Times 26,069: The Monotreme With No Name

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
What a good week it’s been for Times crosswords – five for five that I’ve really enjoyed, and naturally it didn’t hurt that my time on this one ended up at 10 and a half minutes, keeping my average over the week at under the 10 minute mark. Arbitrary things please arbitrary minds and all that…

This one was by no means a walkover, rather an exemplary mixture of easy entry points and then plenty much thornier to fully parse. I only started making much headway with the clues in the bottom half of the grid, eventually working my way back up and resolving the tricky NW corner – observe and admire the very well hidden definitions for 1A, 1D, 3D. Also 11A, which I have to say I wasn’t really sure about as a clue, the general gist of the cryptic definition being a bit too straightforward, but the word sought a bit too non-obvious. Or maybe it’s just that I live in London where agricultural matters are less on people’s lips. (Though the house I live in at the moment is apparently a converted dairy!)

Some excellent wildlife in here and I’m very glad 25A seemed familiar from somewhere so that I didn’t sit there scratching my head and muttering “but that’s an instrument… not a ruminant?” Anyway I am pleased to report that following a Google Image Search my five-year-old daughter gives baby bongos a big thumbs up. (Speaking of whom, thank goodness today is the last day of the Easter hols and back to school on Monday!) So the usual extravagant plaudits to the setter, and if next week’s crop of puzzles are as good as this week I think we’ll all be happy solvers indeed.

Across
1 SECOND PERSON – you: SECOND PERON [redeploy | old military leader] “to secure” S [South]
9 RITES – ceremonial: SPRITES [impish people] “avoiding” SP [special]
10 RIGHT WING – Conservative: WIGHT RING [island | association] “swapping leaders”
11 DAIRYING – cryptic def: Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney all being breeds of milk-producing cattle as well as Channel Islands
12 JESTER – entertainer: JEER [taunt] “is entertaining” ST [street]
13 MAGELLAN – explorer: MA [mother] + ALL [quite “backward”] in GEN [intelligence]
15 NITRIC – type of acid: TIN [container “brought back”] + RIC{h} [full, “apart from last”]
17 ABOARD – on bus: BOAR [swine] “ripping into” AD [poster perhaps]
18 FIREBALL – meteor: in FL [Florida], (BEL-AIR*) [“excited”]
20 PONCHO – “protection for Peruvian”: {wea}PON CHO{sen} “partly”
21 PLATYPUS – strange beast: TYP{e} [“tailless” sort] in PLUS [given EXTRA “protection”]
24 AIRSTREAM – current: (MARRIES {t}A{r}T [“ignoring the odds”]*) [“jockey”]
25 BONGO – ruminant: B [born] + ON GO [“when starting pistol fires”]
26 COMMENCEMENT – launch: COMMENT [observation] “arresting” CE MEN [church | workers]

Down
1 SERFDOM – bondage: MODES [techniques] FR [father] “is engaged in”, “shown up”
2 CUTTING CORNERS – not doing a thorough job: CUTTING [keen] + CORNERS [crooks]
3 NASTY – blue: ST [stone] needs NAY [no “antique”] setting
4 PARENTAL – “eg. mum’s”: RENTAL [unearned income] supporting PA [dad]
5 RAGA – typical Indian piece: RAG [bit of jazz] + A
6 ON THE SIDE – double def of “selected to play” (i.e. on the team) but “second fiddle?” (i.e. not front and centre)
7 VICTORIA SPONGE – suitable item for tea interval: (A SPORTING VOICE*) [“broadcast”]
8 AGARIC – “spotted poisoner, perhaps”: “upstanding” RAG [kid] “detained by” CIA [spies]
14 LARGHETTO – at a leisurely pace: R [runs] into LA GHETTO [the French | quarter]
16 RIFLEMAN – soldier: (FIRM LEAN*) [“irregular”]
17 APPEAL – suit: APPEAR [to turn up] with L [length] not R [right]
19 LASH OUT – double def: attack in anger / don’t stint
22 TABLE – board: S [{member}S “finally”] leaving STABLE [firm]
23 SEAM – main [SEA] + M [“source of” M{ineral}] &lit

61 comments on “Times 26,069: The Monotreme With No Name”

  1. Morning Verlaine, morning everyone.

    Chwenty Choo minutesss, marvellous crossword that.

