Times 25700 – Oh, MOMA!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 35 minutes

Music: Joni Mitchell, Miles of Aisles

An easy puzzle with a sting in the tail, I’m afraid. While our Dorset correspondent likes to complain of obscure poets, I am usually stuck on UK comedians and TV personalities. But tonight we have a genuine novelty, an artist who may not be widely known, and isn’t Tiepolo either.

So while I completed 97% of the puzzle in 18 minutes, I was left to puzzle over the last entry for quite a while. I even started to wonder if the checkers were sound, although I was pretty confident S.E.N. = Senior [something starting with E] Nurse. Finally, I just blindly put in what the cryptic was pointing to – look what I found!

Across
1 ESTRANGE, anagram of SERGEANT, which only works with the UK spelling.
6 CHANCY, CH + [f]ANCY.
7 WHIG, sounds like WIG. We had such a party in the US, too, but they came a cropper when they couldn’t decide between the North and the South in 1860.
10 BRAINPOWER, BRA IN POWER. Er, over to you, Beavis.
11 FLOODLIGHT, FLOOD + LIGHT in different senses. It doesn’t get any easier.
13 HIKE, double definition….well, maybe it does.
14 PROPOSER, P(R OP)OSER.
16 ARRACK, [b]ARRACK[s]. Also spelt ‘araq’ or ‘arak’, watch out for those.
18 MYOPIC, MY + O + PIC.
20 LONGBOAT, LONG + B(o)AT,
22 YOKE, sounds like YOLK. This could be a little difficult, since the checkers are nearly useless and most solvers will be looking for something that sounds like black or dark.
24 HEATSTROKE, HEAT + STROKE. An oarsman is called a ‘stroke’ by metonymy.
26 ESPADRILLE, anagram of SELL PAIRED. The most popular footwear in puzzles.
28 ICON, hidden in [symbol]IC ON[ly].
29 ASTERN, [e]ASTERN.
30 ANNIGONI, AN(GIN backwards)ON + I. Not even an obscure Renaissance figure, but a 20th-century portrait painter who stuck to his knitting in the age of Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Cy Twombly.
 
Down
2 SCHOLARLY, anagram of COSY HALL containing R.
3 REGROUP, RE + GRO[w] UP.
4 NOBEL, switching the last two letters of NOBLE. I made this more difficult by reading the first word as ‘Ariosto’.
5 ERA, ARE upside down, it’s that simple!
6 CONSTRAIN, TRAIN under CONS, in different senses.
7 ANOTHER, A + NOT HER.
8 CHEEK, double definition.
12 GORILLA, G(O)RILL + A.
15 SACCHARIN, S(A C CHAR)IN.
17 CRACKDOWN, CRACK DOWN, get it? The ‘welcome’ part is a bit deceptive, one expects ‘hi’ or something like that in there.
19 PRELATE, PR(E L)ATE. ‘Prate’ is not just talk, but a particular type of talk.
21 BARKING, double definition.
23 OASIS, O(AS)IS[e].
25 SHEEN, S(HE)EN, it’s actually Senior Enrolled Nurse, had to look it up.
27 LEA, sounds like LEE.

45 comments on “Times 25700 – Oh, MOMA!”

  1. A similar tale here, 26 minutes in all but a good 5 of those spent on my LOI, YOKE. I only know ANNIGONI because he did a famous portrait of HMQ.
  2. Pretty ordinary I thought. ANNIGONI will be known to the Brits for having a portrait of the Queen in his pocket.

    “Sergeant” must be an angrammic fave. There’s:
    ESTRANGE, GRANTEES, GREATENS, NEGATERS, REAGENTS, SEGREANT and STERNAGE as far as I can make out. Any others?

    Might have been in the speed category if not for a few knots in the SW.

  3. …took about a quarter of my time to identify. A fair clue, made harder by the ungenerous checkers.

    TEA tells me that SNAG TREE (in Websters) is another possible anagram from AEEGNRST.

  4. 13:58 .. similar story, the YOKE holding me up longest. Didn’t know the artist but the wordplay was fairly clear.
  5. Which included a 5-minute work interruption. Made it harder than it should have been by convincing myself there was an old British politician named Rugg. Turned out I was thinking of the Hillbilly Bears. A common mistake, I’d imagine.

    Once that was corrected, the NW corner fell, and I was able to nut out ARRACK, YOKE and ANNIGONI. Have never seen that spelling of ARAK, and never heard of ANNIGONI, but all fairly clued.

    Flicked through the alphabet to solve YOKE, and had that horrible feeling you get when you reach V or W without a penny-drop, but it ended happily.

    Thank you setter, thank you blogger.

