Times 25999 – A new millenium starts tomorrow!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 80 minutes

Music: Shostakovich, Symphony #10, Karajan/BPO

Well, I certainly didn’t cover myself with glory in this particular solve. While the puzzle was somewhat more difficult than last week, I’m sure everybody had better times than I did. Sometimes you just get the wrong end of the stick on every clue, and have a very difficult time correcting yourself. In other cases, I did actually see how the clue worked, and still couldn’t solve it for the longest time.

The puzzle itself was not that hard, although some of the clues were a little tricky. Except for ‘rondavel’ and ‘gite’, neither of which I had heard of, the vocabulary was quite ordinary.

Across
1 MADCAP, M(A.D.C.)AP. Nope, not an anagram of ‘plan’. ‘Map’ was the next thing I tried, and I still couldn’t get it. One of the final ones in the top half of the puzzle.
5 COMMERCE, COMME(-n,+R[oom])CE, a simple letter-substitution clue.
9 LISTERIA, LIST + ER(I)A, very straightforward.
10 SIRIUS, IRIS backwards + US, my first one in.
11 CRINGE, C(RING)E, another easy starter clue.
12 TENACITY, TEN + A CITY, i.e. Manchester City and not Manchester United. Since we’re talking footie here, a team with one sent off leaves only ten players.
14 DOUBLE DEALER, DOUBLE (as a bridge bid) + DEALER (in a bridge game). A play by Wycherley, too.
17 BUSINESSLIKE, BUS + I (NESS) LIKE. Perfectly simple, but my last one in. The checkers were not helpful, and while I had spotted ‘serious’ as the literal, I was expecting something ending in -tive or -tine.
20 RONDAVEL, R(anagram of DON)AVE + L. An word unknown to me, but the cryptic should give it to you once you have all the crossing letters. I was stymied for a long time by the incorrect placement of the ‘don’ anagram.
22 ENOUGH, E[ngland] + NOUGH[t]. I wasted a lot of time with birds and synonyms for ‘avoid’.
23 WINGER, W[h]INGER, one of the few simple clues in the bottom half.
25 AROMATIC, A ROMA[n]TIC.
26 STAMPEDE, anagram of MADE PETS.
27 ELEVEN, i.e. the number represented by X followed by I. There are a lot of other possibilities, which I did try.
 
Down
2 AVIARY, A[dvance] VIA RY. I tried to make this a staircase clue for a long time, and toyed with ‘apiary’ as well before seeing it.
3 CUT AND DRIED, anagram of CAD INTRUDED.
4 PERSECUTE, PER SE + CUTE. A cute clue that I needed the checkers to see.
5 COASTAL, CO(A ST)AL.
6 MESON, ME(O.S. upside down)N.
7 EAR, [f]EAR.
8 COUNTIES, CO(UNTIE)S, what we no longer have in Connecticut.
13 CHAPERONAGE, CH[ildren] + A + PER[s]ONAGE. Seeing the ‘c’, I was sure this would have Cain and Abel, but not so.
15 DRIVE HOME, double definition.
16 HUMORIST, anagram of US 0 MIRTH. Unfortunately, about 30 minutes elapsed between spotting the anagrist and solving the clue.
18 SALVAGE, SA(L)VAGE. I was sure this was going to start with ‘re-‘, messing up my attempts to solve 17 across.
19 IGNITE, I[sland] + G(N)ITE. For a long time, I was convinced that ‘island’ was the literal, and that the answer contined LED. Wrong, wrong, wrong!
21 VERSE, hidden in [o]VERSE[as]. The single lonely answer in the bottom half for quite a while.
24 GUM, G[l]UM.

25 comments on “Times 25999 – A new millenium starts tomorrow!”

  1. … but I thought a bit more difficult than most Mondays. Never heard of RONDAVEL and had to look it up to check. Last in was SALVAGE. And COD has to go to HUMORIST.

    Edited at 2015-01-19 03:11 am (UTC)

  2. Definitely more difficult than most recent Mondays, anyway. I must have encountered RONDAVEL somewhere, once, because once I thought of ‘rave’ (and finally gave up on ‘do’) it looked vaguely familiar. But I checked the dictionary after, too. Like Vinyl, I thought of ‘island’ as the literal at first (then ‘light’ as a noun), thought 17ac would end in -ive and 18d begin in re-. I was pleased with myself for getting, for once, the ‘for’ in 5ac.
  3. ….in more ways than one.

    First, because I didn’t find this very much fun. Nothing I can put my finger on, but it just seemed rather dull. Or maybe that’s just me on a Monday.

    Second because my last one in was EULOGIST at 16 dn (don’t ask!).

    RONDAVEL was unknown, but I think GITE has been an occasional visitor to this neck of the woods.

