Times 26,150

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I solved this late last night but couldn’t muster the energy to blog until I’d had a night’s sleep. Going back to check the leaderboard now, I can follow modern management practice: conduct a 360 degree review, benchmark my performance against my peers, drill down into the solution to produce a holistic overview etc. etc. In English, that means I clocked 10:33 for what I thought was a challenging but enjoyable puzzle, and based on other people’s times, I was definitely on the right wavelength from the off.

Across
1 OBJET D’ART – OB{it}(=”died”), D{ied} in JET ART(=”black magic”). One of the last in, as those pesky unindicated apostrophes always make sure there’s no biffing in my experience.
6 DECAF – C{old} in DEAF.
9 TRIER – TRI{pp}ER minus PP(=pianissimo i.e. very quiet). I always used to get Trier (Germany, hometown of Karl Marx) confused with Trieste (Italy, where Churchill placed the southern end of the Iron Curtain).
10 TABULATOR – TABU, “LATER”. Given that computer professionals always seem statistically over-represented, I imagine lots of people here, and in the wider crossword community, will now be reminiscing about their early days in IT and the punch cards which carried data. Also the origin of the TAB key.
11 PUT OUT MORE FLAGS – PUT OUT MORE FAGS around L(=50). As an enthusiast of Evelyn Waugh’s work, I spotted this without really thinking. His sixth novel, and one of several in which he captures at greater length that brief summation of soldiering as being months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.
13 ONE BY ONE – look literally and you realise this has nothing to do with the substance of the clue, but the number 11.
14 GLENDA – G{enerous} “LENDER”.
16 TALLIS – TALL(=high) 1’S, the definition being “church musician”, meaning I wasted my time looking for something with a CH at the end.
18 CAROUSEL – ROUSE(=wake up) in CAL{ifornia}. Rather than the fairground entertainment, the place where your luggage appears at the airport, assuming it hasn’t been sent to Dusseldorf by mistake.
21 LABOUR INTENSIVE – (RIOTSUNENVIABLE)*.
23 IN THE OPEN – [HE(=man) in TOPE(=drink hard regularly)] in INN.
25 BEING – BEGIN=start, move the IN forward.
26 NACHO – (CAN)rev. + HO!
27 CHRISTMAS – (ITSCHARMS)*.
 
Down
1 ON TAP – hidden in wON’T APprove. Mmmm…beer.
2 JOIN THE CLUB – literal and metaphorical meanings of the same phrase. Appropriate in a week when Manchester United appear to have been the most active club in the transfer market – this is exactly what Bastian Schweinsteiger might have said to Morgan Scheiderlin as they met at the carousel at Manchester Airport.
3 TORQUAY – TOR{n}, QUA(=by virtue of) {popularit}Y. Nice when a word like “resort”, which inevitably makes you look for the anagram, turns out to indicate an actual resort.
4 ANTIMONY – ANTI-MONEY i.e. “not keen on cash”, minus {chang}E.
5 TABARD – BAR=”forbid”, wearing a TAD.
6 DOLEFUL – a playful definition suggesting that the word might be taken to mean “full of dole”.
7 CUT – Trade Union Congress, TUC(rev).
8 FORESTALL – FOREST on ALL.
12 AGNOSTICISM – (ISACTINGSO)* + M{ass}.
13 OCTILLION – COTILLION is the dance, turn round the CO. at the start to get the extremely large number.
15 FASTENER – FAST(=moving sharply) + (RENE)rev.
17 IN UTERO – (ROUTINE)*.
19 OMNIBUS – OM(=Order of Merit), 1 B{ook} in NUS(National Union of Students). Requiring a second look because OMNIBUS can mean “big volume” or “one book” equally well…
20 BIOPIC – BISHOP(=”see leader”) minus SH(=”order to be quiet”), I/C.
22 EDGES – double def., and the obligatory cricketing clue as we some of us bask in the contentment of England being 1-0 up in the Ashes. For the uninitiated, an edge in cricket is a false stroke which causes the batsman to nick the ball in the direction of the waiting fielders behind the wicket.
24 TIC – TwItCh.

32 comments on “Times 26,150”

  1. 13 mins. I was quite happy with my time because it felt tricky in parts. A biffed TORQUAY was my LOI but I parsed it shortly afterwards, and I also biffed OCTILLION but “cotillion” came to me post-solve. I would have been quicker had the Waugh novel come to mind sooner, and the same goes for OBJET D’ART.
  2. 18:04, finishing with a fair bit of biffing – OCTILLION and TORQUAY in particular.

    Well done Tim for taking the opportunity again to point out that ENGLAND ARE 1-0 UP IN THE ASHES!