    Edited at 2014-02-03 03:21 am (UTC)

  6. 9m. YOKE occurred to me quickly, which is lucky. I didn’t know the spirit or the painter but the cryptic was clear in both cases. Unlike the weekend puzzles, which both made me cross.

  7. As others, I raced through most of this, but was left with two: the painter went in on wordplay, but 22ac? Well, how I congratulated myself as I confidently put in COLE! Well, wasn’t he the one that, possibly oppressively, called for this that and the other during his glorious reign?
  8. Annigoni was pretty straightforward for me – I remember that when he painted the portrait of her majesty in 1969, there was a lot of criticism because he hadn’t produced a chocolate-box likeness of her (as was his previous one in 1956). I remember seeing it live at the time on a stairwell at the National Portrait Gallery and was really very struck with it as it represented more of the person underneath and less her surface beauty.

    My LOI was 16A (being TT is my excuse), mainly because I failed to see how 6d worked. Only looking at it again do I realise TRAIN means AIM (as in rifle)- I was looking for another word for UNDERMINE. Otherwise, 27 minutes which for me is PDG.

  9. Worked out my second unknown Italian in three days (unlike K, I enjoyed both Saturday and Sunday, despite being 2 sort in the parsing of the latter) but was done by today’s spirit. I’d never heard of any of its manifestations, so after toying with ‘arbica’, I went for ‘arriso’, changing CRACKDOWN to ‘smackdown’.
  10. A straightforward offering in which progress was slowed considerably by YOKE and LOI (and unknown) ANNIGONI.

    COD to CONSTRAIN

  11. Very easy 15 minute puzzle with, it will not surprise you, YOKE providing most trouble until I associated “white” with “egg”. I love Janie’s suggestion of COLE.

    Unusually for me no problem with the artist for the usual reason that he was a contemporary who took on the thankless task of painting HMQ

    What, I wonder, will tomorrow bring?

  12. 19 minutes or so. I only knew ANNIGONI from the chocolate box portrait of HMTQ, so looked him up: If you wanted a renaissance style portrait that actually looked like you, he was pretty good.
    YOKE was my hold up, seduced by “not white” into thinking apartheid style, which of course the crossword would never do. I too thought I’d missed it once I’d got down as far as W.
    I also initially essayed BACKGROUND at 10, which actually works quite well, though I quickly realised that filling in E?C was going to be tricky.
    Mildly thrown also by the layout change in the paper version to landscape. It just doesn’t look right.
  13. In the UK, a SEN was a State Enrolled Nurse, not to be confused with State Registered Nurse.

    The change of layout in the paper was as a result of many requests/moans that since the puzzle moved from the back page it was difficult to fold cleanly so that it could be done on one’s knees on a crowded train

    1. Delighted by return to horizontal – easier on knees in bed too. Was about to add my penn’orth to the requests for this.
  14. For the record vinyl in the UK at any rate it stood for state enrolled nurse, the other status at that time being SRN state registered nurse
  15. A very zippy Monday offering. As everyone has already identified, Annigoni was possibly outside general knowledge for some, and YOKE was a well-disguised answer – everyone’s nightmare, isn’t it, those four-letter words with unhelpful checkers – so when they both dropped comparatively early for me, this one put up a Denver Broncos level of resistance (note: for non-fans of American sport, that’s not a very high level).

    I remembered Annigoni from always getting him confused with Alec Issigonis when I was much younger (same generation, rather different specialities).

  16. Mostly very easy. Filled all but 22 in 20 minutes, then took a third of that time again to get 22, running through the alphabet for possibilities, pausing at ROSE and COLE en route. The rest were mostly giveaways.
  17. A Monday morning breeze, completed on my inward commute Balham – W.Brompton – Earls Court, 20 mins elapsed, say 15 minutes on the crossword itself, about the time it takes to write the answers in.

    Surprised that the painter of THE iconic portrait of Her Majesty, which has adorned the walls of all embassies and government buildings for, it seems, a lifetime, should be unknown to so many Times readers. O tempora, o mores!

    1. Are we allowed to talk about Rolf Harris at present? His trial comes up on 30 April 2014.
      1. Being out of the UK, I tend to lose count of which entertainers I was brought up with are on sex charges and which are dead. Is there another category?:)
        1. Private Eye got it about right with their headline “EVERYONE WHO APPEARED ON TV IN THE 70s ARRESTED by our Crime Staff Dawn Swoop”
  19. I agree this was a very Zippy one, and I made no Bungles (by George). Having said that, I don’t know how our faster brothers and sisters write the answers in so quickly. Technique is everything, I’m sure.

    Cheers
    Chris.

