Times 25960 – second heat, second puzzle

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I found this easier than the other qualifiers, made so by the long clues which went in quickly; 17a had me baffled until all the checkers were in.

Across
1 HAPPY HOUR – (Humorous) cryptic definition.
6 DEBUG – DEB (girl), U G (initial letters of user guide); def. remove errors from.
9 MANHUNT – HUT (shed) with N (nitrogen) inserted, after MAN (island, the Isle of Man once again); def. search.
10 BOATMAN – BATMAN (superhero), insert O (wheel); def. transporter, e.g. across the Styx perhaps.
11 SLANG – S (succeeded), LANG (film director; could be Fritz or Walter); def. insult, one of the several meanings of slang.
12 ERNIE WISE – ERNE (eagle), insert I (one), WISE (knowing); def. the comic, Eric Morecambe’s pal.
13 WORST – WORSTED (stuff, cloth) has ED (paper’s boss) removed; def. best. As a verb, ‘worst’ can be a synonym for best, as in to obtain a victory over someone; also there is usage from the urban dictionary of ‘worst’ ironically meaning its opposite as an adjective.
14 ADORATION – ADO (fuss), RATION (helping); def. love.
17 SEMIRIGID – SEMI (house), RID (free, verb), insert GI (serviceman); def. quite hard. Not a word I knew un-hyphenated, and my last one in.
18 COP IT – Def. get in trouble, Cop IT would be a policeman using computers I suppose.
19 WRIT LARGE – (WAR LEGIT R)*; def. plain to see. Wiktionary proposes it refers to Plato’s Republic but it’s an idiom in common use.
22 OVERT – Def. apparent, hidden word, p(OVERT)y traps.
24 TRIPOLI – Capital of Lybia; (OIL)* on TRIP = flow easily, in the sense of ‘to trip along lightly’ I think.
25 LIAISON – LION = celebrity, insert A(udience) IS, LI(A IS)ON, def. affair. I’m the mug responsible for liaison between a British group here and French property owners and it infuriates me when the ex-teacher who writes the minutes of the meetings spells it LIASON, every time.
26 RUDGE – Barnaby Rudge, eponymous Dickens novel, remove the G from GRUDGE (resentment).
27 TOW-HEADED – HEAD (boss) inserted into TOWED (hauled); def. blonde.

Down
1 HAMAS – Insert AM (before noon) into HAS (needs); def. Palestinian group.
2 PENTAGRAM – PENT (confined), A GRAM (weight); def. star (a five-pointed one).
3 YOUNGSTER – YOUNG (green), on ST (way,) ER (heart of hERe); def. child.
4 ON THE DANGER LIST – (GET NHS TRIAL DONE)*; Def. very poorly. Nice anagram, Mr Setter.
5 ROBIN GOODFELLOW – (FOREIGN BLOOD)*, then LOW (dastardly); Another name for Puck. According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898):
Robin Goodfellow is a “drudging fiend”, and merry domestic fairy, famous for mischievous pranks and practical jokes.
6 DRAKE – D(ied), RAKE (a dissolute man); Sir Francis Drake, old navigator.
7 BAMBI – BAMBOO (tall grass) loses OO (loves), adds I(sland); def. fawn.
8 GINGER NUT – Def. biscuit. TUN (barrel) reversed, afer GINGER, one of Biggles’ pals along with Algy, in the long running series of adventure books by Capt. W.E. Johns.
13 WASTWATER – WASTER (good-for-nothing) around WAT (temple); def. lake in Cumbria. Of all the lakes Wastwater looks to me the most remote, sinister and mysterious when you drive along beside it.
15 ANCHORAGE – AN, CHORE (unpleasant duty), insert AG (silver); northern city, in Alaska.
16 IMPRESSED – Sounds like IMP REST (brat, others); def. commandeered.
20 IVIED – I VIED means I fought; def. overwhelmed by climber, covered in ivy.
21 LOOSE – LOO (card game), S E (ends on schedule); def. relaxed.
23 TONED – ONE (a particular) inserted in TD (Irish MP, Teachta Dála, Deputy to the Dáil); def. firm, as in toned muscles.