  3. 18:46, luckily managing to spot the typo before finishing. I saw IM UTERO, which makes a change from I’M SPARTACUS.
    Tim/Pootle, are you really saying that ENGLAND ARE 1-0 UP IN THE ASHES? I must have missed that.
  4. Found this trickier than yesterday’s, and it took me 45mins, but did get them all in the end. Biffed OCTILLION (dnk cotillion).

    LOI: TORQUAY

  5. Thanks Tim. Like others i found this just a little trickier than it seemed. Liked one by one; tried like mad to make the boundaries into False oars, or fours.
  6. Just over 13 minutes, though I lost internet connection at some point and so had to log back on and fill out the grid a second time, resulting in an ostensible 16 minutes on the club timer, ho hum.

    I had no idea what was going on with EDGES, so thanks for the explanation there! Cricket is my big blind spot when it comes to solving these things. Also, had never heard of the place TRIER but I assumed Danish director Lars von Trier’s ancestors might have been from there, so in it went.

    Edited at 2015-07-14 12:05 pm (UTC)

  7. Reasonably straightforward but enjoyable puzzle, with some neat touches — e.g. ONE BY ONE.

    I biffed OCTILLION but couldn’t full explain it because I did not know or had forgotten that there is a dance called a cotillion. CAROUSEL was similarly biffed because I couldn’t rid myself of the notion that the “wake up” bit of the clue was accounted for by AROUSE rather than ROUSE. Doh! Thanks to Tim for explaining both.

  8. Pretty straightforward despite the usual number of unknowns. Well, unknown to me at least.

    Liked the CHRISTMAS anagram. Thanks setter and blogger.

  9. 18:42, after one or two blind alleys. I don’t suppose anyone else thought BALLOT UNIVERSE might be an answer to 21a, or tried to get ASTATINE to fit for 4d. I had never heard of the book at 13a, but it was clear enough from the word play and checkers. I liked 13a, 20d and 22d.

    I couldn’t parse 13d – thanks Tim… I vaguely remembered the word postillion, but of course that is not a dance. Looking up what it meant post-solve, I discovered “My postillion has been struck by lightning” is allegedly an english phrase deemed worth knowing in late 19th Century/early 20th Century phrase books.

  10. Must try to remember EDGES as a cricket clue – it hadn’t registered before. Yes, the Waugh was a write-in, same as others here. One of the ones featuring bad boy Basil Seal – the heel you love to hate. Of course, thanks to the ever-trusty Georgette for COTILLION/OCTILLION. Those expletive apostrophes – I always forget them. Nice one but not specially wavelengthy for me. 15.16
  11. I had to be at home until about 10 this morning, and made the mistake of attempting this in the kitchen surrounded by my kids. In the interests of preserving my solving self-esteem I’m going to blame the consequent distractions for the solving calamity that ensued.
    > At 18ac I put AROUSE inside CAL to get CAROUSAL. Well I didn’t, obviously, but that’s what I thought I was doing at the time.
    > At 11ac I was quite pleased with myself for remembering the novel PUT OUT MANY FLAGS.
    > This left me T_B_N_ at 5dn. The very clear wordplay made the answer obvious. I hadn’t heard of a TABAND, but thought it might somehow be related to the tabard.
    16m for all that including pouring Shreddies, breaking up fights etc.
    Ah well, tomorrow is another day, and at least we’re 1-0 up in the Ashes.

    Edited at 2015-07-14 12:23 pm (UTC)

  12. 13:39 finishing with the rather nasty objet d’art (no matter how many times I looked at it I was never going to get ouija out of O*J**) followed by Basil Fawlty’s manor.

    Count me as another who was wondering which state CL might be and who doesn’t know a cotillion from a cotoneaster.

  13. I’m generally a bit distracted during solving at the moment and at 36 minutes this was my first finished in reasonable time for a while. I didn’t understand OCTILLION, though I’m pretty good on old-style dances, or thought I was, but I never heard of COTTILION. EDGES with ref to cricket was also lost on me. Nice puzzle, for all that.
  14. 28 minutes, but spent an age post-solve trying to get -TILLION to mean something. Glad I left that to trusty Topical. It may not make K feel any better, but I was dead pleased to get Orwell‘s early novel almost immediately. Written on the way back from Wigan Pier, so I believe.

    And Penfold reminds me that when working in Savill Garden as a student (not of botany, I hasten to add, as will quickly become apparent), I showed some visitors to a particularly beautiful bloom: the cotton-easter.

    Thanks for the cricket update, everyone. One misses so much out east.