    1. Nice tribute 🙂 Much loved up here as well as down under.

      “Thank you, Richie …”

      Edited at 2015-04-10 07:32 am (UTC)

  2. 19:31 … nicely chewy, with some entertaining surfaces for this of us who care — the jockey ignoring the odds, father’s bondage practices revealed, Blowers and the chaps discussing cake in the TMS commentary box … and the perfectly formed “Runs into French Quarter at a leisurely pace.” I live for this stuff. Thank you, setter.
    1. I too loved the surface read of 24A about the tart-marrying jockey ignoring the odds, but I’m a bit puzzled about the parsing. Aren’t we actually required to ignore the “evens” in “tart” for the clue to work as an anagram? But no doubt I’m missing something.
      1. Er… I fear I may have confused people above! AIRSTREAM is an anagram of MARRIES {t}A{r}T, not the other way round as I may have inadvertently suggested.
  3. Am I alone in actually being a mite disenchanted by this one? Around the half-hour mark, much the same as most others this week, but maybe I just don’t appreciate the nuances and finesse of this setter’s art. For instance I wasn’t too struck by DAIRYING, nor my LOI 3d (blue = nasty seems somewhat odd).
    Still, a finish is a finish and sets me up in a good mood for the rest of the day.
    1. Ooh yes, I did raise an eyebrow at blue = nasty too. But there were quite a lot of unimpeachable clues to compensate I thought…
    2. It’s the old story — there’s no shortage of dictionary support for nasty meaning obscene or indecent. You just don’t hear it much.

      edit: apologies to keriothe (below) who submitted as I was typing. I don’t dare delete this.

      Edited at 2015-04-10 08:09 am (UTC)

      1. No apology required: I can’t see any harm done. And now I’ve replied so you can’t delete your post even if you want to!
  4. Found this one tricky, so about an hour or so. And I had bingo for the unknown antelope at 25ac. Ho hum.

    PS I too hesitated over NASTY for blue.

  5. Sure, but in the way ‘blue’ is used? Sometimes a setter can be too dictionarthritically correct. 26.32 for an average work-out, which means enjoyable, good value, all the other things I take for granted. I would love to see a panel of all the party leaders solving one of these, aloud, together, instead of the unoriginality contest that passes for a debate.
    1. I’m instinctively inclined to agree with you but it can be impossible to distinguish something that’s a bit of a stretch from a usage you don’t know (see ‘wrap up’ the other day) so I’m inclined to give the setter the benefit of the doubt.

      Edited at 2015-04-10 08:37 am (UTC)

      1. In blogs gone by, someone (*checks Google*) z8b8d8k described this very nicely as a “three-point turn in a thesaurus clue”, where two words have the same definitions, even though most people wouldn’t readily treat the original words as interchangeable. Perfectly fair, but liable to result in raised eyebrows.
        1. I had forgotten that, and what a perfect description it is. If that’s what’s going on though then personally I would say it’s not really fair. The thing is I can’t think of a context in which I would use NASTY to mean ‘obscene or indecent’, so I’m assuming it may just be an unfamiliar usage.
          1. The three-point-turn theory is interesting and may well be valid in certain cases, but the long-standing substitution test beats all IMHO, and I still can’t think of one that suits this occasion.
            1. On reflection, I think that where I said “perfectly fair”, it might be more correct to say “arguably fair”.
  6. 15m for another enjoyable puzzle.
    I thought DAIRYING was a little bit odd, but that didn’t stop me getting it. I also didn’t know this meaning of LASH OUT (splash yes, lash no) or the ruminant, although I’m sure that must have come up before.
    In Chambers one of the definitions of ‘blue’ is ‘indecent or obscene’, and one of the definitions of NASTY is ‘obscene or indecent.’ You don’t get much closer than that. And if Chambers isn’t to your taste Collins has exactly the same definition of NASTY.

    Edited at 2015-04-10 08:04 am (UTC)

  7. Just over twenty minutes, larghetto, for a pretty good crossword. I thought DAIRYING was okay, it’s a fairly common usage even if the clue wasn’t strong. CUTTING CORNERS my COD, although keen crooks might well do a thorough job.
  8. I’m another who thought the Channel Island clue a bit forced, but otherwise enjoyed this, although I still don’t see how ‘second’ means ‘redeploy’ even after a dictionary run. Slow to see the sprites and the serf in the top left, otherwise should have snuck under the half hour. 32 minutes.

