Times 26071 – Up the ladder in a Chelsea tractor!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 38 minutes

Music: Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, Davis/AOSMITF

This seemed pretty tough for a Monday puzzle to me. There are some obscure words and acronyms, and some tricky wordplay. I was only able to finish by trusting the cryptics, and upon researching the answers I found that my trust was not misplaced. UK solvers may or may not have an easier time.

Fortunately for my solve, The Masters ended promptly just before the puzzle came out. You don’t have to ask, I watched all 18 holes.

Across
1 INFANTA, IN + FAN + TA. I had been thinking about ‘Isabela’ before I saw how the clue works.
5 DEFICIT, DEF(I.C.I.)T. One I put in from the definition, and parsed for the blog. I.C.I. was apparently Imperial Chemical Industries, not the first old firm that come to mind for most solvers.
9 EYE, sounds like I. The simpler clues threw me a little, as I was expecting something more complex.
10 PREVENTABLE, P[a]R(EVENT)ABLE.
11 ESCALADE, ESC + A LAD + E, a bit of old military history.
12 THRONE, sounds like THROWN, another simple one.
15 GOWN, GO W + N. I expected ‘from east’ to be a reversal indicator, but it is not.
16 ATTAINMENT, ATTAIN(MEN)T – bishops as in chessmen. We’re not allowed Bills Of Attainder over here, and I don’t think they’d dare try one in the UK today.
18 CUMBERSOME, C([n]UMBERS)OME. I thought for a long time that this must begin with com-, hence it was my LOI.
19 STOT, TOTS backwards, an obscure dialect word that few will know. Yep, it’s a bullock.
22 PUNNET, PUN([Alaska]N [Malamut]E)T. Another one where the cryptic was needed to get the answer.
23 ANATHEMA, ANA + THE MA. This word has been somewhat weakened in modern usage.
25 THISTLEDOWN, anagram of WITH OLD NEST.
27 OCH, [l]OCH.
28 NEEDLED, NEED(L)ED.
29 SHANNON, S + H + AN(N)ON. I don’t recall having seen this particular river in the Times puzzle before.
 
Down
1 ICEBERG, I + CE + BERG, with a figurative definition.
2 FRENCHWOMAN, FRENCH + WOMAN in various ill-disguised guises. This was so obvious that I was stuck for quite a bit.
3 NEPALI, N(E PAL)1. Is Islington in Northern Ireland? No, but the Angel Central Shopping Centre in Islington was formerly known as the N1 Centre, so that may explain it. Those with local knowledge are invited to chime in. This was written in from the literal at my end.
4 ANECDOTIST, anagram of CITED AS NOT, a distributor of ana.
5 DIET, as in the DIET OF WORMS, which presumably describes the feeding habits of birds.
6 FETCHING, F + ETCHING
7 COB, double definition, with the swan better known to me than the loaf.
8 THEREAT, TH(E[gyptian])REAT.
13 OVER THE MOON, double definition, alluding to the nursery rhyme.
14 HARMONIOUS, HARM(ON I.O.U.)S.
17 PEDESTAL, PED(EST)AL, a surface bringing to mind the Fall of France, 75 years ago. The cyclist probably ran into the Wehrmacht and became a POW.
18 CAPSTAN, CAP([rope]S)TA[i]N.
20 TEACH-IN, hidden in [Marga]TE A CHIN[ese].
21 STANZA, ST + ANZA[c]. This refers to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, members of which were called Anzacs.
24 LEAD, double definition.
26 IRE, [f]IRE, my FOI.

53 comments on “Times 26071 – Up the ladder in a Chelsea tractor!”

  1. My, this is going fast, I thought to myself as I did it. My, I’m careless, I thought after submitting, when I realized that I’d forgotten to check two words I’d flung in hastily. STOT turned out right, as I rather thought it would although I didn’t know the word. ‘panier’, not so much. (I had the P and the E; I wonder if I’d ever have got PUNNET in any case.) I had ‘enfilade’ at 11ac at first–probably needs 2 L’s–but saw the light. Not the best start to the week, but Monday itself seldom is.
  2. All plain sailing with some too obvious definitions. Re DEFICIT, I think ICI has been used before but it’s still rather obscure, and I hadn’t met STOT but it couldn’t be anything else. FRENCHWOMAN was poorly clued but GOWN just about made up for it.
  3. 16+ minutes so pretty straightforward, though a few were biffed. Last in HARMONIOUS and CUMBERSOME, where I was looking for the wrong definitions. ESCALADE rang a bell, so, like most of my fortified knowledge, I probably got it from Tristram Shandy.

    At 3d, N1 is simply the postcode district in which Islington is located.

