Times 26036

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Once again I very nearly hit my 30-minute target but failed on this occasion by 7 minutes because of a hold-up in the NE corner where I became fixated on an incorrect first word at 8dn which also prevented me solving the very easy 6ac. I enjoyed seeing a different Oxford detective for once – perhaps DCS Strange will turn up one day? We have answers that fit together at 14dn and 6dn though they are not linked in the clues and I can’t see that they are part of a wider theme. I’m planning to put a comment in the Quickie blog when it appears, recommending that newbie solvers should have a go at this one as I think most of it is very straightforward.

{deletions} [indicators] defintions where given are underlined

Across
1 CONGRESS – CON (study), {e}GRESS (way to make exit)
6 FRIGHT – F (fine), RIGHT (just). This should have been a write-in but I lost my way over a couple of clues in this quarter.
9 ENTERTAINMENT – Anagram [somehow] of INTERNET MEANT
10 ENTREE – EN (space – in printing, half an em), TREE (plane?). Perhaps more usually seen on menus, this can also mean the right to enter somewhere or something and therefore “access“.
11 DAY LEWIS – DAY (time), LEWIS (Oxford detective – Morse’s sergeant, later promoted and given his own series on TV). In addition to his main career as a poet, Cecil Day Lewis also wrote a series of detective stories under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, so “poetical crime-writer” is the definition. [On edit: see comments below re the omission of the hyphen]
13 DANCE FLOOR – Cryptic definition
15 SHED – SH{r}ED (little, as in ‘shred of evidence’)
16 ASTI – A (area) anagram [given a makeover] of IT’S
18 ON THE ALERT – ON (working), HEALER (doctor possibly) inside TT (dry – tee-total)
21 LONG SLIP – Anagram [upset] of POLLING’S. I assume this is a fielding position in cricket that’s out of favour now, to account for “once” in the clue.
22 DOTAGE – TAG (label) inside DOE (female – of several species including Julie Andrews’ deer).
23 STEP OUT OF LINE – Double definition, the second cryptic alluding to the possibility of tripping on a flight of steps if one of them is out of alignment.
25 BRIDLE – L (line) inside BRIDE (marriage participant)
26 RUDENESS – DEN (study) inside RUES (regrets), S (society). The wording is perhaps a little unfortunate in view of what’s at 20dn. [On edit at 07:18 I’ve just noticed that a similar thing has occurred in the two preceeding clues where part of the answer of one clue (line) is mentioned in the wording of the other. What with these examples, ‘possibly’ as the anagrind in consecutive clues (see below) and the not strictly inaccurate but somewhat odd omission of the Day-Lewis hyphen, I wonder if a little more attention might have been paid to some finer details, either by the setter or the editor or both].

Down
2 OCEANIA – A, IN, A, ECO (green) all reversed [uprising]. Australasia and thereabouts.
3 GET CRACKING – GET (see, as in ‘I get it’), CRACKING (excellent)
4 EERIE – {b}EER (ale without head), IE (that is)
5 SO-AND-SO – SO-SO (mediocre) consists of SO and SO
6 FANCY-FREE – Double definition. If one is hard-nosed one is realistic and not given to flights of fancy. Often used after 14dn in a well-known phrase.
7 ICE – Hidden
8 HOT-WIRE – Anagram [possibly] of TWO inside HIRE (rental). Definition: try to start, e.g. a motor car. My last one in, convinced for ages that the first word would be “let”.
12 EAST LOTHIAN – {Prest}O{npans} inside anagram [possibly – again and in consecutive clues!] of IN THE ATLAS
14 FOOTLOOSE – FOOT (pay for), LOOS (toilets), {promenad}E
17 SPONSOR – S (son), NS (bridge team) inside POOR (without much success)
19 TIPSTER – TIPS (goes over), T (time), ER{e} (before, cut short)
20 REGRETS – RE (about), GRE{e}TS (half-hearted welcomes)
22 DYFED – F{ans} inside DYED (sporting colours, hm)
24 END – {p}E{r}N{o}D. ‘Swallowing” indicates removal of letters from “Pernod” and “odd bits” tells us which ones

45 comments on “Times 26036”

  1. … after a bit of a break. Did yesterday’s and found it quite easy — the blogger didn’t. Found today’s much harder — again the blogger didn’t. Be interesting to analyse how these things happen. If only the positivist Hippolyte Taine were right and matters of taste could be subject to scientific scrutiny!

