Times 26143 – Hang a left at Phocaea, you can’t miss it!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 53 minutes

Music: Mahler, Symphony #7, Tennstedt/LPO

This time I ended up with a somewhat more difficult puzzle than is customary on Monday. Since I was both tired and feeling poorly, my solving skills were not exactly at their peak, either. I was going to biff in a few obvious ones, but then I saw what kind of puzzle it was, and concluded that my guesses would probably be wrong. As it turns out, they would have been. So I had to laboriously work through the clues, in a few cases arriving at a word or phrase I had not seen before, or had no idea how to spell.

Since I was on a golfing tour this past week, I have just about caught up with the Tuesday through Friday puzzles, although Friday’s is still only half-solved. I haven’t even printed out Saturday’s and Sunday’s, but fortunately we get a whole week to ponder over those. Today’s was quite enough for now.

Across
1 RICEFIELD, anagram of CRIED, LIFE. A surprisingly straightforward answer, no obscure Irish given name needed.
6 IZMIR, sounds like IS MERE. Not so difficult if you have heard of this port AND know how to spell it; otherwise, impossible.
9 JOE SOAP, JO[n]ES + O[ld} A[ge] P[ensioner]. As an American, although quite an Anglophile, the answer was unknown to me – thank you, Mr Cryptic!. If puzzled, see the Wikipedia article.
10 GREENER, hidden in [uncarin]G RE ENER[gy-saving], an &lit.
11 GRAVE, double definition.
12 REHEARSAL, RE(HEARS)AL.
14 BEL, sounds like BELLE. Not often seen, this is what a ‘decibel’ is one-tenth of.
15 PERMISSIBLE, PER + MISSI(B[oard]LE. I wasted time trying to make ‘admissible’ fit, before I saw the old ‘a’ = ‘per’ trick.
17 CHART TOPPER, CH(ART + [ge]T)OPPER. This one I did biff, successfully.
19 INN, I + N,N. One of the few easy starter clues, my FOI.
20 WALKATHON, LAW backwards + KATH + ON. I thought for a while that ‘hike’, in the sense of ‘increase’, was going to be the literal, but it really is a charity walk.
22 KANJI, K(AN)JI. This might be hard if you don’t know the word.
24 TINTACK, TIN + TACK. Another UK-centric word; in the US, we would say ‘thumbtack’.
26 EXPOSED, EX + PO(SE)D, i.e., a school of whales.
27 RAYON, [c]RAYON, a bit of a chestnut.
28 TEDDY BOYS, T(EDDY B)OYS. I had great confidence that they would not dare use any 50s terms referring to black youths, so I did the old lift and separate.
 
Down
1 REJIG, RE(J)IG[n], relatively straightforward.
2 CUE BALL, CUE + BALL.
3 FLOWERPOT, TOP + RE WOLF, all upside-down.
4 EMPEROR MOTH, anagram of of ROOM THERE around MP. After I put in ‘moth’, I didn’t think the remaining letters would work until I got a crucial crosser showing me where to put the MP.
5 DUG, D[r]UG, where ‘say’ indicates definition by example. I really wanted to put in ‘ate’, i.e. [r]ate, but that shows the wrong kind of appreciation, and there is no ‘a’ in ‘cried, life’.
6 IRENA, IRE + NA, not a very historically correct spelling, but the cryptic gives it to you.
7 MINI-SUB, MINIS + [tro]UB[led]. I nearly bunged in ‘bran tub’, but then I looked at the cryptic.
8 RURAL DEAN, RURAL DE(A)N. A position in the Anglican church not every solver will know. It probably helps to have read the Barsetshire novels.
13 HAIRPIN BEND, anagram of PAIR BEHIND + P[avilion].
14 BACKWATER, BACK + WA(TE)R. I wasted a lot of time trying to work in ‘ch’, when the real cryptic is much easier. BTW, this is one of my favorite Eno songs, from Before and After Science
16 STRIKE PAY, a simple cryptic definition, and a good one.
18 APLENTY, anagram of PLAY and TEN.
19 IONESCO, I(ONES C)O. Perfectly simple for an over-educated old boy like me, but not a playwright who is on the tip of everyone’s tongue nowadays.
21 AGAIN, A + GAIN. A dubious clue, IMHO, since there is no indication of the respective positions of ‘catch up’ and ‘answer’.
23 INDUS, INDUS[try]. A thinly-disguised chestnut.
25 KIT, KIT[ten], one of my last ones in. I was puzzled by ‘cat’ being the first half of ‘tackle’, but there is no reversal indicator. A red herring, as it turned out.

30 comments on “Times 26143 – Hang a left at Phocaea, you can’t miss it!”

  1. Undone by not knowing IZMIR. I can see now that it’s a good clue, but I don’t think I’d have ever got it from the wordplay, especially as I was only moderately confident of IRENA.

