Times 25814 – Young Bears Beware!

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
32 minutes for this most enjoyable outing, which takes us to the South China Sea and back again with stop-offs in Nottinghamshire, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Greece and North America. We even have a quibble, which is always fun.

Across

1 SAND FLEA – the definition is ‘small crustacean’; AND + FL[y] in SEA (the tide).
9 REASONER – RE + A + SON + ER.
10 IRIS – ‘flag’ is a word used by someone to refer to ‘any of various plants that have long swordlike leaves, esp the iris Iris pseudacorus’ (Collins); hidden.
11 CHAMBER MUSIC – ‘notes’; AM + BERMU[da, AKA District Attorney] in CHIC.
13 BORNEO – BORNE + O.
14 CONVINCE – CON + VI(N)CE.
15 FRAILTY – I + LT in FRAY.
16 PRO+TEST.
20 CAPUCHIN – ‘monk’ (topical for me, as I’ve just read Chesterton’s St Francis of Assisi; this as well as the Internet suggests that Capuchins are an order of friars rather than monks); UP reversed + CH in CAIN.
22 MORSEL – M[anaagement] + ROLES* (anagram).
23 ARISTOPHANES – R in A THESPIAN SO*.
25 TO-DO – double definition.
26 HUNT DOWN – HUN + (D[esperadoes] in TOWN).
27 TREADING – not ‘speeding’ as I originally thought; T + READING.

Down

2 AU REVOIR – ‘so long’ (farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night…); (I + OVER) reversed in A + UR (an ancient Babylonian city invested by crossword setters many years ago, from which they still make the occasional sortie).
3 DISCONTINUES – DISC + ON (being played) + IN in TUES[day].
4 LAYABOUT – do I detect a whiff of Guardian here? It’s a double definition where the first one would be spelt ‘lay about’.
5 ARABICA – I still remember a Cantonese learning tape where the Chinese guy kept referring you to the page with arABic numeral so-and-so. Perhaps he was a coffee fan. It’s CA (about) after A + RAB[b]I (ie a teacher requiring a single B).
6 BARREN – RE in BARN.
7 ONUS – hidden.
8 CROCKETT – ‘American congressman once’ – this fellow (full name Day-VEE DAY-vee Crockett), who killed a bear when he was three, served in the House of Representatives, was a friend of the Indians if not the Mexicans, died at the Alamo (had someone tampered with his car?) and was responsible for the mother and father of earworms, popped up in the Prize puzzle of 7 June, not to mention the discussion that followed over the weekend just passed. It’s ROCKET (reprimand) in CT (court).
12 UNINTERESTED – UNI + NT + ‘E+RESTED.
15 FACEACHE – never heard of this abusive epithet for an ugly person, itself rather ugly, which also comes hyphenated. A+CAFE* + CHE[f].
17 RUMINATE – MARTINU* + [unremarkabl]E. Bohuslav Martinů was a Czech composer with a little “o” over his last letter which my software won’t support. It will now! Thanks to Andy.
18 SHERIDAN – Sheridan was the Irish playwright responsible for The Rivals (which introduced the world to Mrs Malaprop) and The School for Scandal. SHE (Crosswordland’s best-selling novel, even if ET remains its longest-running film) + ID (name) inside RAN (published).
21 HOODOO – ‘bad luck’; [Robin] Hood + OO (loves).
24 IONA – ‘place in the Hebrides’; if the crossword compliler wants to tell us that he (or she) possesses something – without saying what exactly – then (s)he might say “I own a…”

32 comments on “Times 25814 – Young Bears Beware!”

  1. Though I failed to parse CHAMBER MUSIC (phew!) and SHERIDAN until after the solve. So add another 10 for those. Good puzzle I thought.

    Edited at 2014-06-16 06:58 am (UTC)

  2. He killed him a bar, actually, according to the song; and I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see this clue and this blog of it. No, really, I can’t. Other than that, a pleasant puzzle, although I had visions of going over the half-hour until FACE-ACHE and ENCHANT came through. I’ve only seen the former once, in “Our Mutual Friend,” where it meant face-ache. I parsed a couple of these only post hoc, e.g. CAPUCHIN (where I was looking for EB ‘elder brother originally’). COD, I think, to 15d.
    1. Yes, but cloaks and even pigeons are not uncommon in churches. I much prefer the thought of a monkey turning up!
  3. 45 minutes with time lost mainly in the SW corner where I had problems working out the anagrist at 15dn whilst still missing a couple of checkers. FRICASSE fitted with what I had and was hard to shift from my mind though it was obviously not correct.

