Times 25876 – much to 11ac on

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
After a poor night’s sleep with one less molar after yesterday’s appointment, this took me a scary 38 minutes and at times I wondered if it was going to be my ‘nemesis blog’, having had lucky escapes so far. The bottom half went in quite fast but the rest, apart from 1ac, was like pulling teeth. Well, not that bad. Even now some of the parsing (8ac, 22ac) is going to be fine tuned (hopefully) as I write, so sharpen your metaphorical pencils.

Across
1 BOLUS – LOB = shot up, reversed, US. A small mass of chewed food about to be swallowed, or a large veterinary pill.
4 CHARLOCK – CHAR = cleaner, LOCK = hair, a plant of the mustard family, I had vaguely heard of it.
8 ROBOTIC DANCING – I had to get all the checkers before convincing myself this was right. Def. ‘posey jerks’, as explained in first comment, it’s an anagram (BIN ACCORDING TO)*. Doh!
10 HOLY SMOKE – Amusing cryptic def. Expression used to show surprise; also a 1999 movie with Kate Winslet, worth a watch.
11 MUNCH – Double def., MUNCH = feed, and Edvard again, the chap who painted four versions of The Scream in 1893.
12 ANTHEM – NT = books, inside AHEM = attention-seeker, def. a number (i.e. tune) of patriots. A Doh! moment when I eventually saw it.
14 FIRETRAP – PARTER, (one escaping), IF, all reversed, def. potential killer.
17 SHOCKING – SING = talk, around HOCK = wine, shocking wine is likely to be spat out.
18 DEIMOS – DEMOS = recordings by new artist, around I. Def. satellite. I knew this because I’m into astronomy; Deimos is the smaller of Mars’s two moons, a pathetic 12 km across, just a big rock, the other one is Phobos. You knew that. If not, see Wiki, it’s interesting.
20 IDLER – RIDER = one on saddle, drop the initial R, insert the L, def. bum.
22 PEPPERONI – IN O (popular opinion initially, reversed) after PEP = go PER = by; def. meat product.
24 SPECTATOR SPORT – (POTTER ACTORS)* retaining SP = betting, indicator for anagram ‘harry’, def. Quidditch, say. Good stuff.
25 SPROCKET – SOCKET (eyeball place) around PaRt, def. tooth. Thanks setter, for the reminder.
26 SHEER – SHE = lady, ER = queen, def. very fine.

Down
1 BIRTHDAY SUIT – Amusing cryptic def.
2 LIBEL – LIB = party, E, L, ends of statE triaL, def. defamation.
3 SO TO SPEAK – Sounds like SEW, TO SPEAK; def. as it were.
4 CUCKOO – Double def. Nuts as in potty, batty.
5 ACADEMIC – Well, a college is academic, and academic can mean not of practical importance; a sort of double def.
6 LOCUM – LUM is a mainly Scottish word for a chimney; insert CO (carbon monoxide, poisonous gas) reversed; def. substitute.
7 CONUNDRUM – CON = against, UN = outside letters of UmpteeN, DRUM = something to beat; def. challenger, not unlike this puzzle.
9 SHAPE-SHIFTER – (FRESH PHASE IT)*, def. being capable of change. Harry Potter echoes here, although the notion is widespread in mythology.
13 TOODLE-PIP – (PILED)* = piled high, surrounded by TO OP, def. I’m off, as Bertie Wooster might say. No Pip jokes please, I’ve heard them all.
15 ELEVENSES – EVEN, inside ELSE = (in) other (circumstances), then S = final letter of circumstances; def. break.
16 KNAPSACK – SPANK = hit, reversed, then (B)ACK = the rear not the top; def. carrier.
19 SPROUT – The author is PROUST, move the S to first place; def. grow. I tried A la recherche du temps perdu, in French then in English, and gave up on both. Anyone called Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was likely to be too big a read for me.
21 RECTO – A hidden answer clue at last. Reversed in PL(OT CER)TAINLY, def. page, the RH one.
23 OZONE – Time for some dodgy chemistry. OZ = lightweight, ONE is the atomic number of hydrogen. Ozone, O3, is an allotrope of oxygen, O2, not the same thing, although both are molecules made of oxygen atoms; I (and the chap in Dorset) will have to allow the inexactitude.

44 comments on “Times 25876 – much to 11ac on”

  1. Very enjoyable for me. Not a good time, but I’m listening to the very tense Arsenal/Besiktas game too. (Although I’m a Tottenham follower, I’m not a Gooner hater).
    Did not parse ‘pepperoni’, and solved ‘Deimos’ from the wordplay rather than knowledge.
    I suppose that a sprocket is a part with teeth, but I was misdirected as, no doubt, the setter intended.
    Thanks for the blog.
  2. There’s also an instance (non proper noun) in today’s Quickie – weirdo
  3. 14:38 for me. Like others I started very slowly, but then got going, until I became bogged down with DEIMOS at the end: I spent far too much time a) imagining the I was going to go between the M and the S, and b) trying to think what on earth “recordings by new artist perhaps” could be. Annoyingly as soon as I tried putting the I between the E and the M, I thought of the answer immediately from the definition.

    Another very fine puzzle – my compliments to the setter once again. That’s three highly enjoyable puzzles already this week.

  4. To be precise, both O2 (strictly, dioxygen) and ozone, O3, are allotropes of oxygen – which is the atom, not the molecule. I wasn’t keen on the clue, as ozone is the heavier of the two molecules, so not lightweight. In the last couple of decades, some more exotic allotropes have been isolated, including O4 (hypothesized but not discovered as oxozone a hundred years earlier), and O8, a metallic form. Doubtless these will turn up in some future puzzles.

    Malcolm Oliver

    1. You are correct of course, Malcolm; I didn’t want to over-complicate matters for non-chemists, only point out that ozone is not the same as oxygen. The lightweight bit is nothing to do with O2 / O3, it’s the derivation of the OZ part of the answer.

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