Times 26011 – How it got here I haven’t a clue!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 43 minutes

Music: Sibelius/Tchaikovsky Violin Concertos, Chung/Previn/LSo

This was not a difficult puzzle for the most part, and I had finished all but two clues after 30 minutes. Unfortunately, I was held up in the end by an incorrect crossing letter, until I figured out what the long answer across the bottom of the grid must be. Many of the clues were very simple, so I was a little annoyed at not completing the puzzle with a better time.

I am sure we will probably get some pretty fast times from the usual crew, particularly if you are in the UK and put in ‘rained off’ without thinking.

Across
1 NOTWITHSTANDING, NO TWIT + H[ard] STANDING. I would have put in ‘nonwithstanding’, only I had already got 2 down as my FOI.
9 VIEWPOINT, VIEW + POINT, where ‘stage’ means a particular place in the process.
10 TETRA, anagram of [b]ATTER.
11 DREARY, D(REAR)Y.
12 HOOLIGAN, H + anagram of AN IGLOO. We’re still waiting for the appearance of ‘mulligan’ in a puzzle.
13 NORMAN, NORM + [l]AN[d].
15 REPROACH, REP + ROACH.
18 DEMOTION, DEMO + TI + ON, that is, a cricket over where ‘on’ has the sense of ‘on top of’.
19 LINE-UP, LI(N)E + UP, a rather loose clue in my opinion – if that is indeed the correct parsing.
21 BESOTTED, BES(OT)T ED.
23 BEACON, BE A CON.
26 ON ICE, O[ffender] + NICE.
27 DISCOURSE, DISC + OURS + E[xcited].
28 SAN ANDREAS FAULT, anagram of SAFE NATURAL SAND. Since I had ‘rained out’ in 16 down, I couldn’t get this from the cryptic, but eventually I saw it from the definition.
 
Down
1 NEVADAN, NADA, VEN upside down. A rather curt reply to the archdeacon, I would say.
2 THEME, THE + M[iddle] E[astern].
3 IMPORTANT, IMPORT ANT. Surprisingly, I couldn’t see this for a long time, a good example of the difficulty I have with easy clues.
4 HAIR, H + AIR. I wanted this to be ‘hint’, but couldn’t parse it. It is hair as in ‘Do you want the window open? Yes, just a hair”.
5 TATTOOER, anagram of TO TREAT + O.
6 NATAL, [-f +N]ATAL, a simple letter-substitution clue.
7 INTEGRATE, E TARGET + N.I, all upside-down.
8 GRAUNCH, anagram of RUNG around A + CH. A word I had not even vaguely heard of, but the cryptic gives it to you. The definition is the Leicestershire dialect word; it means something different in New Zealand, and something else entirely in South Africa.
14 REMISSION, RE + MISSION.
16 RAINED OFF, cryptic definition. This is UK usage, in the US we always say ‘rained out’.
17 TOREADOR, TORE + A D(O)R.
18 DUBIOUS, DUB + I + O + US.
20 PUNGENT, PUN + GEN + T[ime].
22 TIE-IN, T(I.E.)IN. However, ‘i.e.’ does not really mean ‘say’, that should be reserved for ‘e.g.’.
24 CORFU, FROC[k] upside-down + U. I had a lot of trouble understanding the parsing, and put the answer in from the literal, then erased it, and then put it in again…..then I saw it.
25 ASIA, AS + I + A[ustralia].

38 comments on “Times 26011 – How it got here I haven’t a clue!”

  1. About 22 mins. Living in San Francisco, the long one across the bottom was pretty much a write-in
  2. 25 minutes, with TATTOOER last in after I’d corrected ‘tattoist’. A typical Monday.
  3. The definition is “Something associated with film, say”, and “that is”=i.e., which is kept in “can”=TIN for TIE-IN.

    Edited at 2015-02-02 05:26 am (UTC)

  4. Fortunately, I got the fault in first, so I knew it had to be RAINED OFF, which I’d never come across before. Nor had I ever come across GRAUNCH, and waited for all the checkers to report in before entering it. Some nice surfaces, e.g. (not i.e.) 11ac, 18ac, 26ac.
  5. 26 minutes, so another solve just within my 30-minute target.