    Having brought up the subject of Davy Crockett here only yesterday I smiled at 8dn. The original song-sheet I have in my possession confirms that what Day-vee kilt when he was only three was a “b’ar” which is refreshingly pedantic with its use of apostrophe considering the generally appalling colloquial grammar of the 20 verse lyric. One line that I’ve always enjoyed is “An’ knows he’s right ’cause he ain’ often wrong”.

    The blogger’s point about CAPUCHIN is well made though the setter may take some comfort from Chamber’s including this in its definition of “monk”: “other than a friar, but loosely often applied to a friar also”. To avoid all this it might have been fun to have gone for a somewhat surreal surface reading by substituting “Monkey”!

    Edited at 2014-06-16 04:24 am (UTC)

  4. Pleasant outing. Thanks setter and blogger.

    Can still remember reading the lyric “kilt him a b’ar” when I was about five years old. Might as well have been written in Icelandic.


  5. … and that one wrong letter was the A in SHERIDAN (where I carelessly had an ‘o’). This was one of the ones that went in unparsed (others being CHAMBER MUSIC and SAND FLEA). Should have taken longer to parse it, but, like McT (not often I write that!) that would have meant going over the 30mins.
  6. 22.53, so far from a pushover, and indeed with the same two parsed fully post solve as mct and ‘most everyone else (CAPUCHIN while checking for typos before submission). CHAMBER MUSIC deserves some sort of prize for the most disconnected word play of the year: I don’t think there’s any way of going from wordplay to answer. Doesn’t mean I didn’t like the thing. As an aside, doesn’t “American” do double duty here, DA’s being on the Perry Mason side of the pond?
    Davy Crockett, eh? The understudy for the Mr Spock joke, left ear, right ear and wild front ear.
      1. I’m fine with that, though a DA in the UK is a haircut rather than a lawyer. With “American” next to “lawyer” DA sprang easily to mind and might not have done had it been just “lawyer”.
        1. Yes, I suppose it might have helped, although lawyer = DA is pretty automatic without it.
  7. If you’re missing it, you can amply compensate by looking at the latest prize puzzle in the other place — 26,286 by Tramp.
  8. Pleasant enough week-opener. No time as forgot to press start on ‘phone stopwatch but about 25’, with two or three unparsed. ID as name is faintly unsettling. I remember stumbling out of the Davy Crockett film raving in a 12-year-old’s bliss. Now I’d just pick the narrative apart. A sobering thought – too sobering.
  9. Very enjoyable outing today, excellent setting.
    The friar vs monk situation is hard to get too het up about.. there is a a Carmelite order near me, like the Capuchins one of the four mendicant orders, and indeed they live in a Friary (called “The Friars,” just to be clear!).. but the OED says: “Sometimes loosely applied to members of the monastic or of the military orders” so it seems to be acceptable, loosely speaking.
  10. A puzzle that punched above its weight (i.e. took about 15 minutes but felt much tougher than that). Lots of tricky stuff in the parsing, not all of which I saw fully before referring to the blog.

    I remembered the comic character Faceache from my boyhood; wikipedia tells me he appeared in Jet and then, after a takeover, in Buster, though I have no memory of either of those publications (mind you, it appears that the latter absorbed no fewer than 12 other comics in its 40 year lifetime, which shows how many there were competing for my pocket money back in the day).

    Edited at 2014-06-16 08:32 am (UTC)

  11. 15m for a puzzle that felt a lot knottier than that. Quite a few bunged in from the definition, wordplay worked out post-solve. In some cases – most notably CHAMBER MUSIC – said wordplay was rather convoluted and as z8 says you’d never get there the other way round.
  12. 40 minutes, I thought harder than usual Monday fare; didn’t see parsing of SHERIDAN or ARABICA, and reluctantly put in FACEACHE from wordplay as my LOI although not impressed by it.
  13. Like Keriothe, I too thought this one was knottier than the 15 mins it actually took. An enjoyable experience.
  14. I found this a pretty straightforward 25-minute solve, not untypical for a Monday. Perhaps I was lucky, gettilng the classical playwright immediately, and CHAMBER MUSIC with only two letters in place. CROCKETT did not occur to me for some time.
  15. 27 minutes, but back to my knack of getting one wrong. At 1A a misspelling of lee as in lee tide gave me a LAND FLEA. Shame I didn’t stop to consider the unlikelihood of this.

