TIMES 25928 – The City of My Ancestors

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 75 minutes

Music: Mingus Ah Um

As you can see, I was quite slow on this one, and I suspect it is at least moderately difficult. There was definitely some clever stuff that is hardly typical of an ‘easy Monday’, if such a thing still exists any more.

I found the difficulty of the puzzle somewhat annoying, as I was tired and had to wait until 8 PM to start owing to the reversion to GMT in the UK. Consequently, I was unable to appreciate the setter’s wit as well as I would have liked. Several of the answers were
bunged in unparsed, but I am pretty sure I am all correct.

Across
1 STRIP, S + TRIP, one of the two ridiculously easy clues I solved at sight.
4 IMPORTANT, I(M(PORT)AN)T. A well-misdirected literal will have everyone thinking the final ‘it’ is what we are searching for, but not so.
9 ALTERCATE, A L([e]TERC)ATE, yes, CRET[e] backwards. The word seems like a back-formation, but probably isn’t.
10 SCORE, double definition, where a ‘score’ is a written record of the notes.
11 BANANA, BAN + ANA, where a ‘hand’ is a group of, er, bananas.
12 LEMONADE, anagram of OLD MEN A + E[nergy].
14 RESTRAINT, RES(TRAIN)T. Perfectly simple, but for a long time I was looking for something along the lines of TE(xxxx IS)T. You can make ‘terrorist’, but that doesn’t fit either cryptic or the literal.
16 DOILY, D[-a +O]ILY, a relatively simple letter-substitution clue.
17 URALS, [m]URALS.
19 CHARACTER, triple definition.
21 HEADLAND, HEAD LA(N)D.
22 VIBIST, VI(BIS)T, where the container is an anagram of ITV. Not a word you use every day, but the cryptic should guide you to the answer.
25 AMIGO, AM I GO[d]? Corrected from ‘imago’, which would be a boast by Zeus rather than self-doubting question.
26 AT THE HELM, A TT + HE + HE + L + M. A rather elaborate cryptic, which I needed to avoid ‘at the head’.
27 REMEDYING, R.E.M.E. + DYING. I did not expect to see ‘dying’ with ‘death’ in the clue, but the obscure soldiers made the cryptic difficult….until I tried them!
27 TAPAS, TAP + [b]A[r]S, with ‘milk’ as a rather generalized verb.
 
Down
1 SCARBOROUGH FAIR, SCAR + BO[y] ROUGH + FAIR, where a ‘scar’ is a large exposed rock, so the literal is simply ‘song’.
2 RAT ON, [custome]R + A TON. I wasted a lot of time trying to make ‘run in’ work.
3 PARTNER, RENT + RAP upside-down.
4 IRAN, RANI with the ‘I” moved to the top – the favorite queen of US puzzle constructors.
5 PRESENT DAY, PRESENT + D[erisor](A)Y.
6 RESPOND, anagram of PONDERS. I carelessly entered ‘respons’ and got into difficulties.
7 AMORALIST, A M(ORAL)IST.
8 THE NEW YORK TIMES, anagram of THEY STRIKE WOMEN, a cruel canard against The Grey Lady. Paging Maureen Dowd!
13 CINCINNATI, C IN C + IN NATI[on]. I put this in, couldn’t justify it, erased it, and finally saw it. A brilliant cryptic!
15 SHAMANISM, SHA(MAN[t]IS)M. ‘Mantis’ is the regular classical Greek word for ‘priest’.
18 SALFORD, hidden in [apprai]SAL FOR D[ons]. Only vaguely familiar over here in the US, but it seemed likely enough. Ranked 84th out of 114 UK Universities, according to the Wikipedia.
20 ALIMENT, A(LIME)NT.
23 ICE UP, sounds like ‘EYE SUP’.
24 STAG, S + TAG, the second very easy clue.

55 comments on “TIMES 25928 – The City of My Ancestors”

  1. I’d love to comment, but the Times has finally chucked me out. The “Merchant Cancelled” message is all I get. So I guess this is the Last Post. (Cue bugler.) If alanw11 is on, he might like to check his LJ messages.

    Vale mctext until then.

