Times 25696: More Sitzfleisch!

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 28:44

Shouldn’t present too many problems for the regular crowd; but I fell into trouble in the SW and NE corners, trying to scribble the parsings as I went. I think I have them all pretty right now. So let’s see eh?

Across

1. ALLIANCE. “Dalliance” minus D (daughter).

5. CHAFER. Two meanings. (Memories of horrible brown school toilet paper.)

9. DETECTOR. Reversal of ROTTED (went off) including EC (reversal of CE, church).

10. PRELIM. An obvious answer with the crossing letters, but held up for a while on the analysis. Delete the FT (newspaper) from “felt” to get EL and insert in PRIM (proper).

12. SECRET SERVICE. SECRET (behind closed doors) SERVICE (activity led by minister).

15. BING,E. With the E from “mantelpiecE”.  Didn’t know “bust” and “binge” could be (roughly) synonymous.

16. ORANGEADE. ODE (poem) around RANGE (MOUNTAINS) & A{dvertiser}.

17. BAR MAGNET. MAG inside BARNET.

19. HE,GEL.

20. THEORETICALLY. Anagram of “the only article”, minus N. Def: “on paper”.

22. POMPOM. Took a while to see this as well. It’s OM (the medal) after POMP (ceremony). Looking for a Y here.

23. SODALITE. Anagram of “isolated”. (Not a sugar-free 16ac.)

25. RASH,ER.

26. PETER OUT. PET (favourite), {fac}E, ROUT.

Down

1. ADDIS ABABA. A, DD (Doc of Divinity), IS. Then: A, B (Bishop) twice & A.

2. LO{f}T.

3. ACCRETE. Sounds like (surprisingly!) A, CRETE.

4. CROSS COUNTRY. A pun.

6. HER,RING. Do I detect a hint of sexism?

7. FALLEN ANGEL. ALL (everyone) in FEN (bog); N (any number) in AGE, L. Not everyone would equate Satan with the devil — John Milton and some Koran scholars for example.

8. RU,MP. Scored this answer a fortnight ago. Are they trying to tell me something?

11. BREASTSTROKE. Spoonerism of “stressed”, “broke”. (One to go with yesterday’s crawl.)

13. CONTRETEMPS. CONT{inued}, RE, TEMPS (Frog for “time”, hence “the enemy”). Possible COD here?

14. DEPLOYMENT. D (500), E{m}PLOYMENT.

18. ANEMONE. ANNE is carrying a reversal of OME (’ome).

19. HECTARE. HARE is around ECT. “Mental health facility”? — not when I had to nurse patients through them in the 1970s.

21. SPAR{e}. Not as easy at the time as it looks now.

24. {f}IDO. An artifical language related to Esperanto.

50 comments on “Times 25696: More Sitzfleisch!”

  1. Second fail in a row. I knew SODALITE but I never can resist sticking an ‘A’ in the middle of CONTRETEMPS.
  2. 17:27, felt fairly easy, but I put in ‘pompon’ at 22ac. That’s the way I spell it, I knew it had to be that word, but I didn’t take the few extra seconds to figure out why (or, rather, why not) -on.COD to CONTRETEMPS, I suppose, although 26ac had a nice surface, too. When I was a lad at college, beer busts were a fairly standard part of the weekend.
  3. 49 minutes. If not the devil (and I can’t see why not), Satan was certainly a very naughty boy…

    Edited at 2014-01-29 02:44 am (UTC)

    1. It’s something that Satanists vehemently* deny.
      (* “Vehement”: used in Milton to decribe God as beyond his mind.)
      1. Not sure I would describe Milton as a Satanist. He wrote more powerfully about Satan than about God, but then most writers write better about bad characters than good. More from their own experience to draw on.
        1. > Not sure I would describe Milton as a Satanist.
          Me either. The two comments are unrelated.
          1. Although Blake did say that Milton was of Satan’s party. Then again, he would, wouldn’t he?
  4. 26:27, but with CONTRATEMPS. Feel much better now that I’ve seen that Sotira made the same mistake.