    Put off early on by assuming 18ac would be ON THE WAGON (dry) but couldn’t make it parse. Needed the L from …

    … EAST LOTHIAN: best clue of the bunch — a neat geographical &lit. I’d like to know when LONG SLIP was actually used. Probably when Freud last played cricket.

    And OCEANIA … what was George Orwell thinking of?

    Edited at 2015-03-03 03:33 am (UTC)

  2. Went fairly smoothly, although a couple of clues were parsed only post hoc, like 10ac (which had a nice smooth surface). I had no idea about Day Lewis’s crime writing side (and I had thought it was Day-Lewis), or what LEWIS had to do with anything, but checkers and d sufficed. Ditto for LONG SLIP, but with checkers and wordplay. I just looked up PRESTONPANS, and was pleased to see that it’s in EAST LOTHIAN.
    1. Although Day-Lewis was (and still is) the family name, I understand the poet went through a phase of omitting the hyphen and several of his early works or collections were published without.

      Edited at 2015-03-03 07:15 am (UTC)

  3. I sympathize with the American and other non-cricket types who have to deal with cricket references on a daily basis, but if it makes you feel any better this lifelong cricket buff has never heard of the term at 21ac. Still, it could be unravelled fairly easily from the anagram.

    Similarly East Lothian seemed the most likely arrangement of the letters at 12dn and everything else was pretty straightforward.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

  4. Usual meaning is associated with acting outside of an accepted position … stepping away from ” the line” , perhaps with a touch of defiance.

    I am not convinced that this is properly synonymous with a “different approach”.

    1. Certainly in my idiolect it only means something like ‘misbehave, deviate from the accepted behavior’, etc., but it seems (seemed) to me that this had come up before in a cryptic, and anyway I just assumed that this was one more britspeak meaning. I just now checked the SOED, and it gives ‘behave in an unconventional [sic], discordant, or inappropriate manner’
    2. I think in practice, say, in the political world, where one is meant to be “on message”, taking a different approach amounts to much the same thing as behaving in a defiant, inappropriate, nay, discordant, manner.

      Edited at 2015-03-03 07:36 am (UTC)

      1. If you are taking a particular approach to considering a matter
        and I am taking a different approach.
        there is no implied/defined line which either party is required to observe.
        We are having a conversation.

        If your approach is endorsed / official , and I know this to be the case, and I wilfully go against it … I am stepping out of line.
        We are having an argument

        1. ‘If you are taking a particular approach to considering a matter
          and I am taking a different approach
          there is no implied/defined line which either party is required to observe.
          We are having a conversation.’

          May I congratulate you, Anonymous, on a prose poem worthy of Donald Rumsfeld (below).

          ‘There are known knowns.
          These are things we know that we know.
          There are known unknowns.
          That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know.
          But there are also unknown unknowns…’

    3. Collins has “to fail to conform to expected standards or attitudes” the direct opposite of “toe the line” defined as “conform to expected standards…”. “Adopt a different approach” seems similar but perhaps putting a more constructive spin on it. I tend to agree with you that it’s not exactly the same, but maybe not stretching things too far.
  5. 41 minutes. Unfortunately I mis-enumerated 23a, which lost me around 18 minutes, I reckon. Thanks to Jack for the parsing of SHED, where I was as clueless as an English batsman in a Powerplay.

    Has anyone read Scott’s Heart of Midlothian? Not many football teams can be named, if indirectly, after a book.