    I fully intend to read Verlaine’s proem when I have a bit more time…

      1. Mm, the phrase “seconded to the Front” bubbled up from somewhere in the recesses of my brain and it all seemed to make some kind of sense.
        1. No such bubbles in my brain, but I didn’t get to where am today without deferring to a vicious pimp in an oversized hat.

          Edited at 2015-04-10 01:08 pm (UTC)

  9. Put me down as another not particularly enamoured by some of what’s going on here and having three of my queries in the same quarter made for long delays in the NW.

    I’m probably missing something obvious, but how does “redeploy” = SECOND in 1ac.

    11ac is barely cryptic but the answer is somewhat unusual (surely one talks of “dairy farming” rather than “dairying”) so it didn’t leap to mind and I wasted time looking for something a bit more cryptic possibly in the realms of “knitwear” or “knitting”.

    I share others’ doubts about “blue” = NASTY. I might associate both words with dubious forms of entertainment, blue movie and video nasty, but the words are hardly synonymous in that context. Again perhaps there’s another explanation that has not been mentioned so far.

    I think 6dn’s a bit weak too.

    BONGO was new to me and is worth remembering for the future.

    [On edit, crossed with other postings but I’ll let it stand.]

    Edited at 2015-04-10 08:18 am (UTC)

    1. Oooh, yes, re the DAIRYING clue, I had fairisle in for a short while. Thought it worked quite well…
      1. Glad I’m not alone in thinking “fairisle” though I was not convinced enough to bung it in.
  10. I’ll happily forgive any minor irritations (11a, 3d) for a puzzle that gives us LARGHETTO – beautiful clue! SERFDOM very good too (from my perspective as a sucker for an intriguing surface).

    A fine puzzle, and thanks for the blog Verlaine.

  11. 24 mins. I got through the majority of it quickly but six answers took me a good while. I don’t recall coming across BONGO before, and the “on go” element of the answer didn’t spring readily to mind. In the NW I struggled badly with SERFDOM, DAIRYING and NASTY. When I had S?R???M for 1dn I’d convinced myself that bondage=S&M and was part of the wordplay rather than the definition until the penny dropped. After I finally sorted out the NW the ABOARD/APPEAL crossers were my last ones in. The week had been going so well ………..
  12. Indeed. Collins defines it as ‘transfer (a military officer or other official or worker) temporarily to other employment or another position.’
  13. Currently the last all correct on the list, but that includes a 3 hour interruption. I was also trying to work S&M into 1d: a very fine clue with a definition completely hidden in plain sight. All of the NW slow to go in, especially with KNITTING tentatively in at 11. Is there an Alderney jumper? There should be.
    1. I didn’t nominate a COD, did I, but on balance I think 1D is mine.

      I also had KNITTING as a frontrunner for 11A for a while. I’m surprised I didn’t throw something mad in to be honest, after managing to submit the concise with the nasty sounding LUNGWORM for “Pulmonaria officinalis” and, erm, APTERYX for a disease afflicting cattle and sheep. That could only have been more embarrassing if I’d gone for ASTERIX.

      1. You have my sympathy. I originally wrote in the wrong one but then reconsidered and changed it to the required answer. The fact that both words exist makes it quite a nasty clue for a concise puzzle. I did manage to get the cattle/sheep disease right ……….
        1. The trouble with the concise is that any word you don’t know makes for quite a nasty clue. In my case this is such a large category that I gave up on the things long ago.
    2. It seems that some Guernsey jumpers are made on Alderney. Perhaps Alderney jumpers are made on Sark.
      I only knew Alderney the cow as she is the heroine in A A Milne’s Now We Are Six poem
      ‘The King asked the Queen
      and the Queen asked the Dairymaid
      ‘Could we have some butter
      for the Royal slice of bread?’ etc
  14. 37:58. I got completely stuck about halfway through then after about 10 minutes of head scratching I noticed a clue I hadn’t yet looked at. In went TABLE and then the rest fell quite quickly.

    I almost succumbed to a careless CITRIC but my doubts were sufficient for me to amend to NITRIC just before finishing.

