Times 25,938: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Across To Me

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Thanking the crossword gods for an easyish one this morning – we’re moving house tomorrow, so the house is a Rachel Whiteread installation of stacked boxes, I’ve got to head out and sign my life away to estate agents in a couple of hours, and to cap it all the elder daughter has been up all night making calls on the porcelain telephone, poor thing.

Anyhow, about a 15 minute solve here under less than ideal conditions. 18A was the first one in and the whole bottom half of the grid quickly followed suit, solutions such as 26A and 14D being obvious enough from shape and letters to go in unparsed. The trickier stuff this week all seemed to be in the top half, but steady progress was made, especially after knuckling down to the long anagram at 10A, culminating in the clever 7D as my LOI.

Stylistically this seemed quite elegant, with almost universally minimal definitions, and a general commitment to keeping the clues as a whole as short and sweet as possible. COD-wise I did as I say like the lateral 7D, but there were some other nicely turned surfaces in here, 2D, 8D and 19D being worthy of mention. Hmm, it really was all about the down clues for me this morning!

Across
1 HOMESPUN – simple: HUN [barbarian] “keeping” OM ESP [mantra especially]
5 DASHED – frustrated: DA SHED [lawyer dropped]
10 PARTICLE PHYSICS – study of fundamental matter: (PLAY RICHEST*) [“tragic”] in PICS [images]
11 OTTOMAN – seat: OTT OMAN [extravagant country]
12 RAMEKIN – dish: RAM [stuff] + E [“ending in” sale] + KIN [relatives]
13 BRICKBAT – criticism: “turning” TABB{y} [feline “dismissing yen”, ie – Y] “to possess” RICK [pile]
15 LICIT – lawful: SOLICIT [request] – SO [“not so”]
18 MEANS – double def
20 OFFERING – present: RING [group] following OFF E [bad European]
23 RAFFISH – disreputable: RAF [service] by FISH [“shark for instance”]
25 PENANCE – punishment: NA [“not applicable”] in PENCE [“parts of pound”]
26 PAINT THE TOWN RED – revel: PAIN [drag] + (TOTTER WHEN*) [“dancing”] + D [“first in” disco]
27 RATING – sailor: RAG [scrap] with TIN [element] “on board”
28 CARDAMOM – spice: (DRAMA*) [“different”] in COM{e} [approach “lacking energy”, ie – E]

Down
1 HIP HOP – music: H [hearts] put into HIP OP [joint work]
2 MORATORIA – freezes: RAT [desert] “caught by” MOO [low] + AIR [“northward”, ie reversed, breeze]
3 SEISMIC – hugely important: SEC [moment] “involving” {o}I{l} S{u}M{m}I{t} [“regular characters in…”]
4 UHLAN – cavalryman: (HAUL*) [“disturbed”] + N [new]
6 ABYSMAL – awful: AS MA L [when mother left] “suppressing” BY [past]
7 HOICK – jerk: I [one] “indebted apparently”, ie in HOCK
8 DISUNITE – split: DIE [end] “limits” SUN IT [star appeal]
9 APERITIF – drink before meal: “upset” TIRE PA [weary old man] + IF [condition]
14 BROUHAHA – commotion: ROU{g}H [thug “ignoring good”, ie – G] in AHAB [king] “raised”
16 CONUNDRUM – poser: COD RUM [fake spirit] “capturing” NUN [votary]
17 IMPROPER – out of place: IMP [little devil] “in front of” ROPE [line] + R [runs]
19 SMITTEN – besotted: M [male] “stops” (IN TEST*) [“working”]
21 RENEWED – began again: EWE [“member of flock”] in REND [distress]
22 SELDOM – not often: DO [gathering] in S ELM [small wood]
24 FLINT – rock: LINT [“fluffy material”] “coming after” F [loud]
25 PITTA – bread: PIT TA [hollow thanks]

28 comments on “Times 25,938: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Across To Me”

  1. 15:13 … a bit of attention to detail needed on this one, especially for the more creative spellers among us.

    I can’t see or hear HOICK without thinking of the late Bill Maclaren. I never much liked rugby but I would watch games on television just to listen to him … “They’ll be dancing in the streets of Hawick tonight …”

    1. It was almost like listening to Sir Walter Scott reciting his border ballads what with Melrose, Kelso, Selkirk and Galashiels. Heriot’s Former Pupils and Old Watsonians seemed so prosaic by comparison.
  2. Enjoyable puzzle that took me 58 minutes in a couple of sessions. (These umbrella protests in Hong Kong are playing havoc with the transport system and the industry which provides it!) We’ve had both CARDAMOM and HOICK recently, while Uhlan is essentially the Polish/Prussian/German equivalent of ‘sabre’, which also cropped up this week.

    For me, Uhlan is inseparable from Anton Walbrook’s moving portrayal of a psychologically believable German in one of Powell and Pressburger’s best films, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

  3. 1dn went in straight away but I had problems progressing things until I read some of the clues in the lower half where I quickly gained a new foothold and made steady progress finishing in 39 minutes. DK OM or UHLAN but the answers were clear anyway. Nearly came a cropper settling for DISUNITY at 8dn but careful parsing saved the day.
  4. I was helped by the recent appearances that Ulaca mentions of CARDAMOM and HOICK, the latter not being in my vocabulary (not that the former is, come to think of it); and I didn’t understand the wordplay until much later. I’d give it my COD. Nice to see a king other than Edward or George Rex.
  5. 15m. I found this curiously unsatisfying, because most of it went in unparsed from definitions. Fortunately I didn’t do this with 8dn, where a little alarm bell went off in my head as I went to put in the Y of DISUNITY, or 14dn, where I realised that as one of the ‘creative spellers’ referred to by Sotira I ought to check that BROOHAHA was right. So two narrow escapes for me today.
    UHLAN was new to me, but fortunately the checkers didn’t leave any alternative.
  6. The tocsin that saved Keriothe failed to reach my ears so my last letter in after 16 minutes was a fateful Y. All subsequent attempts to justify DIY have proved fruitless. As Bill Maclaren might have said, I had failed to ‘do the needful’ by way of parsing.
    1. One of the definitions of ‘end’ in Chambers is ‘to destroy’, which is a perfectly accurate description of my attempts at DIY.

