Times 25898 – Lord of Los Rings?

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
One or two lesser spotted words in an otherwise friendly Monday offering – a fine example of its type. 31 minutes. In a bit of a rush to get this out, as I need to be elsewhere for the next few hours. So please chat away and critique in the usual way.

I return to find I’ve made two typos, one at 1a and another at 15a. Happily, the first is absolutely spot on – Merton College is without dispute the finest in Oxford, while there does exist some doubt about which may claim the title of oldest. At 15a, alas, though I prefer the kindly epithet offered by cozzielex, I must accept that offered by the bluff Australian. I blame my alma mater for failing to equip me with the necessary Greek all those years ago.

Incidentally, times recorded on the Club site suggest this is by no means a gimme – Jason even took more than 6 minutes.

ACROSS

1. PALMERSTON – PAL + (S in MERTON – Oxford’s finest college celebrating its 750th anniversary this year) for the Victorian PM.
6. AHAB – A + [re]HAB – RE (‘about’) jumping ship from ‘addiction treatment’ – for the man who is to whaler captaincy what Bobby Moore is to England world cup winning captains.
9. CHARTREUSE – CHART to RE-USE; not a spirit or liqueur man myself, so never knowingly sampled this.
10. EDGE – DG in [b]EE[b].
12. CLERICAL COLLAR – more a quiz question than a clue, perhaps.
14. EXTEND – ‘make maximum use of’ is the literal; obtained by slotting ED (‘little’ because he’s an abbreviation rather than one of Ed, Edd and Eddy) around X (ten) + TEN.
15. OTOSCOPE OTISCOPE– a cryptic definition with not a homophone in earshot. This must be the one that tripped up so many on the Crossword Club leaderboard.
17. INCHMEAL – INCH + MEAL; this is easy enough if you know that ‘inch’ is a small island, and can deduce by analogy with piecemeal that inchmeal must mean inch by inch.
19. STAT(U)E.
22. ORDINARY SEAMAN – because his abbreviation is OS.
24. TWIG – a double definition; does ‘twig’ really denote ‘beginning’ to understand though?
25. ADHESIVELY – anagram* of HEAVY SLIDE.
26. RE(E)F.
27. PROPAGANDA – sounds like ‘proper’ + [u]GANDA.

DOWN

1. PI(C)T – still seen today dressed in kilts, orange wigs and face paint.
2. LEAF+LET.
3. ENTHRONEMENT – the literal is ‘installation’ in case you’ve forgotten – so long since we had one. The wordplay is as elaborate as the garb a crownee must assume: E (English) + NT (books of the Bible) about [NORTH* (‘new north’) + E (‘east’) + MEN (‘folks’)] .
4. SKETCH – S (quarter) + KETCH (John/Jack Ketch was Charles II’s rottweiler, AKA hangman).
5. OBSOLETE – OBE around (SOLE + T [‘thegns originally’]).
7. HIDALGO – I learn from ODO that this is derived from hijo de algo, meaning ‘son of something’; I however got it by racking my brain thinking ‘Now what is the name of that film Viggo Mortensen did after LOTR?’; the wordplay is HID (‘holed up’) + (L in AGO). Not a reversal in sight.
8. BLEARY-EYED – [King] LEAR in BY followed by a sound-alike of IDE.
11. HORSE-TRADING – the setter had warmed up CD-wise by the Downs; every racegoer knows that bay is what a horse is when it isn’t chestnut, grey or brown.
13. HELICOPTER – CHEER PILOT*.
16. LABRADOR – A + BR (British Rail) + AD (poster) all inside LOR (‘my’ – COR’s twin brother, flippin’ ’eck, gov!)
18. CODEINE – (E + DOC) reversed + IN + E.
20. TRADE-IN – the keys of D and E in TRAIN.
21. ASLEEP – LEE in ASP; two chestnuts roasting by an open fire?
23. MYRA – RA (‘Royal Artillery’) supporting MY (‘this writer’s) to give a girl I know only from Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge, which I haven’t read.

35 comments on “Times 25898 – Lord of Los Rings?”

  1. U, 15ac is OTOSCOPE. Not that I’m trying to sound clever, I made exactly the same mistake myself.

    Nice to see that great minds think alike, even the pedestrian ones.

