Times 25,863

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
14:58, which is very much my normal sort of time, but as that time is still top of the leaderboard (if only from a very small sample of early birds, of course), perhaps this one’s tougher than I originally thought. Anyway, an enjoyable challenge, especially if you were lucky enough to be on the right wavelength on blogging day.

Across
1 BEMUSE – EMUS(tall birds) in BE.
4 APPRAISE – APP(downloadable software) + RAISE(increase). Nice lift-and-separate.
10 RACKETEER – TEE in RACKER, as opposed to an Iron Maidener, say, or thumbscrewer.
11 MUNCH – Nuts in MUCH.
12 ABOMINATION – A,B,O (blood groups, thus “typing letters”, geddit?), Minutes, I NATION.
14 RUE – RUDE minus Daughter.
15 LADETTE – AD in LETTER.
17 SPIGOT – PIG in SOT. A word with an amusing ring to it, which is why Peter Cook chose it as the name of the unidexter auditioning for Tarzan, a role which traditionally demands the use of a two-legged actor.
19 GAELIC – reverse hidden in domiCILE A Gift.
21 POINTER – Old in PINTER. There’s a joke there somewhere involving the words “Why the long paws?”
23 HUE – “Cast” here as per the example cited in ODO “the colours he wore emphasized the olive cast of his skin“; add hue to cry to get a hullabaloo.
24 ISAAC NEWTON – ISA(Individual Savings Account), A/C, NEW(=unused), TON(£100).
26 BRIBE – Banned in BRIE.
27 TREADMILL – [REar ADMiral] in TILL. I spent some time thinking the half-Admiral was bound to be NEL or SON, which just goes to show you can be too clever.
29 COGITATE – CORGI minus Republican + TATE (gallery). Her Majesty has had lots of dogs over the years, of different breeds, but the corgis have always been the ones most identified with the Royal Household.
30 METEOR – METE(“dole”), OR(“in other words”).
 
Down
1 BARNACLE – BARN, [Large in ACE]. Deceptive capitalisation: for those who haven’t been around for this conversation before, the convention is that a setter is allowed to capitalise a word to make it look as if it’s a place-name (as in hull becoming Hull), but not the other way round.
2 MACHO – CHurch in MAO.
3 SUE – SUEt. One of several sorts of pastry, this one being a good choice if you’re making something very traditional for dinner, like steak and kidney pudding or spotted dick.
5 PORKIES – Cockney rhyming slang, PORKIES=porky pies=lies; also a description of someone or something carrying a little too much meat.
6 ROMANTICISE – (CREATIONISM)*.
7 INNERMOST – (MINESTORN)*.
8 ECHOEY – take BALL, Versus, and another BALL away from bEaCHvOllEYball and you’re left with E CH O EY.
9 MENACE – EN(space in printing) in MACE, which is a brand name for a sort of tear gas.
13 INTELLIGENT – IN(stylish), TELL 1 GENT.
16 DEAFENING – (FADE)*, (NINE)rev. + Guitarist.
18 WRANGLER – With Right ANGLER (slightly left-field synonym, but in a world where a river can be a banker, why not?)
20 COAL TIT – [Left TI] in COAT. TE in British English is TI in American English, and a drink with jam and bread, according to Maria von Trapp.
21 POCKET – [Citizen Kane] in POET.
22 PHOBIC – [Hard Old Boy in PI(irrational)] Constant, one of those semi &lit. clues, I think we call them.
25 TRIBE – TIBER, the river of Rome, with its lowest letter, R, moved upwards…
28 DUE -…and remaining in Rome, uno, DUE, tre, quattro etc., the Italian number being pronounced slightly differently to DUE=”appropriate”.

31 comments on “Times 25,863”

  1. … crossword land after a short break. And a bit under the half hour spent on this (I felt) quite difficult puzzle. Though it may just be lack of practice. Had a lot of trouble with ECHOEY, the “typing letters” and, LOI, MENACE. WRANGLER was good for a laugh.
  2. One of those where I was not quite with it but scrambled through – thinking immediately of ‘comet’ at 30a but being unable to push on from there, and writing ‘phobia’ at 22d. But I got lucky like a McIlroy 3 wood at 18d, which I got for all the wrong reasons, parsing it as WRANGLE (‘dispute’) + R (the right-most letter of ‘hooker’).