    Edited at 2014-06-16 11:58 am (UTC)

  16. Next week Jim Bowie? Getting tired of Davey already. I also recall Faceache from a comic but couldn’t remember which one.

    Enjoyable puzzle with some tricky wordplays but much put in from definition and checkers and worked out afterwards.

  17. 30 mins, but I’d have been at least 10 mins quicker if I hadn’t bunged in an inexcusably stupid “Isla” at 24dn (homophone of I’ll plus “a” – don’t ask). That made HUNT DOWN impossible to solve until I saw how it should work from a wordplay perspective, which then led me to the correct IONA. I also spent far too long trying to think of an alternative for SHERIDAN because I couldn’t see the wordplay for the “ridan” element of the answer for the life of me (I was trying to think of a six-letter word meaning “published” with the “n” taken out). I’m so used to seeing “ID” clued as “papers” that the alternative “name” took a while to see. I’d like to blame the fact that I did this puzzle about four hours later than I normally do, but I think I was just being dumb. Finally, you can count me as another who didn’t bother to try and parse CHAMBER MUSIC, but thankfully the answer was obvious enough once a few checkers were in place.
  18. This one took some teasing out, but three hours sleep and a dawn start might have had something to do with it. Difficult to give a time, as bits came good on various tube/bus rides, and general hanging about in hospital day rooms. Approx 45 minutes. All parsed.

    FOI BORNEO, LOI SHERIDAN (the name=ID took some time for the penny to drop). FACEACHE is an ugly word, also an ugly thing to say of an unattractive woman. I winced as I entered it. For shame.

    CHAMBER MUSIC only “appeared” when several crossers were in place, when the parsing was relatively straightforward, but I’d have never got to this one without the crossers. SAND FLEA was remembered from a previous crossword, and the tired PROTEST has had many outings, some, I seem to think, quite recently.

    DISCONTINUES put me in mind of DISCONSOLATE – a long-ago and fondly remembered Times clue, circa 1971, about a “late night gramophone player”.

    1. An unattractive word but interesting in its letters. It can be male surely? Thanks for the nocturnal vinyl – a classic.
  19. I am slightly shame-faced to admit I could not parse CHAMBER MUSIC.
    Shouldn’t 4d have had a question mark after the clue?
    45 minutes…
  20. Pretty breezy solve, but I put in CHAMBER MUSIC and DISCONTINUE without fully getting the wordplay, and FACEACHE came from wordplay.
  21. 38min here – it’s amazing how turning off one’s mobile and ignoring colleagues improves concentration. SHERIDAN was the last one in. I wasn’t sure if he was an AN or and ON, but the parsing suggested AN.

    Didn’t parse CHAMBER MUSIC. Frankly, if parsing a clue is harder than getting the answer, I think something’s gone wrogn. But otherwise a fair and fun puzzle.

    Today’s ‘Patient of the Day’ Award goes to a gentleman of about 50 who walked in, accompanied by the colleague who had driven him here. He calmly informed the receptionist that he had a piece of rebar through his shoulder (which was true), and wondered if someone could remove it (which we did).

    Given that we’re cutting our armed forces back by 20%, I think we should ensure that the remaining 12 soldiers are all ex-builders.

  22. A sluggish 14:15 (+ 3:17 after I lost my Internet connection and had to type everything in again when the rubbish Times Crossword Club software timed out and lost my solution).

    I never really found the setter’s wavelength, but looking back afterwards, I can see this was a very fine crossword.

    (New word of the day – for me, that is: “rebar”. Thanks, Dr Thud.)

  23. “Bohuslav Martinu was a Czech composer with a little “o” over his last letter which my software won’t support.”

    Your software doesn’t need to support it, as when you post on LJ the text gets converted to HTML, which does. The HTML entity name for ů is uring. You need a & in front and a ; at the end. Google HTML entities for other examples. This particular one can be found here.

    Edited at 2014-06-16 11:40 pm (UTC)

  24. Surprised that nobody commented that the puzzle is back where it should be in the dead tree edition (or do we all solve online these days?)

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