    About 27 minutes for the rest, so harder than usual for a Monday. Never heard of JOE SOAP, RURAL DEAN or IONESCO, but they were quite gettable. And as I’m dealing with a KANJI problem at work today, 22ac was a write-in.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

    1. Count me in as another defeated by IZMIR without resorting to aid after 10 minutes trying. It didn’t help I was unconvinced by IRENA. About 21 minutes for the rest. I like CHART-TOPPER best, but liked JOE SOAP too. Didn’t know IONESCO was a playwright and wondered if 27a was METAL until I got some checkers.
  2. Except that I went to ODO (well, strictly, the Mac Oxford, almost identical) to find IZMIR. I see, from there, that it was once Smyrna which — via T.S. Eliot — I would have known. No excuse though.

    Feel very dated with IONESCO being clued as “old”. In my day (he died in 1969) he was the epitome of the absurd.

    Good puzzle though. This slug-a-lug liked FLOWERPOT best. Bop-de-bop Weeeed!

  3. Kicking myself today. 18:11 .. with one mistake. I know IZMIR perfectly well but decided to spell it Ismir today. Shakespeare woulda, if he felt like it.

    A few penny-drop moments, and nice to see JOE SOAP get an outing.

  4. Came a massive cropper with this one, and about the best I can say for myself is that I was not a DNF. Aboute 45 minutes, ouch.

    I spent literally about half an hour staring blankly at the NE corner. I was never going to be confident about __E_A from the difficult wordplay, the difficulty of the port clue has been mentioned above and with only ____R to go on I was baffled anyway, PIOUR? CLEER? SHEAR? So it turns out my Achilles heel was __N_SUB. WING SUB? WIND SUB? I just couldn’t see it as minute after minute ticked by. Once that penny *finally* dropped the other two were solvable but above averagely difficult clues crossing other above averagely difficult clues, yeesh.

    Ironically I’d never have started this puzzle at 12.30am with some wine and cider in me after movie night, if I hadn’t thought to myself “it’s only Monday, it’ll be a nice easy one today”!

    Edited at 2015-07-06 07:33 am (UTC)

  5. Near 35 minutes for a fairly difficult and enjoyable crossword. A bit surprised to see both RICEFIELD and TINTACK as single words but they are entirely correct. I guess IONESCO is ‘old’ but his The Bald Soprano is still great fun and even better in French, which I can manage with a Collins Robert at the ready.
  6. I was obviously on the setter’s wavelength (and knew how to spell Izmir) as I solved this enjoyable crossword in 12 mins.
  7. 15m. The last time IZMIR came up, with a very similar clue, I spelled it ISMIR. I remembered it this time but the clue is unfair IMO. Those who fell into the trap can take comfort from the fact that Peter Biddlecombe made the same mistake on puzzle 24171.
  8. A very satisfying challenge, especially for a Monday (as has been proven beyond doubt, we don’t get difficult puzzles on Mondays, with the exception of those occasions when we do). That said, even as I was solving, it occurred to me that there were a few things which might not fall into everyone’s definition of “general” knowledge, so I was happy that everything was well within my definition of the term.

    Count me as another who hesitated over the “old” playwright who was still alive when I was born, though. I can only deduce that Times setters are getting younger in the same way as policemen.

  9. I too was undone by the two crossers in the top right (IZMIR/IRENA), although I had thought of Irena, but couldn’t work out the wp. Sadly the cryptic did not ‘give it to me’. (In fact, I’m still not sure that I get it: she loses her ire and is then n/a not available?)

    Couldn’t parse FLOWERPOT, and missed the hidden GREENER. Dnk KANJI, and not sure that I’ve ever come across TINTACK (and I’m ‘UK’ through and through).

    Definitely tricky for a Monday.

