Times 25816

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
At first sight I thought I was going to be a rabbit in the headlights with this one; with weightier problems on my mind, the little grey cells were slow to wake up. But in due course – half an hour or so – and a couple of visits to Wiki, I struggled through. Was this quite hard, or was it just me?

Across
1 DESIGNATE -TANG (smack) IS, back in DEE (river), DE(SI GNAT)e, def. ‘appointed’.
9 VERMEER – Took me an age to parse this. VERM(IN) = nasty people, not IN, EER = ever, def. ‘interior painter’.
10 LEPANTO – ‘Le Panto’ could be where French kids get taken. Battle of Lepanto, 1571, off the coast of Greece.
11 DRONE – ‘Doctor One’ = DRONE, a bee which is not a worker, or possibly a member of Bertie Wooster’s Drones Club.
12 TORTURING – Nonsense = (ROT)* in TURING, def. ‘really hurtful’. We seem to be seeing a lot of Alan Turing recently, although I was trying to get Babbage into it at first.
13 ROSTRUM – Remedy perhaps = NOSTRUM, replace the first letter by R.
15 MAINE – MINE (of information) with A (archive’s first) inserted, def. ‘state’.
17 NODDY – NY (New York) captures ODD (not even), a noddy is a seabird, it comes in a range of colours; black, white, brown…
18 ARSON – A R(SO)N, RN is the service, arson is the crime. Nice surface. Are we in for a Wimbledon series?
19 NONET – Group of nine players. Paid gross? No, net.
20 CALYPSO – Def. ‘sarcastic air’, CAL(L), SPY rev, O(ver).
23 REPROBATE – Def. ‘sinner’, RE – PROBATE. Self explanatory I hope.
25 LOWRY – LOW (base) RY (lines), def. ‘artist’. Laurence Stephen Lowry, the painter chap from up Salford way.
27 KINGDOM – I’m not sure I fully understand this; there’s the Animal Kingdom, and a kingdom is a big territory; is there more to it? Are lions involved?
28 BIRD FLU – BIRD = slang for prison time, FLU sounds like flew (passed quickly).
29 SAVOYARDS – Amusing cryptic def., Gilbert & Sullivan operas are known as the Savoy operas (having been supported initially at the Savoy theatre); Savoyards are Frenchmen from the bit near Italy (Savoie). What a nice clue.

Down
1 DILATE – DI (inspector) LATE (behind), def. ‘become more open’. Especially of cervixes, or cervices.
2 SUPERMODEL – (DEPLORE SUM)*, def. ‘sort of celebrity’.
3 GIN RUMMY – GIN RUM = one drink after another, MY = wow!, def. ‘game’.
4 AIOLI – AI = superb, (OIL)*, aioli is garlic mayo which does have lots of oil in it.
5 EVERGREEN – Amusing (slightly) cryptic def.
6 TRADES – Swaps = trades (you can trade blows), and the Trade Winds blow. Brilliant two word clue.
7 VETO – Hidden word, N(OT EV)EN, reversed.
8 FREEDMAN or FRIEDMAN – I spent a while thinking of John Milton quotes (without much success) then twigged it was Milton Friedman and he sounds like ‘freed man’.EDIT see below; apparently it is FREEDMAN not FRIEDMAN although I didn’t think FREEDMAN could be one word.
14 ROSE MADDER – He went to bed more sane and rose madder (groan). Chemistry time at last. The plant dye Madder Lake contains two organic red dyes: alizarin and purpurin. Rose madder is a commercial name for it; def. ‘in the pink’.
16 IGNORAMUS – Reversed, SUM, A (W)RONG, I, with the W (wicket) removed.
17 NICKLEBY – NICK (edge, in cricket), L, (BYE)*, def. Nicholas, eponymous Dickens chap / novel.
18 ATTORNEY – (ENTRY TO A)*, def. profession’.
21 PAYOFF – PLAY OFF = theatre production cancelled, with the L (pounds) removed, def. ‘profit’.
22 HERMES – HER(ME)S, where ME = this compiler, def. ‘a god’, the chap with little wings on his heels, Greek equivalent of Mercury.
24 PSKOV – I know, I’d never heard of it either. A Russian city of only 202,000 souls near Estonia, founded in 903; the wordplay gets you there, VP with OKS inside, all reversed.
26 WARD – DRAW = attract, from the south = reverse it, get WARD, where you find patients.