  6. Easy one today (by the way last Sunday’s Mephisto was the easiest for some time if anyone is thinking of having a dabble)

    No idea what a LONG SLIP was – seem to recall my wife once owning one

    As to LEWIS both she and Morse were real people – top solvers of Ximenes puzzles that Colin Dexter (a keen solver himself) incorporated into his books

    1. Lewis = she? What am I missing? Also jack, it was Morse who was the DCI. His boss Strange was a Detective Chief Superintendent.

      Dexter was/is a great fan of Ximenes and wrote the forward to the 2001 reissue of his book Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword.

      1. Thanks. Of course I mistyped DCS and have now corrected it. I wondered if Jim is referring to real person the character was based on, or perhaps his finger slipped as mine did.

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

      2. Mrs B Lewis was the alias of Dorothy Taylor who Ximenes asked to compile the Everyman Crossword

        Morse was Sir Jeremy Morse, international banker

        1. Jeremy Morse was a well-known Big Beast in the City when I started there as a young ACA in 1978. It has never occurred to me that he was the inspiration for, er, Morse
  7. As already pointed out, it’s a sign of how imponderable “wavelength” is that I found today’s more testing than yesterday’s, which seems to fly in the face of the popular consensus. All good, anyway.

    Count me as another who would normally regard himself as a cricket anorak, but has never come across the long slip; that said, it was pretty easy to deduce from the material provided.

    1. Maybe not keeping up to date on this was an advantage for me today. Because of enforced playing of the wretched game at school, I was aware of “long” as in “long stop” (a position I was often required to take where I could do little harm getting in the way of the action) and “slip” is always coming up, so LONG SLIP leapt to mind when I saw the anagrist. It was only the presence of “once” in the clue that alerted me to the possibility of something unusual going on.
  8. I think it shows how endearingly bonkers cricket terminology is that cricketophiles who’ve never heard of the supposedly obscure long slip will doubtless regard “short third man” as too obvious a term to need explanation.
      1. These are the things which occupy commentators and spectators during quiet passages of play. A recent World Cup game included detailed discussion of exactly where the dividing line between wide long leg and deep backward square leg lay. There was no agreement. (And yes, I appreciate this may not incite non-cricket lovers to think “I must learn more about this fascinating sport”).
  9. 23m. Well I found this really quite tough. Just goes to show something or other. I didn’t understand SHED, so thanks for that.
    I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the expression ON THE ALERT before.
  10. 32 minutes, my LOI also 8d, having been trying to reconcile 6a as FAIRLY and 8d beginning with LET.
    I too remember being LONG STOP and assumed LONG SLIP was an archaic variation of it.
    I’ve just had to look up DOTAGE – I thought it just meant approaching old age, now I see it means the weak state associated with being old; from now on I shall be less keen on saying ‘I am in my dotage’.
  11. Weird one for me – got the harder stuff OK, but missed out on two of the easier ones (6a and 8d), mainly due to obsessively pursuing FAIR type words in 6a. Dumb!

    Echo comments above re. long slip – thought I knew the game to an almost unhealthy level of detail, but had not come across this piece of antiquity. Tony Greig springs to mind…

    1. Your first para reflects my experience exactly, coupled with the thought that “shock” might be hair-related. Before I had the F checker I was considering HAIRDO though it would only fit the definition part of the clue.

      Congrats on your elevation to the senior blog! I look forward to your debut appearance.

      Edited at 2015-03-03 10:29 am (UTC)

      1. Thanks jack – mildly terrified but looking forward to the challenge. Hoping I wont have to change my handle to Icarus…
        1. If you find out how to change your handle without messing up everything you’ve ever posted here, please let me know!

  12. The ALERT bit of 18ac took me over 30mins. Not sure if I’ve ever seen that expression, either.
    1. ON THE ALERT is in all the usual sources with COED citing the example “everyone should be on the alert for terrorists” giving it an uncanny and rather worrying topicality. It didn’t exactly leap to mind whilst solving but I recognised it immediately I thought of it.
  13. 15:54 … reception on this wavelength intermittent here in west Cornwall (which is usually the case with actual radio reception).

    After some staring at SHED I concluded that it must be a poor clue, only to come here and discover that it’s a very good one. Suitably abashed, cap duly doffed.

