Times 25864

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Managed ninety per cent of this without too much trouble, then spent another ten minutes on several of the shorter clues, trying to convince myself I had the right options. 29 minutes overall, with 19 ac my last one in. No NINAs or pangrams and no obscure GK but a couple of unusual words in a moderately difficult puzzle.

Across
1 HOT DOG – HOG = greedy person, around T(ea) DO = party. Def. food.
5 PICK OVER – PIC = film, KO = OK in retrospect, VER(Y) = extremely, short; def. review.
9 FALSE ALARM – FARM around A L(arge) SEAL; def. unnecessary panic.
10 LOON – L = left, O ON = nothing on = without costume; def. diver; a kind of water fowl.
11 TELEFILM – Reverse all of M (spymaster) LIFE (biography) LET (allowed); def. TV movie. Not sure I knew this was a word but it seems fair enough.
12 ATTLEE – A(s)T(u)T(e) then LEE = General; Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, KG OM CH PC FRS, PM 1945-51 is your statesman, one of the better ones, IMO.
13 IDEA – Hidden word, W(IDE A)wake, def. suggestion.
15 CARDINAL – Triple def. One is a cardinal number; cardinal is a shade of red; cardinal is a cleric.
18 HONOLULU – This teased me for a bit while considering MET and SCALA and EC as content, but it’s HO (house) LULU (opera, by Berg not Bartok as malc kindly pointed out) around NO (small number), def. city. I like Bartok string quartets and the Berg violin concerto and I like some opera but have never managed to stick more than five minutes of LULU. Opera, singer, whichever Lulu you care to pick.
19 CREW – Having reviewed 15 possible words for C_E_ I think this is the one, C (first to come) RE (on) W (with), def. band. And a sort of &lit. I remember the days of saying ‘I’m with the band’, which seldom worked.
21 BEDSIT – BEDS = Bedfordshire, county. I, T(own), without own = private; def. accommodation.
23 INCHMEAL – (MACHINE)* L, def. bit by bit. Not a word I had seen before, but plausible and obviously an anagram.
25 MAXI – a MAXIM is a saw, like a proverb; shortened; def. garment. I spent a while trying to parse SARI, unsuccessfully.
26 SKATED OVER – SKATE = fish, DOVER = port; def. avoided handling.
27 EYEGLASS – EG = say, around YE = you once, LASS = young female, E(YE)GLASS, def. lens.
28 THEIST – T (back of depot), HEIST (robbery); def. someone who believes.

Down
2 ORATE – OR (other ranks, soldiers), ATE (worried), def. speak out.
3 DESPERADO – DE = extremely dire, then REPS = travellers, reversed, ADO = trouble; def. criminal. Once you have the final O there are few possibilities and you work out why afterwards.
4 GOALIE – GO = shot, A LIE = in a position (to take shot, as in golf), def. footballer.
5 PHARMACEUTICALS – (PLASTIC)* around HARM ACE U (suffering one U(ndergoes)), def. drugs.
6 COMPADRE – CADRE (group of activists) around O(ld) MP, def. ally.
7 OWLET – HOWLED, endlessly = OWLE, then T = top of tree, def. little bird.
8 EXONERATE – EX CON (old lag), remove the C (about, to go), E (English), RATE (judge), def. free of all charges.
14 DROMEDARY – DRY around ROME DA(Y), def. animal.
16 INCOMMODE – MOD inside INCOME, def. bother.
17 PUT TO SEA – (OUT PAST E)*, E being edge /end of Shore, def. sail.
20 ACCENT – AC = account, CENT = very little money, def. stress.
22 SLING – Double def; sling = chuck; drink as in Singapore Sling. Are there other types of sling drinkies I wonder?
24 AVERS – SAVER = bank customer (well not at today’s rates!) with the S moved to the end, def. states.

39 comments on “Times 25864”

  1. Do they stack the logs for you or do you have to do it? In Rhinebeck NY it’s DIY unfortunately. Couple of litle tough ones today (19a and 5a) and one new word – for me – (23a) but fortunately the anagram was clear. 23.33. On the plus side, your delayed posting may deter some of the neutrinos.
    1. I trundle 20 km to collect them with my trailer, a stère (m3) at a time, and then have to unload and stack them; but they’re all oak already cut to 50 cm and split and at least you can choose your wood at the yard; the old boy who does them is 80-odd and I just hope he keeps going a few more years!
        1. They’re the pests who infest the Club board. So-called because they post solving times at speeds faster than light (aka their wpm) having solved in the paper or elsewhere or cribbed the answers here, or both. They’re especially bad on Saturdays when they relegate Magoo to page 6 out of the 10 and push most of the rest of us off the deep end entirely. Apparently some of them refuse to understand that they still qualify for the prize drawing, board or no board. The rest are just cheats, wittingly or not, but they come in for a good barracking if they dare show up on the Forum.
          1. It’s all very well for you (and others in this blog) to be disparaging about those who buy the paper, solve the puzzle and then submit online. Why should they not?
            1. There’s an option to “submit without leaderboard”. I presume there’s an expectation that you’d use that option if your submission time doesn’t reflect your actual solving time.