  16. 21 minutes, like others an eyebrow raised at NASTY, but no issue with SECOND or the dairy farming clue. The NW corner was last in. CoD AGARIC. Not the best of the week but a good puzzle. I think I preferred the old avatar, Verlaine, he was much more Verlaine-like.
    1. Well, yes, this new one is most un-Verlainey, it’s Robert Newton as Bill Sikes in David Lean’s Oliver Twist, which I watched last weekend. Any behatted Victorian gentleman in a storm…
    2. Yes, I haven’t yet made the connection between Robert Newton’s Bill Sykes and the great poet either. Perhaps there isn’t one.
      On edit: crossed with Verlaine’s own reply. Just wanted to make it clear that I had worked out who the Bill Sykes image was. Showing off – sorry.

      Edited at 2015-04-10 11:27 am (UTC)

          1. Thank heavens! I was feeling quite embarrassed, especially as keriothe’s misidentification was so much more highbrow than mine (ours).
            1. I was scratching my head thinking ‘Wasn’t he the bloke who starred in Quincy MD?’

              [On edit: ME – I knew I was corpsing it…]

              Edited at 2015-04-10 02:54 pm (UTC)

  18. Well, I seem to have finally been blocked out of the Times crossword club site. I thought it was a good deal: Mr Murdoch got my subs, and I didn’t have to read his paper. Can anyone in the UK tell me what is the minimal Times package that gets me access to the crossword? Otherwise, I guess it will have to be the Guardian.
    Regards
    Andrew K
    1. I did inquire with them recently about the possibility of Crossword Club only subscriptions, but was efficiently rebuffed. It does seem as though the crosswords and buying the newspaper are fairly inextricably bound together, for better or worse…
  20. Struggled in the NW like most others with SERFDOM being LOI. Like some others, I did not find the puzzle very satisfying – but perhaps it is the wavelength factor as it took me 29 mins today.
  21. I confess to not having an easy time with this, so didn’t enjoy it as much as others. It seemed, as you say, a bit of a slog. About an hour, ending with the somewhat obtuse DAIRYING and NASTY. I was also unsure about ‘don’t stint’ = ‘LASH OUT”, and what a VICTORIA SPONGE and AGARIC were. I did like PLATYPUS once I figured it out, and PONCHO was well hidden, as I was trying to fit ‘inca’ inside something. Regards.
    1. Apparently LASH OUT is English usage but I must say I wasn’t familiar with it. I’m acquainted with “going out on the lash” for a drinking binge which is perhaps related? But I was still kind of looking for a reason why the SP had disappeared from the front of SPLASH OUT here.
  22. Thank you Verlaine, I will remember (or try to) LASH OUT as ‘splurge’. By the way, I was quite fond of the former hirsute and elegant avatar. The present one has a bit of a guttersnipe quality, and I expect the actual Verlaine bears more of a resemblance to the former. Best to you.
  23. There are a lot of comments today! And I don’t think I’ve got much to add, did this during a break at work, and I know the BLUE = smutty convention quite well (I’ve already been asked to “not work blue” at a show tonight), but I thought NASTY was a stretch. Didn’t get the brilliance of SEAM straight off and didn’t work wordplay for PLATYPUS, but got BONGO from wordplay alone.
  24. I’d probably have enjoyed this one more if I wasn’t feeling washed out after an exhausting week. As it was, I struggled to a miserable 19:02, making particularly heavy weather of the SE corner. I’m praying for an easy Listener puzzle tomorrow!
  25. Inspired by Verlaine’s new avatar, I have trawled my holiday snaps and added one to my profile.

    Forty-six minutes for me, but I’m consoled by the fact that this is well under three Severs. I spent some time with “knitting” for 11ac, for no good reason that I can see now; I think this was one of the weaker clues of a generally good puzzle.

    I’m also a bit perplexed by “RITES”= “ceremonial”. I can see “ritual”=”ceremonial” or “rites”=”ceremonies, but can anyone enlighten me on this one?

    1. Google-searching “ceremonial”, the first definition that pops up includes “the system of rules and procedures to be observed at a formal or religious occasion” – I wasn’t 100% sure what they were getting at, but I presumed it was something along these lines, ceremonial as a noun not an adjective?
      1. Hmmm. Well, I suppose so, though I’m not convinced. Phrases like “The ceremonial of the catholic church” don’t sound right to me, and “I’ll be attending the ceremonials” sounds very slangy. Still, if nouns can be verbed, I suppose adjectivials can be nouned.

Comments are closed.