    Also had no idea how to arrange the consonants in 23A, eventually plumped for SOLADITE. Stupid minerals.

  5. This seemed rather similar to yesterday’s puzzle in style, so much so that I wondered if it might be by the same setter. Anyway it lacked that puzzle’s flaws as far as I was concerned, for which I was grateful, and I managed to complete it in 36 minutes saving 3 on yesterday’s solving time.

    I didn’t know SODALITE and CHAFER as an insect might have given me problems if it hadn’t come up in the puzzle I blogged only last Friday.

    By coincidence I had spent much of yesterday trying to acquire a recording, audio or video, of Noel Coward’s play FALLEN ANGELS and was amazed to find that the only one available is an American audio production by L.A. Theatre Works. The BBC are sitting on their radio productions and probably long ago wiped their TV version from 1963. The ITV production from 1975 starring Joan Collins and Susannah York may still be in a vault somewhere but they didn’t see fit to include it in their ‘Choice of Coward’ DVD set released a couple of years ago. Unbelievable! I mention this for the information of Coward fans who contributed here on the subject of his plays last week. Incidentally the whole second act consists of a BUST in the sense required at 15ac, a term I had not come across until today, and it’s hilarious if somewhat ear-piercing!

    In the end I bought the US production as a download via Audible.co.uk (an Amazon subsidiary) and will never touch them with a bargepole ever again because of the crappy software they force you to install to access the item once purchased. I wish now I’d paid three times the price and bought it on CD.

    Edited at 2014-01-29 07:26 am (UTC)

    1. I agree the BBC are sitting on a gold mine of historic programmes, but I think their response to not releasing them would be “contractual issues”. I know for example that great Freddie Raphael series “Glittering Prizes” is available in America on DVD but not over here. Trouble is I believe their formatting won’t work on our DVD players (which is why you were lucky not to buy the US version of the Coward play).

      Oh, and I didn’t get the 23A mineral either.

    2. jackkt – just in case you’re not getting notifications, I’ve sent you a couple of LJ messages regarding Fallen Angels.
    3. I don’t recall ever seeing Fallen Angels, though I suppose it’s possible I watched the ITV production. I didn’t have access to a TV for most of 1963 so I almost certainly missed the BBC version.

      It would be great if theatre/ballet/etc companies would release some of their archive films, but I expect they feel the quality isn’t up to scratch.

      1. Tony, there’s a production currently touring and you can see details of venues and dates here http://www.kenwright.com/index.php?id=1342

        It’s a sort of revival (i.e. same producer, same designer but with new director and cast) of a production I saw in the West End in 2000 which at that time starred Frances de la Tour and Felicity Kendall. It’s well worth seeing if you can make it.

        1. Thanks for the link. Our nearest theatre on the schedule is The Rose at Kingston, whose brief run ends this Saturday. There are still some seats left so I’ll see if Janet wants to go (though she may have other plans). I’ve a soft spot for Sara Crowe (last seen on stage in … oh dear! I can’t remember) so it’s certainly tempting.

          Otherwise we could pootle off to the Yvonne Arnaud in Guildford (which I haven’t been to for years) in March.

          We used to go to the theatre quite a lot, but I’m afraid we don’t go all that often nowadays.

          1. Some friends saw this at Windsor a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed it a lot. That’s what has revived my interest in it. Sotira has discovered that the BBC 1963 production, believed wiped and lost for ever, turned up in the vaults of a NYC TV station a couple of years ago and is now in the possession of the BFI, so there’s a chance we may get to see it one day.
            1. I’ve just booked the last two tickets in the pit seats for tomorrow’s matinee. Thanks for the tip-off.

              (I’m a BFI member so I’ll keep a lookout.)

  6. 21′ 42″, wondering about BINGE/bust as it went in. I was protected from beer busts in my youth by maternal disapproval (now overcome) and I suspect cisatlanticism.
    RASHER was a hold up, looking at the wrong end of the clue for definition and trying to come up with one of those words for measles. I nearly left it as RASHES before light dawned. PRELIM was another slow finisher as I struggled with the parsing.
    ACCRETE, on the other hand, was so simple it defied solving for almost as long. I so wanted it to be something that sounded like “in seas” or somesuch. I hold the egregious “location” responsible.
    I thought the clue for CONTRETEMPS was more generous than it might have been. “Argument against the enemy across the channel” would have made it as my CoD.

