Times 26104 – it’s pangram week!

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 12:29, which right now puts me as second on the Club Timer, though there’s a lot of the usual early faster times with one mistake (9 and 13 look like prime candidates for misspelling).

After I finished I looked at the grid and thought it must be a pangram, and sure enough it is, not that it would have helped me finish much faster if I had spotted it early. Seven proper nouns in the grid struck me as a little unusual, though the wordplay is crystal clear for most of these.

Away we go…

Across
1 FREE(priceless), V,ERSE
6 AMBER: reversal of RE, BMA
9 SUPERINTENDENTS: anagram of PRESENTS, UNITED and the first letter of Newsmen
10 AIRBAG: A, I, (GRAB)*
11 STANDARD: JACK is the definition – the rest is TAR containing(boards) AND then D, with S(hip) at the front
13 DEMONIACAL: I,AC after MON(day) stuck in DEAL(traffic)
14 ZION: initial letters of Zen Inspired One Native
16 NON-U: UNION reversed with the middle I removed
17 VILLA-LOBOS: V,ILL then AL(l), OBO(e)S
19 TEA DANCE: (afternoo)N in ACE with an anagram of DATE at the front
20 SIMIAN: N,AIM,IS all reversed
23 BRIGHT AS A BUTTON: TAS(abbreviation for the Australian state) and ABUT in BRIGHTON
24 ERNST: alternating letters in hEaR oNe SiTs
25 SNOWDONIA: NOW,DON in (a)SIA
 
Down
1 F,OS(unusually big),SA(it): got this from the wordplay, it is a pit or depression
2 EXPERIMENTATION: EX,TATI,ON contiaining PERI(fairy),MEN(folk)
3 VERLAINE: GENIAL REV all reversed without the G
4 R,(t)ANK
5 EVENTUALLY: TU ALLY with EVEN(quits) first
6 AIDING: take the 0 from A1,DINGO
7 BENJAMIN BRITTEN: JAM(play jazz) in BENIN, then sounds like BRITAIN
8 RESIDENTS: RESENTS containing ID
12 CABIN CLASS: C IN C(senior officer) L,A,SS with AB inside
13 DUN,STABLE
15 I’LL,1,QUID: got this from wordplay too, though the word makes sense
18 SACHET: nifty piece of clueing here – 19 was TEA DANCE and it becomes the definition and part of the definition – holds TEA, and sounds like DANCE (SASHAY)
21 NINJA: hidden in captaiN IN JAws
22 FARO: O,RAF(people flying) all reversed

36 comments on “Times 26104 – it’s pangram week!”

  1. Had no idea it was a pangram, which was probably just as well. I was helped by getting the long downs early on (although, given the enumeration and the B, I don’t know why 17ac took me so long. Maybe because I don’t care for his music.) I flung in 23ac, but couldn’t parse it (and had never heard the phrase), so I flung it back out, and then parsed it. I liked 2d, although it does sometimes seem that Tati is the only director setters know.
  2. … the composers and the painter — though not all will. As for film directors, there’s a very different one in today’s puzzle in the other place.

    LOI, SACHET; which doesn’t quite seems to gel somehow.

  3. Was ready to have stern words with the setter over 18dn until I saw exactly how it works. Now I think it’s a brilliant piece of cluing. Plenty of support for sachet on the net, apparently it’s more commonly associated with higher quality teas. I’m an Irish Breakfast man myself.

    Enjoyed this one immensely, with the half-knowns (FOSSA, SNOWDONIA and VILLA LOBOS) being very fairly clued.

    Thanks setter and blogger. And thanks to our esteemed Friday blogger for making 3dn a write-in.

    Edited at 2015-05-21 05:31 am (UTC)

    1. There you go, that’s what I like to see, people with VERLAINE somewhere near the top of their mind.

      I hope I’m not actually the near-opposite of a genial rev. (My granddad, who introduced me to the Times crossword at an early age, was one of those actually…)

  4. 18d also last in. It works for me, but is more the sort of thing one expects to find in the Guardian.

