Times 25809 – Which Walton Might That Be?

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I think most will find this reasonably straightforward although there are some slightly obscure references. 20 minutes to solve.

Across
1 CONFETTI – cryptic definition – as usual solved by guessing words from checkers and then groaning;
6 BECAME – B(MACE reversed)E; BE from B(lockag)E; “got” is definition;
9 NEVE – EVEN reversed; the snow that forms glacial ice;
10 SPOILSPORT – SPOILS-PORT;
11 STEPS,ASIDE – STEPS, A-SIDE; flight as in stairs;
13 LOST – many=lots then switch “t” and “s” to give LOST;
14 SUBTITLE – (tube list)*; essential for much modern TV drama;
16 INANER – IN-AN-ER;
18 SPIDER – RE-DIPS reversed; a rest for the cue used in snooker;
20 ALABAMAN – A-LAB-A-MAN(y); Rosa Parks, Jesse Owens, Helen Keller, etc;
22 CLOT – area for vegetables=plot then change “p”=parking to “c”=caught to give CLOT;
24 A-FLAT,MAJOR – two definitions, the second whimsical; one of Beethoven’s favourites;
26 SALAMANDER – SA(y)-LA-M(AND)ER;
28 ERAS – ERAS(e);
29 DAMN,IT – TIN-MAD all reversed;
30 CASTANET – CAST-A-NET; reference Izaak Walton 1593-1683 who wrote a book called The Complete Angler – surely you knew that!;
 
Down
2 OVERTRUMP – (c)OVERT-(f)RUMP; assumes the club suit is trumps;
3 FLEAPIT – F(LEAP)IT; old pre-war cinemas used be called fleapits;
4 TESTA – (cour)T-(seat)*; outer shell of a seed;
5 IDO – I-DO; offshoot of Esperanto;
6 BALLERINA – (bare all in)*; depends where and what she’s dancing I guess;
7 CAPELLA – CAP-ELLA; reference singer Ella Fitzgerald; bright star in Auriga;
8 MORES – MORE-S(taff);
12 ICE,FALL – ILL surrounds (face)*; Khumbu Ice fall and Glacier presumably;
15 TORN,APART – TOR(NAPA-R)T; Napa Valley is a centre of excellence for US wines;
17 ELABORATE – E-LAB-ORATE;
19 DETRAIN – DET(R)AIN; coach as in railway coach;
21 ALAMEDA – A-LAME-DA; a Spanish tree-lined street and another place in California;
23 LIANA – NAIL reversed – A; generic name for climbing plants;
25 TURNS – sounds like “tea”-URNS; starts is definition;
27 DOC – D(O)C; quack is slang for doctor;

61 comments on “Times 25809 – Which Walton Might That Be?”

  1. Well I found this tricky…

    Didn’t help that I put in ‘retrain’ for DETRAIN without really understanding the ‘leave coach behind’ bit, so SPIDER was never going to happen.

    Also left a blank at CLOT, not knowing whether it started with a C or a P. Where is the definition for CLOT? Is it just “who might get caught”? Also had a blank at INANER, again not quite understanding the def (rather?). Thought it could be ‘imaged’ (=represented), but of course then I couldn’t fathom the wp.

    dnk Walton, so that was a punt. As was ALAMEDA.

    Cod: OVERTRUMP. Or maybe SALAMANDER.

    PS This shows why I can never volunteer for blogging duty…!

    1. Hi Janie. At 22A the whole clue is meant to be the definition – some may think it leaves a little to be desired. At 16A the definition is “rather silly”
      1. That’s where I struggled, too. “Rather silly”, to me, gives INANE. Isn’t INANER “more silly”?
        1. I was going to say that too but decided ‘rather’ may just cover the comparative. Still not sure though.
  2. Undone by a careless ICE WALL.

    Main hold-up was INANER, which doesn’t really feel like a word, and the crossing ELABORATE, which I made harder by pencilling in EONS at 28a.

    All in all, a rotten effort — by me. I imagine the crossword was fine.

