Times 25,683

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
My thanks to Tim for standing in for me last week – this is me making up the deficit.

This is a largely 11A puzzle with the occassional rather dated reference. It shouldn’t cause seasoned solvers too much trouble.

Across
1 NARCOSIS – (OC-RAN reversed)-SIS; the drowsy effect of taking a narcotic;
9 TAILRACE – T(AIL)RACE; escape route for water leaving a mill;
10 VEGA – V-EG-A; bright star, twice the size of our sun, and only 25 light years away;
11 RUN-OF-THE-MILL – two meanings 1=ordinary 2=whimsical description;
13 LAMENT – LAME-NT; I like the very precise “section of religious book”; bagpipe music;
14 EXTERNAL – E(X)TERNAL;
15 MEASURE – ME-A-SURE; a slow and stately dance;
16 ACHIEST – A-CH(I)EST; strange word;
20 SIMULATE – S(t)IMULATE; simulation is a fascinating use of technology;
22 POLICE – PO-LICE;
23 MELTING,POINT – “in pot” is an anagram of “point”; strictly at standard pressure, 3414C for tungsten is the highest;
25 HATE – (heart – r)*; simple but nicely constructed clue;
26 STRAINER – S-TRAINER;
27 DISGRACE – DI(S)G-RACE; English male cricket team (well done the ladies!);
 
Down
2 ADEQUATE – AD-EQUATE;
3 CHARLEY’S,AUNT – (raunchy tales)*; dated farce by Brandon Thomas;
4 SPINSTER – (NIPS reversed)-STER(n); dated term for unmarried lady;
5 STAFFER – STA(E-FF reversed)R; for some reason a term I associate with The White House;
6 WITH,IT – two meanings 1=dated drink of gin and sweet vermouth 2=dated slang for “cool”;
7 TAXI – TAX-I;
8 FELL,FLAT – deadly=FELL: accommodation=FLAT;
12 MARTIN,LUTHER – (realm in truth)*; two definitions 1=King 2=reformer (brave monk who challenged Papal authority in 1500s);
15 MISHMASH – MISH(M)A(p)-SH; Maiden=M(cricket); hodgepodge;
17 CAPTIOUS – CAPT-IOUS; obscure word for the much simpler and more effective “nag”;
18 SOCRATIC – SO-C(RAT)IC; CIC=Commander In Chief; dialogue by question and answer;
19 LEOPARD – L(E-OP)ARD;
21 AWNING – A-W(N)ING; any number=N(algebra);
24 LURE – LU(c)RE;

44 comments on “Times 25,683”

  1. I on the other hand enjoyed this effort. I thought it far better than yesterday’s, with some very neat little clues and some good surfaces.. 22ac for example
  2. Once again I solved all but a couple of clues steadily but had problems finishing it off. STAFFER was unknown – I gather it’s an Americanism – and without the first checker I was unable to solve 9ac. Is there a reference I’m missing to explain how ‘minimal water’ = TRACE (assuming that is what’s going on here)?
      1. Thanks. I wondered about that but gave up on the idea when I didn’t find it in the Oxfords. I should have persevered and checked Collins and Chambers, both of which confirm it.
  3. 35 minutes but with a new star – ‘Weia’. I’m better with the pretentious stuff. 🙂

    SPINSTER took me back to Dick Emery and his “Madam….Miss” sketches, which was dated even when it was rolled out in the 60s.

    Just for Janie…

    1. Haha! Reminds me of when my OH chose to go to a “70s icons” fancy dress party as Dick Emery…

      Re the crossie: DNF for me today…

  4. 18 minutes with the last two working out that I’d made a right Charlie of myself at 3d, despite having the anagram to help, and going through my overstuffed repertoire of religious books to get something that filled in _A_I_T. Even when I got it, my first thought was that it was a short version of the Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet.
    I’d certainly agree with Jim that this favours the more experienced solver (for which read d’un certain age) who knows the words that follow “I’m Charley’s aunt from Brazil…” as surely as everyone else can recite the parrot sketch. Apparently, though, there’s always a version on somewhere in the world.
    FELL FLAT tickled my fancy today – presumably where Mr and Mrs MacBeth would have lived had they survived deposition.

    Edited at 2014-01-14 09:34 am (UTC)

    1. I knew Charley’s Aunt from one of the clever Two Ronnies Mastermind sketches where the specialist subject was “answering the previous question”. I can’t be bothered to paste a link as I’ll get spammed, but the pertinent bit is here:

      MAGNUS: In 1892, Brandon Thomas wrote a famous long-running English farce – what is it?

