Times 25976 – Alien Abductions

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Lots to chew over this morning, as we range from the heavens to India via Italianate Turkey. And talking of turkeys, we have a lesser spotted bird and a deadly poison. In sum, another fine Times crossword. 58 minutes.

ACROSS

1. SERAGLIO – OIL and GAS reversed around our monarch (God bless her!) ER; a harem made famous by Mozart’s opera about an abduction therefrom. Cue music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrFbiw77_90
6. A+CROSS – I always let the Times setters off the art-of-setting stuff because unlike their Guardian counterparts at least they can’t reference one another – the cruciverbal equivalent of a 60 Minutes + episode given over to feting a journalist.
9. AT LENGTH – one of the first phrases I learnt in Latin class: ‘At length (tandem), Caesar, having been informed of the movement of Barbarian hordes on the Rhine, put on his toga and prepared to address the Senate.’
10. MATTER – well it couldn’t be ‘dimmer’.
12. LITRE – reversed hidden.
13. RECOMMEND – sounds like WRECK and AMEND. Nice. [Oops! Like WRECKER and MEND – just as nice + a tip of the hat to vinyl]
14. INTERNET CAFE – anagram* of FACT in INTERNEE; not an ET in sight.
18. IDENTITY CARD – a CARD being a rotter – think Terry-Thomas. [as the ever alert Galspray points out, a card isn’t really a rotter. He’s an amusing and slightly odd person]
21. HATHA YOGA – one of those frightening yogas where you stand on one leg and someone else threads their arms through yours from behind an invisible curtain; I had to get this from the wordplay, which is HAT (top dressing) HAY (grass) A+GO reversed.
23. SNORE – what my wife does and accuses me of: SORE around N. Nice.
24. RAISIN[g]
25. ATROPINE – well, it had to be either this or atporine and ATROPINE sounds a lot more like the Greek I used to learn when I wanted a break from Caesar doing his stuff. As anyone who’s ever thought of a permanent solution to that snoring problem will know, it’s a naturally occurring tropane alkaloid extracted from deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna); and an anagram of [o]PERATION to boot. How versatile can you get!
26. WAGING – ha! Caesar again. When he wasn’t divorcing his wife for not being above suspicion, he was waging war (bellum gerens) against the Hun and the Brit, the Gaul having already surrendered – at no great length, it must be said. W[ife] + AGING.
27. SCREAMER – it’s CR in SEAMER (a medium paced bowler who makes the cricket ball land on its seam and move – perhaps Alec Bedser was the greatest ever exponent of this art) [thanks to vinyl for pointing out I’d forgotten to give the wordplay]; now Oxford might have ‘an extremely fast ball or shot’ for this, but I’ve played and watched cricket all my life and never heard it used of a fast ball. A shot in football on the other hand, well, I’ll hand over to the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2010/feb/12/joy-of-six-screamers

DOWN

1. STABLE – S +TABLE; I wanted this to be ‘stally’ for a worryingly long time but got it tandem.
2. RE+LATE – RE as in Royal Engineers.
3. GINGER NUT – we’re getting quite a few of these at the moment. Is it seasonal? It’s rather a daft surface as far as I can make out, relying merely (?) on the fact that a redhead (ginger) is not a blonde. Or am I missing something recondite?
4. INTERSECTION – but this one I liked: IN + TERSE + [a]CTION, where the short and the battle are both short in their different ways.
5. CHARM – a charade of CHA + RM (short room this time).
7. ON THE WAY – the literal is ‘coming’ and the wordplay an anagram of TO WHEN + AY (yes).
8. SHREDDER – SH (quiet!) + RED and RED reversed (reflected).
11. ICONOCLASTIC – two Cs in COALITIONS*.
15. TURNSTONE – a sandpiper that – you’ve guessed it – turns over stones to get its meals: TURNS (makes to head) + TO NE (for northeast). Nice.
16. WITH+DRAW – cricket or football again; when a team goes to Stamford Bridge and holds Chelsea 0-0, it’s never because the Blues weren’t good enough, but always because the other team ‘parked the bus’ – or played for a draw.
17. LEFT-WING – a common phrase but a very nice clue indeed; if you leave the wing (in football – not cricket this time), you move to the centre; impossible if like Man City you play without wingers, but quite possible if like Man United you play with two – even if one of them is Ashley Young.
19. PODIUM – PO+ MUD reversed around I.
20. METEOR – MET (came across) EOR (ROE reversed) for the thing I always get confused with a comet and an asteroid –and a meteorite for that matter.
22. A+SIAN – if a word like Tadjik or Uzbek pops up in a clue, the average setter is most unlikely to be requiring knowledge of that particular land. Dean Mayer, on the other hand…

And a Happy Christmas to you all!

22 comments on “Times 25976 – Alien Abductions”

  1. Although I thought for a while it would be a DNF, as I stared glumly at 21ac; finally A-GO suggested itself, and I didn’t bother with the rest of the wordplay. I was worried about 27ac, too, not knowing from cricket, but I thought SEAMER meant something in the game, and couldn’t come up with anything better. Fortunately we had TURNSTONE recently.
  2. … so glad to see others had trouble too. I put it down to sweating out the Sunday Xmas puzzle; though that did help with one answer today.

    Now I see I had ON THE LAM for 7dn … so a DNF after all that slog!

  3. I had HETRA YOGA, and came here to see the complaints about “top-dressing” being used to get from BETRAY to HETRAY. Wasn’t even close.