  3. I’m not sure why, but I took forever to get even one clue solved and was ready to clock out at 10′, but then one or two scales fell from my eyes and things picked up. Didn’t help that I’d never heard of the snooker spider, or misery=spoilsport, or that, like Janie, I had ‘retrain’ for a long time, or that I was thinking of William not Izaak. The city of Alameda is across the bay from SF, but there are alamedas here and there in California cities, like the Alameda de las Pulgas [fleas] in San Mateo. COD maybe to 6ac.
  4. Or even “sillier”. I thought “rather silly” was a good description of the overall clue.
  5. 29A is an appropriate expression for me today. I fell into both of the mistakes previously mentioned, having both ICE WALL and RETRAIN which gave me an unlikely SPARER at 18A. I hoped it might be something to do with spares being ‘the rest’, and missed the snooker reference despite having misspent much of my youth on the green baize.
  6. 13m, but I had never come across the snow so it was a toss-up between NEVE and REVE and I picked the wrong one. Not the best clue I’ve ever seen.
    As it happens I did know Walton and The Compleat Angler but at least with that one there was a way of solving the clue if you didn’t.
  7. Yet another disaster area for me and it’s unnerving for blogging duties that these are becoming more of a regular occurrence over recent months.

    No problem with The Compleat Angler reference though as I used to visit the hotel of the same name in Marlow.

  8. Good call Jimbo. That Walton almost did for me. Had to look him up. DAMN IT!
    Janie as our next blogger? Yes! We need more ladies in this forum.
  9. Fell into the RETRAIN trap (well, leave one coach for another train?), so stared at _P_R_R for too long. Didn’t know ALAMEDA nor did crosswordsolver.org, although it was gettable from word play. Smiled at IDO and CONFETTI. The rest was OK. Thanks Jimbo for putting me in the picture on SPIDER, glad I wasn’t blogging this one.
    1. Unspammed. It’s the web address that did for it.

      Edited at 2014-06-10 07:56 am (UTC)

  10. 19.40, which to my surprise sits rather well on the leaderboard: I thought I was being rather -um- inane.
    There are many diversions on the way to solving this: the ones already mentioned and, for me, a trip along the SACKCLOTH variation path at 10. My ALOI was CONFETTI, where i was trying to make it a wordplay sort of clue. At least it made me smile, too (a prime requisite for a CD) and led directly to my LOI, that damned artificial language I can never remember. Now, of course, I do.
    NEVE because it sounded more snowy. EVEN as in its adverbial form satisfied me, as in “even greater” or perhaps “even so”. Chambers has it.
    I doubt if Izaac ever cast a net – he was all about using a hook and line, wasn’t he? maybe he used one to keep his catches.

    Edited at 2014-06-10 08:53 am (UTC)

  11. Chambers has ‘more than otherwise’ for ‘rather’. Seems a bit of a stretch to me though.
    1. I wasn’t too unhappy with inaner for rather silly but I don’t really see where the AN comes in. IMHO the Queen is represented AS ER or IN ER but not IN AN ER.
      1. Now you mention it I agree, it doesn’t really work. I didn’t notice at the time. I think I was already worried about what I was going to put in at 9ac at that point.
      2. Seems okay if you take ‘IN AN ER’ as shorthand for ‘in the letters ER’.
        1. “Rather” is a convention for the comparative in Times crosswordland, or at least has been of yore. I can imagine the word’s use in “There’s nothing inaner”. Got caught with ‘plot’ for 22. The def. there is out on a limb but on reflection I rather like it. About 35 min. with the one wrong. Two wrong. I also hit the ice wall. A propos of nothing, there seemed to be a bevy of a’s around.

          Edited at 2014-06-10 04:13 pm (UTC)

  12. I thought this a very tricksy crossword, in a nice way. Right up my street, but I’m not surprised there are some dnf and errors out there.

    Isn’t 10ac a thing of beauty?

    Not keen on 16ac. “More silly..” makes as much surface sense, and is accurater..

  13. I feel a compleat plonker, but at least a plonker in good company. ‘Plot’ and ‘ice wall’ were the two I failed to parse. I think I will forgive the setter INANER, as it made me smile and a lawyer – in Chambers, of course – could make a case for it. Again, I don’t quite see how still can mean ever, so NEVE seems fine to me – I had to get it from the wordplay.

    Janie, your insightful comments are proof enough that you would be up to this blogging lark. And I don’t think anyone around here really minds having to jump in and correct the blogger! It happens to all sooner or later.

    1. “.. and a lawyer – in Chambers, of course – could make a case for it”

      That’s terrible. Well done.

