Times 25,785

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Morning, all. Jim is away, so we’ve traded weeks, and I appear to have done OK from the switch, finishing a pleasant puzzle in just under 15 minutes; some tricky elements, but in each case the solution was there to be found if you worked through it logically (which is how every crossword should be, I suppose). I’ve even had time for a little break myself since the last blog, so I’ve only done one puzzle in the last week, and I can safely say that I should probably practice solving on paper before this year’s competition, as my legibility was very poor, even making allowances for the fact I was on a train. Incidentally, I have this idea that the next qualifier is published tomorrow; I must have picked up a subliminal message somewhere.

Across
1 PINK – double def., based on the way in which colour has come to represent the political spectrum.
3 ECO WARRIOR – COW, ARRives in yEtIrOaR; another disguised definition in “one’s mean and green”. At first, all I could see to fill the gaps was “ICE WARRIOR”; I know conventions have changed, but I thought it was unlikely that a Times puzzle would decide that an enemy of Doctor Who from my childhood was appropriate general knowledge, even if there was also a Yeti in the clue. (Daleks, of course, actually have appeared in the puzzle, but I don’t think you need to have watched a single episode of the programme to know of their existence; Ice Warriors not so much).
9 ARTISAN – (SIT)rev. in ARAN.
11 ORTOLAN – OR(“golden”), [OwL in TAN(“brown”)]. Small songbird, the traditional eating of which in the French manner is controversial to say the least.
12 HEART STOPPING – HEARTS, TOPPING.
14 ELEMI – the central parts of smELls, chEap, coMIng give the resin, which I have encountered far more often in crosswords than in real life (which is never).
15 BAGATELLE – [AGA(“range” in the cooking sense, as recently seen in another puzzle in “Aga saga”), holsT] in BELLE, Venus being famed for her beauty in the classical pantheon.
17 BOLOGNESE – LOG(“diary”) in BONES(“doctor”, most notably Leonard McCoy in the Star Trek universe), Exhaustion.
19 ESTOP – BEST, OPus. This has definitely come up before, so pretty certain I have already confessed I remember very little of the doctrine of promissory estoppel other than its existence.
21 PEREGRINATION – (AGREEONTRIPIN)*.
24 PILATES – Pontius Pilate was Prefect of Judaea, hence in ultimate charge of any significant matters of criminal justice which may have occurred there between 26 and 36AD; Pilates is a yoga-like fitness training method named after a man of that name, and unconnected to the Roman official.
25 LAYETTE – YET clothed in LATE.
26 CRAZY HORSE – CRAZY(“touched”), HORSE(“drug”, heroin to be precise). Crazy Horse was one of the leaders of the tribes which defeated Custer at the Little Bighorn.
27 ARES – hidden in wAR ESpecially; Greek god of war.
 
Down
1 PEACH MELBA – PEACH(=”beauty”), Bachelor in MELA. Until I looked it up afterwards, I didn’t know a MELA, which is a Hindu gathering, but in the context of the checkers and rest of the wordplay, it had to be a thing.
2 NUTCASE – double def.
4 CONSTABLE – playful reference to the literal meaning of the name of John, noted painter of East Anglian life.
5 WHOOP – Wife, HOOP.
6 RETAIL THERAPY – (THEYREPARTIAL)*, with a well-concealed definition in “spending for treatment”.
7 ILLEGAL =”ILL EAGLE”.
8 RANK – double def.
10 SITTING PRETTY – SITTING(=”session”), PRETTY(=”fairly”).
13 WEAPONLESS – (ASLEEP, SNOW)*.
16 GUERILLAS – (IRE)rev. in GULL(=”fool”), AS.
18 LA PALMA – PAL in LAMA.
20 TWITTER – Time, WITTER(“to go on”). I’m fairly sure Twitter has already appeared in The Times in more than just the old meaning, but this is a well-crafted surface to represent the new one.
22 GUSTO – GUST(=”current”), Opposition.
23 EPIC – athletE, PIC.

