Times 26,042

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
For a second blog in a row I got home late and thought I’d tackle this before going to bed, a decision also made with an eye to watching Ireland as they continue to pursue their challenge to show up England even more reach the World Cup knock-out stages. I was musing earlier if there’s any way that Eoin Morgan could qualify to play for this team…mind you, he’d have to score some runs before they’d want him.

Anyway, enough cricket chat; unlike last time, I didn’t regret my decision, as this was a steady solve without being what you’d call simple. There’s some quite tricky wordplay, and some pretty obscure vocabulary; in the latter case, I usually found the required word ringing a bell, suggesting I’ve seen it before in a crossword (so even if I didn’t exactly remember it immediately, I hadn’t entirely forgotten it…and I know what happens when I say I’ve never seen a particular word before). As for the wordplay, I will be impressed by anyone who didn’t bung in at least one thing without complete understanding; I think I have shown all my working in writing the blog, even if it’s retrospective. All in all, very enjoyable, with the clock stopped at just under 17 minutes.

Across
1 GAS LAMP – SLAM(=strike) in GAP(=interval).
5 SPLIT UP – S.P.(=childless), LIT UP(=drunk). SP is short for sine prole, the Latin term used in law; this is one of those things I didn’t know until looking it up afterwards.
9 WORLD VIEW – double def. Mercator created an early projection of the globe, in order to show it in 2-D; and while I didn’t know the German word (my German philosophy is somewhat slight, I’ll admit) I could see that it was “welt” something, so it wasn’t much of a leap – in fact it’s a direct translation of “worldview”.
10 ORMER – FORMER minus the F{ine}; an ormer is a shellfish, its most common habitat being, as far as my experience goes, the cryptic crossword.
11 ACERB =”A SERB”.
12 ON AVERAGE – A{rea} inside ON A VERGE, which is where you might find yourself if you pull over to the side of the road.
14 THERMODYNAMICS – M.O. inside (CHEMISTRYAND)*; at first I thought it would be a simple case of inserting M.O. or DR into an academic subject to produce another one, but it’s much cleverer than that.
17 DOG IN THE MANGER – DANGER “banks” i.e. surrounds (ONEMIGHT)*.
21 STARBURST – BURS(=flower heads) in START. They’ll always be Opal Fruits to me.
23 TREEN – RE(=about) in TEN; simple wordplay for an uncommon word.
24 ENDOW – END(=goal), O{ld} W{ickets}.
25 WHIP ROUND – W{ith}, HIP(=fruit), ROUND(=drinks in bar).
26 SWALLOW – WALL(=barrier) in SOW(=broadcast); see Monty Python and the Holy Grail for further information on the migratory habits of swallows.
27 SOLFEGE – musical scales, of course; [F{ish},E.G.] in SOLE. One of those musical terms which has a very “crossword” feel to it.
 
Down
1 GEWGAW – G{ood}, [W{ife} in (WAGE)rev.]; a lovely word for something decorative – if I didn’t come across this in crosswords, it might well have been Shakespeare, possibly in company with “kickshaws”.
2 SCREECH – S{mall}, CREECH(moving the E from the close (end) to the middle).
3 ALDEBARAN – DEBAR in ALAN (Partridge); being fictional, I guess the rules about living people don’t apply to Norwich’s finest. Aha!
4 PHILOSOPHER – PHI (Greek letter, so one of Plato’s), then [OP{us},H{ard}] in LOSER.
5 SEW – where “everywhere” means all four cardinal compass points, with N{orth} missing.
6 LOOSE – LOO(=ladies, though obviously could have been gents), SE{en}.
7 TIMPANI – 1M inside (IN A PIT)rev. In more musical knowledge gained solely from crosswords, I remembered that “the kitchen” means the percussion section of the orchestra, thus including drums like the timpani.
8 PERVERSE – (REP)rev. + VERSE; I think this is one of those cases where the two words don’t really mean the same thing, but both have a shade of meaning which means they overlap, and that’s enough.
13 ASYMMETRIES – [S{hodd}Y in (EMMA)rev.], TRIES
15 AU NATUREL – (TUNA)* in {L}AUREL. The temptation for anyone who hasn’t parsed this one is AU NATURAL, which looks more, well, natural to my eye; lift-and-separate to get the simple definition “raw”.
16 ODYSSEUS – {B}ODY, (SEUSS)*. An anagram which turns SEUSS into SSEUS is hardly testing, but the “Doctor Seuss” anagram indicator is brilliant.
18 GRANDMA – G.R.(George Rex) AND M.A.
19 EXECUTE – IV(=four) taken from EXECUT{IV}E; another elegant lift-and-separate to get the definition “top”.
20 ON EDGE – ED{itor} in (GONE)*.
22 BOWEL – {vegetabl}E in BOWL.
25 WOW – WIDOW minus her I.D.(=papers).

