Times 25924

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
This pleasant puzzle, about 6 on my Richter Scale, took me 24 minutes, of which at least 5 was spent trying to parse my LOI 5dn. I think we have it sorted now. Someone will tell us how many times we have seen the answer for 12ac recently; it must win the award for the most crossword-ed African country.

Across
1 DISCONCERTED – DISC (recording) ONCE (previously) R(A)TED; def. all shook up.
8 HOSANNA – ANNA (obsolete currency) then SOH (note), all reversed; Glory be, indeed.
9 COCKPIT – COCK (mate), PIT (depression), def. enclosure for driver.
11 MOANING – (J)OAN instered in MING; def. whining.
12 ERITREA – (RETIRE)*, A(rea); def. country.
13 EXTOL – EX (former) then LOT (group) reversed; def. applaud.
14 MOUSETRAP – MO (modus operandi, working method), (PASTEUR)*; def. cheese. In my considerable experience, mice much prefer biscuits on their traps.
16 MEDICINES – MEDICI (Italian family), NES(S); def. drugs. Easier than I thought it was going to be at first read.
19 BERYL – Hidden reversed in FOL(LY REB)UILT; a semi-precious stone composed of beryllium aluminium cyclosilicate; trace impurities give it various colours, emerald is a green variety.
21 SIGN OFF – SIGN (clue), OFF (taken out, e.g. off the menu); def. end message.
23 AFRICAN – FR (father) inside A CAN (first class, preserve); def. from the continent.
24 CHAOTIC – CHAT (discussion) with O (old) ‘captive’, IC (in charge); def. anarchic. I feel sure I’ve seen this before.
25 LIQUIDS – LI QUIDS = 51 pounds; def. flowers. I feel sure I’ve seen this before too, maybe with a different definition.
26 NEUROSURGEON – N (new) EUROS (money from Brussels), URGE ON (stimulate); def. medic.

Down
1 DESCANT – DECANTS (is draining) has the S ‘ascending’; def. Higher air.
2 SUNDIAL – STUN (KO) with T removed, then DIAL (call); def. timekeeper outside. What a charming clue.
3 ORANGEMAN – OMAN (state) around RANGE (mountains); def. Protestant marching.I’d love to use this opportunity to say what I think of the ‘marching’ phenomenon, but I’d better not.
4 CACHE – CACHET (standing) has the T reduced, def. treasury perhaps.
5 RECEIVE – Odd bit of credit = CEI, inside EVER (at any time) ‘upset’, def. get. Took me a while to get it, too, even though I had the bits.
6 EMPEROR – PER (for each) inside (MORE)*, def. ruler.
7 CHAMBER MUSIC – Whimsical cryptic definition.
10 TRAMPOLINIST – TRAMP (down-and-out) then VIOLINIST with the VI (half a dozen) removed; def. fancy jumper.
15 UNSTABLER – UN (peacekeepers), STABLER (groom perhaps); def. less settled, more unstable. I’ve never seen this comparative used but I see no reason why not.
17 DEGRADE – D (democrat), (AGREED)*; def. humble, as a verb.
18 CROFTER – CR (vacated car), OFTER (archaic word for more frequently); def. self-sufficient Scot. I’m resisting the temptation for another political remark.
19 BAROQUE – BARQUE (craft, boat), has O (nothing) in it; def. elaborate.
20 RUCTION – RU (game, rugby union), (A)CTION; def. shindig. An odd word, shindig, so I looked up its etymology; not crystal clear, but possibly from a (self-sufficient) Scot’s word sinteag meaning leap or jump about.
22 FOCUS – CO (care of) F (following), ‘up’, then US; def. hub.

39 comments on “Times 25924”

  2. Quite tricky I thought this one for a toughish 25 minutes solve. I loved some of the succinct and often well hidden definitions.

    Very glad I wasn’t blogging this – as you say 3D and 18D present ample opportunity to cause trouble, something I’ve always found difficulty in resisting!

