Times 25,947

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
This one felt a bit trickier than average, and I needed a few flashes of inspiration before stopping the clock at 16:22 (how many Magoos, keriothes, or other bespoke units of crossword solving that time equates to, it’s too early to say). Lots of good and occasionally quite intricate stuff, anyway, so let’s see if I can successfully unpick it all.

STOP PRESS, after blogging, by which time a few more times are in: a) slightly more than 2 Magoos for me today; b) he’s the only sub-10 minute solve so far, however, so this seems to back up my feeling that it wasn’t entirely straightforward.

Across
1 DISOBEY – [SO BE] inside D.I.Y.
5 SPARROW – SPAR(=box), ROW(=file).
9 HIPPODROMES – HIP(=following fashion), POD(=school, as in group of aquatic animals), ROME’S.
10 VIE – VIE{w} minus the W{eight}.
11 ICEMEN – 1 CEMEN{T}. Defined by “blocks they deliver”, or more realistically, “blocks they used to deliver”, since the iceman has gone the way of the lamplighter and the crossing sweeper as an occupation.
12 KNEE SOCK – (SEE)rev. in KNOCK.
14 ON A SHOESTRING – (HEROESNATIONS)* + G{rand}.
17 WOOL GATHERING – WOO(=court), L{arge} GATHERING.
21 BARDOLPH – the BARD + 0 Like Prince Hal. Beautifully worked all-in-one clue; Bardolph is one of Falstaff’s disreputable associates in various Shakespeare plays; (spoiler warning: his former relationship with Prince/King Henry doesn’t stop him coming to a sticky end at Harfleur).
23 OCULAR – {J}OCULAR minus the J{udge}.
25 AXE – X(cross) in lAkEs.
26 HAIR RAISING – AIR(=display), RAISIN(=fruit) in Hg, chemical symbol for Mercury.
27 DESERVE – DE (“from” in French), SERVE, as in getting the rally started in tennis.
28 ENGAGED – ENG{lish}, AGED(=getting on).
 
Down
1 DAHLIA – DAH(the ‘dit’ and the ‘dah’ being the traditional component parts of Morse Code), (AIL)rev.
2 SUPREMO – SUP(=drink) RE(=on) MO(=tick). I shall confess to spending a while wondering if there might be a small parasitic animal called a REMO.
3 BOOMERANG – BOO(accompanies hiss), “MERINGUE”, cunningly defined as “shell on (food) course”. As the Scots dialect joke goes “Is that a chocolate eclair or a meringue?” “No, you’re not rang at all, it’s definitely a chocolate eclair.” Works better when spoken, not written down, of course.
4 YARD – [D{iamonds} RAY]rev., the chain in question being the old measure which still marks out the 22 yards of a cricket pitch.
5 SIMON PETER – (OMENPRIEST)*.
6 AISLE =”I’LL”.
7 RAVIOLI – [0,L{eft}] in R.A. (“drawer” as in artist) VII. Another well-disguised definition in “filled envelopes”.
8 WRECKAGE – [REC(=recreation ground=playground), {loo}K] in WAGE.
13 CHAT-UP LINE – (UNETHICAL,P{atient})* &lit.
15 TWITCHING – ITCH(=burn) in TWIN(=match), G(=note).
16 OWN BRAND – OWN(=admit), BRAND{y}.
18 OARLESS – O{ld}, ARLES’S. Genoa used here as a type of sail, which would be all you had for propulsion in the absence of any oars.
19 GOLDING – (DIGLONG)*, Booker and Nobel Prize winner William, presumably.
20 BRIGID – RIG(=to fix) in BID(=offer). Irish version of Bridget / Brigitte etc.
22 OPHIR – OP{us}, HIR{e}. If you know this, I strongly suspect it’s from the same place as I do, to wit the opening line of John Masefield’s Cargoes, “Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir…”
24 ERSE – reverse hidden in glenrothES REctor, also &lit. as the tongue in question can be Scots Gaelic as well as Irish.

36 comments on “Times 25,947”

  1. The other joke-ule to go with 3dn is: What do you get if you mix four egg whites with a stick of dynamite? Sorry.

    Have no idea why I got stuck on OCULAR and BRIGID at the end.

    The Wik entry for OPHIR is revealing. No one seems to know where it might have been. But it seems that “King Solomon received a cargo of gold, silver, sandalwood, precious stones, ivory, apes and peacocks from Ophir, every three years”. Why would he want or need apes?

    COD (whatever Jim might yet say) to BARDOLPH.