46 comments on “Times 25,785”

  1. Thanks Tim.

    Chambers has 3ac as one word.

    Yes, I think that you are right about the second qualifier being tomorrow, which raises the spectre of another blast from the past here.


  2. Much harder than yesterday’s for me today, meaning that I finished in just under an hour. Should’ve been quicker, considering I use an Aga, am a fan of Twitter and spent my formative years living in Constable country. DNK MELA, and had a stupid mistake at 23dn: spic, meaning impressive???
  3. Had a bit of time to myself today, so had the rare luxury of being able to focus on the main cryptic having dispatched the Quickie. Got all bar a few, so happy enough.

    Still struggling with a couple, so would be most grateful for further clarification (and apologies if I am being thick):

    – 8 down: How is “rank” a definition of “complete”? (I had “file” in here – which caused me grief on others in that corner – on the basis that to file a form might be to complete a form)
    – 3 across: Get the definition, but the exact wordplay still eludes me (sorry Tim – I’m sure it’s obvious from your blog, but I just don’t get it…)

    Had never heard of HORSE as a drug (got the answer but could not parse it). Internet search (and call to my son, who is, shall we say, of an age…) also drew blanks. Does one have to frequent a particular pub in Camden to be aware of this usage?

    Never heard of ORTOLAN or LAYETTE either. Guess that’s just me having a sub-par vocabulary for this puzzle. Will try to stash these away for future use!

    2. “Rank” as in “Rank outsider” = complete outsider

      3 ac:
      Beast arrives = Cow arr
      in = place the above inside…
      yeti roar coming regularly = alternate letters of “yeti roar” = e i o r

      so E COW ARR I O R

      ….one’s mean and green = cryptic definition

      Hope this helps!
      Dave (lurker)

      1. Thanks Dave. So seems like ARR is an abbreviation of “arrives”? Well, blow me down (absent the ability to state something stronger in this forum!) Never heard of that. Once that is understood, all is clear.

        Thanks again, O Lurking One

    3. HORSE is in Chambers, ODO and Collins. It’s quite common in Crosswordland, so file it away!
      1. Thanks, will do. I think it’s time to upgrade my dictionaries (my Chambers offered no insight on this one).
        1. Just google , nick ; if it fits it’s correct! p.s. I find my Mac dictionary as good as anything ; if the word isn’t there I google—– meaning.

          Edited at 2014-05-13 11:29 am (UTC)

  4. 15 mins. Count me as another who didn’t know the MELA in 1dn but the answer was obvious enough from the definition. The BAGATELLE/GUERILLAS crossers were my last two in, although I didn’t parse them until after I’d finished. It took me longer than it should have done to see the CD for CONSTABLE. My NW corner looks a mess because I started writing in “headcase” for 2dn before I realised that it had a letter too many.
  5. 35 minutes for this very enjoyable puzzle. The succinct clues were to my taste and I always like a Christmas cracker joke or two.

    We used to refer to pub crawls as PEREGRINATIONs, so that brought back happy memories (inasmuch as I can remember any of them). Didn’t immediately recognize the term “mela”, though Google reveals we have regular “Health Melas” in this area organized by the Lancashire Gujarat Health Users’ Forum.

    My only concern was with the surface reading in 3: it didn’t make sense to me; though I suppose it might refer to a Skoda Yeti.