    A game of two halves this, with a biffing bonanza in the first establishing a healthy lead over the setter (albeit at the expense of two yellow cards – for ‘Saint-Saens’ and ‘Voltaire’) before I lost focus in the second half, as the ape, the useless assets and the tea bag ran rings round me like Messi, Neymar and Suarez.

    Until checking the dictionary just now, I though ILLIQUID was pronounced with the accent on the first syllable and that it was made up of ‘ille’ (that) and ‘quid’ (which). So much for the Classical education.

      1. We’ve had Sever and Verlaine this week already. What price a 5-letter light for an Iron Age settlement near Avila?
  5. As with today’s Quickie I got within sight of the finishing line in good time but spent what seemed like forever on the home straight, clocking in eventually in this case at 50 minutes.

    Didn’t know (or, in case Jerry is around, had forgotten) FOSSA or ILLIQUID, and I missed C-IN-C in the parsing of CABIN CLASS

    18dn strikes me as wrong because I have never ever heard of a ‘sachet of tea’ and by my understanding of the word a sachet is a sealed container, not a porous one as is required in tea-making if the tea is not of the loose-leaf variety.

    .

    1. … saw probs with SACHET. Though I wonder what one should call the little paper envelopes that tea bags may come in … the posh ones at least. Could they be sachets?
    2. Whereas I was under the impression that a sachet was porous, but held scented matter to upgrade one’s sock drawer. I don’t know what to call the metal thingy with little holes in it that one might put loose tea into and drop into a teapot, but ‘sachet’ does not leap to mind.
          1. I still say bah humbug to all this tea sachet business. It sounds like something invented by marketing people to make their product sound posher and justify charging 10 or more times the price of a teabag. And I can just hear them putting the stress on the second syllable too. For all the substances mentioned in the usual sources that might be contained in a sachet, tea is not one of them.

            Edited at 2015-05-21 06:12 am (UTC)

            1. … Sorry to have got this whole thing going when my prob was with how the clue works! I might accept the connection between sachets and tea. And perhaps sashay and dance. But put together, the thing just doesn’t work for me.
              1. McT, surely if you replace “19” with the words “tea dance” it becomes a perfectly acceptable clue? And that’s how it’s meant to work isn’t it?
    3. The tea bag itself might be enclosed in an air tight sachet , jacket , to preserve its freshness, but the tea bag itself can be regarded as a porous sachet .

      Edited at 2015-05-21 05:29 am (UTC)

      1. This sort of thing is a marketing trick, because dried tea doesn’t really go stale (at least not for a very long time) and so doesn’t need to be kept in an airtight container. Jack is closer to the mark with ‘something invented by marketing people to make their product sound posher and justify charging 10 or more times the price of a teabag’.
        Having said that, these little pouches are exactly what I thought of and it seemed OK to me.
  6. I’ve no problems with 18d – I think it’s a really clever clue. As for being associated with higher quality tea, I’m sure I remember the Tetley Tea Folk on their adverts referring to “little sachets” so if it’s good enough for them…
    26 minutes by the way.
      1. Ah, I go back further than that!
        When they first launched tea bags to the unsuspecting population of GB I seem to recall that the advert exhorted you to “pop the little sachet into the cup…” or something like that.
  7. Glad it wasn’t my turn this week – it might well have taken longer than my 28.30 (still on page 2, mind) to break it all down. EXPERI…. went in on just those 6 letters without grasping dear old M Hulot’s contribution.
    AIDING was my LOI: I had guessed ARDENT and couldn’t navigate away from it. Most of the Southern Region was impossible while I had THREE STARS at 12: it’s decent but not great accommodation, and has a TAR aboard the SS, but not much else to recommend it.
    A touch of the TLS about this one: very arty, with the SACHET clue either very, very clever or elusively loosely allusive depending on how you interpreted it. I hope to find a comment shortly from our esteemed colleague at 3d to prove he’s not fulfilled the basic requirement for being included in a Times crossword.
  8. No problem with this and its boring collection of composers, writers and a non-descript commuter town plus the old fashioned CABIN CLASS, TEA DANCE and BRIGHT AS A BUTTON. All very fusty. You should get out more setter.
  9. I enjoyed this one (apart from the plethora of people) and despite the sashet debate, I thought that the 19ac/18dn combination was a creative bit of cluing. I was helped with 15dn by the old solver’s trick of
    If you’re struggling and you’ve written a U,
    see what happens if you bung in a Q
  10. 25 mins. With the exception of yesterday’s championship qualifier I’m not having a very good week. AIDING was my LOI after STANDARD, and like Z8 it took me a while to see that it wasn’t “ardent”. Like others I got FOSSA and VILLA-LOBOS from the wordplay.
  11. 19m. Funny one this: I found much of it very easy but then got seriously stuck at the end. I didn’t help myself by mistyping DEMONAICAL and biffing FIRST CLASS, and I’ve never heard of VILLA-LOBOS. But it was all there in the wordplay so I sorted it out eventually.
    18dn is unusual but it works fine as far as I’m concerned.
    Bit of a TFTT theme today: as well as our esteemed blogger at 3dn we have thud_n_blunder’s avatar at 21dn.
  12. Given how much time I spent talking to 3d on Tuesday afternoon (the blogger not the writer) you’d have thought I would have spent less time today going Ver Ver ???