    Didn’t know GRAUNCH or the required meaning of HAIR (also never heard the example of usage given in the blog). I was pleased to remember TETRA as a fish as this has caught me out in the past. NADA might have given me problems but it turned up in a puzzle only a few days ago and was still fresh in my mind.

    RAINED OFF / LINE UP were my last two in and I lost 4 minutes on the latter wondering if there may be an alternative answer that fitted the wordplay better. Then I realised my mistake was parsing LIE UP as ‘remain’. Having worked out LIE (remain) and UP (period of success) it all made sense and I have no quibbles at all with the clue.

    Edited at 2015-02-02 06:07 am (UTC)

      1. Yes, so had I and if quantity can mean distance then that would seem to be okay. Not sure if it can though, not being a scientific bod.
        1. Perhaps the Immoral Bard can help. Portia, from the Merchant of Venice:
          But just a pound of flesh. If thou takest more
          Or less than a just pound, be it but so much
          As makes it light or heavy in the substance
          Or the division of the twentieth part
          Of one poor scruple—nay, if the scale do turn
          But in the estimation of a hair,
          Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate.

          Edited at 2015-02-02 10:12 am (UTC)

          1. . . . or even G K Chesterton. In The Head of Caesar, Father Brown assures the unhappy girl “I don’t want to force your confidence by a hair

            Edited at 2015-02-02 11:41 am (UTC)

  6. Started off casually, then had a Severesque clean sweep of the down clues (well thought I did), so got all excited and didn’t go back to check the doubtful-looking TATER fish. Which of course I had accommodated by entering GARUNCH (as likely to me as GRAUNCH) at 8dn.

    A lesson to be learnt there, but I doubt that it will be.

    Vinyl, 18ac has nothing to do with cricket, it’s just OVER = ON. On and off are the two sides of the wicket in cricket, an over is a set of deliveries, ah forget it, how ’bout those New England Patriots eh?

    Thanks for the blog and thanks setter for an easy one which I failed to capitalise on.


  7. …so on the easy side, but a couple of unknowns / unremembereds: GRAUNCH, TETRA.

    I too finished with RAINED OFF and LINE UP. I thought HAIR probably had some connection to ‘hair’s breadth’…?

  9. Graunching of gears is my most frequently heard usage, though by extrapolation I have also come across it used of two badly-fitting abstract items (such as ideas) graunching together. Quite a nice onomatopoeia.
    What’s with the bullfighting theme? TOREADOR in this puzzle and MATADORS in the Quickie.
    22 minutes – a satisfying start to my week.

    Edited at 2015-02-02 09:26 am (UTC)

  10. 13.39, with that troubling NEVADAN and the crossing NORMAN my last two in. I was toying with NOODLES – “no old” something or other meaning something obscure from poker.
    I agree with Galspray on the absence of cricket in 18.
    I thought (until today, obviously) that GRAUNCH was a word my family had made up, an onomatopoia for the gearbox crunch. Perhaps we did, and have achieved some lexicological fame at last.
    Fave of the day RAINED OFF. However parochial it may be, it was an excellent cryptic definition. CDs that are not excellent are, of course terrible.
    1. The earliest example in the OED is from 1881 “Graunch, var. of ‘crunch’ and ‘scrunch’, to crush or grind with a noise; crash.” Taken from “Leicestershire Words,” apparently.. does your family come from Leicester, Z8?
  12. I was surprised to stop the clock at 11:31 as it didn’t feel that fast, though it was certainly more straightforward than some we had last week.

    Like others I hadn’t heard of graunch but I foresee plenty of use for it given that my car doesn’t go into reverse without graunching.

  13. 8 mins. Count me as another who had never heard of GRAUNCH and it was my LOI. I also took a while to see LINE-UP but had no problem with RAINED OFF.
  14. 16 minutes, with only _I_E UP remaining, resorted to the blog to see if LINE was correct as I felt it was a very weak clue so I must be mssing something else; UP = SUCCESS? Otherwise an anodyne Monday puzzle. The top and bottom crossers were write-ins which made it easy. I knew my tropical fish and GRAUNCH is a word we use occasionally in this household.
    1. I think it’s “period of success”, Pip, as in e.g. a business enjoying an up at the moment.
  15. 9:43.