    1. I was going to mention GITE; we definitely have had it fairly recently, or I wouldn’t have known it–as it was it took me a long time to fish it out of memory.
  5. Took a long time over several clues that were hidden in full view, including AVIARY and LISTERIA. Trusted the wordplay for the unknown RONDAVEL.

    COD to 22ac, for obvious reasons.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

    Edited at 2015-01-19 06:53 am (UTC)

  7. 24 minutes, with my last two being the elegant not-a-dog-then 4 and the unlikely-looking RONDAVEL, which should really be something minstrels sing. Solving distracted by trying to imagine a lake in a hut.
    Plus points to HUMORIST: not recognising the &littish nature of the clue led to attempts to recall that dinosaur on the edge of memory, which was probably actually T Rex.
  8. I struggled with this and having nodded off twice whilst solving in the early hours I abandoned it for the night. On resumption I started with about a third of it completed with answers scattered around the grid and it took me 22 minutes to fill in all the gaps. Was quite pleased at least not to have to resort to aids as this had seemed on the cards at one point. Knew GITE but DK (or HF) MESON and RONDAVEL.

    I wonder if I’m in for something special to blog tomorrow to mark the start of a new millennium.

  9. 37.45. Last in coastal, which should have been one of the first. I appreciate 16 – very Thurberish. Does anyone read him now? Not your usual Monday.
    1. For my money Thurber’s Macbeth Murder Mystery and Twain’s Hamlet soliloquy in Huck Finn should be required reading for all students of Eng. Lit. On separate occasions my English teacher nonpareil, Mrs. Thorne RIP, silenced a class of 16-year-olds to awestruck reverence with them. Comic genius. I don’t think any of us will ever forget.
      1. Thank you for that, Olivia. I reached for my two volume Vintage Thurber (apparently given as a Science prize after I had left the school concerned in 1970) and reminded myself of the Macbeth Murder Mystery. Priceless. Some of his later drawings fall into the same category.

        Joe, I suspect that most people will know about Walter Mitty even if they have not read the original.

        Edited at 2015-01-19 03:06 pm (UTC)

        1. There’s something about the man. Impeccable prose, wildly funny, and cinders of a burning humanity scattered about it all. Have either of you read ‘Superghosts’? I’ve played in in secondary school classes, not quite incessantly, for nigh on fifty years, after coming across it in T. (Title is his last sentence.)
  10. 30 min – I remembered RONDAVEL from somewhere, so no holdup there. At 17 was expecting -IVE, so spent time trying to make something of Loch Etive instead of the usual Scots water Also had had RE- from 18 – that was LOI, as completion of bottom half went in quickly after I’d cracked 17.
  11. 17 mins. Definitely trickier than last Monday. LISTERIA was my LOI after AVIARY, and you can count me as another who needed all the checkers before being happy to enter RONDAVEL from the wordplay. I thought the clue for HUMORIST was very good once I’d seen the anagram fodder.
  12. Tricky for a Monday. My last two in were LISTERIA and AVIARY as I too tried to fit something to do with stairs into 2d.
  13. I found this the toughest for some time, limping home in 50:20. A couple of times I thought I might give up but I was glad that perseverance paid off.

    I was surprised to hear people being unfamiliar with GITE, but perhaps it’s the non-UK solvers. A few years back it seemed that all the middle class here aspired to holiday in a little gite in the Dordogne.

  14. Much trickier than it should have been, and I limped home (rather than drove) in about 80 minutes. DNK RONDAVEL (just had to scroll up to remind myself having forgotten it already), but I did get AVIARY fairly early. LOI (can you believe it?) was GUM. What a mug!
  15. Limped home in 44 mins despite my only DNK being RONDAVEL. LOI was BUSINESSLIKE. This puzzle was a good argument against the theory that Monday’s puzzles are easier.
    1. I must have been on the setter’s wavelength, judging by some of the comments above from people who usually finish much more quickly than I do. This seemed to me pretty straightforward, and I was done in just under the half hour. I liked AVIARY, HUMORIST and AROMATIC.
  16. Late solve, late comment. 14m here, for a puzzle that felt a lot harder than that. DNK RONDAVEL, but we used to stay in GITES on holidays in France when I was a kid.
  17. 43 minutes here, with the unknown RONDAVEL being the last in. FOsI were MADCAP and AVIARY. The geeky part of me appreciated MESON, LISTERIA and SIRIUS.
  18. 12:33 for me, feeling unusually tired (for a Monday) after an exceptionally busy day.

    Despite being almost certain of it from the definition, I had great difficulty parsing MESON, persistently trying to get “soldiers” on the inside and “very big turning up” on the outside.

    RONDAVEL rang the faintest of faint bells: maybe I’ve met it in a crossword, or maybe I was simply thinking of RONCEVALLES or ROUNDELAY or something.

    Some nice clues. I particularly liked 11ac (CRINGE).

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