Times 25,899

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Back from my holidays (thanks to my new Tuesday oppo for covering as required) and I have to say this wasn’t necessarily the puzzle I was hoping to come back to. Things started well enough, but I spent a long time staring at several blanks before I managed to wrestle them into submission – more than one word here was on the edge of my knowledge, if not actually beyond it, and (unless I’m missing something) there was another irritating typo in a clue, which didn’t help. Maybe it was because I knew I had to blog, not just solve, but I wound up a bit fretful as a result, and finished up (after, for the record, 33 minutes) with the feeling I hadn’t enjoyed this anything like as much as usual. Let’s see if it’s just me.

Across
1 SOLDER – (Private) SOLDIER without the 1.
5 SUMERIAN – [ME(this writer), (AIR)rev] in the SUN.
9 AILSA CRAIG – AILS, A/C, [I in RAG]. Any followers of Open golf will be familiar with the island visible in the Forth of Clyde from the Turnberry course.
10 ASHY – A SHY=a try, and a tray would be ashy if it happened to be an ashtray. Though an ashtray isn’t really a “tray”, is it. I guess it can be in crossword land, which is good enough.
11 BARONAGE – [ON A] in BARGE.
12 AT HOME – FATHOMED.
13 CEDE =”SEED”. Presumably the “rarely” suggests that people don’t call their children their “seed” very often, rather than it being an uncommon word for “give up”.
15 IBERIANS – SIBERIAN is the Asian area, move the Succeeded from start to finish to get the Spanish and Portuguese.
18 VOLTAIRE – VOLume, (IRATE)*.
19 TOMB – OM(Order of Merit) inside T.B.
21 SEPTIC – SCEPTIC minus the Cold.
23 TITANATE – TIT is the bird, followed by AN ATE(Greek goddess of mischief).
25 PION – PISTON is the moving part, take away STone to get the subatomic particle.
26 PROMENADES – (NOMADPEERS)*.
27 PANCREAS – RomE inside PANCRAS. The martyred bishop St Pancras (who didn’t come from Rome, as it happens) is not to be confused with the other martyred St Pancras, who did come from Rome, and after whom the station is named. Not that this matters for crossword purposes, of course.
28 SATANG – SATAN(the great tempter) + Good. The Thai baht is divided into 100 satangs, making the 1 satang a pointlessly small coin. Not that I knew this before looking it up post-solve, as I had no idea what it was.
 
Down
2 ORIYA – reverse hidden in fridAY I ROlled. Once I’d worked out what it had to be from wordplay, it rang a faint bell, but I can find no appearance of it in the daily puzzle in recent times. It’s an Indian ethnic group and language, anyway.
3 DISHONEST – DISH(plate), ONE(I), SoughT.
4 RACIAL – A/C in RIVAL.
5 STAGE DIRECTIONS – (DECORATINGSETIS)*.
6 MAGDALEN – MAG(publication), [A Learner] in DEN. So, Merton yesterday, Magdalen today.
7 ROACH – BROACH.
8 AD HOMINEM – (HIMADEMON)*. Attacking an opponent personally rather than through strength of argument; playing the man, not the ball.
14 ESOTERICA – (ISEEACTOR)*.
16 INTENDANT – INTEND(mean), ANT(little worker); in my version of the Club puzzle, the definition is definitely “manger”, though I assume it should be “manager”. Pffft.
17 DISCIPLE – DISC(record), 1 PLEa.
20 ATHENS – THEN in AS, where As is Arsenic. I’m trying to think of a phrase where “then” is interchangeable with “again”, but I can’t quite find a convincing one.
22 TONIC – two meanings, one musical, one medicinal.
24 TOE-IN – (I.E.)rev. in TON(fashion). Another one where wordplay gave me the answer, but I had to look it up afterwards to discover that when vehicles are built “toe-in”, it means the front wheels point inwards, which seems logical.

47 comments on “Times 25,899”

  1. Welcome back, Tim, and having blogged three successive Tuesday puzzles I was very pleased not to be on duty for this one which went off the scale as far as solving time was concerned.

    I agree there’s an error at 16dn and have already posted a comment in the Club forum. I had no idea what TIE-IN was with reference to vehicle design and still don’t really understand it, to be honest. I can’t make any sense of ‘rarely’ at 13 or ‘then’ for ‘again’ at 20. ‘Then again…’ is common enough but that doesn’t make the two words synonymous.

