Times 25766 – This blog is bought to you by…..

Solving time: 55 minutes

Music: None available

Once again, I am attempting to solve a holiday puzzle in the wilds of Connecticut, with nary a reference book to be had. Fortunately, I was able to guess a few of the words I didn’t know, and I confirm them later on through the internet.

This is definitely a puzzle that will be much easier for the well-schooled. The vocabulary is not entirely obscure, but you will be much more comfortable if you know a wide variety of words and their various possible meanings. I probably would have enjoyed solving this puzzle had I not been under the pressure of having to solve it. I definitely needed to rely on the cryptics in a couple of places.

Across
1 DUCKBILLS, DUCK + BILLS, in different senses. Should have been easy, but I was trying to make ‘hornbills’ fit for a while.
9 CHIMERA, CHIMER + A.
10 DWELL ON, D(WELL)ON. If you think ‘source of water’ = ‘w’, you’ll be solving with the imaginary Dellon River.
11 HOGAN, HOG + A[bandoned] N[issen]; the trick here is to have a non-golfing ‘hogan’ in your vocabulary.
12 MEADOW RUE, MEAD + anagram of WE + OUR. Playing around with ‘we’ and ‘our’, I got ‘rue’, and the answer was suddenly obvious.
13 CONQUER, CON + QUER[y].
15 ELVER, E(L)VER, my first in, not difficult if you know the word.
17 SOLID, SO + LID, with a very smooth surface.
18 BADDY, BA(D[ecoye]D)Y, another early answer.
19 LOWER, double definition, where ‘Hereford’ is a cleverly disguised cow.
20 CHENNAI, CH(ENNA)I, Queen Anne backwards providing the inner letters.
23 DISCOMFIT, DI’S COMFIT, where ‘first’ is merely a tricky positioning indicator.
25 EVOKE< EV(OK)E, where the literal is well hidden and an elaborate phase is used to refer to Eve.
27 DELIVER, double definition, where 90% of solvers will be looking for some specific type of ship.
28 EXCLUDE, EX(CL)UDE, where a word that may not jump to mind immediately is needed for the cryptic.
29 DEMITASSE, anagram of TEA MISSED, a relatively simple anagram if you know the word.
 
Down
1 DODOMA, DODO + M[odern] A[frican]. I had never heard of it, but the cryptic very strongly points to it. I didn’t expect it to actually be in Africa, though.
2 CLEM ATTLEE, CLEMANT[-is][+ T LEE]. I was a little surprised by this, because it seems disrespectful to refer to Attlee as ‘Clem’, but I have no idea if this was generally done in the newspapers of the time or not. The substitution clue is perhaps overly complex. Not surprisingly, this was my last in.
3 BALLOTED, B(ALLOT)ED, i.e. a degree of B.Ed.
4 LONER, L(ONE)R, a neat &lit.
5 SCARECROW, S (CARE) CROW.
6 WITHIN, [s]WITHIN, admittedly not the first saint most solvers would think of.
7 DENG, hidden in [forbid]DEN G[round].
8 MANNERLY, MAN + NE[a]RLY.
14 UNDER FIVES, UNDER + FIVES in different senses. Actually, UNDER + FIVE + S[mall] is probably better.
16 VALIDATED, VAL I DATED. From the ‘Rebel, Rebel’, or ‘Lola’ era.
17 SECRETED, SEC + R(ET)ED. I saw the answer first, and figured out the cryptic later.
18 BROOKLET, B(R)OOKLET, easy in retrospect, but not obvious without crossers.
21 NAEVUS, N(A + E + V)US, the enclosing letters being a well-known redtop upside-down.
22 STERNE, S(TERN)E, where the enclosing letters are S[pac]E.
24 SODOM, [quasi]MODO’S upside-down.
26 OUCH, [p]OUCH, an easy starter clue.

27 comments on “Times 25766 – This blog is bought to you by…..”

  1. No answers for 17dn, 25ac and 21dn. The problem was that my port at 20ac was ADELPHI. Figured (Queen) LEDA reversed and PHI. There are so many ADELPHIs, one would have to be a port! So that stuffed most of the SW.