  3. Pleasant ramble. Agree with unexpressed sentiments re 3dn. As a child I watched them doing it through Hoylake each year on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, and a grim lot they looked.
    Re shindig, this article from the excellent World Wide Words gives as much background as there is
  4. 31 minutes for a quality offering. I always like a subtle definition so I enjoyed “timekeeper outside” for sundial, “cheese” for mousetrap and indeed just “get” for receive.
  5. Took me a while to get into this one but finished in 20 minutes. Some nice definitions, surfaces, charades and I was even happy to meet our old friends ANNA and MING. Anybody else waste time taking the J out of Meiji? I see Sotira is again adjacent to FunnyBunny on the club leaderboard, as she usually is here.
  6. 18:25 .. took a long while to see the parsing of DISCONCERTED which led to prevarication and some generalised faffing in the northeast. Otherwise a fairly smooth solve.

    My thanks to the setter for helping me not to spell it ’emporer’.

  7. 14 mins. The amusing MOUSETRAP was my FOI and I really enjoyed this puzzle. I finished the bottom half much quicker than the top half because it took me much longer than it should have done to realise 1ac was a charade, and the penny only dropped when I saw recording=disc. After that ORANGEMAN, SUNDIAL and DESCANT were my last three in, in that order.
  8. 40 minutes with 1dn, 2 and 13 as my last ones in and causing me some problems. I failed to parse 1dn having convinced myself that the starting point was ‘desiccant’ to which I needed to do something to arrive at DESCANT.

    At 19dn I was helped by a very similar clue within the past day or two which caught me out, but not this time. And RUCTION came up on Countdown yesterday as the only word worth finding in a particular selection.

    Edited at 2014-10-22 08:31 am (UTC)

    1. That young guy who just won Countdown 8 times is a bit good, isn’t he? I certainly didn’t know many of the words he came up with now, let alone at his age.

      Edited at 2014-10-22 08:55 am (UTC)

      1. He wasn’t all that young for Countdown considering there have been one or two Octochamps who were still actually children – one called Conor springs to mind from a few years ago. I think this one was at university or certainly of that sort of age, but come to think of it I don’t think we were ever told how old he is. He didn’t come across as among the most modest of gifted competitors and this led to a number of adverse comments in the places where such things are discussed by viewers.

        Edited at 2014-10-22 09:42 am (UTC)

    2. Jack, I was also a bit iffy about decant = drain; when I decant my wine I leave the solids behind, so I suppose I am draining the solids. I can’t think of a better way to parse it, yet, though.

      Edited at 2014-10-22 08:35 am (UTC)

  9. 18m. I found this a bit of a struggle for some reason: there was nothing I didn’t know apart from this meaning of ‘shindig’. ‘Drain’ for DECANT is a little bit loose but close enough for me.
  10. This was a bottom-up solve for me as nothing yielded in the top half on first pass. Hadn’t come across that meaning of MOUSETRAP before.
  11. 39 minutes – liked DISCONCERTED.

    Re the marching phenomenon, the 18-year-old CS Lewis (born in Belfast, of course) writes of his ‘repulsion to noisy drum-beating, bullying Orange-men’. 40 years later, in his book An Experiment in Criticism, he lumps Orangemen together with witch-hunters and the Ku Klux Clan as examples of groups that ‘can become dangers as great as those they were formed to combat’.

    1. Interesting that he saw what the KKK were formed to oppose as a danger as great as themselves.
      2. He comes out strongly against witch-hunts (all religious intolerance, actually) in his magnum opus ‘English Literature in the Sixteenth Century’ – and elsewhere – and shows his disapproval of the KKK in his diary (kept in his 20s), so what he means here is danger in the eye of the beholder, i.e. what the witch-hunters and the Klansmen considered dangerous.
  12. 27.47 after a block at the end due to writing in ‘discomforted’. Merely prepositionally speaking, in 3 ‘from’ might have been ‘off’, if one were to overstep the bounds of propriety.
  13. Pip, I assume you saw my comment before I decided to withdraw it. I think it may still be worth saying that none of the usual sources lists decant/drain directly.
      1. Thanks for confirming that. A thesaurus is useful as a general reference but they tend to cast their net a little wider than most dictionaries when it comes to shades of meaning, so some around here are reluctant accept a thesaurus entry on its own as proof that meanings actually correspond.