    2. Both mean ‘always’. I actually struggled more to see how ‘even’ means ‘still’, although I can see it now of course.
      1. (That’s just meant as an example of still = even.) Could you reciprocate with still = ever? I tried to find (rough) equivalence, but failed.
        1. I find equivalence in both Chambers and Collins. Admittedly ‘archaic’ in one and ‘poetic’ in the other, which perhaps discounts it.
            1. Actually thinking about it ‘ever’ is a somewhat poetic version of ‘always’ (being terribly highbrow, I’m thinking of The Hunger Games: ‘may the odds be ever in your favor’) so I’m back to being miffed.
              I should stop worrying about it: there’s nothing I can do about it. Our wills and fates do so contrary run that our devices still are overthrown and all that.
              1. But the correspondence in the clue is between ‘ever’ and ‘still’. ‘May the odds be still in your favour’ has, for me, a different meaning.
                1. It could mean exactly the same, because ‘still’ sometimes means ‘always’, particularly in the context of a high-falutin’ sentence structure like that.
                  1. Aha, so that’s the archaic, poetic, dialectic usage? I’m pleased to say I’m as ignorant about Hunger Games as I am about Harry Potter.
                    1. Exactly. As I said, terribly highbrow.
                      When it comes to this stuff – The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Frozen, The Lego Movie – I’m a veritable polymath.
  14. Various blind alleys which have been pointed out here, several of which I went all the way down. When I found myself thinking “Huh, that RETRAIN simply doesn’t work” it should have reminded me that when I have an answer which doesn’t work, it’s usually because I’ve got it wrong. As with anon. above, I also thought I’d been very sharp in spotting the correct Walton and putting in TRIANGLE right at the start, so there was another corner which needed unpicking before I could finish correctly. Overall, I thought the good, such as 12dn, very much outweighed the slightly shaky.
  15. I found this pretty quick: 10 minutes for all but 30Ac, plus another 10 before I got castanet. I was sure which Walton, but got hung up on variants of TRIANGLE (pun on try angle, which also fits the theme of the clue) but couldn’t reconcile it with the cross checking answers.
  16. Happy with that. Always enjoy a good cryptic def, which 1ac certainly was. Not so much fun of course when you don’t get them.

    Didn’t know NEVE, TESTA, CAPELLA, IDO or ALAMEDA, but was able to trust the wordplay, which makes a good puzzle for mine.

  17. After 10 mins I had only NEVE and was wondering where the next answer was coming from. But I eventually got a toehold in the SW corner and worked up from there.

    Izaak Walton and The Compleat Angler were no problem – there is a Walton window in Winchester Cathedral with the legend “Study to be quiet” which I always liked. But like z8b8d8k it did occur to me that casting a net is not exactly angling.

  18. A smidge under 14 mins for me, with the ‘snow’ being the last one in. An enjoyable experience
  19. Where I had the crossers, I guessed REVE instead of neve, and a slightly mis-spelt ISABEL for the silly queen. Where I only had some of the crossers I think TEAS(e) is a pretty good afternoon time. Not knowing that a bridge is a spider meant that I never was going to sort the R/DETRAIN, but I really can’t justify, even to myself, CLARINET other than that it has a musical connotation and the right number of letters. I liked OVERTRUMP, and enjoyed the 3/4 I got, plus particularly DJ’s explanation of the ones I didn’t.

    Edited at 2014-06-10 11:43 am (UTC)

  20. 17 mins, but with “plot” rather than CLOT, which is an absolutely dreadful clue IMHO. It seemed to take me an age to get anywhere near this setter’s wavelength, and on my first read-through of the acrosses I had only got ERAS. At least I saw ICE FALL, and I also didn’t have a problem with INANER, although I thought that was another poor clue.
  21. Indeed verging on the obscure for some entries, but overall a reasonable effort I think. I had 30 mins for this, which isn’t too bad for me, and I was okay with Walton, after twigging.

    Thanks all.

  22. Re Olivia, how unusual it surely is to find a troll attacking a crossword website.

    Not.

    What is it, I wonder, that attracts them so?

    1. It always amazes me how annoyed non-solvers get about cryptic crosswords, which as far as I can see do no harm to anyone. During my first marriage I had to do the puzzle in secret (in an additional copy of the paper so that I could destroy the evidence) if I was to avoid accusations of time-wasting, laziness, a false sense of intellectual superiority etc. I was also once asked to leave a pub because I was doing a crossword. ‘People who do crosswords upset the other customers’ I was told. So it’s no surprise that a forum devoted to crossword solving should attract such people.
  23. Well done those of you who trusted the wordplay at 21 to get Alameda. I, too, trusted the wordplay but it appears that Apaleda es uno mombelo.

    I also failed on PLOT and I now see why I didn’t understand how plot could be right. Not a great clue really. I’d use a stronger word for a vegetable-plot-parker.

    18:12 otherwise if anyone’s counting.

  24. I need to remember this – didn’t know it at all. In the end it seemed a bit more likely than “spader”/”redaps”, but “redips” and “insaner” seem curiouser and curiouser.