  4. The ‘simple’ ones are sometimes the hardest. I spent what seemed like half my time on 12a, in search of a fitting royal palace. Maybe it was just me, but the down clues seemed a lot easier than the across ones.
  5. Managed to invent three new words, STOT, ESCALADE and ATTAINT, but fortunately they already existed.

    Not so lucky with NEPALE, which seemed unlikely and I realised my error as soon as I hit submit.

    Thanks setter and blogger. Any Kiwis slightly miffed about 21dn?

    1. Nah. Most of them are over here. Three cheers for John Key (one of the few left, so they had to make him PM) who has a policy of repatriation.
  6. 10m, taken just over the mark by THRONE, which took me a while to see. Lots biffed this morning. I don’t remember seeing STOT before.
  7. 7 and a half minutes, except not, as I managed to convince myself that ENCOLADE might be some kind of assault. At least ESCALADE proved unfamiliar too when I went back over the puzzle to discover my mistake!

    I also managed to submit the concise with an error too where I’d started typing in a wrong answer and then gone on with the puzzle without taking the precaution of deleting first (you can always overtype that stuff, right?) I am an object lesson in “more haste, less speed”!

  8. What a mixed bag this turned out to be: some pretty trivial answers alongside some really obscure words. It makes something of a change when the last section to fall is the central set of 4 clues.
    I assumed it must be ESCALADE from the old table-top racing game Escalado, of blessed memory.
  9. 21 minutes with a few moments lost by carelessly biffing EAR at 9ac. I rather liked the GO W{est} idea at 15ac though it’s weakened by use of ‘with’ in the clue which leads one straight to ‘W’ even though that’s not the intended route to the answer.
  10. 9:42 .. main obstacle self-induced by a dyslexic Neapli, but otherwise fairly plain sailing. ESCALADE neatly clued.

    Isn’t THISTLEDOWN a beautiful word? Very nicely clued, too.

    1. With you on both counts. One of the pleasures of the crossword is its framing of the separate word, so to speak. Cumbersome isn’t bad either.
  11. Stuffed with cold and by an unspotted typo, for an irrelevant 16 odd minutes. Spent a long time over SHANNON, wondering whether the “unknown” bit of the clue was missing. Juliet: “I come, anon” must mean “I’ll be there, but you won’t recognise me”, I suppose. ESCALADE from most Sharpe novels: clearly a very silly way to attack a walled city. CAPSTAN very nearly a fine &lit.

    Edited at 2015-04-13 08:22 am (UTC)

  12. Managed to complete this quickly (by my standards) but with similar unknowns to those mentioned by others (STOT etc. etc.).

    Sorry if I’m missing the obvious, but how does ANA = Stories in 23a (or have I totally misunderstood the clue?!) Have checked Chambers and online, but nothing seems to fit…

    1. Rattled through this in double quick time, under 10 mins so clearly on the wavelength or something. Some pretty clues though like 25ac (yes it is Sotira 🙂 and 5ac
    2. Here we go from ODO:

      archaic
      1 [TREATED AS PLURAL] Anecdotes or literary gossip about a person.
      2 [TREATED AS SINGULAR] A collection of a person’s memorable sayings.

      Edited at 2015-04-13 08:56 am (UTC)

        1. Nick, ana does come up fairly regularly (it’s a useful set of letters) so try and remember it.
        2. Think Victoriana etc , which is the sort of place where it turns up outside of Crosswordland.
  13. 15 minutes, STOT from wordplay unknown otherwise not a bother, Monday fare. I remembered ICI as 45 years ago they tried to seduce me to be their graduate trainee, thankfully I resisted and joined a well known Chocolate company instead.
    1. Ha! I detect a Rip-off – or should that be a Pip-off? (Apologies if I’m the 20th person to make that comment.)
  14. 8 mins. I sometimes take a while to get going on a Monday but INFANTA went straight in and I built out from there. I find it interesting that we have a lot of common experiences but now and again a clue that some find tricky causes no problem at all for others, and today I saw THRONE as soon as I read the clue, pausing only briefly to see if there was any way “thrown” could be the answer. I vaguely recall having come across STOT before but I confess that ATTAINMENT was biffed. Like Ulaca I finished with the HARMONIOUS/CUMBERSOME crossers. I thought the clue for CAPSTAN was excellent.
  15. 12.45 so a rare sub-15. But a handful of clues for the children – e.g. last two down – takes the edge off.
  16. Must have been been on the setter’s wavelength, as I found this one of the easiest Mondays in quite a while, which is to say about 20 mins for me. But it was, as others have said, a bit of a curate’s egg, mixing extremely simple clues with a sprinkling of obscurities. ESCALADE and STOT were new to me but the cryptic path to the right solutions were fairly signposted. Nice puzzle.