    1. Pointless quibble of the day: it seems the supposition that the cargoes of “gold, silver, sandalwood, precious stones, ivory, apes and peacocks” came from Ophir is a conflation, encouraged by Masefield and endorsed unquestioned by Wiki and several other (some much weirder) sites. That set came from Tarshish (wherever that was), as described in 2 Chronicles 9.21 et al. Ophir contributed gold and “a large quantity of algum wood and precious stones.” (2 Chronicles 9.10).
      Masefield also took liberties with quinqiremes and Nineveh, which weren’t around at the same time: I think he just liked the way the words fitted together.
      As for what Solomon needed with all those apes, don’t know: entertaining his 1,000 wives and concubines with chimpanzee tea parties, perhaps?
  2. Desperate to get in under the half-hour, after what seemed like ages but was more like 5 minutes I flung in OARLESS, without the slightest idea what Genoa had to do with it. I also spent lots of time on CHAT-UP LINE (we’d call it a pick-up line), never twigging to how it worked. BARDOLPH is a lovely clue, I suppose, but ‘Associate of Falstaff’ rather gave the game away, since Pistol, Poins, & Nym wouldn’t fit. I rather liked AXE, though.
  3. Or 1.4 Topicals, or a sub-McText (Yes!!!).

    Thought it was going to be quicker, but BARDOLPH, OARLESS and DESERVE held me up for quite a while at the end.

    “Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir” is burnt into my brain from a long-ago primary school class. Couldn’t have told you the poem, the poet, the context or even what a quinquereme was, but still it’s there, as evocative as ever.

    Enjoyed this puzzle, possibly because I solved it. Thanks setter and blogger.

    1. I can’t tell you either (although google could) but I know that cheap tin trays and smoke stacks are involved. I only know that poem because it has come up here.
  4. 27:59 … one of those where the time just seemed to disappear, though I did struggle with the BARDOLPH, OPHIR, CHAT-UP LINE area, the latter being one of my last in.

    I really liked OCULAR. Beautifully done.


  5. 30mins for all but OARLESS, and another 5 for that one. Kept thinking of cake…

    dnp: ‘on tick’, ‘shell on course’, the anag for CHAT-UP LINE,

    dnk; the DAH bit of Morse code, the chain bit of YARD, OPHIR, so lots to learn (and try to remember) today.

  6. I’m afraid I had a touch of the 17a with this one today. After about 50 minutes I was panicking a bit, especially as I had trouble parsing quite a few (thanks Tim) and ultimately had to resort to aids for 11 & 18, neither of which I’d have got normally.
    Strangely, Bardolph was my 2nd in, after 16d. It seems it’s definitely worthwhile brushing up one’s Shakespeare, especially Prince Hal’s associates, the rude mechanicals and assorted lovers.
    BTW, isn’t “Quinquereme” one of the most beautiful of words?
  7. 13m. My maths is no good so someone else will have to work out how many keriothes that is.
    This was one where I happened to know the obscurities, although OPHIR was only vaguely familiar. I liked BARDOLPH and CHAT-UP LINE. I was a bit puzzled by ‘meringue’ being defined as a shell but it’s there in Collins.

    Edited at 2014-11-18 08:41 am (UTC)

  8. I lost concentration on this one after getting bogged down part way through. In the end I also lost interest and used aids to polish off 21 and 11.
  9. I didn’t find this so much difficult as a bit of a slog. Like Jack found myself losing concentration but finished eventually in 25 minutes

    Got BARDOLPH from obvious definition and leading B. Knew OPHIR from doing crosswords. Got ICEMEN from cryptic and checkers. Thought CHAT-UP LINE was awful and wrote it in faintly until I twigged the cryptic which made it the best clue in the puzzle for me.

  10. My run of successful finishes ended today. After 45 minutes I ended up with ORLIENS and BILLOLPH in the SW corner, neither of which I was convinced by.

    A tough puzzle with my COD to DISOBEY for the nicely hidden definition.

  11. 21.56 interrupted minutes, during which I changed (on basis of wordplay) a dimly remembered OPHAR to its just as dimly remembered correct entry. My slow corner was the NE, where I had a tentative KNEE HIGH until nothing else worked. Challenging stuff, and I still don’t believe CHAT UP LINE is an anagram of unethical P. That went in because there aren’t that many entries available as 4-2-4 with a P in the middle. A very fine clue, except that it was easier to miss how good it was than to parse it.
  12. Rather a literary one with whiffs of O’Neill and Masefield. The latter provided some of us with a real booby trap a few months ago because he misspells “quinquereme” as “quinquireme” in the poem and I fell right in along with TonyS and probably others. Bigtone produced a rather good joke on the subject.

    “Bardolph” was in the TLS weekly puzzle recently in a very confusing clue that made reference to him as a drinking buddy of Falstaff et al but the answer was a different character entirely, called “Lord Bardolph”. Z probably remembers. That sort of thing happens a lot over there. I for one enjoyed this. 17.11.