46 comments on “Times 25960 – second heat, second puzzle”

  1. Desperate to get in under the hour, so trusted the wordplay to get WASTWATER.

    My supreme literary knowledge helped when I unravelled the ROBIN GOODFELLOW anagram, looked at the clue and decided he must be a friend of someone called Drudge (I see now that it’s fiend, not friend). Ah, that must be the Dickens guy from 26ac. Let’s take his head off, leaving RUDGE, which…yeah, that’s a word that could mean resentment. Easy.

    Frankly I don’t know why they let me near these things.

    Edited at 2014-12-03 07:31 am (UTC)

  2. Mostly very straightforward but inventive and entertaining. I completed this in 35 minutes and only missed my half-hour target thinking that WESTWATER seemed more likely than WASTWATER despite the wordplay clearly pointing to the latter solution. In the end I trusted the wordplay and was rewarded accordingly.

    I didn’t fully understand how WORST worked though I knew all the required meanings. SLANG as an insult was new to me. I knew ROBIN GOODFELLOW as Puck but didn’t get the ‘drudging fiend’ reference.

    1. According to Chambers SLANG in this sense is not an insult, but just a verb. I have only ever come across it in the phrase ‘slanging match’.
      1. Ah yes – should have thoguht of that. A propos nothing very much, after seeing ‘upgrade’ and ‘upgrading’ vying for supremacy among my Chinese colleagues (even if they both trail ‘enhancement’ by a country mile), my Indian colleague has just come up with ‘upgradation’. I feel like suggesting that mdern business practice is to use ‘upgradatisation’….
        1. Ah, business jargon. The hardest thing about rejecting linguistic prescriptivism is the knowledge that I can’t tell people they’re wrong when they say things like ‘adding value going forward’.
          1. That’s nothing. Any Hongkonger worth his/her salt will instantly set to work to organise award ceremonies where organisations are rewarded for ‘the implementation of sustainable adding value going forward cum ethical solutions for a win-win synergy in the workplace’.
              1. Never heard of it, but what I do know is that the Gold Award would be for coming third – oops, second runner-up – as Diamond and Platinum hold top honours at least until they find a more valuable element. The way we are heading, it will probably be Water by the time my grandchildren are grown up.

                Edited at 2014-12-03 11:00 am (UTC)

  3. A Jack and a bit for me today (37 minutes, to be precise) – trying to make an anagram out of 16 letters at 5d (the right stuff + v) will I think be my excuse. Same obvervations as others. Barnaby Rudge is probably best known for being Dickens’s worst book; the historical novel he should have left to Sir Walter.
  4. 12m, so the easiest of the prelim puzzles so far by some margin for me. SLANG only vaguely familiar (see above), and WASTWATER completely unknown. It looks unlikely, and was my last one in, but in the end like others I trusted the wordplay. I had no idea about ‘drudging fiend’ but it went in from the checkers.

    Edited at 2014-12-03 08:37 am (UTC)

  5. 30 minutes, the last 10 of which I spent trying to convince myself of WORST and WASTWATER. Finally thinking of worsted swung me though I still came here half expecting to be wrong.
  7. Right hand side in quite fast … then stuck for ages on the LHS. Fond memories at 13dn.
  8. Like mctext a game of two halves. Raced through RHS but struggled with LHS until I got HAPPY HOUR.

    Excellent anagram at 4D. I thought WASTWATER was 2 words but once I wrote it in WORST and SEMIRIGID (which I thought was hyphenated) came quickly to mind.