    Otherwise … I enjoyed this one!

    Edited at 2014-04-21 06:51 am (UTC)

  2. I found this quite hard because of my lack of GK in certain areas, like not knowing DODOMA, CHENNAI or HOGAN and probably one or two other references along the way.

    CLEM ATTLEE has come up here before as I remember commenting that I had never heard him called that and the newspapers in his day would surely have referred to him as Mr Attlee or simply Attlee. Still, a quick Google reveals there is a biography on sale entitled CLEM ATTLEE so maybe the name was in use. Incidentally I can’t find the previous reference as the search facility above seems no longer to work properly.

    Talking of which, the button to the Times Quickie is currently linked to #26 (i.e. last Monday’s puzzle) and changing the url doesn’t work so I shall be unable to blog #31 until the facsimile newspaper becomes available sometime later this morning. (Now done

    Because of the broken link at the Times I’ve temporarily put up today’s Quickie #31 here: http://jackkt.livejournal.com/

    Edited at 2014-04-21 08:03 am (UTC)

    1. There’s definite evidence in the real world of the abbreviation being commonly in use; I remember when visiting Fulham 25 years ago, I used to drink occasionally in a pub called the Clem Attlee, on the estate of the same name. I seem to recall it being fairly “colourful”, at least by the genteel standards of London SW6. Sadly, like so many of the pubs of my youth, it has long since been flattened…
  3. Spent ages on 3D since I could only think of ALLOW giving BALLOWED that is plausible but I’d never heard of. Got there in the end.

    CHENNAI is what used to be called Madras, which I’m sure pretty much everyone has heard of. BENGALURU for Bangalore is a step too far.

  4. Far be it from me to offer parsings on one of my Eccles days but …

    I read this as “a few” = FIVE, “small” = S; with the def being “tots”.

    Edited at 2014-04-21 04:09 am (UTC)

  5. I was lucky here as I wrote in MEADOW RUE without understanding why. iPad solvers using The Times app were hampered here by the end of the clue being covered by the ‘insert’ button, so that it read ” . . .brewed with our plan”, which I assume now is ‘plant’.. A not infrequent and annoying occurrence, especially when the covered bit is part of an anagram.
  6. I got just one wrong today through carelessness. I doubled-used ‘shelter’in 2dn and consequently was trying to think of a shelter for a PM, and I came up with CHEZ ATTLEE!. Well at least I got the right PM. I’m currently reading a biography of WSC by Roy Jenkins and I get the impression that even Winnie would have been unlikely to have called Attlee ‘Clem’.

    Does anyone know what the problem is with the front page of the TOL on Firefox. Since Friday it has been the 28/09/11 page. IE8 also wouldn’t work until Saturday and to make things even more confusing the BBC (on their own site) were reporting on the death of Gaddafi (also at the end of 2011) on Saturday.

    On Friday I noticed that some readers were commenting on this but the comment stopped from that day.

    I’d like to know if any of you are still experiencing the same problem. Enjoyed today’s crossword as well as the two at the weekend.

    1. Yes I’ve been getting the same thing re the Times front page since last week. No idea what’s going on.
  7. Some tricky and difficult stuff in this puzzle – not least 14D. Didn’t know HOGAN or CHENNAI and wanted 27A to be “salvage” until STERNE knocked that on the head.

    30 minutes to solve. Thank you setter and Vinyl both.

  8. Have just re-read the clues and there are some excellent surfaces that I didn’t fully appreciate while solving. For Brits of my vintage I would have thought it was normal to say Clem Attlee, but perhaps that says more about the people I mixed with. Good puzzle – 21 mins.
  9. 20 mins, which looks like a decent time based on the above comments, and I would have been slightly quicker had I not entered an unparsed “mannered” at 8dn until I realised that 18ac had to be BADDY. I had the most trouble in the SE because I was one of the 90% looking for the wrong kind of ship for ages, and it was only once I finally saw DELIVER that I got SODOM and STERNE, my LOI. I thoroughly enjoyed this puzzle.