        I did have some doubts earlier about drain/decant but then I thought of several examples in which they could be substituted in a sentence without changing its meaning and decided to delete that part of my comment.

  14. I thought the currency was a crossword ‘old friend’. A couple of head-scratchers but nothing too onerous – if the lovely person that I met on Saturday (sorry I have forgotten your name) is still aiming for a ‘double Sue’ he will need to have achieved between 15 and 16 minutes today.
  15. Took a fair time for this one, and had to finish it when I came in, ending with several in the top half. DECANTS and SUNDIAL were my two last. All parsed and understood. Eventually.

    Really enjoyed this one, and was determined to finish. Found it tough working out several cryptics, but where the definition was disguised, this was the only way in.

  16. 13:43, a rather pedestrian solve rescued by a flurry at the end wherein disconcerted and cache were the last to fall. I had 5 clues unparsed which went in on def and checkers.

    I don’t think I knew the old currency and thanks to Pip for coming up with a good example of a case where off and taken out can mean the same.

    Edited at 2014-10-22 11:54 am (UTC)

  17. …after way too many beers. Must have been an easy one. Or maybe I should drink more often.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

  18. Ugly!! Surely ‘unstable’ is absolute and can not therefore be more so. The comparative of stable can be only ‘less stable’

    John Mck

    1. The convention is that if a word is in one of the standard source dictionaries then it’s fine for crossword purposes and any complaints should go to the dictionary compilers rather than the setter. Collins and Chambers don’t have UNSTABLER but it’s in the Concise Oxford and Oxford English dictionaries along with ‘unstablest’. Rather interestingly neither is in the larger two-volume Shorter Oxford.
  19. Unusually, I attacked both crosswords today and happy to have ended up completing this one unaided. I only mention my ‘around the hour mark’ time to encourage any others that may think they’re alone in not solving within 20 minutes or so.
    Pip – I note your comment in 18dn. I wonder if you may be interested in today’s Quick clue at 6dn. I think it may be fairly common practice to erroneously associate an Aran jumper with Scotland as the setter did.
    1. Well spotted. I don’t usually do the quickie except when blogging it but have just taken a look at today’s online. Having lived in Dublin for 10 years at one stage, I would not have confused the Aran Islands with the Isle of Arran, as our setter did!
      1. I think much of the confusion is caused by the fact that, especially in the pre Internet days, in England at any rate you wouldn’t often see Aran in writing, just hear it talked about. ‘Arran’ approximates much better phonologically to what we hear than ‘Aran’, which would be pronounced ceteris paribus by most Brits much like ‘Arab’ is pronounced in dialectal American English. So an easy mistake to make when you come to set a clue.
  20. A rare morning commuter trip to London meant that it was treeware today and the time must have been about 20 mins as I bought the tree on Twyford station and had done it by Hayes and Harlington on the fast train. As said before, so much easier with a pen than poking about on a screen or a keyboard

    Edited at 2014-10-22 07:11 pm (UTC)

  21. Did this over a late lunch and thought it was rather good, very few fell immediately, but everything made crystal clear sense with very tight wordplay. Nice one, setter!
  22. 41 minutes here, with the last 15 spent in a state of word-blindness over UNSTABLER (which, I agree, is an uggerly word). I also failed to parse DESCANT (the closest I got was some manipulation of “dessicant”). But apart from that, this was an enjoyable puzzle and a steady solve.

  23. 9:21 for me, so slightly better than the last couple of days – but I still made ridiculously heavy weather of some easy clues.

    A most enjoyable puzzle. I raise my hat to the setter.

  24. I thought that I was going to struggle greatly to finish this one, but worked through steadily and things fell into place nicely, if not especially quickly.
    I agree that ‘unstabler’ is an uggerly word, and wasn’t too sure about the ‘off’ part of 21a, but, overall, a most enjoyable puzzle, so much appreciation to setter and blogger.
  25. By coincidence, 4ac in my archive Times crossword for today (No. 11,675 from 20 October 1967) is “The plumber’s turn to check mate? (8)”.

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