    COD to the reverse hidden over the abomination. Fine puzzle. (As indeed is Don’s quickie for those who usually give that genre a miss.)

    Edited at 2014-08-12 02:43 am (UTC)

  3. But with PUCKER instead of POCKET. Don’t ask me to explain.

    8d took a bit of unravelling.

  4. I agree with mct that this one was quite hard work. I got home in under an hour but only just.

    Most of it is very clever, though some of it perhaps tried a little too hard to be so. For example “typing letters” indicating blood groups ABO (if indeed that is what was intended) strikes me as stretching things a bit. Having said that at least it’s better than my own reading of the clue in which A B and O were simply random letters selected from the 26 available, like sometimes we have “notes” to indicate a mix of letters in the musical scale.

    Also, if I have understood correctly that in 22dn “apprehending” is an enclosure indicator it seems a little unfair to interpose two apparently extraneous words in front of the items to be enclosed.

    Edited at 2014-08-12 05:37 am (UTC)

    1. I was going to make a similar comment about 22dn. Without the “Such is”, the clue would be more technically correct without any detriment to the surface reading.
      1. My guess is that this one went through several editorial rounds – none perhaps much of an improvement on the others. 🙂

        I accepted the challenge of trying to work out how you got PUCKER at 21d, but ended up in some very dark places…

        1. It’s more innocent than that. When I said “don’t ask me to explain” I actually meant that I have no explanation for how I arrived there.

          Now you’ve got me thinking. Maybe we could have a competition for reverse-engineering incorrect answers into legitimate clues.

          1. I like that, but Gallers has himself alluded on occasion to his relative lack of Classical knowledge. I’m going for an ad-littish CD where ‘writer’ is PARKER, and ‘appropriate’ signifies that the solver should substitute two of the medial letters with the first letters (‘leads’) of Citizen-Kane and U (‘accepted’). Reversed.

            Edited at 2014-08-12 07:17 am (UTC)

            1. Full marks for trying to untangle the spidery non-workings of my brain. McT is pretty close to what I think I was thinking, I think.
  5. 27.39 for this: I haven’t had a breeze for a while and October looms…
    My last two, adding almost infinitely to my time, were WRANGLER and METEOR, where I couldn’t get a grip on either clue. My pronunciation of “dogged” didn’t help, and I was looking for canine or tracking variations but with no idea as to what the outcome might be. And I fell for the sucker punch of looking for a two-word synonym for dole which might mean petrol or some such.
    Nice long anagram at 6 relieved the struggle, but two short definitions bothered me: is RUE really equivalent to deplore? And, while I think we’ve had it recently, how close are appeal and SUE?
    Hard work.
  6. 32 minutes, so a bit easier than yesterday for me.

    I was sure I’d seen LADETTE recently and indeed it was in 25,851. I thought this curious for a very 1990s word.

    COD to ECHOEY for the unusual nature of the clue.

  7. Tim, at the strange 22D I think c=speed of light=constant. Not sure the clue works 100% but just guessed from ?HOB?C

    Quite tough in places I thought. I think I’ve seen that A,B,O device before Jack but didn’t think of it until some time after guessing the answer

    I see we have Sir Isaac again – the scientific equivalent of Tiepolo. Hello setters, there are plenty of other candidates

    1. >…
      >I see we have Sir Isaac again – the scientific equivalent of Tiepolo.

      That would be either vastly underrating Newton or vastly overrating Tiepolo! (You could try “the scientific equivalent of Rembrandt”, which would make sense both in and out of the context of crosswords.)

  8. 21 mins. I found the top half tougher than the bottom half and I struggled most in the NW corner, although I didn’t help myself by wasting time trying to justify “profiteer” for 10ac before the correct answer finally opened it up. After that I finally solved the BARNACLE/BEMUSE and ABOMINATION/MENACE crossers, and then I went back over to the NE where ECHOEY was my LOI. PHOBIC had gone in earlier with a shrug, and although all the elements for the answer were there in the clue I agree with Jimbo that it doesn’t quite work. Having said that, I thought that overall it was a good quality puzzle.
  9. Quite a tricky one today, especially the NE corner. It took me just under 18 minutes in a rare moment of calmness while our one year old grandson is having a nap. I smiled at both the ‘Queen’s pet’ and the ‘inconvenience to Hull’.
      1. Probably that, too!