    For a while I was thinking that 4dn was going to be ALONE with “individual” as the definition because I could see wordplay of A-ONE (right) outside L (left), but I wasn’t confident so didn’t enter it, and once I got the checker from DUCKBILLS I was able to see the &lit and the right answer.

  10. Nice puzzle finished in 21 minutes dead. I wandered down all sorts of byways in the NW corner, being another who searched vainly for the River Dellon, and who doesn’t remember informed about Dar Es Salaam no longer being the Tanzanian capital; also convinced myself the combination of plant and alcoholic drink pointed to RYE, but got there in the end.
  11. 15:23 with fingers crossed that dwell on, meadow rue, hogan, Dodoma and naevus would be correct.

    I thought the hunchback clue was rather clever.

  12. Today, went wrong with MANNERED at first, struggled to find the RUE other than the common variety, had to resort to a Wiki list to find DODOMA (thought it was still Dar es..) and crosswordsolver for HOGAN but some great clues and all good fun. Loved the humpback clue, once I eventually twigged it. Around an hour with a couple of interruptions. Thanks for the blog it can’t have been easy under pressure and in the sticks (if that’s where your bit of CT is).
  13. I had CLARKE (Arthur C of that ilk) at 22dn which rather sank my chances of getting 23ac.
  14. Pleased – and not a little relieved – to finish this in about an hour all told (in 3 sessions).
    Dragged 1d & 20a from the recesses of my mind – though I would have been hard pressed to say where they were. Didn’t know 11a but Hogan seemed more likely than Pigan or Sowan! Delighted not only to get but also parse 24d.
    COD to 5d – excellent! Closely followed by 29a.
    Good puzzle, good blog.
  15. 16:05 – never heard of meadow rue or the capital but the wordplay was clear so…
  16. How kind of the setter to keep in mind that not all solvers live in the UK! Dodoma and Chennai were no problem, and I must admit I thought they were fairly standard GK. Just goes to show…

    I enjoyed this one, especially hunchback when I finally realised how it worked.

    Nairobi Wallah

  17. 17:28 here. I enjoyed this one. Very little that could just be bunged in from the definition, and quite a few (HOGAN, MEADOW RUE, DEMITASSE, DODOMA, NAEVUS) that had to be constructed carefully from wordplay which thankfully was always clear. I did wonder about the River Dellon but couldn’t quite believe it.
  18. About 30 minutes, ending with NAEVUS, which I didn’t know, so from the wordplay only, and caused me to look it up since it seemed so unlikely to my eye. I didn’t know DODOMA either, but the wordplay was even more clear and it didn’t look as weird as NAEVUS. I knew everything else, and I too smiled at the hunchback clue. Nice puzzle, nice blog. Regards.
  19. That was an odd upper-left corner, everything else went in very quickly, but I was left with wordplay alone for MEADOW RUE, DODOMA and I was surprised to see CLEM ATTLEE. I wonder if the setter had different plans for that quadrant and was forced to change something?
  20. Found this one hard but very enjoyable. Was stuck in the SE as I had DISCOURSE – sweet being a course and to discourse as in rattle on. Still not sure how we are supposed to get FIVE for “a few”…..
    Loved the hunchback clue.
  21. Quite enjoyed this until I got stuck, and then had to resort to reference works to confirm my painfully extracted entries, so a DNF – thanks to HOGAN, MEADOW RUE, DODOMA and NAEVUS.

    FOI ELVER, LOI (of the “all my own work”) WITHIN (my COD), thought DENG well hidden, and 12ac had me vainly looking for something-RYE, before I realised the drink was at the other end!

  22. 14:50 here for an interesting but toughish start to the week, as I never really found the setter’s wavelength.

    The capital rang a faint bell, though I couldn’t remember the country.

    I’d wanted the second word of 12ac to be RYE, so was grateful that the wordplay reminded me that there was a plant called MEADOW RUE – and that an alcoholic drink called MEADOW RYE probably didn’t exist!

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