              Otherwise there doesn’t seem much point in having a leaderboard.

              1. Thanks galspray – that’s exactly it. Why not identify yourself Anonymous? It costs nothing and it’s pretty friendly around here.
              2. The trouble with the Club Misleaderboard is that there doesn’t appear to be an agreed set of rules for submitting on it, even among regular solvers, be they T-List celebrities or lesser mortals such as myself. When even the noble Barracuda advocates the use of any available assistance it is clear that, at the moment, anything goes. Surely for the table to have any value at all only times should be posted on it if the crossword has been completed without any outside help whatsoever (even by means of a helpful hint from a passing spouse say). Anything else should qualify as a DNF and accordingly be submitted off the board. Presumably it would be possible for anyone prepared to play by those rules to identify themselves by perhaps adding an asterisk after their name. By ignoring all other posters one would then have a chance of getting a meaningful comparison with the times taken by other solvers.
                1. I think there’s an unwritten agreement among competitive solvers (like those who enter the Times Crossword Championship) that we don’t use any aids before submitting, at least for the daily 15×15 and Jumbo cryptics – though personally I extend that to all the timed puzzles.

                  The barracuda is not a competitive solver, and, to be blunt, I’m really not terribly interested in his views on the matter.

                  1. Tony – I’ll cop to not being completely kosher with the TLS. Also if we get that fellow Nietzsche in a daily puzzle and I can’t get the consonants in the right order without checking I’ll peek – and own up. Although I think I may have got him nailed finally after all these years. I won’t be at the championship this year but I do behave accordingly.

                    The point, as I see it, isn’t that we all have to stick to championship rules, but that people like anonymous and evanimonx should grasp the fundamental difference between a typing contest and a solving contest (duh). Even if some go and look in the OED or on google while the clock is ticking that’s one thing and I say fair enough, but just entering the data from an already solved puzzle is sad, especially if the answers have been cribbed from here.

                    Nice pic!

  2. What keriothe said, without the jet lag sadly. And the loons. Our nightly chorus comes from banjo frogs at this time of year.

    I knew SARI was wrong, but don’t think I’d have ever got MAXI, although it’s totally legit.

      2. I saw saw, but unfortunately I only looked for words meaning one of ‘saw’ or ‘garment’ that fitted _A_I and could be extended to mean the other. If I had done the same with words fitting _A_I_ that could be shortened I might have got it. But I didn’t.
  3. Moderately difficult but enjoyable puzzle. Curiously, Jack’s LOI, 5D, was my first entry, which was a help but not as much as it ought to have been. MY LOI was LOON, preceded by INCHMEAL. The former was a bird not familiar to me and the latter a word I’d not met before, but both get-able via the cryptic parsing, which I guess is a sign of a good puzzle.
  4. 36 min: I was another with SARI, as failed to find anything else to fit. (Also a careless O/P typo – I usually spot before submitting, but OUT TO SEA seemed possible (without looking at the clue).)
  5. 17 mins. Count me as another who had never come across INCHMEAL before but it was obvious enough from the anagram fodder once a few checkers were in place. I had the most trouble in the NW where it took me longer than it should have done to see HOT DOG and TELEFILM, I was reluctant to enter GOALIE until I could parse it (which I eventually did), and then the DESPERADO/IDEA crossers were my last in, the latter of which I thought was excellently hidden. I saw MAXI/maxim fairly quickly.
  6. I really struggled to finish this. I nodded off more than once and then went through a period when I was conscious and staring at the puzzle but my brain wasn’t functioning. DK INCHMEAL or LOON as a diver bird. The long Down was my LOI and its absence contributed to a goodly proportion of my woes.
  7. Once again the Bard to the rescue. ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon” from Macbeth when he was losing it at the end. Unfortunately, he did not write about MAXIs so time wasted with SARI.

    Edited at 2014-08-13 10:46 am (UTC)

      1. Am sure that you are technically correct but one can dream . . . Apparently ‘cream-faced’ is a more recent bowdlerisation of the original that I won’t repeat. Anyway, I cannot think now courtesy of galspray’s contribution below!