      Edited at 2014-11-07 10:25 am (UTC)

  7. Surely 11a is not a cryptic def. It is Extravagant (OTT, over the top) country (OMAN). Literal is seat.
    1. Ooh yes, that seems much better. The Ottoman Empire was an extravagant country, and it did give its name to a seat, he said straw-clutchingly… Amending!
  8. Like keriothe I found this a strange puzzle. I lost count of how much I put in on definition plus checkers but unable to see the parsing without a good deal of effort. It started at 10A and ended at 28A! It all became a little wearisome towards the end

    Can’t say I think any of the clues are particularly good but equally I have no cribs. 20 minutes to solve.

  9. 1.41.21 it says on the club timer, and last of the OK’s so far. I optimistically started it about 15 minutes before the school run, and you can’t stop the clock.
    Easier to solve without parsing, for the most part, but with a stellar time unavailable I thought I’d parse anyway. Just as well with BROUHAHA, APERITIF and CARD-um-something where it was all too easy to rewrite the dictionary.
    I also had to be on the alert for where the definition was before jumping to my preparsed conclusions: what was that low northward breeze beginning with M?
  10. 25 minutes. Not too difficult, though it took me a while to parse PAINT THE TOWN RED and Ahab wasn’t the first king to come to mind in 14 dn.

    Pleased that the wordplay for 28 ac was clear as I usually misspell CARDAMOM on my shopping list.

    Like Ulaca, I immediately thought of Theo Kretzschmar-Schuldorff on solving 4 dn; a superb film.

  11. 31.35. Took quite some time to get going but then it unravelled. Something a little too deliberate about this one perhaps. Where are your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?
  12. 15 minutes. The two long ones went in straight off and there were no great holdups thereafter.

    Like john_from_lancs and Ulaca, I thought I recalled Uhlan from a film. Unlike them, it turns out I was thinking of Disney’s Mulan, which is neither about a cavalryman, nor is it called Uhlan.

  13. Hmm, apparently everybody else is aware that Ahab was the seventh king of Israel.. my knowledge failed to take me beyond whaling. But I put it in anyway..

    On examination there are some very neat clues – look at 22dn for example, tres elegant

  14. As already noted, I found several going in on a sudden flash of inspiration because they fitted the space and checkers, parsing to follow. Luckily I did follow through on that bit of the process or I’d have fallen into the DISUNITY trap as well. I also realised that if I was trying to justify to myself that you’d “LEG IT” after doing something wrong, and failing, that probably meant it wasn’t the right answer.
  15. Fell into the DISUNITY trap, wasting ages wondering how DIY could be an “end”. Frustrating. Otherwise pleasant, if mechanical in parts. PARTICLE PHYSICS, rather irritatingly, leaped off the page fully formed and was my FOI.
  16. 14:36 which surprised me as I felt I was struggling at times, particularly, as seems to be the case for others, in spotting what the answer must be but being unable to verify it from the wordplay quickly.

    9 down almost did for me. As I got to the end of APERITIF the part of my brain that does such things decided that after TI the final letter must be a C, and duly instructed my hand to write it in. That made occuring very tempting at 20 (if something is occuring it is in the present) but I didn’t quite believe that OCCU was a “European” word for bad.

    Uhlan was unknown (so unknown that I almost put the H at the beginning before solving homespun) and I’ve never heard of King Ahab. I certainly didn’t vote for him.

  17. 19 minutes, with some unparsed; my usual lack of biblical and Jewish knowledge meant I didn’t know of King Ahab, and, like others above, I put in answers from definitions and just a vague idea of how they worked, not an exact parsing. Not the best of puzzles, but not the worst or hardest either. I did like HOICK and the convoluted 2d though.
        1. Not running Maggie down – nor Jezebel – just pointing out that Ahab had a better known “other half”.
  18. 43m all correct so a step forward as I did find this challenging and like others have noted lots went in on checkers and definition and a prayer. So many thanks for detailed blog and entertainment.
  19. A peaceful 23:57 without any real issues. Avoided DISUNITY and knew about UHLAN so I obviously wasted my time elsewhere. Nice to be reminded of Bill McLaren, both born and died in Hawick.
    1. . . . not of course to be confused with Eddie ‘Early Bath’ Waring. from the other sort of rugby.

      Edited at 2014-11-07 08:32 pm (UTC)

  20. Done in 20 minutes, despite not knowing the king nor recognizing the ‘om’ as mantra. I knew UHLAN! Happy day! Succinct puzzle, I thought. Regards.
  21. 12:50 for me, having difficulty with the setter’s wavelength.

    I recall a book from my childhood called “Schoolboy Yarns and Howlers”. Typical of the latter was: “A certain man drew a bow at a venture, but it missed the venture and hit Ahab.” I don’t suppose it raised much of a laugh then, but I doubt if many people would even get the reference nowadays. (For the record it’s 1 Kings 22:34.)

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