Times 26023 – ….and startled the ultra-fastidious!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 31 minutes

Music: Sibelius, Second Symphony, Barbarolli, RPO

This seemed like another routine Monday effort. Some of the wordplay was quite convoluted, but since the literal was sitting in plain sight, that was not much of a problem. I still have one or two to work out after the fact, but I should be able to manage.

Here in New York City, we are getting some very cold weather. Fortunately, all the snow has missed us, so when it decides to warm up there will be nothing to melt. In the meantime, I am going to refrain from playing the ‘Antarctica’ Symphony, as Sibelius is quite cold enough.

Across
1 EAVESDROP, E(anagram of SAD OVER)P. A surface that plays to my hobbyhorse; never store records in flood-prone basements!
6 MOSES, MO[l as]SES.
9 CORGI, COR + GI, the small breed that E.R. fancies. The dogs are at the Garden starting tomorrow, but no Corgi has ever won Best in Show.
10 GLADSTONE, GLAD + STONE.
11 PRESENT, P + RESENT, the ‘here and now’.
12 AVIATOR, [narni]A + VIA + TO + R[ook].
13 SKATE ON THIN ICE, S + KATE + ON + THIN + ICE, a nice change from the usual fishy clues.
17 RHODE ISLAND RED, anagram of OLD SHERIDAN + sounds like READ.
21 AMORIST, A M(O[livier], R[icardson])IST.
23 ADMIRAL, LA(RIM)DA, all backwards. The Lada was only slightly better than the Trabant.
25 FRIVOLUS, FRI + VOL + O U.S.
26 TEMPI, hidden in [exaspera]TE MP I[n].
27 REEDY, RE[m]EDY.
28 TENNESSEE, T (i.e. a Model T car) + anagram of SEEN, SEEN.
 
Down
1 ESCAPIST, anagram of CASE + S[and] in PIT.
2 VERNE, [in]VERNE[ss], one I had to puzzle out for the blog, since the answer is fairly obvious.
3 SWINEHERD, anagram of REDS HE around WIN.
4 RIGHT ON, [b]RIGHT + ON.
5 PHARAOH, P(H[enry] + A R.A. + O[ver])H. All right, I just put it in from the literal.
6 MASAI, M,(AS)A1. Not difficult if you can remember the chemical symbol for arsenic. Now what is the symbol for old lace?
7 SPORTS CAR, SPORT SCAR, a chestnut.
8 SHERRY, S + HERR + Y[en]. I nearly put brandy, but I don’t think Brand was from Southern Germany.
14 APHRODITE, anagram of PERI HAD TO; he would have.
15 NANOMETRE, NAN + O(MET)RE, where ‘satisfied’, as often, means responded to a demand for payment.
16 ADELAIDE, A[rrived] + sounds like DELAYED. I’m not to up on the English monarchs of this period, had to look her up.
18 INTROIT, IN + [de]TROIT, another write-in from the literal.
19 LIAISON, LI(A[ndrocles] IS)ON.
20 GAFFER, double definition, one jocular.
22 IVORY, double definition, as in ‘tickle the ivories’.
24 REMUS, R + EMUS.

41 comments on “Times 26023 – ….and startled the ultra-fastidious!”

  2. It was comforting to see that I’d finally got Tamworth into my memory banks; I’d forgotten the Lada, on the other hand, but that didn’t matter. Wasted some time looking for a dog at 17ac, I don’t know why, and of course for Cain at 24d. I assume the peri in 14d is a she; and if you’re thinking of Willi, Vinyl, it’s Brandt.
  3. Struggled a bit to start with until the two long answers fell. Then again at the end in the bottom left, with REEDY last in. Kept thinking of IL, LUI and our favourite Frenchman, RENÉ … when all I needed was a simple M! Must be taking the stupid pills again.

    Surprised not to see a few gripes here about the sound-alike in 16dn. Works, appropriately, with an Australian accent.

    Don’t knock the humble Lada. Many were sold here in 4×4 format (the Niva) and are still used on bush properties. Largely because nobody cares or cared about damaging the bodywork. I’ll admit though that finding Lada in the same puzzle as Lamborghini is redolent of the sublime and the ridiculous.

