Times 26068 – anger, animals and the elderly

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 11:02 on the club timer and holy moley there’s someone with a 5-minuter already, so I am in second! I guess this confirms my suspicion that it’s on the easier side and if you twig the wordplay quickly, several long answers could become write-ins.

I wonder if the setter was going for some sort of ghost theme, with some animals mostly clustered on the right hand side of the grid, and some unpelasant terms grouped together on the left hand side.

Suggestions welcome and away we go…

Across
1 PRECURSOR: P(quiet) and then sounds like CURSER surrounding RE
6 HIPPO: HIP(joint) then OP reversed
9 ODYSSEY: ODE surrounding Y and SS, then another Y(year)
10 GRANDMA: GRAND MAN without the last letter – Grandma Moses was an American folk artist
11 FRICTIONAL: FICTIONAL surrounding R(umpole) – my parents would enjoy the surface, as I think they’ve watched every Rumpole of the Bailey episode a few hundred times
12 SONG: ON in S(alzbur)G
14 TAMIL: hidden in jusT A MILlion
15 ECOLOGIST: LOG,1’S in E, COT(cottage)
16 OFFENSIVE: O,FIVE containing FENS
18 SEDAN: Well now I fell silly – I got this from the chair definition, and figured there must have been a battle there – apparently there have been two of them!
20 POXY: PROXY without R(ace)
21 BEAUTIFIED: BEATIFIED with U(nit) inside
25 HOODLUM: O,O(rings),D(Deputy Lieutenant) in HUM
26 TAFFETA: FAT reversed then FETA
27 PRESS: double definition
28 CHALLENGE: L,L,E(ighty) in CHANGE(money given back)
 
Down
1 P,ROOF: as in a publisher’s galley proof
2 ELYSIUM: ELY(See), and then SUM surrounding I(current)
3 UNSETTLING: (spel)L in the U.N. SETTING
4 SAY-SO: I liked this one… SAY(for example), SO(sic)
5 RIGMAROLE: (A,GIRL,OR,ME)*
6 HAAR: AA(Automobile Association) in HR(hour)
7 PADRONI: (DROP IN)* surrounding A
8 ORANG-UTAN: RANG inside OUT,AN
13 WORSHIPFUL: ROW reversed, then SHIPFUL – another title for London’s Livery Companies
14 TROOP SHIP: cryptic definition
15 EPIDERMIC: R in EPIDEMIC Edit: can’t proof-read my own stuff well – originally this had EMPIDERMIC, which is related to a Latin American dessert
17 FOXHOLE: ELF reversed around OX(neat),HO
19 DRIVE-IN: DRIVE(energy) then first letters of Is Negligible
22 U,LT,RA
23 DRAKE: reference to Sir Francis DRAKE
24 ALAS: take both T’s out of AT LAST

36 comments on “Times 26068 – anger, animals and the elderly”

  1. I was heading for a reasonable time on this one but then got delayed by WORSHIPFUL, EPIDERMIC and BEAUTIFIED. So44 minutes in the end. I’m on slow form today as the Quickie took me forever.

    Edited at 2015-04-09 01:10 am (UTC)

  2. That included about eight minutes of interruptions, so definitely on the easy side. DNK PADRONI, but the cluing was generous. Was also bewildered by WORSHIPFUL, but trusted the wordplay.

    Would have been a good week so far for me if not for yesterday’s disaster. Still, three out of four ain’t bad (extrapolating from Meatloaf’s assertion).

    Thanks setter and blogger.

  3. Am I the only person never to have heard of Grandma Moses, I wonder? 27 minutes for this, held up a little by the neat 17, POXY and my last in FRICTIONAL.
        1. And that’s just our blogger. Think how much the NSA must know about what you didn’t know in 2011.
    2. Hadn’t heard of her until very recently – she’s currently on a tour of Crosswordland.

      What an excellent blog you’ve written today, George.

      *Ensures preservation of comment for all time*

      1. I’d like to write something pithy, but someone would delete it, for revenge.
    3. According to Wiki, there was also another folk artist called Grandpa Moses.
      A bit of a downer for those who had ‘fellow mostly’ as PA (from PAL) rather than MA (from MAN) …
  4. Certainly on the easier side, but not the less entertaining for that. I was pleased to remember HAAR, probably from a long-ago Mephisto.

    I managed to hold myself up for quite a while by putting SIEGE at 18ac with a fair degree of confidence. Although on reflection a siege is not really a battle, I’m sure we have seen looser definitions than that.