      SMITHERS: British Leyland.

      MAGNUS: Correct. Complete the following quotation about Shirley Williams: “Her heart may be in the right place but her…”

      SMITHERS: “Charley’s Aunt”.

  5. I love it when obscurities are clued with obscurities. I’ve even come across TAILRACE before (in a crossword of course, where else?), but as I wasn’t familiar with definition 12 of “trace” in Chambers I was never going to get it. What a great clue. It’s put me in a really good mood.
    1. …and the setter was probably trying to be even more helpful by placing it directly above RUN OF THE MILL Would the latter have provided a better clue as a CD?
    2. Never mind K – there’s always tomorrow. To save you potential future angst a “headrace” delivers water to the mill.
  6. . . . after falling initially into the Charlie trap. Crawled out of the trap eventually. I quite liked this puzzle.

    Edited at 2014-01-14 10:09 am (UTC)

  7. 48 minutes being unfamiliar with but dredging up captious, staffer and Charley’s Aunt. Got 23 ac easily but didn’t like it as a clue – shouldn’t it be either an anagram or not? Or is a part clue type OK in an easy clue? Or am I missing something? I was about to get grumpy about 9 ac as well until I realised that rain wasn’t just an unnecessary word. Maybe I just need another pinch of salt (seasoning).
    1. The clue comprises two parts. First a definition “At…..liquid”. Second a play on treating the solution as if it were itself a crossword clue. Thus Melting Point = anagram of “point” = “in pot”. A reasonably common device.
  8. I hope your return to that picture means the waters have receded in your neck of the woods Jim.
    1. Yes Olivia they are slowly receding although some roads are still impassable. More rain is forecast but not the combined wind that pushed the tides up the rivers and caused havoc. Has NY thawed out?
      1. It’s much warmer at the moment thanks Jim but it won’t last. I bet NY Kevin, who’s 75 miles North of here and several degrees colder, was relieved when his car started on some recent mornings. I get regular UK weather bulletins from my mother who’s in Glos which has had its problems too.
        1. Our mothers are near neighbours then, Olivia, so we probably get similar reports. “Tewkesbury has achieved island status… again” etc. I grew up in those parts and was surprised when I learnt that some places don’t flood every year.
          1. I know what you mean Sotira, I revelled in a riparian lifestyle in my youth, even though I only recently learnt the word (on this blog of course).

            As kids we were always secretly willing each flood to exceed any previous flood. Probably not what Jim wants to hear at the moment, but hey, a week off school was a week off school.

          2. My mother is now in Fairford, Sotira, where the major problems have been falling trees, blocked roads and flying roof tiles I gather. I do know that Tewkesbury always catches it. Years ago when I had a brand new driver’s licence I took my little brother to the Abbey for what he called a “songy loonier” (son et lumiere).
  9. 15 mins, and I enjoyed this puzzle.

    TAILRACE went in with fingers crossed from the wordplay, although I’m pretty sure I must have seen it before. I knew of a “mill race” so it seemed like a decent guess that the last four letters of the answer would be “RACE”, and “AIL” for “suffer” was an obvious assumption, so I didn’t need to know that particular definition of “trace” as I already had the “T” from STAFFER.

    I spent a minute on my LOI, SIMULATE, because I’d convinced myself that the “time” in the clue was going to be “AGE” at the end of the answer, and it was only when I decided to see if I could interpret the clue another way that the penny dropped.

  10. 43m. NW corner was recalcitrant – 2d LOI – surely ‘ample’ is more than ADEQUATE.
    I knew TRACE as my father was a local observer for the Met Office, and I helped in my schooldays (30s) to keep the records.
    1. Yes I do agree.. ample is more than adequate, so it would seem that adequate has to be less than ample.. I have carefully not looked it up in the dictionary though, as it upsets me when dictionaries get it wrong 😉
  11. I enjoyed this puzzle, which had a number of nice clues(eg 19, 22, 23). It took me longer than yesterday’s, though I’m not sure it was significantly harder. One wrong for 9, where I couldn’t think of anything other than TAILGATE or TRIPLANE to fit the grid, so plumped for the former, which at least had AIL and a connection with water, even though I couldn’t explain T GATE.
  12. I fell flat on 8dn. I was convinced that the deadly accommodation was some sort of PLOT (ie burial or some such). Took a wild guess at Hell Plot and paid the hellish price of disgrace for the error.
  13. As observed above, a hint of the vintage about this one, though it certainly didn’t spoil my enjoyment. I can’t imagine many bars these days where people routinely order a gin and it (possibly while discussing the career of Beerbohm Tree and wondering whether he ever starred in Charley’s Aunt – answer: he didn’t, at least as far as I can see). Anyway, as Jim suggests, these are all part of the landscape of the Times crossword (at least if one has reached a certain age) rather than being awful obscurities.
  14. All but two in 16 minutes. Took a few minutes to see SIMULATE, then 15 minutes before giving up on TAILRACE.