    Edited at 2014-09-22 02:30 am (UTC)

  2. Allowing for interruptions, still would have been well over the hour. Not in great form today.

    At the risk of labouring last month’s very bad pun, it’s nice to see two Moby Dick characters in the same crossword.

    1. As you can see we posted at the same time so I didn’t see your note to Ulaca.

      I must say I would have expected you and most of the other regulars to be coming in at under the 15 minute mark with this one, but as you say, you are not in the best of form. On the other other hand you might want to spare a thought for Alex Salmond who is probably not having the best of Mondays either.!

      Anyway hope your day gets better

  3. I didn’t get much pleasure from this rather too easy, even for a Monday, puzzle, and this from someone who rarely comes in under the hour anyway!

    The w/e puzzles at least presented something of a challenge, in fact yesterday’s offering occupied most of my Sabbath and was great fun (especially 9ac & 12ac), but this was mostly nonsense; e.g. what was 6ac doing in The Times cryptic? And I can’t see A Turing and the lads at BP tearing their hair out trying to unravel 13dn. Well, I can only hope the quick puzzle is more of a challenge.

    When you return Ulaca, you have a typo at 15ac, it should be OTOSCOPE

    Edited at 2014-09-22 03:43 am (UTC)

    1. You didn’t say how long you took today, but if you rarely finish in under an hour, then I’m putting you down as a beginner. As someone rather more experienced – significantly faster, anyway – I can assure you that 6ac is a perfectly respectable Times crossword clue. And in general clues in the daily Times cryptic are aimed at typical Times readers rather than the Bletchley Park brigade.
  4. Is Bobby Moore the sole captain of a winning England world cup team? That’s what I’m assuming, since Ahab pretty much fits the whaling equivalent. We had INCHMEAL quite recently, which is the only reason I got it this time. And I suppose many of you know Thurber’s story of the very proper gander who was hounded out of town because someone (perhaps a setter) heard it as ‘propaganda’ (hence red, etc.). I had the same doubt as Ulaca about TWIG; I thought it was more like satori. All in all, I think I agree with cozzielex.
    1. Football, yes, and that’s what most people mean when they talk about the world cup.

      (Martin Johnson captained the England rugby team to a storming victory over the Green and Yellows – plus the ref – in 2003, but that hardly counts, as only a fraction of the world’s nations play rugby at anything approaching the same level.)

  5. The majority of my answers went in without much thought for wordplay. I was surely heading for sub-20 solve today but I was let down by two or three stragglers, most notably 3dn my LOI. I came home in 32 minutes eventually

    As alluded to by Kevin and Galspray above, INCHMEAL appeared only last month on 13th August in puzzle 25864 when very few contributors had heard of it.

    I wonder if 1dn here and in today’s Quickie are a coincidence.

    Edited at 2014-09-22 08:18 am (UTC)

  6. Not much to add, really, on a friendly Monday offering.

    You have a typo in 1ac, ulaca; I think you must mean “oldest” not “finest” 😉

  7. After a good week last week, disappointingly back to my slapdash ways this week, throwing in COAST TRADING at 11D and ignoring the nagging doubt.

    Other than that I was quite happy with completing this in 35 minutes.

  8. Mostly easy but the last few held me up, I wanted 23d to be META so 25a ending in a Y took a while to sort out. 35 minutes all told. I am familiar with the OTOSCOPE.
    I liked 27a, once I’d ruled out it ending in -ENEGAL.

    Oxford’s Finest is of course Christ Church, Merton being a lesser jewel but with convenient access to our back garden AKA The Meadow.

    1. True story… in 1966 (I think, maybe 67) HM The Queen visited Ch Ch to open the new Picture Gallery. A dozen or so of us who were roomed adjacently were lined up, be-gowned and slightly less scruffy than usual, to form a meet and greet opportunity. HM came along the line, stopped at a chap (now a very honoured member of the judiciary) and said ‘… and how long have you been here?’ to which our man replied, ‘just since the rain stopped, Ma’am.’
  9. 11m. Gentle stuff.
    Nice to see an appearance by what is without doubt Oxford’s finest college.
    1. A fellow I knew once was on vacation in China, and at some temple or other he came across a hapless Chinese tour guide being questioned by a middle-aged American tourist: “Now, you’re sure this is the most beautiful temple in China?”
      1. Reminds me of the matronly US tourist who accosted a uniformed official (I think a Bulldog) outside of one of Oxford’s oldest and asked “Excuse me, can you tell me if this building is pre-war?” The rather curt replay was “Madam, this building is pre-America!”