    1. Yep, I had SIEGE in for battle at first. The perils of thinking too much in French!
  5. 25 minutes and without aids. A satisfying puzzle with some nice clues. Very happy.
    Good to have a bowler that didn’t involve cricket for a change (so where was the obligatory cricket reference today then?).

  6. Phooey! This would have been my third <10m time of the week, except that I literally spent two and a half minutes not being able to see BEAUTIFIED (with some of the problem there being that I had GRACE at 23D for a good while – well, WG was probably a pretty good bowler, and GRACE is a girl’s name is a bird, right? So a few seconds over 10 minutes in the end, worse luck.

    Another most enjoyable puzzle, it’s been a good week I think. C’mon Friday’s, be excellent for me!

  7. 14:01 … raced through until I had the Blessed thing and the cargo capacity left. It took me 7 minutes to realise I had the wrong end of the stick on both, so I’ll have to say “great misdirection!” to make myself feel better.

    COD .. definitely WORSHIPFUL

  8. 15.55 but with hoar which I had resolved to look back on but forgot. Haar, which I vaguely knew, said it all. Mind you, looking at the grid, so do a couple of other 4-letter-words, between them.
  9. Exhausted by coaching ulaca on zapping on the CC Forum and hurt by his response, I was never going to finish this in the time available. Confidently writing in Ulysses and Epidermal and never having heard of Grandma Moses did not help and to me, HAAR is a town in the south of The Netherlands

    Edited at 2015-04-09 08:00 am (UTC)

  10. A brief interruption took me to a shade under 19 minutes, though I’m not too sure where the time went in a rethaer steady solve.
    ECOLOGIST my last in, not least because we’ve got used to ECO=green in recent months and I couldn’t work out what the poet was doing or where his house was. “I wandered lonely as an economist”, perhaps.
    Left DRAKE until I had the checkers, though on reflection isn’t “famous bowler” always Drake?
    I did wonder whether there’d be some GRANDPAs. Any admissions?
    1. Me for one as PA short for Pat (a fellow) and Moses was a grandpa – irrefutable logic apart from being wrong!
  11. No problems with this somewhat vanilla offering. A pleasant enough meander down country lanes really. I only knew of Grandma through crosswords. Liked SAY SO – rather a good clue I thought.
  12. Must be where Paul Haarhuis resides.

    You need a thicker skin to survive around here, Tone.

  13. 26mins, all understood (or vaguely remembered from other crossies; GRANDMA, HAAR, SEDAN). Had ‘roxy’ in for a while, thinking it was some sort of race (akin to Pygmy, perhaps), as I had ‘proxy’ as the ‘inferior substitute’. This made TROOP SHIP my LOI, with a shrug, as I wasn’t totally sure it wasn’t ‘troup SHIP’.
  14. 14 mins. I confess that I considered “grandpa” for 10ac before I remembered Grandma Moses. BEAUTIFIED was my LOI after DRAKE. Having read Michael Howard’s excellent book about the Franco-Prussian war a couple of times SEDAN wasn’t a problem.
  15. A very pleasant 9 minutes, as all the required knowledge came readily to hand (in the same way as Camus supposedly claimed to have learned everything he knew about life from football, I have learned everything I know about primitive artists, French military history and sea fogs from crosswords).

    I’ve also forgotten plenty of things, but happily today was not one of those days.

  16. 12:23. I couldn’t spell PRECURSOR the last time it came up in November, and I still can’t. Drat.
    I thought this was going to be very quick at first but then I got bogged down at the end, particularly over BEAUTIFIED/WORSHIPFUL.
    Very enjoyable puzzle.
  17. About 25 mins for me, so very much on the easier side by my standards. I was helped, on this occasion, by having most of the GK required — “galley”=”proof” suggested itself quickly for someone who spent his professional career in the inky trade. HAAR was new to me and a guess, but a confident one based on the cryptic indicators. Nice puzzle.
  18. A pleasant fifteen minutes or so, with too much of that spent on WORSHIPFUL. HAAR known only from crosswords but I remembered the primitive artist from when her work was very popular. A toughie tomorrow, let’s hope.
  19. 38m but with GRANDPA for Moses so a not quite all correct. Guessed SEDAN correctly at least. Enjoyable puzzle and the mention of Drake reminds me of my favourite ‘howler’. Asked to tell the story of the armada one blessed child ended her version with a servant running to Drake shouting ‘Sir Francis! Sir Francis! Come quick! The Spanish are here.’ To which Sir Francis memorably replied: ‘Never mind the Spanish, they can wait. My bowels can’t!’
  21. 10:08 for me. I’d have been quicker if I hadn’t been so darned tired that my mind kept wandering off to the things that had been occupying it earlier in the day. Nice puzzle, though.

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