    Nice blog U, despite the two errors. Surely a CARD isn’t a rotter? And if Alec Bedser was a better seamer than Glenn McGrath I’ll go hee for chasey.

    Johnners used to tell a great story about Bedser (or his brother?) checking into a hotel with his team-mate Jack Crapp. I’m sure you could tell it better than I could.

    1. Looks like I’ve notched up a hat-trick of errors. It must be the influence of our very own ‘Rotter’, who’s more amusing than mean. On to far more important things, and you know me far better than to think I’d put an Australian at the top of any list, especially those pertaining to the most sacred of all pursuits. Warne I would have to put ahead of Murali (on the basis that we are talking about bowling), but he would have to give place at the top of the list of all-time great spinners to Bobby Peel, of course.

      I think my favourite cricketing gag is the one about Kiwi Bob Cunis, of whom an Observer hack wrote, ‘Funny sort of name – neither one thing nor the other’.

      1. Ta galspray.
        Just reminded me that my parents had a bit of a debate over which of the Bedser twins I should be named after.

        Eric.

        Edited at 2014-12-22 06:38 am (UTC)

    2. I’m with you on 21a – the clue’s wordplay pushes you to HETRA, I’d argue. Given the surface isn’t exactly coherent, a dodgy clue to my mind.
  4. Technically a DNF because as I crossed the 60-minute line I reached for aids to look up HATHA at 21ac, TURNSTONE and ATROPINE. In fact 16dn was my LOI as I wasn’t able to crack it until the H checker was in place. A very enjoyable puzzle nevertheless and I thought 1ac was excellent.
  5. 18:03 … although that included a break to go and sign for a package and to have the compulsory chat with the postman (one of the things I missed when living in a place with ‘Super Mailboxes’ at the end of the street, so I can’t complain. Long live the Royal Mail).

    Very classy puzzle, I thought. TURNSTONE my COD for the wordplay / surface combination.

  6. 25m. I found this a terrible slog, and didn’t enjoy it at all. However I’ll put that down to feeling decidedly sub-par this morning. I kept looking at clues like 21 across, thinking they were dreadfully obscure and terribly unfair, only to solve them once my brain managed to look at them from the right angle. This is the sort of thing I usually enjoy so it must just be lurgi-induced grumpiness.
  7. 27.14, so not (for me) a Monday easy even though the NW was a promising fast start.
    HATHA YOGA from wordplay and somewhere back there memory, going over and over the crossing clues to see what might be wrong.
    TURNSTONE with approval but a sneaky thought about where the OCD afflicted beachcomber was doing its thing at the time.
  8. A longish solve at 50 minutes. I thought I’d made a mistake when I ended up with H_T_A for the first part of 21, but then vaguely recalled HATHA YOGA.

    Although there were some good clues I thought 9 and 18 were unimpressive. Splitting compound answers into their component parts strikes me as poor practice unless surface wit justifies it (as might be the case of cryptic definitions). That’s not the case here.

  9. 18 mins, which looks a decent time considering I’m coming down with a cold. I thought this puzzle had some very good clues but I agree that there were also some pedestrian ones. I thought the clue for TURNSTONE was excellent even if the directional aspect of the wordplay wouldn’t apply to some of our overseas solvers. ON THE WAY was my LOI, and it took me much too long to see that “coming” rather than “coming to” was the definition.
  10. Just under an hour and a half, so it must have been pretty tough. I was held up for ages by the conviction that 25 had to be PTOMAINE, and the setter had somehow mistaken an M for an R.
    I once had the pleasure of playing the Sultan in a production of “Die Entführung aus dem Serail” surrounded by several nubile young ladies, so 1ac came readily to mind.
  11. This took 40 minutes, and I had to look up HATHA YOGA. I saw the yoga part, but I don’t have any insight into it’s various sub-branches. TURNSTONE was one of the LOI’s, and it is quite nicely done. Regards.
  12. I’m another who tried to make PTOMAINE fit the poison clue. Wasted a long time on it. 35 minutes
    1. Another ptomaine sufferer, but chuffed to finish this one without recourse to aids. This was another one that seemed to be more tricky than it looks after the event. A few that went in on wordplay, well only one actually – the yoga one. On principle, I have to comment on the execrable homophone (to my ears at least).
  13. After 60m there was the sound of the towel hitting the floor with 21a incomplete and 25a correctly as it turned out pencilled in. I found this a real struggle with no really joyful moments even as the clues were unravelled. I’m sure I only got the women’s quarters and the bird because of doing these puzzles. Thanks for the entertaining blog as ever.

  14. Over my allocated half-hour, but interrupted by the need to speak to my Glasgow dwelling daughter to make sure that she wasn’t involved in the awful accident there. She was not, but thoughts go out to the families of those killed and injured: illogical, but it always seems even worse when such incidents occur so close to a Season that should be filled with joy.
  15. Yet another ptomaine sufferer. And technically a DNF because I went for hatra yoga, Because hay never occurred to me for the grass (rat did). But still quite pleased to have it done in just over an hour on one that good solvers found tough. Thanks, Ulaca
  16. 10:17 for me, held up by a handful of clues – for no very good reason really. Interesting puzzle.
  17. For the pedestrian solvers like me. I carried this around with me for ages, days in fact eventually finding all of the answers except 1ac, at which point I finally had to go to t’internet to find the only word to fit. Never heard of seraglio but was trying to make singe backwards fit in. Pleased that I eventually got the others , had to check on atropine and turnstone, and Hatha yoga rang a distant bell thankfully.

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