  4. 18 minutes ending with pharaoh because I wasn’t sure of the spelling.
    I echo mctext’s comments re the Lada. I had one in Peru; one day I stopped to get some petrol/gas. The attendant (those were the days) offered to check the oil and, after he’d used the dipstick, came back to me and said, “there is no oil in the engine”. (It sounded more dramatic in Spanish, I seem to remember.) Filled her up with oil as well and it ran perfectly thereafter.
    Not sure I’d class a Lamborghini as a simple sports car though.
  5. 25 minutes, so well within my target time of 30. As far as I’m aware NANOMETRE was unknown – unless Jerry comes along and reminds me I blogged it only last week 🙂 – but anyway the wordplay was very helpful.

    I’m puzzled by mct’s comment about 16dn. I speak RE and the homophone works perfectly for me.

    Edited at 2015-02-16 07:09 am (UTC)

    1. Been around a bit in my time and I’ve heard the “e” in “delayed” pronounced long in several places: |diː’leɪd|.
      (Of course, and adding somewhat to the point, here it’s a schwa! So no-one would say RP |dɪˈleɪd|. And to call the city |’adɪˈleɪd| would mark you out as a Pom right away. It’s |ˈadəleɪd|.)

      Edited at 2015-02-16 07:44 am (UTC)

      1. Firstly, I meant RP above but can’t edit it now.

        Sorry I don’t fully understand phonetic symbols so I may be missing your point but in RP “delayed” is pronounced “dill-aid” and the former Queen Consort is “Add-ill-aid”.

        I accept that others may say things differently and that’s fine, but I don’t think there’s anything dodgy about a homophone that works in RP being used in the Times crossword.

        Edited at 2015-02-16 08:22 am (UTC)

        1. For what it’s worth I’m also an RP speaker and when I say ADELAIDE the E is a schwa, so the homophone doesn’t quite work. Not that it bothered me.
        2. The phonetics are straight from the Oxford dictionaries. But sorry about all that. I’ll try to find a better way of doing it. Roughly:

          iː is long E, as in “eel”
          ɪˈ is as you have it for RP, as in “ill”
          ə: is schwa, which sounds a bit like “uh” (think of a Kiwi saying “fish and chips” where it appears three times.)

          Seems all three, or mixtures of them, can appear in “delayed” and “Adelaide”.

          1. Most Kiwis would pronounce the ‘and’ in ‘fish and chips’ as /n/. No time to waste on the schwa! Same for many speakers of Standard British English, in fact.
              1. Sure. I make exactly the same sounds when I say ‘pad a ladle’, for instance. Both the D and the vowel sound are different to the way I pronounce ‘a delay’.
                Maybe it’s just me…

                Edited at 2015-02-16 11:10 am (UTC)

                1. I’m adder laid for the queen and dill aid for the late-running train so the homophone isn’t perfect for me but as far as I’m concerned it’s close enough for a crossword clue by some margin.
                  1. Yes I agree. The distinction is a fine one. Repeat after me: ‘while Derrida delayed Blackadder laid a saddle aiding Madeleine in Adelaide.’

                    Edited at 2015-02-16 01:30 pm (UTC)


  6. No problem with the homophone, I’m with Jack on the ‘dill’ pronunciation for both…

    Where I did, however, have a problem was on the spelling of PHARAOH… which meant that 12 was never going to work. Looking back now I see I’ve bifded ‘orbiter’, which has thrown MASAI out completely. Doh.

    REEDY unparsed, too.

  7. 11 minutes dead, though I have to admit not stopping too much on the way except to correct my numerous mistypings. Would it spoil the fun if we had a spell checker on the crossword entries?
    Speed meant I missed the Lada and wasn’t fussed about Adelaide – I didn’t know Queen ever did a gig there. I also left TENNESSEE to stew in its own juices, with a note to mildly complain about having to find a word for model and then make up an anagram about its doubled letters. Can’t read, can’t count, do know when a clue is just, well, right.
    In 1975, when I drove through and around East Germany, my Fiat 125 was a dead ringer for the Polish (Polski Fiat) version of the Lada. At that time it was only available to the Party royalty, and turning up at youth hostels created a stir not unlike kicking a termite mound.
  8. 12:13. This was mostly very straightforward but it put up a little resistance in parts. My last in was VERNE: for some reason it took me ages to see which Scottish city was required.
  9. Easy one – 15 minutes mostly spent writing in answers from definitions