  20. 11:23 here, no problems at all with YOKE, had to think a bit to come up with ANNIGONI, but there can’t be many artists with GIN reversed in their names, and I remembered who he was when I’d parsed the cryptic. Quite a lot of very easy clues today, e.g. 7,11,13,28,29ac and 4,5,7,8,27dn.
  21. 15:06 with quite a considerable part of that being spent on working through the alphabet to get YOKE! D’Oh! Like Janie I did consider COLE for quite a while.
  22. Had to trawl to find unknown ANNIGONI and put in LONGBEAK for 20ac (it is a real sort of duck, but parsing requires a leap of faith). Twigged YOKE quickly though with a chuckle. Never seen ARRACK spelt in such fashion before either. So not a pushover Monday for me, even if Jim thinks it was a doddle.
  23. COLE is wonderful! I wish I could remember but I’m sure we had YOKE in the last year and it caused me trouble, so a vestigial memory must have kicked in. Decades ago my mother sang in the London Bach Choir so we had the Messiah libretto around the house but I was too young to read it, I could only listen. The words “take his ‘yolk’ upon you” and “his ‘yolk’ is easy” puzzled me very much. 13.8 which is warp speed for me.
  24. Agreed, easy stuff on the whole. Like almost everyone else, I was held up by YOKE, my LOI. I join in the plaudits for Janie’s COLE alternative.
  25. 11 mins. Fortunately I saw YOKE almost straight away but ANNIGONI was unknown to me and it took me a couple of mins at the end to see what the wordplay was telling me. I’m blaming the change in my normal routine brought about by staying up to watch the Superbowl, or at least watching it until the Seahawks went into a 22-0 lead, at which point I was fairly certain that the Broncos were dead in the water so I finally went to bed.
  26. Well, I think if Annigoni was unknown to me, I might consider keeping quiet about it. What would the queen say?

    Very easy this one, c12mins. Yoke needed an alphabet sweep but otherwise straightforward.

    Cor, our new editor RR hasn’t half leapt into action it seems, changing the crossword format in the paper (apparently) on day 2!

  27. Another SEN comment. Back in the day, SEN was almost as ubiquitous as an element of clueing as Supporter is now.
  28. About 25 minutes as an estimate, as I was watching the US football game. LOI was Yoke, like a lot of others. Never heard of ANNIGONI, but with the checkers and finally seeing what ‘mother’s ruin’ meant here, I saw the wordplay. Regards.
  29. Whatever you looked it up in is wrong. It’s actually ‘State Enrolled Nurse’.

    For future reference an S.R.N. was a State Registered Nurse.

    The S.R.N. was the more senior of the two.

  30. 31m so average for me though 4m spent on the unknown artist. The rest was easy enough and twigged YOKE straight off. I’ve never actually seen or heard anyone admit to wearing ESPADRILLE; presumably only worn in times crossword land. Like Keriothe I was at odds with the weekend offerings both as yet unfinished.
    1. Perhaps worn only when hunting eland, steenbok, addax, gemsbok, hartebeest and other denizens of the plains of crossword-land?

      Done for by the painter – had the backward gin, but couldn’t get the anon. Do any others freeze mentally their particular areas of ignorance e.g. poets, painters, authors, French departments, Greek mythology, Scottish words, etc?
      Rob

  31. Sergeant is spelled in the USA just like that: sergeant. You might call the sergeant “Sarge,” of course. Sargent Shrivet was not a sergeant.
  32. Nice blog, thanks. Same problems with yoke and Annigoni, and also knew only the ARAK spelling. I learnt early the important rule: when offered more arak, if it sounds like a good idea you have already had too much to drink.
  33. 8:46 for me, old enough to have had no problem with ANNIGONI, but (like others) held up at the end by 22ac (YOKE). I reached this with just the E in place, and was worried that the answer might be PALE (thinking of off-white, but very uncertain if the Pale of Settlement or the English Pale could be regarded as “oppressive rule” – particularly as “antagonise” had seemed a bit far-fetched as a definition of ESTRANGE). I was quite relieved when the O turned up, even though it produced another bad attack of vocalophobia.

    I made ridiculously heavy weather of LONGBOAT and BARKING as well.

  34. I love this blog. I re-taught myself how to do cryptic crosswords over Christmas (after learning about a decade ago on the Telegraph at school) and I have attempted the Times almost every day since then. I love it. Yesterday’s (25700) took me about 2 and a half hours and I only failed on two – YOKE and ANNIGONI – so i’m glad to see everyone else did too. I also found 3d very hard because the comma after West somehow made me fail to see that the W was removed from a synonym from mature (I assumed it was just a synonym of abandoning and then a W – I got there eventually). Really liked 10a.

    Yours,
    JB

Comments are closed.