    By the way, did others notice that there were two quite different clues for 8D in the Saturday cryptic? The online version was “Hint the writer’s mostly in debt?” (6) and that in the newspaper was “Nudge object underneath note” (6). Only the latter, as far as I could tell, could be made to yield a satisfactory parsing.

    1. Mike, I only saw the online, which I parsed based on most of the writer’s possessive within the colour, if that makes sense without giving too much away re. a puzzle that is still under embargo!

      Intriguing that two such radically different clues could appear!

      1. Again, without giving too much away, I agree with your Saturday parsing, and I also saw only the online version.
  17. A red-letter day for anyone without a mistake, as they will be finishing above Magoo. Would need to go some to beat Jason, though, who just missed out on a Bannister. (And a mention in despatches to our own Mohn, who clocked a shade over 5 minutes.)

    Edited at 2015-04-13 09:22 am (UTC)

  18. Diet of worms a 27 clause religious declaration by Martin Luther (orig german)
  19. Thanks for that anon. I saw the Luther connection as I solved the clue but then promptly forgot all about it and didn’t realise it hadn’t been mentioned elsewhere in the blog.
  20. A bit too quick for my own good this morning, and I see now I have a wrong’un: an unparsed panier at 22ac.

    We lived in Geneva many moons ago, and so ESCALADE was familiar as the attack on the walled city. For my kids however ‘escalade’ will only ever mean the chocolate pot that was sold to represent the marmite of scolding broth that was poured over the enemies by Mere Royaume…

  21. Just under 13 mins having spent far too long trying to make 18a a word beginning with ‘come’.
  22. A leisurely 20 minutes. I found this pretty easy despite the unfamiliar ESCALADE. I wasn’t too sure of the meaning of STOT either, but guessed it must be the answer.

    I didn’t write in FRENCHWOMAN for a while because I suspected some tricky deception. A very poor clue, methinks. I wasn’t that impressed by the clue for GOWN. As jackkt says, the trick of the clue is rather nullified by ‘with’, the standard indication of W. The rest of the clues were fine.

  23. 12:07 with the left hand side proving easier than the right.

    Some nice touches such as “shortly” actually needing a synonym rather than being a truncaticator.

  24. Coming as I do from Stotfold, on the A1 north of Stevenage, Letchworth etc. this was easy. In the Domesday book, Stotfold was a stopping-off point for cattle drovers en route to London
  25. 22 mins with my main delay being in the SW. Re anon’s comment above, I live a couple of miles from Stotfold but never knew STOT was a bullock.
  26. The Diet of Worms was guaranteed to reduce the upper fifth history class to helpless giggles. I spent some time with “enfilade” in 11a but still managed a very good (for me) 9 plus minutes. EXCEPT, that my system chose the moment of submission to misbehave and I wound up entering a blank grid. Trying to be a grown-up and not let it spoil my whole day.
  27. I didn’t know STOT, ‘ICI’ or ‘PUNNET’ but that didn’t prevent a rather relaxing 20 minute solve. LOI was ESCALADE as the key meaning one of the keyboard abbreviations never fails to baffle me, despite it being such a regular occurrence. I must suffer some kind of mental block. Unlike vinyl, I didn’t bother to look up the unknowns afterwards, I just figured I’d learned a few new words, assuming of course that I don’t immediately forget them. Regards to all.
  28. I forgot to mention earlier that I knew this as a brand of SUV (hence the blog title, I assume) made by GM under the Cadillac marque. It was for a time the Chelsea tractor of choice for hip-hop stars, and frequent mention in their oeuvre resulted in a sales boom and a significant reduction in the average age of a Cadillac owner.
    1. …as Ulaca pointed out fourteen and a half hours earlier, in the very first comment of the day.

      Edited at 2015-04-13 05:03 pm (UTC)

  30. Probably a p.b. for me. Brain must have been stimulated by watching the University Challenge final. Tremendous teams: awesome and humbling.
  32. 7:54 here for a pleasant, straightforward solve.

    I seem to recall first coming across STOT (meaning a bullock) in a Ximenes puzzle, probably 50+ years ago. Like Olivia, I wasted time trying to make ENFILADE fit the clue to 11ac.

  33. 28min for me. Never heard of STOT in the sense of a bullock – only as a verb.
  34. The Diet of Worms 1521 (German: Reichstag zu Worms, [ˈʁaɪçstaːk tsuː ˈvɔɐms]) was an imperial diet of the Holy Roman Empire held in Worms, Germany at the Heylshof Garden. A diet was a formal deliberative assembly.

    Especially the Diet of Worms is well known fore Martin Luther’s reformation.

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