Times 25862 – Nothing much in the corridor of uncertainty

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
A slight delay in posting this which I blame on the goings-on at Valhalla. Some nice touches in this puzzle, but overall a typical Monday offering to ease us into the week. In this respect, it resembles Paul’s fun puzzle in Saturday’s Guardian more than the two weekend Times puzzles, each of which was as meaty as a mixed grill. 28 minutes. (Thanks to early birds for spotting my bishes.)

ACROSS

1 REFUSENIK – REF + USE + KIN reversed.
6 STRAW – W[ith] + ARTS all reversed.
9 BOYCOTT – BOY + CO + TT.
10 RAPPORT – RAP (as in ‘rap for possession of firearms’ or charge) + PORT.
11 LIFER – anagram* of RIFLE.
12 BEEFEATER – double definition; a 9-letter word plus ‘guard’ should trigger this.
13 ORTHODOX – HOT+ROD* + OX (neat is a literary bovine).
14 AMMO – MO (medical officer) on AM.
17 EVER – [s]EVER[e]; a 4-letter word plus ‘constantly’ should trigger this.
18 BONEMEAL – BONE (as in ‘fillet’) + MEAL (‘spread’) for the fertiliser.
21 DRACONIAN – ‘harsh’; DRAC (‘Queen eg’ = CARD backpedalling, ie reversed) + ON (‘supported by’) + IAN (prototypical Scot).
22 PRANG – P + RANG.
24 ADDRESS – D in A [mini] DRESS; literal ‘tackle’.
25 CAROUSE – CA + R(O)USE.
26 TWEET – TWEE + T[ime]; ‘tweet’ is fast achieving virtual chestnut status.
27 EVERGREEN – a bit tricky; the literal is ‘always popular’, the wordplay ERG (‘bit of work’) + RE (the Christian/religious element in the curriculum used to go by a number of names, including Religious Instruction [RI], ‘Scripture’ and Religious Education [RE]) in EVEN (think ‘He cares still/even less than I do’).

DOWN

1 REBEL – B in REEL.
2 FLY OFF THE HANDLE – ‘are mad’; the wordplay is ‘FLY OFF’ (‘to leave from Heathrow, perhaps’) + AND (‘with’) + THE (‘the’) + HANDLE (‘traffic’ – handle stole goods). Yes, I just worked it out…
3 SHOWROOM – ‘salesman’s pitch’ as in place where he does his stuff; SHOW (‘play’) + ROOM (as in ‘room for improvement’).
4 NOTEBOOK – NOTE (as in ‘mark it down in the diary’) + BOOK.
5 KERNEL – hands up who was working around ‘key’? RN (‘fleet’) in KEEL (‘base’) for ‘most important part’.
6 SUPPER – S + UPPER.
7 ROOM TEMPERATURE – TEMPER in [ROO (our ‘jumper’) + MATURE] .
8 WATERFOWL – anagram of first letter of W[etlands] + AFTER LOW; the anagram indicator is ‘flying’ .
13 OVERDRAFT – R[ight] goes into OVER DAFT (‘excessively unwise’).
15 CORNICHE – ONCE+RICH*; a 8-letter word plus ‘coast road’ should trigger this.
16 LEAPFROG – LEAP (‘clear’) + FROG (‘potential prince’ – transformed, in the aptly named Grimm version, by being thrown against a wall).
19 POTENT – PO[r]TENT.
20 TISSUE – AT ISSUE (‘in dispute’) without (‘wanting’) the A[nswer]; as cunning as that professor of cunning at the university of cunning. ‘Wanting’ in a clue can indicate, as here (where it is construed as ‘lacking’), that deletion is required, or the opposite, that addition is required (where ‘wanting’ is construed as ‘needing’).
23 GLEAN – G[ather] + LEAN.

31 comments on “Times 25862 – Nothing much in the corridor of uncertainty”

  1. Once again I thought I was on track for a sub-30 minute solve but missed that target by some way, held up by several clues that put up considerable resistance towards the end. 13ac, 3 19 and 20dn were the last ones in.

    To be a bit picky, at 23dn GLEAN (whether verb or noun) is not really the same as ‘harvest’.

    I wonder if the NINA in the row 6 was intentional as it’d be a fair bet it could have been seen as relevant to some topical event at any given time, not that I’m aware of any such at this moment.

    Edited at 2014-08-11 04:38 am (UTC)

  2. All but BONEMEAL and LEAPFROG in about 16, finishing with 23.30, so ahead of the game then falling apart at the end, like everyone except McIlroy. I blanked out on “possible prince” with the crosses being what they were, and for the other I was scrabbling around for shorter synonyms for going on the wagon (cutting out the hard stuff, obviously).
    Congratulations ulaca on working out 2d. Well nearly: there’s a superfluous AND in there. I left it unparsed, unable to make any link between “traffic” and HANDLE.
    Odd crossword with a slightly sloppy feel: two EVERs, two ROOMs. ORTHODOX, for its sneaky anagram fodder for my CoD.
  3. All but four completed in 20 minutes. Unusually, the last four standing were all “stand-alones”, ie all their checkers were in place.

    KERNEL, SHOWROOM and BONEMEAL fell gradually, but TISSUE took ages. I saw the parsing early, but “ATISSUE” didn’t look right, ring a ring o’ rosie notwithstanding.