    Glad I gave up because I wouldn’t have got it in a week. Dreadful clue in my (and keriothe’s) opinion.

  16. 25:46 .. 16 minutes for most of it, 10 minutes on STAFFER / TAILRACE, which I only cracked by running painstakingly through the possibles for the shared letter. I knew both words but couldn’t for the life of me see them.

    I didn’t know what comes after “I’m Charley’s aunt from Brazil…”, Z8, but having looked it up I declare myself quite tickled.

    COD to LEOPARD

  17. I raced through this in 11:14 so that must make me a seasoned solver then.

    Indeed, I got tailrace by virtue of having encountered it in one of these puzzles before and was happy to rely on the wordplay to get the unknown captious and only vaguely familiar staffer. I did underline “rain” at 9 to query later but figured it was there to improve the surface and that minimal rain was as good as minimal anything to denote a trace.

    Charley’s Aunt came to me from a somewhat indirect source (see my reply to Z8 towards the top).

    COD to mishmash for the nod to Douglas Adams, with WSOGMM being the Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash, the technical term for the sum total of all the parallel universes.

    Edited at 2014-01-14 02:13 pm (UTC)

  18. Enjoyable solve, completed over various journeys and snatched coffee breaks, total time about an hour. The four “long ones” went in almost immediately, MELTING POINT being my FOI. Didn’t know TAILRACE (my LOI), or the specific meaning of TRACE, but of an age when CHARLEYS AUNT seemed to appear in every other crossword. Had “heat” for HATE initially, but SOCRATIC soon put me right. Also entered MISHMASH without parsing. Agree that there were some nice surfaces, especially 19dn.

    Edited at 2014-01-14 04:05 pm (UTC)

  19. Done in bits and pieces and for some reason a little delightful. Without being too taxing, or too easy, for me, it had a certain fine balance. I suppose achiest is OK if achy is though one wonders sometimes about a setter’s licence.
  21. Slowed down by temporary ‘heat’ like Londoniensis. Slow to see ‘simulate’ like Andy. Failed to parse ‘mishmash’ also like Londoniensis, and failed to parse ‘Martin Luther’ fully as the original of that name sprang out at me (so to speak).
    Overall, a pretty good crossword day.
  22. Well, I considered “captives”, “cupsizes” (clearly a moment of confusion there) and a few others before deciding on “capnious”, which seemed to have the requisite “cap’n” and “ious”, on the basis of an obscure link with carbon dioxide and the fact that someone who was… anyway, it’s a long story.

    Still, you learn something new every day. Unfortunately, this means that, even if I forget nothing, I will only know about 30,000 things by the time I die. Given that at least 18 of those things are vital pieces of medical knowledge, that leaves room for only 29,982 potentially interesting or useful pieces of information. Or 29,981 plus the word “captious”.

    I am now in a grumpy mood. Fortunately, the evening’s* influx of walking wounded is beginning, so I will have plenty of people out on whom to take it.

    [*Top tip for A&E attendees: try and turn up during the day. More of the doctors will be sober, and we’re less likely to think that your injury was sufficiently non-urgent to wait until Emmerdale had finished.]

    Edited at 2014-01-14 07:54 pm (UTC)

  23. I enjoyed this very much. I got TAILRACE without understanding the “rain” reference so am grateful to have that bit explained here. ACHIEST is very dubious – not a word I can imagine anyone actually using. 38 minutes. Ann
  24. 10:01 here for an interesting puzzle.

    No problem with CHARLEY’S AUNT (which I’ve long had on my list of “difficult words”, having spelt it wrong a couple of times – probably in the 1960s).

    I was a bit nervous of STAFFER (only vaguely familiar) and TAILRACE (since I hadn’t come across the specific meaning of “trace” before). And I wasted time trying to work out how “King” fitted into 12dn since the anagram already seemed to have ample/adequate letters. (Doh!)

  25. Solved early but got caught up and missed the blog. I liked this too — as per Jerry — apart from the NAism (STAFFER), a word we can do without. Very tempted by SPOUSAGE at 20ac as a kind of cryptic def. Not too pleased either by “ethnic group” as the def for RACE in 27ac.

    Anyone else notice the tribute to the Korean pop singer in column 11?

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