62 comments on “Times 25816”

  1. I think 8D is actually FREEDMAN – I got one wrong according to the club site and this seems the likeliest candidate, though the clue is not the most unambiguous of its kind that I’ve ever seen.
      1. One reason I chose Friedman was also because I didn’t think FREEDMAN was one word but Chambers is the destroyer of dreams once again …
  2. I plumpded for FREEDMAN after checking in Chambers that it is one word. I think “to quote Miton” means “sounds like Milton”. Not the best of clues.

    I also don’t understand 27A KINGDOM and I think ROSE MADDER is a tad obscure. I think the book/film may be better known.

    The rest is straightforward enough – 20 minutes to solve

    1. I know you regard Biology as stamp-collecting, Jim, but I’m inclined to count 27ac as a “science” clue (and therefore a good thing) if only to bring the tally up.
      1. I confess I didn’t notice it while solving but I think dyste’s RIchard III interpretation makes this very much an arts clue. I don’t think this is an accident… or at least I hope not.
        1. I’d be amazed if the setter had Richard III in mind. That would turn a good clue into a very weak one, IMO.
          1. Really? Whether or not it’s a good clue in its absence, how could the presence of the reference make it worse?
  3. It surely had to be FRIEDMAN (though I wrote in the alt. at first and “corrected” it). “Man” in clue and in answer seems wrong. Also wondered what’s sarcastic about CALYPSO. Never thought of it that way. Put me down as another not understanding KINGDOM.
  4. I think your parsing of KINGDOM is correct as a double definition – “For one animal” needs to maybe be read as “For one, animal”, i.e. an example of the taxonomic rank, and the second “a big territory”.
  5. Tend to agree about 8dn, which appears to parse either way though I did pick the right one. Couldn’t move for freedmen in these parts, in Saxon times..

    Didn’t know Pskov. I had heard of Peskov, once part of the Hanseatic League, but didn’t connect the two.

    Much prefer Savoie to the Savoy


  6. Took me a fair old while today, with about an hour, before taking a break, and then finishing with half a dozen or so on the rhs falling into place in another 10 mins or so.

    Same ?s as others at KINGDOM and CALYPSO, and I too had ‘friedman’, thinking that FREEDMAN would be too much of a gimme.

    Lots of unknowns today (inc PSKOV, NODDY bird, SAVOY theatre), so was happy to finish with only one error.

    As an aside, anyone in New York wanting a gluten free meal should head for Friedman’s Lunch, a fab diner in Chelsea Market. Of course, you’ll have to pay for your lunch…

  7. A bit of (educated) guessing got me the Russian city, and if you asked me for the best adjective to describe calypso music, “sarcastic” would be a long way down the list. Still, I got there. Clearly I was helped that in studying classics, you come across FREEDMAN as a single word early and often.
  8. Enjoyed the light-hearted feel of this and finished, so I thought, in 25 minutes. Alas, I had written LAPANTO and am convinced that 8 could just as easily be FRIEDMAN. Definition: Milton? Word play: “This man at liberty (to quote)”.

    Never thought of a calypso as sarcastic: the ones I know are joyful, celebratory songs: “London is the place for me” and “Those two little pals of mine, Ramadhin and Valentine” from Lord Kitchener and Lord Beginner respectively.

    The puzzle initially put me in a very good mood, particularly as it is still printed on the back page; but these couple of niggles have taken the edge off a little.

  9. 21 mins, all correct and all parsed. The TRADES/DRONE crossers were my last ones in. I’ve seen FREEDMAN spelled as one word more than I’ve seen it spelled as two, so I didn’t have a problem with that one and I don’t think the wordplay was that ambiguous. Similarly, I read part of the clue for KINGDOM as “for one, animal” so didn’t have too much of a problem with that one either once I’d decided that there really must be a Russian city called PSKOV. The “sarcastic” in the clue for CALYPSO threw me but the answer couldn’t have been anything else once all the checkers were in place. Finally, I knew LEPANTO so wasn’t tempted by “Lapanto”, and I also knew the Savoy G&S reference so SAVOYARDS wasn’t a problem. Having said all that, this was one of those puzzles where having the correct GK definitely helped, and if I hadn’t had the requisite GK I’d have been with those of you complaining about it.