    Edited at 2014-10-27 02:46 am (UTC)

    1. Sorry to see you go, Mct, if this really is the end. I realize a number of people have a principled objection to paying Murdoch so much more; but as Jess (Big Daddy) Unruh, the former leader of the California State Assembly, once said, there are times when one must rise above principle.
      1. “Murdoch” happens to be the university that no longer pays me for my work. It was named after Professor Walter Murdoch — a great man who would never have denied fair pay for fair work. Or, indeed, would have denied access to anything on the basis of capacity to pay. Which I now don’t. A man ahead of his Times.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Murdoch

    2. You can’t leave, McT. Where we gonna find another guitarist?

      Seriously, it will be a great shame if you can no longer comment here. I hope you can find a way around the issue, or your university starts paying up. I’m sure everyone here would be happy to write them a stern letter if that would help.

      1. I can see the letter now …

        Dear Professor Caplin [the gal who sacked me]
        I’m sure Alec is a great PhD supervisor. But even if he’s not, he can snigger with the best of them on Times for the Times.
        Yours sincerely …

        Still … thanks for your kind words.

        Alec

  2. In 10a, the two meanings of ‘score’ derive from the same root, the scoring in a game of cricket origianally being done by carving a notch in a piece of wood. No music involved here, I think. And at 15, ‘prayer’ references the praying mantis.

    I wanted to spell the paper mat with two Ys, but I see that that is only the way you spell the impresario who brought us G&S.

    LOI the hidden at 18d (as so often); COD to REMEDYING. Not too tough for me, as my dad did his National Service with REME.

    Edited at 2014-10-27 02:45 am (UTC)

  3. I did my best not to see (m)any answers while posting this. I’m feeling frustrated, because I cannot get this puzzle to appear at the CrosswordClub site. I like to work it on paper, but it’s not coming up to work online either. Can’t be my browser or computer, as I’ve tried at least two of each.
    1. Guy – this was happening to a lot of people (including me) yesterday. There was a good deal of discussion in the Forum of the Club site, under the entry for Sunday Times Cryptic – 4613. A few suggestions in there worth trying. In the end, logging out and logging back in seemed to fix it for me.
      1. For me, it came up on one device (the one I can’t easily print from) and not another. Glad to see that I was not singled out for special punishment.
  4. I put in ‘headline’ at 21ac, I have no idea why, other than that it fit the checkers; one of those where I throw something in then forget to return to it to think. I also had ‘to the …’ at 26ac for a while, until I finally realized that I’d misspelled it as CINCINATTI. 8d was indeed a lovely cryptic, but its loveliness was wasted by the ease of solving with a Y_R_ and the definition.
  5. Much relieved that I wasn’t alone in finding this tough, though actually I completed the whole of the RH side in reasonable time without difficulty but then ground to a halt with only 1ac and 4dn on the LH side. About 20 minutes later I dragged 1dn out of nowhere as a song title that fitted the enumeration and the S checker I had in place and reverse engineered to check it was correct. After that I picked off the remaining clues one at a time and very slowly. At the end I was left with CINCINNATI completely unparsed and was too exhausted to persevere with it.

    This would have turned out something of a nightmare if it had been my day on duty.

    Edited at 2014-10-27 11:04 am (UTC)

  6. I can log in OK, but any attempt to print gets me a blank screen, and if I try Play I get a pop-up “Invalid status response : 500”. Puzzles I’ve already completed come up ok though. Very strange.
      2. I got the same messages but was able to solve and submit fine when I switched to Chrome instead of Firefox, though comments on the site suggest this does not work for everyone.
  7. 15:24 … not much that was easy in here but a few inspired/lucky guesses kept me from stalling.