    I didn’t realise that FANCY-FREE was coined by Shakespeare (Oberon, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The term FOOTLOOSE was, of course, coined by Kevin Bacon.

  14. 18 mins. I also found this one a little trickier than yesterday’s, although in retrospect there is no good reason for it.

    FRIGHT, which could have been a write-in if I had been more on the setter’s wavelength, was my LOI after HOT-WIRE. It took me much too long to see DANCE FLOOR, DAY LEWIS (hyphenated or not) and FANCY FREE.

    Count me as another cricket fan and ex-player who had never heard of LONG SLIP, but at least the anagram fodder meant the answer was fairly straightforward.

    1. In fairness to all of us who struggled to see it, I do think the clue for FRIGHT is a clever piece of bowling. It exploits the seasoned solver’s automatic association of ‘shock’ with hair, and throws in the much less common type of reversal. As Sir Geoffrey would say, “Takes a good batsman to get out to that.”
      1. I agree. When I had nothing but ??I??? I briefly tried to parse “haired”.
  16. 18:08, slowed by an unparsed (and uncorrect) on the wagon which only came to light when I decided that East Althion didn’t sound very likely. That gave me regrets which looked a bit tricky when I had it beginning with O, and then on to the top right to finish off.

    Fright was almost my LOI so I’m inclined to disagree with Jack’s judgement of it being very easy as I fell for the old “make it look like you have to do a reversal to get a word associated with hair” ploy.

  17. Two short solving sessions at work, though I will admit I’m not familiar with any works of Day, Lewis, Day-Lewis or Day Lewis, I’ve filed him, her or they away as a poet/writer/detective/stablehand that shows up in crosswordland occasionally.
  18. Never heard of the fielding position- FLY SLIP is the usual term I think. Pleased to get an all correct unaided puzzle after a long spell of incomplete/DNF/gave ups. I thought FRIGHT a clever clue, and liked EAST LOTHIAN, which I believe might be where the battlefield of Prestonpans is.
    Regards
    Andrew K
  19. As to time, I plead in mitigation that I was listening to the football match on Radio 5 Live while I tackled the puzzle. I delayed myself quite a lot by entering ‘hairdo’ at 6a, and ‘sort of’ parsed it by thinking that ‘fine’ could relate to ‘h’ (hard) in pencil lead classification. It’s quite surprising what one can persuade oneself of when inspiration fails.
    I corrected everything in the end, but dunces corner for slowness.
  20. 10:49 for me, still recovering after being laid low with some kind of lurgy, but certainly feeling a lot better than I was last week. I’d just done yesterday’s puzzle, and found this tougher – possibly because tiredness was setting in. In fact my brain more or less seized up towards the end, and I had to come here to find the explanations of 23ac and 6dn (for which, thanks).

    Older Champsionship competitors may remember the Rev Colin Morton who reached the final several times at the end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s (before moving to Jerusalem). He used to occupy the manse in Prestonpans.

  21. Solving time: a whisker short of a decade, or so it felt. 51 minutes according to the timer. I’m pretty sure my brain is beginning to rot. On the other hand, that’s only a shade under 5 Severs, so mustn’t grumble.

    My LOI was ENTREE, because I couldn’t parse it for love nor money, and was reluctant to put it in without considering all possible alternatives. On the other hand, I had no problems with “LONG SLIP”: once I realized that it was a cricketing clue, I knew that almost any two words that fit the checkers would do, and “long slip” seemed daft enough to be plausible. I’m pretty sure that there must be a cricketing position which is simultaneously the name for a stage in the development of a salmon and also a kind of exotic tree.

    Spent much of this afternoon removing an otter tooth from a gentleman’s nose, which I’m pretty sure is a medical first. The otter itself was no longer attached to the tooth.

  22. Surprised to get here a day late and have no comments on what seems to be a theme:
    Entertainment
    Dance Floor
    Step Out of Line
    Footloose (and Fancy-Free)

    I’ve never seen the film, but I imagine you could work in a bit of rudeness and regrets along the way.

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