    Other unknowns were ORIYA (my LOI), PION (though I’ve probably met it before here and forgotten it) and SATANG.

    Edited at 2014-09-23 01:30 am (UTC)

    2. I knew I’d met this before. It may have come up again since, but it previously occurred in puzzle 24910 in July 2011 clued as “Opera director”. It’s a title used widely on the continent apparently,also applied to theatre directors.
  2. I went offline at 31′, came back to it a few minutes ago, and finished after maybe 10′ more, but that included Googling the island, hoping there was an X CRAIG somewhere in Scotland. DNK ORIYA either, and I’ve already forgotten how I got it; probably running through the alphabet and then finally seeing the hidden. DNK SATANG, either, but at least there I was up to the wordplay. But I put in ‘tie-on’; it seemed OK at the time, and I’d never heard of a toe-in. I agree with Ulaca about ‘then’. Then again, we could be wrong.
    1. Now and then = now and again?

      I got the wordplay for TOE-IN immediately, but dismissed it as being far too ridiculous. And with the typo in 16dn and not thinking of Ate, goddess of mischief, I got entirely stuck in the SE corner.

      Edited at 2014-09-23 04:15 am (UTC)

  3. A mere 112 minutes for this, spread around a PowerPoint presentation. It was certainly a struggle and a bit Club Monthlyish, but I rather enjoyed working it all out. I can’t even claim that the typo held me up much, as I’d never heard of an intendant and in this puzzle thought nothing of one unknown word being defined by another.

    Went for TOE-IN over TIE-IN merely because the cryptic told me to, so was pleased to get my reward for once. Last in the Indian.

    I think a case can be made for again=then. Chambers and ODO both have ‘in addition/also’ as a meaning of then, with the example ‘Then there’s the cost to take into account’. I think we could substitute ‘again’ here.

    Edited at 2014-09-23 02:54 am (UTC)

  4. I finally got around to Googling Oriya, and sure enough, I knew the name, under an earlier spelling: Orissa. I had thought of putting in Orisa, but of course couldn’t make it fit the wordplay.
  5. 33’10” for this esoteric collection, which indeed had a Club Monthlyish feel to it, if with a low count on the top scoring Scrabble letters. It was the NW that caused most grief, maybe just because none of it went in straight away and so gave the impression that it was harder than it turned out to be.
    I didn’t spot the typo in 16, being more concerned that I’d never met an INTENDANT that wasn’t super. That plus the fact that the typo is one of the two most common CV spelling mistakes, as in “I posses good skills as a manger” neither of which are picked up my MS spellchecker.
    Scraped from the very bottom of the well of memory: SATANG (though I was in Thailand last year and have a few of the unspendable things) ORIYA, PION (have they run out of Greek letters to tag with -on yet?) and the Island, because I’ve never had to spell it before. Thanks (sort of) to setter for generous wordplay for these.
    I thought of the tray under a coal fire for the ASHY answer, though in retrospect I think that was an ash-pan. Not my CoD, anyway. Don’t think I’ve got one.
    1. If a CV contained the sentence “I posses good skills as a manger”, the applicant’s spelling would be the least of my concerns!
      1. Absolutely. It’s one of the things that makes weeding out duff CVs a far easier job than one might expect!
  7. A bit tortuous isn’t it – and not a lot of fun along the way

    I was depressed by 10A (what a tray could be – eh?) and never recovered. Then the very obscure ORIYA which I know as Odia. Finally, the typo was the icing on the cake. Roll on tomorrow.

  8. Unlike some I rather liked a certain quirkiness about this one, though held up a long time at the end by dishonest and then pancreas. An hour all told. Unaware of titanate, toe-in, satang. Good to see the finest Oxford college taking a bow, not that it was mine.

    Edited at 2014-09-23 09:14 am (UTC)

      1. As don – puts the college right down the list. As children’s author a different matter. (Ducking in advance.)
        1. I’d have it the other way round, but his Narnia books are probably more enjoyed by others than by me. (Incidentally, I added ‘as don’, since his college as a student was Univ.)
    2. St Pancreas may have been one of the Wave of Saints invading England in 1066 and All That.
  9. Found this a right slog, with a slew of unknowns – ORIYA, TOE-IN, INTENDANT, TITANATE, SATANG – though I really didn’t help myself by reading the enumeration of 5D as (10,5), which meant the many minutes I spent considering the letters on paper were entirely wasted. Unfortunately ASHY was one of the first ones I saw, which put me in a bad mood for the rest of the puzzle.
  10. Found this hard and it took a while to get started; took me just over three-quarters of an hour. Bought the compiler’s dummy at 10 and spent too long trying to think of a four-letter word to do with anagrams.