    One quibble I do have now that we’re three days into the reintroduction of the puzzle onto the back page of the paper is that the font used for the clues seems to be smaller than it used to be.

    1. >The “sarcastic” in the clue for CALYPSO threw me but the answer couldn’t have been anything else once all the checkers were in place

      If you have the correct checkers, maybe (see below)

  10. 21.21 with Milton, not the Emancipated One. Like others, I wondered what “man” was doing both clue and answer, and was worried enough about the correct spelling of the economist to change it from FREEDMAN because otherwise it wouldn’t be a soundalike, so little chance of getting it right. I think the balance of the clue tends toward E not I, but I feel a strong appeal coming on.
    Otherwise same quibbles, really. I keep imagining there’s more to the KINGDOM clue than there is.
    For CoD, I’m a suceur for Franglais, and am fortunate enough to remember the spelling of the battle so could forgive le wordplay ambigu.
  11. Far too many obscurities for one puzzle in my view. My DKs have all been covered so I’ll leave it at that other than to mention 10ac which, if one didn’t happen to know the spelling of the battle could just as easily have been LAPANTO, given that the French word for ‘pantomime’ is feminine. A poor clue amongst several others in my view.

    And as for the sarcastic song, that’s not quite justified in any of the usual sources though I suppose Collins mention of ‘satire’ might just cover it. But my earliest memories of calypso come from the time of the Coronation where there were several popular ones celebrating the occasion without any satirical or sarcastic intention whatsoever.

    1. My earliest calypso memories are of Lance Percival in TW3, back in the days when no-one questioned the ethics of a very British singer adopting both Caribbean style and intonation. At least he didn’t black up!
      I would have used the word “satirical” for the stuff he produced on a weekly basis.
  12. I can sympathise with those who complain about the amount of fairly obscure GK today. However since I knew it all with the exception of the Russian city, I’m not joining them!
    Nice amiable plod after an initial panic.
    Also thoroughly approved of 17a!
  13. Well, I enjoyed this quirky number, although calypso I’ve typically associated with the song about Ramadhin and Valentine, spin bowlers who shook England up in the 50s. I even had FREEDMAN as my one ticked item and therefore COD! Seems unambiguous to me, given one is looking for a Milton Friedman soundalike. I’m surprised I’d never come across PSKOV. Perhaps they’ll play a World Cup game there in 2018…
  14. My standard approach (complete ignorance) paid off here as I wrote in Freedman without a second thought (apart from surprise over a double dose of MAN), invented Pskov from the wordplay and scribbled Kingdom without knowing why. Thanks for the blog Pip.

    Edited at 2014-06-18 11:07 am (UTC)

  15. Whilst Titian was mixing rose madder
    His model climbed up on her ladder
    Her position to Titian
    Suggested coition
    So he leapt on the ladder and ‘ad ‘er

    (I believe he discovered rose madder – hence the flesh tones)

  16. A quick solve for me today – 8:23 – whilst hoping that there was a place in Russia that fitted the wordplay.
  17. A bit tougher than the last two days, taking me 45 minutes. I don’t really see any ambiguity in 8; “to quote Milton” indicates the rejected part of the homophone pair is FRIEDMAN. To interpret it otherwise requires a tortured reading of the syntax.
    As I commented above in a reply, my interpretation of 27 draws on Richard III.
    One wrong at 10, as I entered LAPANTO for an unfamiliar battle.
    A mixed bunch of clues, I thought. 4 lacked a definition (it’s certainly not &lit), 5 seemed rather silly, but I liked the cryptic complexity of 9 and the surfaces of 23 and 18d.
  18. Oh dear, 17:48 but 4 (four! Count ’em) wrong.

    Friedman was one, natch.