39 comments on “Times 26,042”

  1. held up for a few minutes by being too hasty and putting in chromodynamics which made 3D impossible but fitted all the other checkers. when i looked at the anagrist more carefully i saw it

    at 6D “easy gents” doesn’t quite make a good surface reading!

    about an hour but meeting someone for dinner in the middle so no real time

  2. I found this mostly straightforward until I ran into very choppy waters in the SE corner.

    I’m not sure about 9ac. It doesn’t seem to be a double definition as “Mercator’s” alone defines nothing, and translating the answer directly into German is hardly cryptic. Perhaps I have missed something but it doesn’t look right to me.

  3. I also needed about an hour for this and as the moment approached I finally gave up trying to work out 27ac and looked it up. I guess I should feel a bit ashamed that as I have a degree in music and many years experience of teaching it a long time ago, I didn’t know the word. But then I never learned formally the technicalities of singing. I might have stood a chance with “solfeggio” which at least I’d heard of without remembering what it was.

    Didn’t recognise SP = without issue or TREEN, though no doubt I have blogged them both in the past. Similarly ALDEBARAN but I was helped by having had DEBAR come up only a day or two ago, and by being a big fan of Alan Partridge, though I wish Coogan had not continued with him after the first series of “I’m AP”.

    On Derek’s point I think both words in 9ac have to be taken together but agree having the answer in the clue in German is not much cop. Most of the puzzle was superb though.

    Edited at 2015-03-10 07:13 am (UTC)

  4. 29:05 .. phew, that seemed awfully hard to me, and seemed to get harder as it went along (is that possible? does prolonged observation alter a crossword? I don’t know). I hope I’m not the only person who has trouble spelling ASYMMETRIES and made life extra difficult (re THERMODYNAMICS) as a result.

    Satisfying to finish, anyway. I inferred SOLFEGE from the existence of Bach’s Solfeggietto, which I can play — either very slowly, or faster and with all the right notes, not necessarily in …

        1. I did the same, but fortunately I had a feeling that I didn’t know how to spell it. It’s the ones I think I can spell that are really dangerous.
  5. Thought I’d never get started on this one, but once I did I quite enjoyed it…much more than yesterday’s crickety one!

    ORMER, ALDEBARAN and TREEN could have been mombles for all I knew, and I don’t think I’ve come across SP for childless before.

    Hazarded ‘trade wind’ at 9ac for a little while, again don’t think I’ve ever seen the German word.

    cod: SOLFEGE for it’s ‘work on scales’ def. Spent a long summer holiday many moons ago au pairing in France where I had to supervise my charges’ music practice .

  6. 18 minutes and small change, held up at the last by SOLFEGE. I remembered solfeggio and sol-fa once I’d found what letters to insert in the fish, but had not remembered this French (sic) version.
    I suppose you could argue that the cryptic bit of 9 is the Mercator reference: you wouldn’t commonly describe what he did as a “world view”. But it does have a hint of village word quiz about it, a not quite perfectly formulated cryptic clue. You know the kind of thing “Underground stations” 1. Make them sick?! 2 Breadmaker’s special.
    Knew Sine Parole once Tim reminded me, but shrugged when entered.
    Good clean fun.
  7. 14m. Like Tim there were a few in here that I knew vaguely from crosswords past. TREEN, for example.
    No problem with SOLFEGE, although I’m not sure where I know it from. It reminds me of the Aristocats but I doubt they actually used the word.
    I didn’t know SP and assumed it must stand for ‘single parent’. My first reaction when I learned what it actually stands for was that sine prole sounds like a good motto for the Bullingdon Club. This prompted a line of enquiry that revealed to me that ‘proletarian’ comes from ‘a citizen of the sixth and lowest class, who served the state not with his property but with his offspring.’ You all knew that already of course but I have done my living and learning for the morning.