    Knew TOE-IN as Dad had a motorbike an sidecar (more of a box really which carried pigs, hens and ducks to market, while I sat on the pillion.) AILSA CRAIG was a variety of onion (an also a tomato) that he used to grow.

    While I’m in a nostalgic mood, the clue for 23 across reminded me of the picture on the side of a Cerebos Salt drum from those days showing an urchin trying to sprinkle salt on a hen’s tail. I wonder if the setter had that in mind.

  11. Not much fun, for all the reasons others have stated. Wasted much time on 16D until I eventually realised that a typo was the problem. ASHY was absurd and CEDE not much better. I was among those who didn’t like “then”=”again” at 20D, but on the basis of the examples quoted by Ulaca and Paul Heyes I’m prepared to give the setter the benefit of the doubt.
  12. I’m sure we had this sometime in the misty past (a year or more ago?) because I got it wrong then – flat out never heard of it so I remembered, just. Speaking of the misty past, I “did” the French Revolution for History A level and dredged up “intendant” from then. They were local officials of the Ancien Regime and no doubt oversaw the collection of the infamous salt tax, so “manger” wasn’t completely off the wall…. Magdalen was my dad’s alma mater.

    Edited at 2014-09-23 09:35 am (UTC)

  14. … that this was not appearing tomorrow; would have been a DNF blog for me. Didn’t know ORIYA, had to guess a couple from the wordplay, SATANG and SUMERIAN; was not impressed by ASHY and TITANATE as a titanium salt. Not a lot of fun, maybe I was just hung over.
  15. A very good workout this – 24 min to finish, fully parsed. Thought I would never get going until I was able to write in the long answer at 5d, and then steady progress thereafter. Found the loss of an A in 16d more than a little irritating, but did not cost me too much time.
    Some impressive clues, in my opinion, with 10a bringing a smile to my face when it finally clicked, after a tentative entry of ARTY earlier.
  17. Several hours for this and quite enjoyed it. I have stayed in Thailand many times and only today discovered the existence of a satang…..I thought it was just Baht and shrapnel. DNF as I didn’t know the Scottish Island,but the cryptic was obvious. Can your COD be the one that got away?

    Must confess I didn’t notice the misprint at 16dn and again the cryptic made the answer clear (as long as you could equate INTENDANT with AMNAGER)!

  18. Perhaps I was lucky, but I found this pretty straightforward and certainly didn’t experience the grief that some have expressed above. 30 minutes, which is about average for me. We’ve had a clue very much like 1ac recently, so that was an easy start. Its symmetrical partner was also a giveaway to someone who always has a few satang in his pocket (they’re worth about 1p). 2 was very familiar and 24 was no stranger either, as I worked in a garage in my university holiday periods.The long anagram at 5d was easy from the definition alone. I did have to think for a bit about 25 and 27, my last entries. Titanate was the only unknown, but the wordplay was clear enough.
  19. I confess DNF after about 90 minutes. 26 foi (the lonely across answer after scanning through those clues first) closely followed by 5 and 8 for the downers, but nothing connecting for quite some time. I got ASHY quite early, but didn’t believe it, and got TOE-IN but couldn’t convince myself why TON was fashion (I’m still not sure. Help needed!)

    ORIYA remained crossers only at the end, even though I had looked and seen the hidden answer – never heard of it or them. I’d tried for ages to think of a tribal name with ID in it somewhere, which slowed down the progress on the whole NW. Then the typo really scuppered me for a while, throwing me down the blind alley of INCENSANT (fitting with mean, but no obvious place for manger in the clue). This led me to consider COMA for 19 having earlier rejected TOMB.

    All quite a mess really, meaning I personally didn’t enjoy this one much.

  20. I abandoned ship around the 30 minute mark, various forgottens and unknowns making the south-west a fairly hopeless task. TITANATE AND TOE-IN both looked such unlikely words (to me) for a salt and an automative feature that I dismissed both when they crossed my mind. Oh well. Tomorrow, as they say, is Wednesday.
  21. 41m here, in a couple of goes. I did find it a real slog, but I rather enjoyed the challenge.
    A few unknowns today: AILSA CRAIG, TITANATE, SATANG, ORIYA. They were all gettable from the wordplay, but I would take issue with the setter’s use of the word ‘easily’!
    The NW was the hardest section, but my last in was PANCREAS. It took me an absolute age to see it, for some reason. I had no idea about the saintly bishop, but it should have been fairly obvious from the definition.