    Well blogged and well solved U. Too good on the day.

    Edited at 2014-08-11 07:23 am (UTC)

  4. Nothing complicated here apart from some of the parsing so thank you ulaca, The full quote from Blackadder Goes Forth is “As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University”.
  5. Not a difficult one but I spent a good minute and a half at the end unable to see the parsing of TISSUE. TWEET definitely seems to have been given the fast-track treatment.
  6. 29′ with the last 5 staring at the checkers for 5. (Yes, preoccupied with key.) Thought I wasn’t going to finish again. Clinging on. (Glean OK for harvest, as in Keats’ To Autumn, ‘And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep / Steady thy laden head across a brook…’)
    1. My point about GLEAN is that it’s an activity separate from harvesting a crop. It takes place afterwards.
      1. Jackkt, according to ODO the verb is described as historical and means to gather (leftover grain)AFTER harvest.

        At 25 mins a PB for me. Very pleaing as anything under an hour is a major victory. OK, it was an easy monday stroll, but they all count!

          1. I am with jackkt on this. Gleaning is picking up odd bits after harvesting, not harvesting itself.
  7. A touch over twenty minutes. Always enjoy crosswords with succinct clues, and this one had quite a few. Oddly enough, it was the two short across answers that gave me the most trouble today: spent too long trying to justify DRAM (as a Scottish round) instead of AMMO, and couldn’t parse EVER. In the end, I thought that it might be a triple definition, but I was ever so wrong!
    Invigorating start to the day.
  8. 11 mins with no real problems so I must have been on the right wavelength, although I’m another who was held up slightly at 5dn by trying to fit “key” into the answer. My time was probably helped by the fact that I saw the two long down answers almost immediately. SHOWROOM was my LOI after ORTHODOX. An enjoyable puzzle.
  9. Thank you for the blog, which helped explain why I was correct in a few places without being able to say why. I was also another who was looking for his key, and followed J from L in putting in DRAM at first. With that and the very original “potential prince”, this was tougher than the average Monday.
  10. Another victim of late night golf, although fell asleep at 2am and watched the magnificent end this morning on playback. So it took me 40 minutes with a few unparsed due to lack of that cutting edge. Yes I was thinking KEY for a while and was slow to get STRAW and RAPPORT. Only last Friday I was expounding that “left = port”.
  12. Fifteen minutes to solve all but three clues (probably the best in the puzzle), 16, 18 & 20, those holding me up for another ten minutes. I see jackkt’s point about ‘glean’, though I wasn’t bothered at the time of solving.
  13. As so often, starting the week with a silly mistake. DRAGONIAN, anyone?

    An enjoyable 18 minutes, nonetheless, with several at the end trying to understand BONEMEAL. In the end I settled for half-understanding and bunged it in.

  14. Same story as others – quick except for a handful at the end with TISSUE LOI. Interrupted twice so no time but a 20 minute sort of puzzle. Some good parsing ulaca – nice one!
  15. I found this fairly tough, taking a full commute and a walk down the platform, or 41 minutes.

    Like galspray I ended up with several ‘standalones’ left to solve. I always find this offputting particularly when they have been there since early on.

  16. I thought this was a particularly straightforward puzzle, even for a Monday – it didn’t take long to solve – 6:36 – even with visiting No 1 son asking me questions about cryptic crosswords at the same time. Lots to smile at but my particular favourite has to be the ‘potential prince’
    1. Just think of No. 1 as performing the same role as Tiger’s dad coughing on his son’s backswing while practising in the garage.
  17. Just under ten minutes, slowing a little at the end after a very quick start. Although it was fairly straightfoward I thought this was a very enjoyable puzzle, with a lot of elegant clues.
    Thanks for explaining 2dn, ulalca: I didn’t spot the handle/traffic bit. GLEAN seems OK to me if you read ‘harvest’ in a broad sense: it’s all part of the same process.
    1. It is not the most important issue facing the world today but I do not think that gleaning is part of the process of harvesting. The harvester harvests the crops and goes away happy. The gleaners come in and pick up the scraps for themselves. In the wider sense, perhaps part of the circle of harvesting life but a bit like saying that scavenging in restaurant bins is part of the process of catering.
      1. It’s part of gathering in a crop, the broad definition of harvesting, if not the salient part. I’d say it’s a stretch but not actually wrong.
      2. I certainly agree it’s not the most important issue facing the world! But to harvest is to gather a crop, and it seems to me that gleaning is – again, broadly – part of that process.
        Edit: or what joekobi said!

        Edited at 2014-08-11 05:34 pm (UTC)

  18. Thanks for the blog which clearly explained the ones I could not/did not parse. Loved the potential prince. DNF as I never managed to get past KEY in 5 down so it was impossible of course. I found this crossword very enjoyable.
  19. I too put in DRAM instead of AMMO which made WATERFOWL take longer than it should. Thought I had done this one quickly (for me) but was surprised to see it took me 55 minutes. I thought glean was fair enough as in to glean the truth, and loved frog as a potential prince. Good start to the week…..
  20. 11:24 for me, with LEAPFROG and BONEMEAL holding me up badly at the end. Like others I wasted time trying to make 5dn start with KEY.
  21. Without twigging to LEAPFROG, I ruined my chances by seeing 18ac as a tough CD: SOFTSELL. Go on, try talking yourself out of it…

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