        And time does move more slowly down in these parts, as you know, Jim.

        1. Indeed – and you must go with the flow. We see incomers try to speed everything up – they either slow down or leave. Just spent 2 hours running our local tea dance – trips down memory lane with dance music from the 50s and 60s. Sounds as if you’re enjoying yourselves anyway.
    2. I also feel like I’ve been off the pace of late. I wondered whether the main cryptic has got tougher since the introduction of the quickie.
  11. 37′ after rejecting abomination early on because like an idiot I’d slammed in porkers. A testing little number. I love the idea crypticsue of sprinting to the finish as the grandson begins to wake up. Perfect training conditions, light sleepers in the family. As for phobic, I think the &lit part’s brilliant and cannot see why the second part couldn’t simply have been ‘Hard, old boy!’ with the q.and ex.mark falling away in the re-reading. Odd.
  12. 17m. I didn’t really enjoy this: most of it went in from definition and some of the clues are decidedly odd. I don’t like the strange construction of 8dn, for instance, and unless we’re all missing something 22dn doesn’t work. I don’t really understand 5dn either.
  13. What an absolute shower of spiffing solvers you lot are. Making me feel quite inadequate after a couple of week’s away; I must be rusty, not that I was ever much of a well-oiled machine before I went.

    ECHOES instead of ECHOEY (knew that was wrong!), got 13 down and then wouldn’t allow myself to enter it, failing to see the link between TELL and distinguish. Not very 13d that. Got 12 from the checkers, but had no idea about where the first three letters came from.

    Hopefully, things will improve as the week progresses.

  14. Despite some easy clues early on I spent 40 minutes getting all but 28 and 30 and ended up using an aid for the latter, from which I worked out the former (why the usual ellipsis was missing?).
    I thought some of the clues very strained, especially the unnecessarily convoluted clue at 8dn, and 22dn, which is little more than cryptic garbage. Is it an attempt at &lit? Whatever it’s attempting, it doesn’t work for me.
  15. 14:37 which looks a good time judged against my peers but I’d hesitate to say I was on wavelength as there was much I didn’t understand. I guess I just got lucky.

    – I didn’t see where the ABO in 12 came from.

    – The HUE/CAST connection escaped me at the time although it now seems familiar.

    – I couldn’t parse MENACE at all (my LOI) and just hoped for the best based on def and checkers.

    – I had WRANGLER as a very odd clue indeed, with a definition at each end (I’m dogged/hooker) made up of dispute (wrangle) and R for right.

    – I nearly suffered with the momble SHOBIC, def “With an irrational constant” (clearly something mathsy) made up of H OB inside SIC, something latiny for such.

    FWIW I quite liked the way echoey worked.

  16. Thanks for explaining ABOMINATION. I had no idea where the ABO came from. Could not discern ECHOEY without help. Otherwise I enjoyed this especially BEMUSE which made me laugh.
  17. Wow. That was hard. About an hour altogether, LOI being PHOBIC. I thought this was too tricky for regular solving, so I didn’t, as I usually do, just put in certain answers from definitions; I waited to parse them too in case I was missing something, and clearly that took a while. (Confession: The only thing I didn’t parse was the PORKIES as CRS, which was an ‘educated’ guess.) Very indirect stuff here today, I thought, not the usual fare, but a good challenge. BARNACLE made me smile. Well blogged, Tim, and regards.

    Edited at 2014-08-12 04:40 pm (UTC)

  18. 14:39 for me, which perhaps isn’t too bad considering that I was feeling desperately tired and had to really concentrate to stop myself dropping off to sleep.

    An interesting and enjoyable puzzle.

    (I found an old press cutting – from around 30 years ago, I reckon – and thought I’d use the picture from it as it shows me actually solving pretending to solve a crossword. I can’t remember where it was taken, but the grid is headed “Collins Dictionaries”.)

    Edited at 2014-08-12 10:30 pm (UTC)

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