEDAL — absurd!
  7. No time, as I bounced off the surface frequently and eventually resorted to picking the best fit out of crossing letters entered into my electronic dictionary. Glad this wasn’t yesterday. Most clues went in on definition alone (if I could find it) and then slogging through the tortuous wordplay (if there was any) to confirm. Actually, EGG TIMER I’d be inclined to hold up as an example of a good CD – it certainly justifies the cryptic bit.
    I think I knew I was in for a struggle when I tried to create something with AGENDA in it at 6d – “get on” was such a clear indication for AGE… It kind of went downhill form there.
    I’m with those who dislike random Roman numeral clues like 29, even if it was one I solved relatively easily.
    MONT BLANCE was clever, but by then I’d stopped parsing answers that looked right.
    A merited round of applause to Jack for cracking this one.
  8. 33m. Definitely off the wavelength today. I managed most of it in about 15 minutes but with four to go (BUCKLE, ALSO, CRUSADE, LEEDS) I didn’t enter another answer for another 10.
    It was all a bit of a struggle. As Jimbo says the setter just seemed to be trying a bit too hard and my reaction on seeing the answer was more often “I suppose so” than “eureka!”.
    Today I learned that ARCHANGEL is a place, and that NEWSY can mean almost the opposite of what it appears to mean. I also relearned what PERIDOT means: I knew it, but it was filed in my brain under “words that exist and mean something or other”.
  9. LDVIC “Why not just various English letters while we’re about it? “

    Perhaps I’m missing something here, but I don’t think that would work would it? There are only 7 Latin numerals to choose from, and here the setter gives 5 of them, all different so I can’t see an issue. And “balls” seem a likely place for coming across Latin numbers.

  10. Felt happy to solve this under the half-hour (though not by much). Very tricksy. While it would be an exaggeration to say I’m keen on those clues which are “some Latin numerals” or “some musical notes” or “some directions i.e. a combination of N,E,W and S”, my only real raised eyebrow was at the definition of “newsy”, as I was like keriothe in looking for something that meant the complete opposite. There again, I am a prematurely grumpy old man who’s become disillusioned with newspapers whose idea of what is newsworthy or interesting diverges so greatly from my own. Harrumph!
  11. Prematurely crabby old lady here agreeing with Tim re gossip=news. Pshaw. It took me a very long time to see DRAMA QUEEN and BUCKLE. The Bristol Old Vic is pretty nice too, though it wasn’t such a great clue. 23.5 here and so far the usual neutrinos seem to be absent from the Club board.
  12. All but the NE – where trying to make LEMMA fit into 8d slowed things up – went very quickly. I also had IDLE, here due to lazy parsing. And I got to PEDAL as P(ress) plus and anagram (work)of DEAL, with a couple extra words I couldn’t fit in.

    Like DJ, I didn’t click with FLOORPLAN or OPAL, but my other reservations were about definitions, for which my non-UK syntax isn’t a reliable benchmark. So I won’t gripe there, with the exception of NEWSY which I just don’t like.

  13. NE corner was my undoing – after failing to make something of L.A. & ONE for 8dn, decided it had to be LIEGE (perhaps sheltered by their lord?). This made 13ac impossible – eventually tried ACED, possibly defeated by spin in tennis.
  14. I’m with keriothe on this one. The answers crept in but not particularly joyously. A great job of parsing by Jack.
  15. This is one of my mother’s favourite words – and when she said ‘Write me a newsy letter’, she meant full of tidbits, not the latest on constitutional reform. (Incidentally, Collins agrees with my mum…)
    1. Chambers too: “full of news or gossip”.
      And ODO: “full of news, especially of a personal kind”. Example: “Susan’s short, newsy letters”.
    2. My mother says the same. “Thank you for the lovely newsy letter” has nothing to do with current affairs (unless they’re current, um, affairs). Mothers are, of course, greater authorities than dictionaries.

      Edited at 2014-01-10 01:14 pm (UTC)

      1. Not to mention fathers, as demonstrated by one of my kids the other day:

        Child: Daddy, can I play Minecraft*?
        Daddy: Go on then, just for half an hour.
        Child: [pause] I’m going to go and ask Mummy.