    1. It wasn’t a joke, Olivia. I really did hear Sir Michael Hordern rhyming quinquireme with Jeremy.

      Edited at 2014-11-18 07:08 pm (UTC)

    2. Fortunately the crucial E was checked, otherwise I’ve an uneasy feeling I might have got the QUINQUEREME puzzle (No. 25,630) wrong.
  13. DNF after 60 minutes, as I put in a tentative LOW PRICE for 16 on the basis that admit = allow, take away some ALcohol for LOW and then PRICE for no good reason other than the fit with the cryptic. When I couldn’t make the SW work, I revised that for OWN LABEL, which held me up again in the same corner. I finally got it right, but still couldn’t see DESERVE and OARLESS, despite recognising the sail reference for genoa.

    A good challenging puzzle though, and thanks to the setter and blogger. I must mug up on my Shakespeare.

  14. 36 minutes after a final near blank-out on deserve and oarless. I agree with Golding described as rambling, after Lord of the Flies that is. I’ve made a good few hundred youngsters learn Cargoes over the years, generally with a competition as to who can bark out the third verse best. A boy once named his rabbits Sandalwood, Cedarwood and Sweet White Wine.
  15. Three-quarters of an hour on this enjoyable puzzle. Particularly liked the
    “Morse —” in 1 down and the “shell on course” in 3.

    Had most of the puzzle done in 20 minutes but came to a halt in the SW corner, mainly through thinking about the clue for 25 after I’d solved it. As ramblers will know, Cross Fell is a hill in Cumbria that sometimes offers spectacular views of the English Lake District, though the visibility up there is often poor. Being a keen walker, I wondered if the clue could be slightly reworked to include this information: perhaps “Lakes intermittently viewed around Cross Fell”.

    Had forgotten about Genoa being a sail and, after exhausting all possibilities involving cake, convinced myself the clue was referring to drifting down a river. Google informed me that there is a Genoa River in Australia, which I thought might link to BOOMERANG and WOOL-GATHERING.

    1. As an aside, back in the 70s CSIRO was investigated chemical means rather than mechanical shearing for removing wool from sheep. Pickering published a great cartoon in The Australian: “Coming to grips with hand-plucked sheep.”
      26 min =average for all except BARDOLPH (did not know) and OARLESS (have heard of ARLES via a painting, perhaps?) Things to do so used aids to finish.
      Rob
  16. No time because this was done piecemeal in between singing exams but certainly nearer 30 mins than 15. The SW caused me most trouble because I neither recalled Bardolph nor spotted the excellent cryptic and mombled a Shakespearean who made OARLESS problematic.
  17. About 25 minutes but rather than finding it a slog I thought it was beautifully put together (although the subtleties of the waggledagger clue went over my head with an audible whoosh).

    I gave up ticking clues in the end but I particularly liked “following fashion”, “from Morse –”, “sound of shell on course”, “nothing left in drawer seven”, and “get rally going”.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

  18. About 45 minutes but needed aids at the end for CHAT-UP LINE. That term apparently hasn’t crossed the ocean. But when seen, the clue has to be applauded, which I’ll do despite getting stumped. Quite proud of myself for remembering the genoa jib to solve OARLESS, and OPHIR from wordplay only. Regards.
  19. One hour twenty minutes for me, which is 6.153846 keriothes (says my calculator, of course). Not a good time, but I’m surprised I was even able to finish, despite four or five clues I really didn’t understand at all. But I’m getting quite good at intelligent guesses of the wordplay, I suppose. I am really astounded at how many words are hiding somewhere in the dark corners of my mind, just waiting for a clue to lure them into daylight.

    Edited at 2014-11-18 11:41 pm (UTC)

  20. 14:51 for me – disappointing as this was the sort of puzzle I think I’d probably have posted a decent time for if I hadn’t been feeling so darned tired after a busy day (including 45 minutes just spent on a really tough puzzle from 1948, which at one point I thought I was only going to solve about a quarter of). Lots of good stuff in today’s puzzle.
  21. Pleased to creep in under the target half-hour, and a puzzle I really enjoyed. Eng. Lit. was certainly useful for ‘Bardolph’ and ‘Ophir’. I suspect that being taught by joekobi would have been quite a pleasure.
    1. Thanks. Don’t be too sure you weren’t – I feel as if I’ve taught pretty well everyone.
  22. One neat feature not mentioned is that Morse ‘dah’ is also written as an em dash as in the clue.
    1. Brilliant…(perhaps a little too brilliant if it’s taken 24 hours for anyone to mention it). Well spotted, anyway, I must confess that completely eluded me. The poor setter must think s/he’s wasted on us…

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