    1. Thanks, I was going to comment on that surface, but you beat me to it. I unless is Skoda product placement (do they have to pay, and wouldn’t it be a capital Y?) i think it’s defective; “held by” rather than just “in” would work and only add slightly to the least concise clue of the set.
      Perhaps the setter had in mind the goose still quacking after becoming the (Peter and the) wolf’s lunch in Prokofiev’s opus.
      1. Didn’t the yetis in Doctor Who have a sort of flap in their tummies that opened up to let the silver orb in and out? You could probably fit a rodent or kitten in there.
  6. In September, my cousin tried reefer for the very first time
    Now he’s doing horse – it’s June
    (Prince, “Sign o’ the times”)
  7. 14m. A gentle, enjoyable puzzle I thought. I was helped by knowing the slightly unusual vocab: ELEMI is a bit of a crossword regular, as Tim says, and I’m sure I’ve come across MELA in the same context.
    I’ve seen Jeremy Clarkson eat an ORTOLAN on the telly so that was no problem. I say ‘seen’ but of course his head was under a napkin. He seemed to enjoy it, but his words were muffled so it was hard to be sure exactly what he was saying.
  8. 44 minutes – my closest shave with a 3ac was when I once saw an old lady almost mown down by a lycra-warrior on the Iffley Road – or more accurately on the pavement which he’d mounted at full speed where the cycling lane ended. Good to see Emlyn ‘ughes get a mention at 26. Liked the GUERILLAS, even with just the one ‘r’.
  9. Thanks for sorting that out Tim. I just couldn’t see it although I had the answer. It crops up in the NY Times puzzles fairly often or I wouldn’t have known it at all. Didn’t even try to parse 1d and definitely dnk “mela”. 17.44. I hope tomorrow’s vintage isn’t like the last one we had (alas poor blogger).
    1. Interestingly mela is a Maltese expression of response to something meaning “sure “or “of course”. One of the reasons I thought of the combination of letters ; of course , nothing to do with the actual answer!
  10. 46 minutes with two or three not fully parsed (including MELBA and PILATES) as I forgot to go back and check them before reading this blog. AGA for the third time in barely a week!
  11. 15:23 .. I liked it.

    Last in PILATES, helped by having watched the penultimate episode of Rev last night — Ralph Fiennes ruefully washing his hands in his high-end kitchen sink.

    COD .. RETAIL THERAPY, for sure, which is ever so, ever so clever.

  14. Forgot to check finish time, so somewhere up to about 10 minutes short of 24 minutes today. There’s accuracy for you, must try it with the Competition puzzle. Is that tomorrow?
    Liked ARES for its &littish feel.
    Knew ELEMI but not mela, and thought PINK only just scraped into the cryptic category.
  15. 28m, but having stupidly put ELESI in 14A. I’m on a roll of getting one wrong. More haste, less speed needed.

    L’Ortolan is a fine restaurant near Reading. Thankfully they don’t serve ill treated birds.

  16. 19:12 with bagatelle last in (I was thinking mountain ranges) and peregrination unknown.

    I’m off to Glasgow for a 3-day conference tomorrow so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to solve and pop in. I’ll report back on the deep-fried ortolan.

    1. I had to find an illustration of an ortolan for a blog review the other day – about 80% of the pictures on Google images were of the cooked rather than the flying variety 🙁
  17. I’m sure that “rank” is correct, but can’t an argument be made for ” “ring” in 8 dn. As in a complete line is a ring, and when you complete the line to someone, you ring them? Tenuous, perhaps, but not beyond reason?
    1. Rank IS correct ! Circle line , barely , but not complete , unless it’s bent!
  18. Comfortable steady solve in 25 minutes, LOI the nemesis. Didn’t parse MELBA but it had to be.
  19. About 15 minutes, ending with CONSTABLE/BAGATELLE. Didn’t know of the ‘mela’, but everything else went in without much difficulty. I can’t explain how, but the weird ECO-WARRIOR was a write in. Very nicely clued puzzle, so thanks to the setter and Tim also. Only other quibble is the unfamiliar spelling of GUERILLAS, but it had to be correct. Regards.
  20. 40 min. in and out of a post-work coma. The 3 surface is fairly ghastly. A shame it had to be in the same puzzle as the ingenious 6. Good to be reminded of 21, since childhood a word of a little magic.
  21. Lots here I hadn’t heard of (so took an hour) but I like peregrination enough to adopt it for John from Lancs purposes. I was quite happy to put in ring for 8dn as a cryptic definition rather than the ‘correct’ answer of rank as a double definition. Does it mean a crossword clue is suspect if there could be more than one answer? Much more likely my solving skills are suspect…
    1. In general, clues should only have one right answer, so any initially plausible alternatives won’t fit properly with either the wordplay or definition (at least in theory). One of the time-honoured traditions of the annual competition is the Editor announcing that, as part of the rules of the day, if a solver thinks they’ve been marked down for a perfectly valid alternative answer, the two of them can discuss it until they finally agree that the Editor was right all along. I don’t think there has ever been a successful challenge, but someone like Tony S might be able to say with more certainty if he comes along later.