    Edited at 2014-09-23 03:22 pm (UTC)

  22. First in was ARTY at 10ac, so had problem in NE – after seeing misprint, got to wondering whether numeration at 8dn had gone wrong too and it was ANTI- something. The T excluded the possibility of an anagram)
    23ac was also a hold-up: Ate was obvious from ‘salt’, but couldn’t think of any 5-letter birds that worked.
  23. 41 mins. I was never on this setter’s wavelength, and the best examples of this were the clues for DISHONEST and INTENDANT where I thought there was much more going on than there actually was, although the misprint for the latter didn’t exactly help.

    It took me ages to see AILSA CRAIG despite having the C?A?G checkers early on, ORIYA was only vaguely known, and the TITANATE/TOE-IN crossers were my last ones in.

    Finally, I’m not sure why the setter felt the need to apologise for the MANGER misprint. Isn’t that the editor’s job?

  24. Managed to skate over the misprint as I knew the word and was generally happy with this one.

    Complete aside – good to see that the fine accounting technique of teeming and lading is still being used, mainly by Tesco it seems.

  25. Hi all. Took ages, probably about an hour, ending with the unknown TOE-IN after fighting through the other unknowns, which fighting was not ‘easily’ done, despite the setter’s description. I did get them all, though, showing, at least for me, they were doable. But it was not a cakewalk by any means. Regards.
  26. Stopped the clock at 40 minutes having dealt with a couple of phone calls in between wrestling with this. Like K, I rather enjoyed it and dawdled over PANCREAS at the end. Pencilled in VEIL instead of TOMB initially on the basis that 1) it was hidden (confined) and 2) the combination of ‘order’ and ‘confined’ spoke to me of nuns.
  27. I wonder if also the setter meant that if A is shy from TRAY then you get TRY. Nobody has mentioned this and it does say ‘A try’ not ‘Try’, but in Crosswordland ‘a something’ can equal ‘something’, so isn’t this yet another way of seeing the clue, something that if sound makes it rather nice in my opinion and not worth all the filth that has been flung at it?
    1. If that was intended it’s quite brilliant!
      For the record I for one didn’t mind the clue before.
  28. Ailsa Craig from the info given an impossible guess
    The Times has lost me, obviously I have become too stupid to attempt the nerw guy’s puzzles.
    What next, like the rest of the crap journalists, will he start putting reality stars as answers to the clues
    1. I don’t see anything impossible in working out AILS = troubles, AC = account, I = I and RAG = paper, and piecing these elements together in the correct order even if you don’t happen to know the name of the island . And that’s without checkers which make things easier still.

      Where is your evidence that things are moving towards your final assertion?

      Edited at 2014-09-23 09:58 pm (UTC)

  29. Finished this one in about 3.6 years, or so it felt. Actual time something like two hours, or about 12 Severs. (Which reminds me, where is he? Does he have an exeat?)

    SATANG was an unknown, but clearish from the wordplay. AILSA CRAIG* was half-remembered, though I’d have guessed she was a character from Doctor Finlay’s Casebook if pressed. INTENDANT (not withstanding the misprint) was unfamiliar, but I suppose there has to be something for a superintendant to be super over. Good to see PION and TITANATE holding up the banner for geekdom.

    (* Nice to see that Scotland has voted to remain English, by the way. Now that the matter of ownership has been cleared up, I think we should seriously consider selling Scotland to Norway.)

    Edited at 2014-09-23 11:44 pm (UTC)

    1. I’m not sure Norway would regard this as the purchase of an asset so much as the assumption of a liability. This is no slur on our Scottish cousins: the same would apply to the UK as a whole.
      1. I’m sure a good estate agent could make Scotland sound like an attractive purchase. “Open-plan multi-level property benefiting from extensive sea views, ample parking, and mooring for submarines. Ideal renovation opportunity. Included are a number of outbuildings, many with mains electricity.”
          1. That’s another aspect of the independence debate I never understood – all this argument over whether or not we should let Scotland have the pound. Personally, I’d be prepared to give them at least 50p if it means that much to them.
            1. 50p might have been quite generous compared to what a Scottish Groat would have bought you. Or a gross undervaluation. Depending on the oil price. Thank goodness we don’t really have to think about these things.

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