    Not sold on model=T but it didn’t trouble me as I had all the checkers and only read first word of clue! And the homophone works OK for me as I speak C-D

    1. Jimbo – thank you for the Cornish yarg tip. The farm shop up the road sells it, and it’s lovely. Will become a staple in our house, I suspect.
  10. Found this very easy, under ten minutes. I don’t understand or speak Schwa, RP or Phonetic, but the homophone works fine for me

    Count me another Lada Niva fan; in addition to being indestructible, it also had a rather good performance off-road. Refined, it was not..

  11. Must have been easy today as I did it in 40 minutes. I learned one new word, INTROIT, in doing so. A very pleasant coffee break. Now for some cleaning.
  12. All went fine until the SE corner where I missed the hidden in 26, was fixated on Cain and Abel to the point I missed REMUS, and hadn’t a clue about NANOMETRE.

    But, overall a win for me to have got all bar three on a weekday offering.

  15. Jimbo, I remember T=model being one of the first “conventions” my Dad taught me when I used to “help” him with the Telegraph cryptic but I don’t recall coming across it in the Times before.
    1. No I don’t recall it in the Times either but my memory is freewheeling down hill quite rapidly these days. I have seen it elsewhere and I’ve never liked it

      Ford started with the Model A and the production one before the T was something like the model N. After the T he started over again and the next production model was back to Model A! I just don’t think model=T really cuts it as a suitable substitution.

  16. 11:20, slowed a bit at the end by Admiral (I mentally had Lada as coming from elsewhere in Eastern Europe) and Queen Adelaide (who?).

    If I had any tippex I’d have used it on Pharaoh. Eyebrow raised at T for model (see above).

  17. 20 minutes for an easy puzzle, but I thought there were some nice clues (2, 10, 26 tin particular). Didn’t know INTROIT. It’s ages since I’ve seen a Model T in a crossword. It used to be very common, even when the car was ancient.
  18. 11:15 … plenty to enjoy, like the surface for RIGHT-ON. The wordplay for VERNE is pretty fiendish — good job the answer sort of presented itself.

    I don’t trust my memory on these things at all, but I thought there was a time, maybe 5+ years back, when T for “model” was coming up a lot.

  19. i found this a little chewier than the usual Monday fare, but it was obviously just me.
    No complaints and a good start to the week.
  20. There were indeed some very nice clues here, and really perfectly weighted for a Monday I think, so well done setter, and editor! Easy but full of delights.

    Had no problem at all with that ‘phone, though the discussion of finer points above is nice.

    Isn’t it ‘foosh ‘n’ chups’ in NZ? Ay?

  21. I thought there was some clever wordplay. About 40 minutes. Spent a lot of time because I can never remember where all the As and Os in PHARAOH go, and then wasn’t sure I’d seen MASAI without double Ss or triple As. Thanks for the blog, Vinyl.
  22. A respectable (for me) 29 minutes, with all parsed except PHARAOH – I had the outermost P…H as the “public house”, assuming the usual abbreviation, and was therefore short of a few letters.
  23. 15 mins. I was cracking through this but then got bogged down in the SW. My rule for pharaoh is to spell it as I think it should be spelled and then switch the “o” and the second “a”.
  24. For once, the homophone worked perfectly for me, and Adelaide presented little challenge. I was surprised at the raised eyebrows over model =T, as this is one of the codes with which I’m very familiar. My cruciverbial history is Scotsman + Telegraph, so that may be the reason.
  26. In grumpy mode this week and didn’t like this one: too many proper nouns (10 in the answers, 15 in the clues), brand names included, T for model never seen in the Times before, etc. But very easy 14:29, only my 2nd or 3rd sub-15 minutes ever.

    But made ungrumpy by the Lada-love. Bought one in 1988 to do a lap of Australia on the premise that if it died it was cheap enough to leave on the side of the road and hitch home. Ended up owning it more than 12 years, great car, good off-road, don’t care what happens to it cos it’s worth nothing, and definitely unrefined 😉
    Rob

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