      That said, I can think of very occasional puzzles where a setter/editor has appeared here to confirm that there was an alternative which he/she hadn’t spotted, but even then it’s usually still far from clear cut that the unexpected one was really acceptable. The last one I remember involved erudite discussion of the technical differences between a “skunk” and a “skank”…

      Anyway, not sure I’d fancy anyone’s chances of getting a challenge past the editor on this one.

      1. We had an example here only last Sunday (re ST4588) in which Peter agreed to accept FOXTROTS as an alternative to DOGTROTS
        1. There you go, then. I missed that (I haven’t caught up with the last week’s puzzles yet), but that does appear to be a undeniable valid alternative being accepted by an editor.
      2. My view, for what it’s worth, is that RING would have no chance of being accepted as a valid alternative answer.
  22. 36m here after a slow start with the French snack bird first one in and ARTISAN my LOI. Some clever clues here but they seemed to fall into place easily at the end. Thanks for blog – had no idea how 1d worked except it fitted the space and some of the clue!
  23. 8:13 for me, feeling a bit tired after a busy day and an evening out, and hence making heavy weather of some easy clues. I don’t recall coming across ELEMI other than in crosswords, but I imagine MELA is familiar to anyone living in London (and Ealing in particular).
  24. Much the same experience as everyone else. I had to check post solve that ‘guerilla’ is a valid alternative spelling. I always spell it with two ‘r’s in deference to my almost forgotten schoolboy French – ‘guerre’ = war.
    I will not be entering the competition, but look forward to tackling the qualifier tomorrow (oops, later today)
  25. I mean, elemi, really? Ah well. No doubt if I’d known it I’d be congratulating myself. As it was, I’m a DNF.

    Based on my performance over the last few days, either the setters have raised the bar by a couple of notches, or I’m losing more neurons to hard drink and soft drugs than I’d thought.

    COD for me was LAYETTE, not because I liked the clue but because I like the word, which I suppose makes it my WOD instead. Close second was RETAIL THERAPY. My most disliked clue was CONSTABLE, which I thought was rather feeble.

    It’s been a slow day here. Injury of the Day goes to a young woman who fainted. Neither the fainting nor the resulting fall did her any serious harm, but a helpful passerby dislocated her elbow putting her into the recovery position.

  26. As an inhabitant of a Spanish speaking country (Spain, to be precise, Catalonia to be romantic/misguided), GUERILLA really hurts my eyes. Just sayin’.
  27. It’s Wednesday, just raced through the “qualifier”, and realised I’d not commented on Tuesday’s, so here goes: this was a “Goldilocks” crossword for me – almost done on my inward commute, then completed on my homeward trip – just right, in all about 20 minutes! Nothing too HEART-STOPPING about it, a bit of a BAGATELLE really.

    FOI ORTOLAN, LOI PINK, which I’d noted down earlier but discarded on the grounds of “it can’t be that straightforward”. Ah well, Monday mornings rule, even on a Tuesday (or a Wednesday, it seems).

    I suppose ELEMI was the fly in the ointment (or in this case the ointment in the ointment) but it’s a “crossword word” so deemed to be fair game.

    Custer’s nemesis is schoolboy GK (as any fule kno). Surprised that the setter didn’t allude to the “adult” Parisian cabaret of the same name, especially as the “touched drug” reference would have given an intriguing surface.

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