    At first I threw in “castaway”, as in “carry on casting” but it didn’t take long to correct – although I agree with Z about the hook and line. I was another one with “ice wall” (something to do with North Wall perhaps) but one of the advantages of solving on paper is that often when you go to key in the letters online the parsing sort of presents itself.

    What a very nice conversation here! We’ve got a troll on the Club Forum at the moment. He first popped up in April and now seems to wish to get up the nose of the great PeterB. I don’t really see that working. Would this be what is meant by a “concern troll”? Oh, forgot – 25.39.

    Edited at 2014-06-10 12:00 pm (UTC)

    1. We’ve had two trollish commentators on the Club site recently , Olivia ; one seemed to be activated in the late evening ( boozed up ,maybe) the other seems nastier and lives up to his sobriquet.
      1. Hi barracuda. Yes the other one was definitely PWI (posting while intoxicated) and seemed more pathetic and annoying than actively unpleasant – which is what describes the current one. I think the latter went after me in April because at some point in the previous few months I’d responded to some intemperate comment of his about the (to him) overly lowbrow references in one of the puzzles with a New Yorker cartoon that seemed apt. I won’t do that again.
  25. Not for me, this one. Some people love to learn new, obscure and useless words here, but I don’t. And I know a lot of of foreign words, but I still object to Spanish/Portuguese in this crossword. As for ‘inaner’, that’s just clunky. No excuse if it’s ‘in Chambers’. Dictionary publishers like to include a lot of words because it looks good in the adverts.

    Edited at 2014-06-10 01:43 pm (UTC)

    1. Still, the day wasn’t a complete write-off: enjoyed the one about the lawyer ‘in Chambers’.
  26. Not my best day’s solving.
    One missing (Castanet – would never have got that) and mistakes with Darn It (Damn It) and Imaged (Inaner).
    Enjoyed Ballerina and Detrain.
  27. After reading the comments above, I’m sheepishly reporting that I didn’t have any real problem with this except for not having heard of NEVE, but then I guessed it correctly. INANER is inane, IMO, but otherwise, thanks to the setter. I got a kick out of the covert frump, and the CONFETTI. About 20 minutes overall. Regards to all.
  28. Didn’t know NEVE, and got stuck in the SW corner by quickly (thinking I had spotted the double meaning) putting in DUNGEON for “keep”, thinking to properly parse it later which I forgot to do…..stupid me. INANER I agree should have been clued better.
  29. 10:34 for me, the last minute or so spent agonising over INANER, which, like others, I’m still not too keen on: I don’t really mind INANER = “rather silly”, but IN AN ER for “how the Queen is represented” doesn’t feel right.

    I made another of my desperately slow starts, but eventually hit the setter’s wavelength helped by a number of what seemed like old chestnuts.

  30. …call for desperate measures, one of which (as Stephen Fry suggested) I shall now pour for myself.

    //I made another of my desperately slow starts…//

    If I could make as desperately slow a start as Tony, I’d finish in half my usual time.

    As it is, I was beaten by INANER. I saw it, and thought (a) INANER surely means “more inane” not “rather inane”. (b) the Queen is surely not represented “in an ER” – maybe “by ER”; I may take this point up with her. (c) INANER is one uggerly word. So, like others, I took a stab with “IMAGED”. I feel cheated by a clue which doesn’t “click” even when you have the answer in mind.

    NEVE was new to me. I plumped for it, rather then “REVE”, on the grounds that it’s closer to “neige”. Now that I look more closely, I also find the adjective “niveous” tucked away in a cardboard box at the back of my memory.

    1. Surely that’s her sister, who is the one Mag-ed (is Mag slang for Margaret in UK, too)?
      About average 25 minutes, but guessed wrongly on alameda, not speaking Spanish. Vane doesn’t mean weak, but avaneda sounded like an avenue. Liked 1 ac, 6 dn and 12 dn.
      Rob
  31. Great crossword for you guys. Forget the other 0.5 million who like to be amused too. Wrong level for 90% of your solvers my friend.
  32. Enjoyed the crossword and was grateful to negotiate the tricky bits successfully: I think I nearly dropped all the clangers that others have mentioned, but thankfully avoided them all. Inagree with those that object to ‘inaner’ at 16a: the clue does not indicate a comparative and should teally lead to an answer ‘inane’.
    On the other hand, I thought that there were some superb clues.
  33. Sorry, I seem to have accidentally logged out. The 29m 12s was me, and I would not wish to be associated with the previous anonymous.
    George Clements
  34. Actually finished this on Wednesday, on trips to and from Angel, after spending over half an hour getting nowhere yesterday. Too many obscurities (NEVE, IDO, TESTA) and woolly clueing (CLOT, INANER) for this to be fully enjoyable.

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