    COD .. the very neat DOILY

  8. 15m. REME slowed me down a bit, because it always does, but not as much as C-in-C.
    Not sure I’ve heard VIBIST before: I would say ‘vibraphone player’. Well actually I’d say ‘Roy Ayers’.
    I think we are dealing with an insect at 15dn, rather than a priest, otherwise there’d be no need for ‘apparently’.
      1. Fair point, but I think a ‘perhaps’ would be required… unless this is a particularly cynical setter…
  9. Started quickly on this one but then really slowed near the end, even having to dig out pen/paper for the newspaper anagram (despite having THE ?E? ???? TIMES …) Thankful that the wordplay guided me to the correct spelling of CINCINNATI (vs the erroneous one with two Ts). LOI SCORE and I was quite prepared to discover that it was wrong.
  10. 17 mins. The RHS, apart from VIBIST went in quickly but the LHS proved more troublesome. I finished back in the NW with ALTERCATE. I’m sure Olivia and Kevin will have had no problem with 8dn.
  11. Trickyish, especially for a Monday. The US city normally takes me at least three goes to spell correctly, as you don’t normally get checkers and wordplay in real life. And if I was asked to name a UK university I’d probably think of at least 84 names before reaching Salford, but there you go. Nothing that couldn’t be worked out satisfactorily in the end.
  12. Right Andy! My goodness the club site is buggy. And just when I was sitting on top of the club board at under 10 minutes (a first for me) except no one can see it. Whinge whine. I promise I was there an hour or so ago. Of course it’s an anomaly because (a) Jason is having access problems, (b) Magoo hadn’t shown up yet and (c) there were no neutrinos so far.

    So Alec is still with us (we hope) and also I assume Tony Sever who’s another one on borrowed time. Does this make the rest of us who meekly coughed up the higher sub look a bit foolish?

    Nice puzzle – I would say that.

    Edited at 2014-10-27 11:16 am (UTC)

    1. 1 Magoo *7m, 38s Mon 27th Oct 2014 0 862
      2 OliviaRhineb *9m, 43s Mon 27th Oct 2014 0 851
      3 mohn *10m, 23s Mon 27th Oct 2014 0 848

      I hope you’ve taken a screenshot … I would!

      1. Thanks Sotira! I hope it doesn’t take the geeks
        q u i t e so l o n g to fix things this time.
    2. Cracking time, Olivia, though I see that Jason has now moved in ahead of Magoo.

      Yes, I’m still around – though with the sword of Damocles hanging over me as ever.

  14. Club site still not working for me, on either browser, although older puzzles work fine. Eventually managed to print it off from the newspaper main site (whence come the Quick Cryptics). Harder than a usual Monday breeze, about 40 minutes with 7d and 10a my last to go in. At least now (temporarily) I know how to spell Cincinnati, although I didn’t get round to parsing it. Nice anagram for the NYT.
  15. 34 minutes, held up by the end by VIBIST. I didn’t know BIS so wasn’t confident of my answer even when I’d settled on it.

    I took a look at the ST crossword on my dad’s ipad at the weekend to see what the fuss was about regarding the interface but it seemed OK to me, certainly better than the Android version. Did I miss something?

    1. Did you actually try solving on it? It uses its own embedded keyboard (rather than the iPad’s one) which is really fiddly, and if (like me) you have a separate keyboard it doesn’t work.
      1. Ah, I see. The Android version always has the embedded keyboard so I didn’t notice as I’m used to it. The Android one is much worse as it lags and doesn’t catch up – if you type a long answer like CINCINNATI without waiting for each letter to appear before you type the next you’ll end up with something like CININTI.
        1. It’s similar with the ST interface: it’s very easy to miss letters so you have to watch what you’re typing very carefully.
          1. I finished the ST yesterday on my new IPAD mini no problems, except for the usual problem of big chunky fingers and tiny tiny keys when using that ST keyboard. Other than that, the only problem I’ve found is that the (number of letters) sometimes overwrites the last letter or two of the clue, which means that you have to guess at the final word in the clue before you can solve it.
            1. . . . which makes it all the more interesting when the last letter or two are part of an anagram. I like keriothe solve on a keyboard which the ST version doesn’t support and with the ST version, you have put in every letter of every word, even though the crossers are there. It just slows things down. Never mind the sausage fingers.
              I dont mind PB using this for the ST if this is his wish because I use treeware on Sundays but it is not good when this interface appears (apparently randomly) during the week.
  16. Got pretty much finished after 13 minutes but eventually gave up on score and amoralist, the latter because I got fixated on finding a homnphone for something that can be good or bad to go inside a mist.
  17. I struggled with this today. 1d went in without parsing fully as did 13d, and I couldn’t quite convince myself that SHAMANISM was correct. I think I got offended on their behalf by the audacity of declaring their religion “fake”, and just couldn’t separate the two words in my head. I eventually saw the light. It’s a funny way for an avowed atheist to behave.
    1. As another avowed atheist, when I saw ‘fake religion’ I thought ‘that’s a tautology pleonasm’.
  18. I think’s it a bit unfair to cosh people so hard over the head on a Monday morning. I wandered in at just under twenty, ably assisted by strong coffee and paracetamol.