    11:40 with Tippex (probably the nearest I’m ever going to get to Magoo but I bet he doesn’t use Tippex).

  13. Horrid little clue (for me anyway) because I didn’t know the resort, only the game. Knew it wasn’t sago but had to run through the whole *a*o gamut backwards, twice, before seeing the “flying people” thing. I thought “flying over” was just a fancy way of indicating a reversal and was looking for old people as in the Mayo or something. Yes I know. 30.15
  14. 5 minutes under the hour for me. 18d was easily my COD, although I quite liked 12d too. DNK Villa-Lobos, but I’ve come across the surname before. There’s a taxi driver in Pulp Fiction called Esmerelda Villa-Lobos. No problem with Faro – my parents have lived there (or near there at least) for the last twenty years or so. Didn’t spot the pangram, so quick on the heels of Tuesday’s, until right at the end when the Q went in. Good puzzle & well blogged.

    Edited at 2015-05-21 01:20 pm (UTC)

  15. 30 minutes or so watching the cricket. LOI SACHET which seems a clever and fair clue to me. Wasn’t sure about AIDING or ADDING as didn’t see the dog = dingo idea so thanks for the enlightenment.
  16. No problem with the SACHET but ILLIQUID gave me pause for thought – my LOI. I played around with the idea of Jules Verne for 3d, partly because I think of him as a proper writer and Verlaine as merely a poet. I didn’t notice the pangram which would have helped with 15d. 35 minutes. Ann
  17. West side went in easily, east side was a different story. Not knowing BMA had me puzzling over why ENTer meant danger, and falling for first class made my entry points difficult.
    Why do you think the editor failed to just switch this with tomorrow’s so we could have the pleasure of a Verlaine Verlaine? Surely they know our blogging rotation.
  18. About 15 minutes, ending with CABIN CLASS. Needed wordplay for FOSSA, FARO, and VILLA-LOBOS, but in each case there it was. No problem with SACHET but held up a bit on 18 by taking to long to see the need for ‘ace’. Regards to all. Interesting to see the mention of the original VERLAINE, although I expect our version can be considered something of an original himself.

    Edited at 2015-05-21 05:31 pm (UTC)

  19. Around 20 mins. Wasted time by forgetting to try a Q before the U in ILLIQUID. Schoolboy error; oh dear.
  20. 13:02 for me, feeling very tired after an exhausting day, and flagging badly towards the end, particularly with SACHET (my LOI) where I had to bumble slowly through the alphabet.

    At least VERLAINE went straight in, his name fresh in my mind after meeting him (the blogger that is) on Tuesday.

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