        Edited at 2014-08-13 02:31 pm (UTC)

  8. About 20m for all but 25ac. A trawl through the alphabet for a word meaning either ‘saw’ or ‘garment’ failed to unearth MAXI, so I just bunged in the only thing I could think of, which was SARI. I choose to blame jet lag.
    No problems with 10ac, as I’ve been listening to the charming racket they make every evening for the last couple of weeks.
  9. Not having a whole lot of fun with the crossword at the moment – another 25 minute solve and another (double) typo to spoil the view. Might be beginning to see what Tony was talking about the other day about over complexity and such, though I hope for better days. Preferably before October.
    INCHMEAL should be taken outside and shot, though quietly for preference so no-one notices.
    Almost another SARI, but remembering the machine gun in time.
    Apropos of nothing in particular, does anyone know if Robin Williams was a crossword nut? His capacity for making wild verbal connections at lightning speed would suggest an affinity with the craft, but I can’t find any reference.

    Edited at 2014-08-13 11:40 am (UTC)

  10. No problem here with what I found an average puzzle that took 20 minutes to solve. Thought I might get a clean sweep until 19A stopped me. Then found the southern hemisphere a bit harder. Didn’t know INCHMEAL but like others worked from checkers and anagram.
  11. A rather slow 50-minute solve. I’m another who’s never heard of INCHMEAL, so had to wait for crossing letters before having the confidence to write it in. 13a rather stretches the meaning of ‘receptive to’ (ready to receive) to mean ‘having already received’, and 5d does more than stretch meaning – it tortures language. Even overlooking the liberal conjoining of ‘plastic’ and ‘coated’ into one hyphened word, the cryptic grammar surely requires “needing different plastic coating”.
  12. A tough 47′ here but thankfully finished. Held up by the short answers and forever by 5 dn. Clever clues without being amusing, I maybe unfairly thought.
  13. Timer didn’t work but I would say about 25 mins – I found this one particularly tough going and my old friend the Tippex bottle was well used today.
    1. Without wishing to sound too gloaty, I have to say that your time today comes as a bit of a relief, Sue. Your time on Monday (considerably faster than mine) definitely put the wind up me!
  14. Plus another half hour trying to parse EXONERATE.
    Nice bit of Anglo-Saxon in INCHMEAL, where the MEAL is from:
    “mǣlum, in the sense ‘measure, quantity taken at one time’”. (ODO).

    A puzzle with a strange mix of the obvious (CARDINAL; SLING) and the obscure (the clue, as mentioned, for EXONERATE; and the answer for, as mentioned, INCHMEAL).

    In between the two, my LOI, CREW. A seriously good clue.

      2. Been away walking this week so just starting to catch up; but could not pass by without saying what a wonderful pun that was, Galspray!
        Also surprised nobody has commented on what a lovely clue 14dn is, such a neat surface for a by no means easy word to clue
  15. 24 mins. Sorry to be picky Pip but Alban Berg wrote Lulu, which may explain why you don’t like it.
    1. Indeed, I could say it was a ‘who will spot it’ spoof but… there again I don’t like Bluebeard’s Castle either. Thanks Malc for the admonishment, I was winging it this morning in a hurry after the log man, won’t do that again!
  16. About 25 minutes here, and DNK INCHMEAL either, but in it went. I also confess that INCOMMODE isn’t familiar either. LOI was HONOLULU, and I couldn’t parse GOALIE, just threw it in, so thanks Pip for that. Regards.
  17. Enjoyed this in gaps in the day. Always good to complete unaided. Thanks for the explanation of lulu. Thought crew was a great clue and had a chuckle over skated over.
    I have only occasional fires (for the pleasing friendliness it gives to our north facing front room), chopped a couple of trees down a year or so ago and am still using up the logs.
  18. I too had never heard of INCHMEAL, but as it seemed close enough to piecemeal, it seemed fine as an anagram. I was caught for awhile by 12ac – took oddly to mean an anagram of astute, giving me statue. Took ages to realize it was wrong, but a lovely piece of misdirection!
  19. 11:02 for me, helped (though perhaps only a little, given the straightforward wordplay?) by knowing INCHMEAL.

    I wasted far too much time checking that I could justify some of the answers (BEDSIT, EXONERATE, …) even though I was pretty certain there weren’t any viable alternatives. (I actually gave up on EXONERATE, and it took me some time to work out the wordplay after I’d finished!)

    Although this was a little on the convoluted side, I enjoyed it very much – perhaps because today’s archive puzzle (from 1956) was a nice easy one, with the result that I was feeling a lot less tired than I was yesterday.

Comments are closed.