        Or has everyone heard that one?

        1. I haven’t heard that one, no. Of course in the case of Merton the answer could have been ‘yes madam, it does indeed predate the Hundred Years War’.
        2. Closer to (my) home is the tale of the US tourist who agreed that Windsor Castle was a fine edifice but questioned why they built it under the Heathrow flightpath.

          Edited at 2014-09-22 10:41 am (UTC)

          1. Post London 2012 I would have thought the answer was obvious: so that Her Majesty might conveniently parachute into the back garden. Honestly, some people just don’t stop to think, do they.
  10. Missed my half-hour target by a couple of minutes, mainly because of the girl’s name. I wrote RYMA (“my” up in RA) half recalling W.H. Hudson’s Rima from Green Mansions, which I read years ago.

    On visiting this site, I was mortified by my inability to spot MYRA; Googling RYMA, I discovered there is such name, meaning “white beauty” or “white antelope”.

    Doesn’t surprise me, though; it seems as though almost any word, no matter how absurd or obscene, has been used as a name. Levitt and Dubner in their book “Freakonomics” describe some poor child being given a name that would be too offensive to write here, but which was apparently pronounced She Taid. (Also, incidentally its anagram.)

  11. Sub 40 minutes for me, a rare occurrence indeed. Held up by PICT (loi!).

    Coupled with my footie team beating MUFC 5-3 yesterday, and completion of yesterday’s stinker of a cryptic (like Cozzielex, it took me a good while to get there), a great start to the week.

    If only my rugger team hadn’t let the side down quite so badly!

  12. 16 mins. If I had seen PALMERSTON straight away (like I should have done) I’d have been quicker. As it was the NW took a while to untangle and EXTEND was my LOI after ENTHRONEMENT.
  13. Fairly straightforward Monday fare, taking 25 minutes, but I forgot to check OTISCOPE, so a wrong entry there, and almost a wrong entry for 23, since ‘holding up’ suggested a container reversal. As John says above, almost anything counts as a name these days, except in France, where they are very strict about such matters.
  14. Like John I considered RYMA for quite a while before remembering Hindley. Myra was probably always an unusual name, but since the Moors Murders in the 60s surely no child has been called this, at least in Britain. Strange how an unusual name becomes affected like this – there are still plenty of people called Ian.

    Edited at 2014-09-22 01:03 pm (UTC)

  15. 16:05 but, no doubt due in part to my well-publicised lack of a classical education, I went for otiscope. Bloody foreigners. How do they get from otic to otos-?

    Last three in were extend, enthronement and the Spaniard. I didn’t know the Ketch fella.

    Ulaca, there’s a far more (in)famous Myra than the one you cite but the least said the better

    COD to chartreuse which I think we’ve had before but it’s still clever.

  16. There’ll have been a few Myras since Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ was published. Just nicked under the quarter-hour today though a bit 8. An entertaining Monday flourish to introduce a no doubt more challenging week. I think ‘twig’ is OK for that leap of understanding that precedes laying it out in words.
  17. Not too easy for me Cossielex. It’s nice for slower minds to be able to finish some fairly easily now and again. This took me almost an hour with the common error of OTISCOPE. Enthronement LOI for no reason that I can see now but then that is so often the case for me. Thanks for the parsing of Labrador which I could not see: must try to remember the LOR word.
  18. Not easy for me, close to an hour, LOI being ENTHRONEMENT. I can’t offer any real good reason why it took so long, but it did. DNK Ketch, but I believe I saw everything else. Except LOR, of course. Regards to all.
  19. 19 mins for me, with LABRADOR my last one in. Must own up to be another of the OTISCOPE brigade.
  21. 10:16 for me – desperately slow, but considering how tired I feel it could well have been even slower!

    A pleasant, straightforward start to the week.

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