    Does anyone else have this wretched cold?

    1. Hi there. I believe the definition is ‘shop’, which is another UK way of saying RAT ON, as I understand it. Regards. No need to be anonymous here.
  20. About 25 minutes for the puzzle ending with AMORALIST/SCORE. Those and ALTERCATE were relatively tough, I thought. Andy, true, 8D went in at first look. I have never seen the word VIBIST before, like keriothe I’d say ‘vibraphone player’, and I think of Lionel Hampton in that role before anyone else; in fact, I can’t right now think of any other vibraphone player. Regards to all.
  21. Hmmm, seems like I missed all the fun, I had no problem printing. Solving… I didn’t have my smart boots on with the last one to fall being the extremely well-hidden SALFORD. In the end it all made sense, that was some tricky wordplay for CINCINNATI (a place I have problems spelling, even though I’ve been there twice).
  22. Well, I finished in about 50 minutes (after waiting till the evening and hoping the crossword site would be up again) and looking back discovered it had been a rather difficult puzzle, made no easier by the fact that I had never heard of SALFORD (until I discovered the hidden word) nor TON for fashion nor ANA for literary gossip. But the solutions to the clues they involved couldn’t really be anything other than what they are. Rather liked the anagram for NEW YORK TIMES (they have finally induced me to take out a digital subscription and I guess it is still the best newspaper in the world, except of course for the crosswords). And CINCINNATI with the C-IN-C (which of course I didn’t C) is absolutely brilliant.
  23. No idea on time. Solved uneventfully on my Tesco Android, which has laggy entry on the Times app, while not watching whatever was on TV.
    Good crossword, though, with the invisible Salford my last in. Liked the tripledef CHARACTER most.
  24. Like others, I had problems with the site today – sometimes it wouldn’t work at all, sometimes it worked in one browser but not another. At some point I paused and this failed to register, so my total time came in at some huge number. I think in total I spent about an hour on this one, and I’m relieved to see that some others found this one a bit chewy as well.

    I liked SALFORD (as a clue, at least), and my LOI was ALTERCATE. I had a horrible feeling that I was expected to know some ancient battle site, and was relieved when it turned out not to be the case. VIBIST was unknown – I’d have said “vibraphonist” if asked. The “rani” of 4d was also new to me, and I did spend a while wondering if there was a “queen Rian”.

    Today was disappointing – the changing of the clocks usually brings an uptick in the number of cyclist-versus-car customers, but this has been quite a quiet day. The most entertaining event was a game of “this little piggy” – a farmer (why is it always farmers?) had managed to sever three and half toes, and we had to guess which one went where. The problem was made more challenging because he was already missing two toes from his other foot, leaving us without a reference. In the end, we decided that it the exact order of toes probably didn’t matter much.

  25. Got all the difficult ones in good enought time, then stared at the easy ones for quite a while. Thanks particularly for explaining the scar in 1d. I was winding up to complain about the rock/folk/other distinction and now I don’t have to.

    Edited at 2014-10-27 09:41 pm (UTC)

    1. 13:37 for me, dragging my feet most of the time but then finishing in a reasonably quick burst.

      Not really my sort of puzzle, I’m afraid – though perfectly respectable if you like that sort of thing.

  26. Somewhat too late in the day, but I parsed 15d as
    No time for prayer, apparently = MANIS inside SHAM,
    that is MANTIS (the insect that prays) without the T for Time. Rather less specialist knowledge required than knowing that mantis is the classical Greek word for priest.

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