    Edited at 2015-07-14 12:44 pm (UTC)

    1. I don’t think my mind actually registered an author at the time, which at least eliminated another opportunity to be wrong.
  15. Did this early doors bfore the grandchildren shattered the peace, but only now returned to find the blog had appeared. Found it straightforward although didn’t get the dance bit of OCTILLION so call that a biff. Torn between TOR and TER for the ending of 10a. EDGES was a nice reminder as noted above – England are 1 – 0 ahead !
    1. Is it tomorrow I’m covering your blog by the way? Just making sure before I rush in where angels fear to tread…
  16. Nice puzzle, good blog. 35 minutes but with OCTILLION & TORQUAY unparsed.
    OK, I’ll take up the challenge of IT nostalgia. That veritable paragon of intellectual accuracy Wikipedia cautions against not being confused between a tabulator (generic data browser and editor) and tabulating machine”.
    Rot. We used to call them tabulators long before browsers were a twinkle in Sir Tim’s engineering eye.
    Oh, and manual typewriters also had a “tab” key which skipped the carriage to preset positions.
    By the way, a letter in Saturday’s Times commented on last week’s SHEATH clue as “O Tempora, O Mores” – precisely the comment I made at the time on this blog. Remember you heard it here first, folks…
  17. Slow, slow, thick, thick slow. 26.44 believing all the way I was tackling a tricky one, failing to understand either ONE BY ONE or CO/OCTILLION, almost missing Christmas. Maybe distracted by the discovery of God’s last message to his creation. Major Kudos to the Americans for a 3 billion mile achievement, though disappointed that they forgot to drop the fridge off, unlike the Europeans.
    1. Wonderful achievement, indeed, and what images! And your description, Z, is stirring stuff. It makes me all the more ashamed to admit that I looked at that photograph and immediately thought “Now that’s prime Clanger territory, that is.”
      1. No need to feel ashamed. The stirring stuff is a reference to H2G2 (only marginally more worthy a piece of high art than The Clangers) wherein the message in question is “We apologise for the inconvenience”.
        1. Ah, thank you. I read the first few Hitchhiker’s Guide (I don’t feel qualified to use the shorthand) books back around the time of publication, so it’s nice to be reminded of them. Maybe time for a reread.
  18. About 20 minutes, ending with TORQUAY, which left me pleased with myself for solving it at all. I missed the parsing of BEING, and had no idea of the cricket reference on the EGDES. All the rest were OK, while those two were biffed.

    By the way, I understand England is up 1-0 in the Ashes. (Against whom?) Good luck, old chaps. Regards.

  19. 14:33 … one of the most enjoyable in a while for me. It all just fell together, ending for me with the delightful ONE BY ONE. Thanks, setter. Thanks for the entertaining blog, Tim. By heavens you’re frighteningly good at that management speak.
        1. You guys are scaring me now. Making me laugh, but scaring me.

          I’m off, just in case this stuff is contagious. Added value button, indeed.

  21. I thought this was quite hard (didn’t know the Evelyn Waugh novel, nor the TABARD, nor the church musician, nor of course the cricket term, but I guessed it might be a tennis stroke hitting the ball with the edge of the racket, nor BIOPIC for that matter, nor the state abbreviation, since when I last lived in the States states had abbreviations like MASS and CAL but only rarely two-letter ones), but I’m getting quite good at pulling words from the dim fog at the edge of my memory.

    At the end I did have one very curious mistake — TABULATER rather than TABULATOR. It’s not that I don’t know how to spell it, but I parsed the clue in a non-standard way and so didn’t catch that “picked up” was referring to the sound. To me, the TAB was to be picked up (as someone usually does in a restaurant if one doesn’t want to be arrested) and the rest was “U LATER” (so presumably forbidden earlier). Now I was convinced that the wordplay required the E and so this must be an alternate spelling, hidden somewhere in the bowels of Chambers or such. Oh dear!

    My COD is the clue for BEING, but there were lots of other good ones, too.

    Edited at 2015-07-14 06:35 pm (UTC)

  23. 9:22 here for a pleasant straightforward solve (held up a little at the end by TORQUAY).

    When I first joined ICT (International Computers and Tabulators) back in January 1963, I spent the first week of my training course wiring plugboards for tabulators, sorters and reproducers (before moving on to learning how to program a 1301 – in machine code – in the second week). I don’t know if there ever were tabulators that doubled as “ordering devices”, but ours didn’t: if you wanted ordering, you had to buy – or hire – a sorter.

    (On reflection, you could order the columns of your table, so I suppose “ordering device” is fair enough.)

    Edited at 2015-07-15 12:20 am (UTC)

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