    Let’s go through the checklist:

    Didn’t know graunch – tick.

    Held up a bit by line-up – tick.

    Got notwithstanding straight away so that certainly helped things.

  17. I am tending a grumpy baby while her sick mother is sleeping having dosed up with antibiotics, so this was exactly the right level of difficulty for me to do one handed with baby grunting over my shoulder. Indeed, I believe she was graunching. This is a wonderful word which I have never come across before but one which will now have a lot of outings.
    Rained off is a write-in for Brits.
    Thanks to setter and blogger.
    Suecaro
  18. 25m for me today with pauses over GRAUNCH and LINE UP. Enjoyable overall and agree with Z about the CD for RAINED OFF which gets my vote for today’s star clue just to prove I might be getting over my ‘question mark’ complex.
  19. No real time to announce as I was watching the U.S. Football championship, but not very long. LOI was LINE UP. Like our blogger I immediately thought of RAINED OUT, but I actually didn’t write it in. A second read of the long 28a yielded that bunch of checkers, so It had to be the unheard of RAINED OFF. GRAUNCH also new to me. Regards.

    Edited at 2015-02-02 03:26 pm (UTC)

  20. 9m. I’ve never heard of GRAUNCH, but it’s a good word. My car is an automatic but I did once GRAUNCH the compressor by putting the jack in the wrong place.
  21. 20 minutes. DNK GRAUNCH and only know TETRA from crossword land. Despite being a Brit, my LOI was RAINED OFF due to LINE UP being my POI and a fixation that it must be CALLED OFF.
  22. 31 minutes here, with GRAUNCH my next-to LOI. I’d encountered “grunch”, though (it’s a medical term for the sound made by badly damaged knee when flexed or extended; in practice it is almost impossible to hear over the accompanying scream), so “graunch” seemed plausible.

    TETRA was my LOI – I spent most of the puzzle trying to fit a “rejected British” (rb) into the space. As a former aquarist, I can vouch for the fact that there are many species of tetra, all of which are a poor substitute for whitebait. My motto: never keep a pet you can’t eat in a pinch.

    All in all, a nice puzzle with no wilfully obscure words.

  23. Pretty much romped through this one in about 30 minutes, then ground to a halt on “rained off” and “line-up”. I was on the point of giving up when the penny (or in this case, raindrop) dropped. The second coin then fell pretty rapidly, when I realised I’d been mis-reading the clue.
    “Graunch” took me back to John Cleese in an old training film “Who sold you this, then”, which I used many years ago when training customer service engineers. Worth a look!

    Edited at 2015-02-02 10:58 pm (UTC)

  24. 9:46 for me, making heavy weather of several easy clues after a rather exhausting day.

    GRAUNCH was what card readers on early computers used to do when there was something about your pack of cards (program or data) that they took a dislike to and so proceeded to mangle them, bringing themselves to a grinding halt at the same time.

  26. I thought 13ac was one of those occasional annoying (and poor) clues in that there are two possible solutions that can’t be determined by other clues. NORMAN, as above, or NORMAL: NORMAn (invader stripped) + L (Land, after) = the usual thing.

    Apart from this, refreshingly easy (or just suiting my thought processes) for someone who never gets close to the nanosecond times posted here. Didn’t time it, but probably about 25 mins in two tranches, apart from the continuing angst over NORMAN/NORMAL!

  27. I thought 13ac was one of those occasional annoying (and poor) clues in that there are two possible solutions that can’t be determined by other clues. NORMAN, as above, or NORMAL: NORMAn (invader stripped) + L (Land, after) = the usual thing.

    Apart from this, refreshingly easy (or just suiting my thought processes) for someone who never gets close to the nanosecond times posted here. Didn’t time it, but probably about 25 mins in two tranches, apart from the continuing angst over NORMAN/NORMAL!

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