    1. HAPPY HOUR was my first one in, written almost before the ink was dry on my print-out. I’m afraid this may tell a tale!
  9. Easiest of the prelim puzzles so far, though I didn’t know ON THE DANGER LIST and spent some time fiddling around with the letters to see if there was anything else possible. That meaning of SLANG only vaguely familiar (except in k’s example) but the wordplay seemed to work.
    1. And if you stumbled across IN THE DANGER SLOT, I hope you dismissed it more quickly than I did!
      1. It was my second last one in (SLANG being the last), so I had all the checkers and fortunately wasn’t subjected to the siren song of IN THE DANGER SLOT.
  10. Puzzle of the standard you expect from Finals Day; precisely clued, so that if you get tripped up, it’s invariably down to user-error, such as seeing “capital” and __I_O_I and writing in NAIROBI without thinking it through. That aside, I found myself nicely in tune with this (though it may just be that championship sessions are like supermarket queues, in that it’s very easy to worry that you’ve picked the wrong one when it’s too late).
    1. You should do what Hongkongers do and put a family member in 3 queues with 1 item each, and then wheel the trolley over to the one that goes fastest.
      1. I can’t decide if this means a) the rest of the world still has no idea how queues should work, or b) the rest of the world has taken the British idea of formalised queuing and taken it forward in ways we never managed to think of, until they are visibly superior at it – rather like cricket.
        1. Bizarrely, the (rural) French have their own way; waiting patiently with never a grumble in line while the front customer chats to and often exchanges ‘bisous’ with the till lady and then takes an age to find her cheque book and scrawl in it… only the ex pats turn to each other and raise their eyebrows. Until you get used to it and realise it’s not a blood-pressure-raising matter.
  11. Surprisingly straightforward. I also found the RH side easier than the left,. I thought of WASTWATER long before I had the confidence to put it down. Last ones in were 2 and 11, but the definition was not one I recognised except in the context of a slanging match. 35 minutes.
  12. That was the one I wasn’t quite sure about – less there than meets the eye. I blithely started off with ULLSWATER and SEMISOLID which had to be fixed. Some of the clues had an Anax flavour to them but if so it was one of his easier ones. 16.36
  13. . . . thus being the only qualifier so far that I have done in under 20 mins. Some good cluing here lets see whether I can do the same with my Xmas Turkey clue.
  14. 23′, held up at end by slang. 12 brings back memories of a programme whose absence like that of Spitting Image shows the dull age we live in now.
  15. Bit of a struggle here at 20:56, with the NW corner putting up meaty resistance. I knew Wastwater. Did you know there’s only one lake in the Lake District?

    The only one I couldn’t parse was worsted.

  16. What do you think of Martin Chuzzlewit? I rather enjoyed it after the difficulties of sorting out all the relations in the first fifty pages or so – including two Martin Chuzzlewits!
  17. Competition puzzles seem to be a bit of a tall order, but this one extended the warm hand of friendship. Well, almost! And if somewhat stern (so as to be utterly unequivocal, I’m sure) the thing is full of neat ideas. Not sure I’d have fared so well under the comp. conditions, but there are many nice things here.
  18. Not very sporting. In a hurry, join a queue of six people who only have one item each and then have to wait for six family-sized trollies to go through! “I predict a riot!”
  19. Nice to know that I would have been one of those select few who completed it under the hour mark – just.
    I’d never heard of TOW-HEADED and had a blind spot trying to parse 5d.
    With many of them I got the answer quite quickly but then didn’t have the courage of my convictions to decide they were right.
    Perhaps this what distinguishes the superheroes of the crossword fraternity and us plebs (if I can use the word without getting sued)
    1. I hate to burst your bubble Deezzaa but there were three puzzles to complete in an hour and the number given just indicates how many got this one all correct out of the three.
  20. About 35 minutes, with WASTWATER being new to me. As was ERNIE WISE, but his wordplay was clearer, at least to me. Agreed the RHS was less of a holdup than the left. Regards.
    1. Kevin,if you’ve never heard of (let alone being exposed to) Morecambe and Wise, you’ve much to be thankful for; their regular appearance was one of the more tedious downsides of my family Christmases for many, many years. I wonder how, today, their usual scenario of two chaps in pyjamas in a double bed chatting innocently with no hint of gayness would be received by the viewers and the ‘PC police’.
        1. Straight man perhaps, but I’d nominate Margaret Dumont for the best straight person ever.
      2. Morecambe and Wise make semi-regular appearances here in crosswordland, but that’s my only exposure to them. Even when solving this clue I didn’t think of the duo at all, I just followed the wordplay. But their semi-regularity here makes it evident that someone thinks they’re funny, or at least memorable.
  21. I finally got round to tackling the three puzzles from the second prelim this lunchtime (I managed to acquire a spare set on the day). This one took me 9:31 (the quickest of the three), with no disastrous hang-ups, though (with the initial A in place) I did start to write in ARCHANGEL hopefully for 15dn before realising about two-thirds of the way through that ANCHORAGE would actually fit the wordplay.

    I spent enough holidays youth-hostelling in the Lake District in my teens and early 20s to be thoroughly familiar with Wastwater (good for swimming in after a hot day on the fells), and I’ve happy memories of staying at the Wasdale Head Inn with my wife when I was older and could afford it.

  23. What with two Guardian setters in the answers – 5dn and 10ac, I’m inclined to wonder if the setter was being deliberately 22ac 😉

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