    *sigh*

    1. I read it as “losing it” – becoming angry – producing IRE followed by the Not Available. But revisiting it, I would have thought that “losing it” would produce irate, which is not to our purpose. Anyone else want to give it a go? As vinyl says, the cryptic gives it to you. How generous!
  10. 36.15 for me, over 15 minutes at the end struggling through the alphabet for the two 6’s, finally throwing in IRENA in desperation as at least being a female name and having a passing acquaintance with “losing it”. I suspect like many others I was trying for a girls name which, on losing IT, becomes not available. Perdita nearly works if you spell purdah wrong.
    Having confidently put in BACKWARDS at 14d (champion BACK, D note, WARS fighting, sort of fits the definition) I wasn’t relying on anything being correct, which didn’t help in the NE. Well done to setter for destroying confidence, not so well done for producing two crossing very-hard-if-not-impossible clues.
    At least with the Japanese one you really only had to wait for one of the end letters and trust the cryptic. KANJI rang a faint bell (nice Scrabble™ score) but not as a language.
    I’m still(at the time of writing) on page 2, and less than 3 Jasons. No Monday Easy.
  11. Same here on IONESCO, while relied on Bradford for IZMIR. (About 30 min, but a typo elsewhere)
  12. Nice to find a more testing puzzle on a Monday. Like others I struggled to complete the IZMIR IRENA crossers having finished the rest with no problems in 25 minutes. I knew Izmir was a place in Turkey but thought it was a resort not a port, and the homophone ‘is mere’ didn’t equate to ‘without aditives’ for me. Nor did IRE for ‘losing it’ seem good, surely it would be IRATE? Explain please.
    1. Chambers gives ‘unmixed’ and ‘pure’ as meanings of ‘mere’, but marks both as obsolete.
  13. 23 mins. I’m glad I wasn’t alone in finding this trickier than a lot of Monday puzzles. No surprise that IZMIR was my LOI after IRENA, and as has already been said the clues for both of them were less than straightforward. Less excusable was the amount of time it took me to get the FLOWERPOT/GRAVE crossers.
  14. It took me quite a while to find the frequency but then went fairly smoothly. I got IZMIR from misremembering the Masefield Cargoes poem (it’s Ophir). NB: He misspells quinquereme as quinquIreme – which caught me out nicely a while back. I think we had IRENA fairly recently, and I certainly agree with the various comments above on the parsing. My brain says it should be IRENE or IRINA. 28.32
  15. I was also undone by Izmir. Originally thought it might end in ‘-ese’ (additives) Noese? Then when I had the m and r thought it might end in -mor (sounds like more) Nomor? I’d never heard of either (not surprisingly), and after getting Irene was none the wiser, as I’d never heard of Izmir either. Otherwise found this quite straightforward.

    I think that what Americans call ‘thumb tacks’ are called ‘drawing pins’ in the UK. A tintack is a sort of nail like a panel pin.

    Edited at 2015-07-06 12:00 pm (UTC)

  16. 22:15. I though it was just me that found this tough but clearly not. Most of the NW went in quite quickly from the off but it was a plod thereafter, taking too long to see the ball part of the snooker clue and struggling at the end in the NE as per.

    Kanji unknown (but as Z says easy enough to figure out with the first or last letter in place) and I seem to be the only one who has never, ever heard of Ionesco.

    COD to flowerpot now I see how it works.

  17. I’m the “anon” above. Forgot to log in. Btw why is IONESCO an “old” dramatist? No older than many other playwrights who feature regularly here. Ann
  18. Tintacks are useful for nailing down carpet and lino. Definitely not drawing pins or thumb tacks. They are usually stubby greyish nails with big flat heads (coated in tin maybe?) I wonder what they call them in the USA? Carpet tacks? (What the grasshopper picked his teeth with in the non-pc “Polly Wolly Doodle”) Ann
  19. It’s obvious really. Kit being half of kitten. Kit also being tackle!
  20. Ouch. DNF here trying to figure out the IRENA/IZMIR pair. I was trying to remember if NAMUR was a port, and I thought it fit the wordplay pretty well, but the space remained blank. The possibility, though, prevented me from entering IRENA, which I saw but found unconvincing. Also new to me: JOE SOAP, TINTACK, KANJI and the RURAL DEAN. Better luck tomorrow, I hope. Regards.
  21. As it happens, I have just started again the Barchester Novels, starting with The Warden, which is a fine book. I had it in my mind that somewhere in here was the statement about a publication:- “a Subscription entitles the Subscriber to the Publication until one of the three expires”, but I now know that this is from elsewhere.

    Edited at 2015-07-06 05:44 pm (UTC)

    1. I’m a Barchester nut bigtone. I also loved the tv series in the early 80s with the young Alan Rickman as the slimy Slope. Gave it to my 92 year old mother last Christmas (she can’t read well now) and she was hooked!
  22. I think the IZMIR/IRENA/MINI-SUB corner took me three times longer than the rest of the puzzle, but finally they went in. Phew!
  23. Weighed up ‘Ismir’ and ‘Izmir’. Plumped for the wrong one. Bother.
  24. 19:09 for me, not really on the setter’s wavelength, even for some of the old chestnuts like 23dn. I got RICEFIELD straight away, but then, when I came to 5dn, somehow read the first letter as A and bunged in ATE, hoping that it would do for “appreciated”. Eventually I realised that 10ac really had to be GREENER, but then struggled for several more minutes over IZMIR and IRENA. Not really my sort of puzzle.

    After quite a decent week last week (under an hour for the six puzzles), I’ve an uneasy feeling that this week could be a disaster.

    PS: I wasn’t too keen on “such as” in 27ac (RAYON). And, like others, I’m not too keen on IONESCO described as an “old” dramatist either.

    Edited at 2015-07-06 10:27 pm (UTC)

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