    Also the Frenchies. I cry foul there (and disagree forecefully with Pip that it’s a “nice” clue). Whilst having to make the link between G&S’s Savoy Operas and the French area of Savoie is fair game, if you don’t know what the area’s residents are actually called you’re into a bit of a roulette game with ?R?S. I plumped for Savoyeros, shoehorning the “love” bit in (and what with Savoie being so near to Spain!).

    Where next? No not Lepanto (recalled that from a previous puzzle) but the crossing calypso and payoff.

    For the latter I somehow took the wrong letter off play (P, that well-known abbreviation for pound (well as least it begins with the same letter)) to give layoff, clearly a betting term where, once you’re sure to win something back on a bet, you lay off some of the risk to crystalise some profit.

    That left me C?L?L?O for the sarcastic air. I didn’t once think of air as a song so went for the momble calileo (“Indeed, Sir,” intoned Jeeves, with more than a hint of calileo), with ELI the well-known “agent” of God.

    Anyway, the presence of calypso gives me an excuse to report back on last night’s UED, with this three-for-the-price-of-one from Tim Brooke-Taylor:
    PANTING – a Jamaican cooking receptacle
    GLOATING – a Jamaican light bulb
    GRATING – a Jamaican elephant

    Barry Cryer evoked the spirit of yesterday’s puzzle with:
    CELERY – a bit like a cellar.

    1. SAVOYARDs is also a term for lovers of G&S, so to be fair you have got two chances to win, even if one is French and the other is somewhat specialist knowledge.
      I also had LAY OFF for a while.
    2. I could point out it’s over 600 km from Savoie to the Spanish border, according to viamichelin… I also had C-L_L_O for a while until I corrected layoff to payoff.
      Thanks for the Jamaican entertainment.
  19. 18m, but with FRIEDMAN. I think the ‘this’ at the beginning of the clue makes it unambiguous, but it didn’t even occur to me that FREEDMAN might be a word so I didn’t look hard enough. Nasty little clue. And I don’t think the battle of LEPANTO is sufficiently well-known for ambiguous wordplay. SAVOYARDS is also a bit of a stretch although the checking letters are (mostly!) helpful.
    All in all not my favourite puzzle of late.
  20. A calypso can certainly be sarcastic, though I don’t think it has to be. For an example, Google Tom Lehrer’s song “Pollution”.

    If you visit American city
    You will find it very pretty
    Just two things of which you must beware
    Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air.

    1. He has a marvellous song brimming with Russian cities though I don’t recall if Pskov is there.
      1. Sorry, the Lehrer comment is from me. 18 minutes but with Friedman though I reluctantly admit freedman is the more likely given the phrasing: a neat feint and maybe a little sly. Can’t be doing with sarcastic as a natural definer for calypso. – joekobi
  21. Well I know I’m not the world’s greatest solver but I found this one almost impossible.

    The new Times editor seems to lurch from the sublime to the ridiculous with great frequency. A bit more consistency in degree of difficulty would be greatly appreciated in this neck of the woods.

  22. I had FRIEDMAN, but have no complaints. Should have seen how the homophone indicator worked, and would have if I imagined that FREEDMAN could be a word.

    But I share the concern of others (eg jackkt and keriothe) regarding LEPANTO. If you don’t know the battle it’s a toss of the coin.

    Also didn’t like SAVOYARDS, but that’s just because I didn’t know either reference, so resorted to cheating. Shame on me.

  23. FRIEDMAN and LAPANTO later and I’ll admit defeat. Oh boy, it’s my turn tomorrow, wheee!
  24. This was an obvious enough answer given the anagram and checking letters….but am I alone in having a bit of a quibble with the definition, i.e. “profession”? Surely the meaning of “attorney” is a person who practises in that profession, rather than the profession itself (which I suppose would be “attorneyship”). Or am I missing something?