    I think we should all be grateful to the setter for not linking SODALITE with sugar-free ORANGEADE. Well done!

    Edited at 2014-01-29 07:54 am (UTC)

  7. 13m, but with CONTRATEMPS. Partly because I didn’t bother to parse the wordplay, partly because I can’t spell. I couldn’t parse it after solving anyway, because I failed to see the “temps” thing.
    I’d like to claim ignorance of French but the fact that I hold a French baccalauréat from a French lycée in France makes this a bit of a dicky argument.
    Mince.
  8. Not much to say about this. I agree it’s yesterday’s puzzle without the problems – so just plain vanilla. 20 minutes with no hold-ups and no excitement

    Always amazed to come to the blog and find an erudite discussion about an entirely mythical concept

    And I think it’s “le muppet” k

        1. A claim about a particular being is merely ontic. Ontological claims are about Being in general.
  9. A few seconds under 13 mins. Count me as another who was looking for a Y at the end of 22ac before the penny dropped. 13dn wasn’t a problem because I knew how to spell it and I also parsed it correctly. SODALITE went in as the most likely answer from the anagram fodder, and PRELIM was my LOI from the definition so thanks for parsing it McT. Having said that, I probably should have seen it.
  10. 16:15 with prelim and pompom last to fall.

    Monty Python to the rescue at 19a and sodalite a guess based on the most likely order of the letters (a wrong guess and I’d have been claiming it was unfair).

    I nearly came unstuck at 18. Whereas spelling contretemps is one of my strengths I am pretty crap when it come to anemone as I’ve always pronounced the marine creature “sea anenome”. The fact that “towering” is a pretty poor reversal indicator (doesn’t it imply going up above or into something rather than just going up?) was nearly my undoing.

    1. Also didn’t see towering as reversal; and I generally hate clues where a random collection of letters are clued as a boy or girl’s name. Mona? Nena? Why not? Though Anne perhaps is common enough, unlike Irena or Iveta or whatever it was last week. Almost as bad as a random collection of letters being clued as a Scotch word – don’t start me on that!
      Less than 20 mins (=fast), but anemone spelled wrongly.
      Rob
  11. Dionysus weds Blake to Nietszche as I’m sure we’d all agree (…awaits ‘speak for yourself’ style responses), and Blake saw poor old Milton’s true poetic colours in the ‘Satanic Verses’. A lovely reading methinks, soaked in politics and the spotting of what’s both obvious and unintended. Anyway perhaps the fetters were on here too, as others mention. Better than yesterday’s, but short on fizz? Too Apollonian for me at any rate.
  12. We have a small piece of sodalite at home – No 1 son was much amused by the name of it on a visit to the Natural History Museum when he was at junior school! I eventually remembered it when trying to sort out the pesky anagram and finished in 13:44.
  13. 42m here and slow thinking rather than difficult clues mostly responsible. Struggled to parse some of these so thanks for blog.
  14. Nice crossword I thought, enjoyed the spoonerism and the contretemps clue. Can I ask- is the anagrind in 20 across ‘working on paper’ and also is the reversal of ‘ome’ in 18 down because towering means rising?
    1. No, the anagrind is “working” and definition is “on paper”

      The use of “towering” as a reversal indicator is questionable (as mentioned above).

  15. The Times app timer says that I took over 2 1/2 hours on this but as this time included a swim and the dog’s second walk of the day, I would estimate around 20 mins. A pleasant enough stroll.

  16. All correct, including the mineral where I too was lucky to put the letters in the right order, and the flower where I had to switch the second N and the M to satisfy the parsing (and the dictionary).
  17. The first 21 clues took about 20 minutes, and the remaining 7 another 40, off and on. In retrospect not sure why, there was nothing fiendish about them. Wasted time parsing LOT: looking for TOL-erate or something similar. Also looked for the mythical “Y” in POMPOM.