    Edited at 2015-03-10 10:33 am (UTC)

    1. i think we usually see it meaning STARTING PRICE but the old law latin worked nicely here. no idea how i remembered it or why i had to learn it in the first place.
      1. Yes, starting price is more common. ‘Single Parent’ worked fine for me, so I’m not complaining!
  8. Interesting puzzle that apart from 9A presents a fair and interesting challenge with obscure words clued with excellent cryptic derivations. Not sure what the setter was trying to do with our famous cartographer but putting in the German for the answer appears a bit bizarre.

    On a very positive note my cherry tree has come into blossom so spring has really arrived here in Dorset

    1. My frogs knew spring was here a couple of weeks ago. I have no idea where they are the rest of the year – my pond occasionally dries in hot summers with hosepipe bans – but they sure know when it’s time to fill the place with tapioca, and return accordingly. They’ve only been wrong once. The tapioca froze.
      1. Yes, we’ve also had such signs like robins looking for nesting material etc but somehow a tree coming into full blossom signals that winter is really on the retreat and lifts the spirits.
  9. 23 mins. I found this one quite tricky, and I spent the last 3 mins teasing out SOLFEGE from the wordplay. Count me as another who was held up by entering a careless ASSYM at the start of 13dn, and it was only when I realised what 14ac was probably going to be that I went back to it and spelt it properly. And parsed it ……….
  10. Took longer than usual (34 mins) but time spent enjoyably. It occurred to me while I was solving anticlockwise from NW that there seemed to be an overabundance of Ws but it seemed to even out in the end. Agree with previous comments that 9A is a bit odd but the answer was clear.

    Edited at 2015-03-10 11:43 am (UTC)

  11. How does the “m” in IM = “thousand”? m = mega or a million,surely?

    If “m” is supposed to be “milli”, then shouldn’t it be “thousandth”?

  12. A relief after yesterday’s battle – 10:24 with Tippex. Never heard of 27a but the wordplay was very helpful there.
  13. It’s just as well you didn’t think too hard about single parent equating to childless.
  14. 19:53 with the across clues peppered with more question marks than the Riddler’s suit:
    Split up – How does SP mean childless?
    World view – am I missing summat?
    Ormer – is that a thing?
    Thermo… – parsing?
    Treen – is that a thing?
    Solfege – is that a thing?
  15. Similar question marks to Penfold. Got them all except the scaly one, where I finally opted for SOLZEDE, something to do with the 80’s band Fischer Z (fish’s head), and yeah I know it doesn’t make sense.

    Also entered AU NATURAL, not for the first time so no excuse for that one.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

  16. BIFD quite a few of these but all correct after 50m so definitely on my challenging side. I had same queries as others and also had ASSY.. Until I managed to remember EMMA. Some odd phrasing – risk banks for example – which hid the definitions from me but I did feel I would get there eventually. Thanks for the blog which cleared up quite a large number of guesses.
    1. somewhere i must have turned over 2 pages at once – i get the general idea but please tell me what it means.
  17. Elapsed time over an hour, but as interrupted by postprandial nap, really about half that. I agree Mercator was unhelpful at 9ac, not being German-speaking. I was surprised that TREEN was unfamiliar – it turns up on nearly every antiques show. 3dn made me wonder whether I’d missed the demise of Alan P – but I suppose the embargo only applies to real people 😉
  18. I must admit to biffing a few in my 27 mins today. I have come across “sine prole” before but it did not spring to mind today nor did I know the “kitchen” reference for percussion so TIMPANI was my LOI.
  19. About 30 minutes, ending with SOLFEGE. Overall, a fun puzzle, and my holdups were similar to Penfold’s. I’m surprised no one’s yet pointed out how nifty WOW is. Wonderful and succinct. Thanks to the setter and Tim, and regards.
  20. Just over half an hour, but undone by having to research 27a. Lots of very clever clues, but 6d and 22d reminded me too much of a Grauniad type puzxle.
  22. but relieved to see others had similar difficulties to me. A flying start – Gas-lamp, bang, World view, bang, Gewgaw, bang, Screech bang, Andromeda, bang (yes, that certainly held me up later) and then, after a later correction to the star finished bar 27a after 35 minutes or so. Fruitless 10 minutes trying to parse SOLLERET (which I am certain all who contribute here know but combined elements of scales, fish, sole etc) until the penny dropped. Interestingly the two volume concise OED I keep in the kitchen and is 40 years old did not have SOLFEGE but the recent one I keep in the book-room did… We live and learn
    Chris M-W

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