    David B

    1. I think this comes from the questionnaire-type q.: Profession? One tends to say (e.g.) teacher, not teaching. As for Lepanto (below), well, the battle is part of the expected GK. – joekobi
  25. 16 minutes with a FRIEDMAN. Perhaps ‘one now at liberty’ would have removed both the clunky repetition of ‘man’ and the potential for confusion? And I sympathise with those whose GK did not extend to LEPANTO.
  26. I had the adequate GK so eventually got through in 25 minutes. Over here the ‘Freedman” as one word referred to the emancipated former slave population that came under government care and protection, overseen by the Freedmen’s Bureau. That would be utterly obscure for inclusion in a UK puzzle, I’d say, but it allowed me to avoid being flummoxed by the single word version. But to clarify, my GK includes Friedman but my brain never made that connection, I just threw in FREEDMAN from the def. part of the clue. Regards.
  27. 10:25 for me, with about a minute spent agonising over FREEDMAN/FRIEDMAN. I suspect that if the clue had read “He’s now at liberty to quote Milton?”, I’d have gone straight for FREEDMAN, but I was spooked by “This man …”, even though I suppose it was meant to be helpful. In the end, though, I didn’t feel there was really any doubt.

    I’m not really all that sympathetic to those who hadn’t heard of LEPANTO: not only is it an important battle but there’s Chesterton’s poem as well (required reading in the old days). Also it last came up less than a year ago!

      1. Utterly, completely DNF, with the NW corner as blank as a Norfolk farmer’s expression.

        As for LEPANTO – all I can say is that I have managed to stay alive for 52 years without knowing about it, and I don’t feel I’ve missed a lot.

        Nice to see Tom Lehrer mentioned in the annos – he’s about the only one of my childhood heroes who’s still alive. But PSKOV wasn’t one of the town’s mentioned in “Lobachevsky”. (Actually, the only quibble I have with Lehrer is that he sullied the name of Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. ) The towns mentioned are:

        I have a friend in Minsk,
        Who has a friend in Pinsk,
        Whose friend in Omsk
        Has friend in Tomsk
        With friend in Akmolinsk.

        His friend in Alexandrovsk
        Has friend in Petropavlovsk,
        Whose friend somehow
        Is solving now
        The problem in Dnepropetrovsk.

        Edited at 2014-06-18 11:29 pm (UTC)

  28. Unlike many above, I thoroughly enjoyed today’s offering, completed on various train and tube rides today, total time about 30 minutes. FOI SAVOYARDS, a totally giveaway clue to all (as Michael Flanders would say) true blue English men or women, and if you aren’t English, or a man, or a woman, God help you!

    Started in the SE, veered North, then SW and ended, with some headscratching, in the NW, LOI TORTURING. Enjoyed the rather odd juxtaposition of the sublime VERMEER and the gritty LOWRY, with Titian thrown in via the ROSE MADDER reference in the scurrilous limerick which every skoolboy kno. I was surprised by the muttering over the GK – it all seemed a bit straightforward if a tad “traditional”. My only GK flutter was the wretched NODDY, which I may have vaguely heard of once, and indistinctly at that, but it couldn’t have been anything else with the wordplay and those crossers.

    I was in the FRIEDMAN camp, but have been convinced of my error by the many commenters above.

    Given the state of the world, I’d have thought that a knowledge of the interactions between the Christian and Mohammedan worlds was rather essential GK – and that LEPANTO was a rather daring topical political statement by the setter …

    1. >SAVOYARDS, a totally giveaway clue to all (as Michael Flanders would say) true blue English men or women.

      Well that’s rather patronising isn’t it?

      Incidentally, as the noddy’s conservation status is “least concern” (that applies to the brown or common noddy, the black noddy, and the lesser and blue noddies) it’s more than likely that there are a lot more of them around the globe (whilst a tropical seabird they have a global distribution) than folk from Savoie or fans of G&S.

      And any foodie knows that noddies are a dietary staple on the island of Nauru.

      So if you didn’t write noddy in straight off there must be something wrong with you.

      1. I’m obviously not a true blue Englishman: I’ve avoided G&S almost entirely for my whole life, with only two exceptions:
        1. A production of The Pirates of Penzance my daughter’s class put on a couple of years ago. It was highly enjoyable in the circumstances but it didn’t strike me as a suitable activity for grown-ups.
        2. Crosswords.

  29. When my son learnt Kingdom, Genus, Species etc in school biology I invented the mnemonic King Penguins Can Out-Fart Grey Squirrels. I for get what they all stood for now, though Animal was definitely one of the Kingdoms…

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