        *Don’t ask

  16. 23:49 with LOI Leeds which is a bit crap as that’s where I am.

    It didn’t take long for sand/polish to come up again after collective eyebrows were raised at it last time.

    Whilst I have no beef with the puzzle overall I did think that “influenced by spin… shrinks” and “work with press from Oxford” were just a little too strained.

    Thanks to Jack for parsing martial law which I couldn’t parse at all (other than, erm, I for island).

  17. 21 mins so I must have been on the setter’s wavelength. I thought there was some cunning cluing and I don’t share the quibbles that some of you have, although that’s probably because I managed to solve it in a reasonable time.

    I started slowly but then the lower half of the puzzle fell into place and I worked my way up. My last two in were the same as Sotira, PEDAL followed by BAGPIPES.

  18. Didn’t warm to this, DNF, having read the blog I find several that stretched things a bit far – BAGPIPES, CRUSADE and OPAL for three. And here we go with the SAND = polish (or not) discussion again. Roll on tomorrow.
  19. A full 70 minutes to complete this. I agree with many of the niggles already expressed; 1 and 13 were the worst offenders. On the other hand I liked 14 and 16, and some originality shown elsewhere.

  20. Let with several blanks in the top half. Lower half went in ok, even if I didn’t fully understand where MARTIAL LAW came from.
  21. This took me an hour, and it wasn’t a lot of fun, as others have said. LOI was PEARL, but it was the NE corner that held me up too, along with the unlikely BAGPIPES clue. No reason to repeat quibbles already expressed, so, simply, regards to all. Well done Jack.
  22. good job that i gave up on the train on this when i did – otherwise i’d now be stuck in inverness swearing at a half-finished crossword . . .
  23. Add me to the list. Looking back the clues don’t seem unreasonable generally although I do question a couple. Didn’t like 8dn as I feel that lee = shelter rather than sheltered so I was trying to find something hiding within the city. 17 dn I didn’t find gettable or amusing at all so I’m happy to join those not liking this cd.
    See what happens when I get 2 crossword in a row? I become grumpy at not sailing through the third – thank you, setter, for restoring my sense of perspective!
    1. (Collins) LEE adjective

      (prenominal) (nautical) on, at, or towards the side or part away from the wind ⇒ “on a lee shore”

      1. Agree on an adjective working, but isn’t a lee shore the opposite, one that is unsheltered? Guessed solely from an early Deighton spy novel, where he introduced each chapter with an excerpt from an Admiralty manual, one being:
        What to do if caught on a lee shore in a storm:
        Never get caught on a lee shore in a storm.
        Rob
  24. Staggered through this in about 45 minutes. Definitely not my wavelength and was stuck in the NE until I finally worked out that 8dn was where much of my teenage courting and drinking (unfortunately mainly the latter) took place.
  25. DNF today with six missing in the top half – mostly in the NE corner. Should have got Buckle. Chuckled at Egg Timer.
  26. Am I the only one who didn’t finish by putting bell into 20ac? Rings a bell = familiar. Then couldn’t bring myself to put email in at 23dn for obvious reasons. Tony D
    1. I had BELL for a while but fortunately ’email’ didn’t occur to me so I had to rethink.
    2. Good to know I wasn’t alone. Part of my 120 minutes was spent thinking on just these lines.
  27. 13:31 for me, though, looking back over the clues, I feel I ought to have been a lot faster.

    Unlike others, I found nothing to object to in this puzzle, and thought it was rather good. I particularly liked 1ac (even though it took me ages), and 29ac (which I got straight away without the need for any crossing letters) was just fine.

  28. Another late solving session, and I found this hard going. I was pleased to complete the puzzle correctly, without aids, though I failed to parse ‘martial law’ (though the definition and crossing letters made it pretty unmistakeable).
    As I like to solve the puzzle in the newspaper, I am rather annoyed at the 20% price hike to £1.20. It seems that News International are determined to force readers into subscriptions for either the print or digital editions, and I wonder whether the days of print editions are numbered.

Comments are closed.