    Never sure about a crossword where my FOI is HEGEL. Liked BREASTSTROKE and CONTRETEMPS. LOI the innocuous RASHER.

    Can a totally artificially constructed language be called a “tongue”? Anywhere, that is, except crosswords?

  18. 30 minutes but obviously influenced by Ernie Wise’s partner – I had all the right letters for 23ac but not necessarily in the right order.
  19. Half before a long lunch out, half afterwards, probably 25 minutes in total, LOI the now obvious RUMP and PRELIM (without realy parsing the latter). Had vaguely heard of SODALITE (but not of DOSALITE or LODASITE) so plumped correctly. A swim and a walk with dog like Big Tone would have been healthier.
  20. I was reading the comments feeling a bit dismayed for those who misspelled CONTRETEMPS, until I looked and saw that I had done so as well. Le Bonehead. Regards to all.
  21. 13 minutes, no great hassles today and I think again that everything was in with no quibbles, which means tomorrow’s must be the stinker… and it’s my turn. Wheee…
  22. Pleased with my completion time, especially as I had one short interruption, and ‘sodalite’ was a bit of a punt for me too.
  23. 9:52 for me, with the last minute or two spent agonising over SODALITE – which I thought of straight away, but then (in the grip of vocalophobia) wondering whether I’d simply imagined it. (My list of difficult words contains a particularly evil pair of minerals which have a pair of letters swapped.)

    I bunged in CONTRATEMPS, but it didn’t look right so I changed it to something that looked better (and had the added advantage of fitting the wordplay :-).

    I initially misread the enumeration of 17ac as (6,3), and (working from the wordplay) wondered for a second or so if a BARMAG NET could possibly “have its attractions” before spotting my mistake.

    1. We had a quiz round on phobias recently. I wonder if you’d have got venustraphobia – no one else did! Papaphobia was my favourite.

      (For the uninitiated, Tony’s coinage refers to vowels as the sole checking letters.)

  24. DNF for me. I was going through it like a hot knife through cartilage until POMPOM (where, as many others, I was looking for a Y) and SPAR. I’m annoyed with myself over SPAR – I’d parsed the clue (so to speak), but SPARE failed to pop into my head. Ah well. I blame the NHS for my mental decline – it makes it far too easy for doctors to gain access to recreational substances.

    I also failed to parse “PRELIM”, and thought it was a rather inelegant clue.

    Busy day here (drizzle-coated roads are always good for business). The highlight of the day, however, was not a road accident, but an artistic one. A young gentleman was brought in with his entire head encased in plaster (yes, plaster). He had, it seems, had the brilliant idea of taking a cast of his head from which to make a replica.

    To his credit, he had poked air-holes for his nostrils. His plan, he said (afterwards), had been to crack the plaster after it had set, remove it in sections, and then glue the pieces back together. However, he had failed to appreciate four important points. First, that plaster of Paris is surprisingly strong when set. Second, that not being able to see might impair his ability to find the hammer. Third, that simply rubbing vegetable oil into his hair would not prevent the plaster from sticking to it. Fourth (and this was the sad part, which very nearly stopped us laughing) that plaster of Paris generates quite a lot of heat in the later stages of setting.

    By the time we’d got him out, he looked like a lightly-scalded Duncan Goodhew. Priceless.

    1. Ah, genius and madness, never far apart. I hope you took plenty of pictures and let him keep the fragments of plaster. I smell an exhibition at Tate Modern in the making. It actually might be priceless.

      Why did he want a replica of his head, by the way?

      1. >Why did he want a replica of his head, by the way?

        Maybe a gypsy fortune teller told him that one day he’d have a mishap and his head would end up looking like a lighty-scalded Duncan Goodhew so he decided to make a replica of his head in pristine condition before that happened.

        Edited at 2014-01-30 08:44 am (UTC)

        1. I think you’ve given him the title and back-story for his Tate Modern installation “Circularity”. I wonder if he needs an agent.

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