Times 26169 – more haste less speed

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I started this early in an attempt to have it done and blogged before setting off for a routine doctor’s visit, as there can be a long wait once there. All went swimmingly well; with two thirds done in a few minutes, I started biffing a few with a view to sorting them out later. Disaster. I fell into several well laid traps by the setter, or perhaps I was just trying to run too fast. In the end I untangled it all in about half an hour; had I been Cryptic Sue I might have run out of Tippex, but all’s well that ends well. No doubt, with less pressure, most of you found it a doddle either way, it’s a fine puzzle, Mr Setter.

Across
1 CABBAGE – CAB = taxi, E = close to Braintree, insert BAG = luggage, def. cole.
5 SPENDER – Reverse REDS = commies, insert PEN = author, def. poet; Stephen Spender 1909 – 1995, British poet.
9 ACETAMIDE – Insert AM = before noon in anagram of ICED TEA; def. compound. CH3CONH2, more correctly ethanamide, a white solid which (when impure) smells of mice. [I’ve cracked the code for subscript numbers in HTML now.]
10 EQUIP – E = last from Monkhouse, QUIP = joke, def. stock.
11 EGHAM – E.G. = for, HAM = one overacting; def. place in Surrey. Or (see below comments) E.G. = for one, and ham is an adjective. As I hadn’t done 3d, and had E*H** I was pencilling ESHER, as that and EPSOM are the usual places in Surrey which arise, but I was wrong.
12 EARWICKER – EAR = attention, WICKER = basketwork; def. 17 hero. By now I’d done the easy 17a but also 6d which I’d inadvertently spelt ending -AIC so I had a problem. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker is a character in FW, see below 17a.
13 VICTORIA CROSS – VICTOR = winner, I Across = first clue, def, award. If this is not a chestnut, it’s brilliant, and I’ve not seen it before.
17 FINNEGANS WAKE – FAKE = spurious, around INN (pub), (AGNES)*, W (wife); def. comic work. I think you need a Ph.D in English or Irish literature to be able to find this book ‘comic’. I read Ulysses in my living-in-Dublin period and enjoyed it, tried FW and still have my copy undeciphered. A friend I worked with in Dublin told me his father (Professor Denis Donoghue) ‘wrote books about people who wrote books about James Joyce’ and ‘he was one of the most famous people in the world, amongst the twelve people who knew about him’.
21 REHEARSED – HEARS = catches, inside REED = grass; def. practised.
24 ABHOR – ABH = charge, OR = soldiers, def. can’t stand.
25 AORTA – A or T = choice between first or last letters of ArgonauT; add A; def. vessel.
26 AFORESAID – AID = benefit; insert FOR ESA; def. mentioned above. I spent too long trying to guess what ESA meant, but you just insert it. Doh!
27 OBSCENE – OB = outside broadcast, SCENE = fuss; def. shocking.
28 TREADLE – A bald tyre may be TREADLESS; remove the S and S for sons twice pulled out; def. rocking lever.

Down
1 CHAPEL – H = husband, in CAPE = robe, L = left; def. here to worship.
2 BEETHOVEN – BEE = second letter, spelled out, insert O V = old volume into THEN = later; def. he composed.
3 ANAEMIC – I MEAN = I intend, reversed into AC; def. weak.
4 EMILE ZOLA – ALE = drink, insert reversed OZ, LIME (Harry Lime, the third Man chap); def. writer.
5 SHEER – Def. fine, as in stockings; sounds like SHEAR = cut.
6 ELEGIAC – E, (GAELIC)*; def. written in couplets. For some reason I had at first written in ELEGAIC which upset my Earwicker to be the other hero Mr Earwacker.
7 DRUNK – DUNK = submerge, insert R, def. soak. I had a lot of trouble with this, trying to parse DIPSO and DOURO until I had the K from our hero.
8 REPHRASE – R = run, ERA = time, insert PH = public house, add SE = SituatE vacant; def. couch differently.
14 INSIDE-OUT – IN SIDE OUT = batting team dismissed; def. completely. I think, in the sense of ‘turn inside out’ meaning to review completely. Our cricket clue today.
15 OVERHEARD – (HAVE ORDER)*, anagrind ‘being out’, def. picked up by neighbours?
16 SFORZATO – (OF TZAR SO)*, def. stressed, musical instruction in Italian.
18 EMANATE – E = east, MANATE(E) = sea creature shedding tail; def. spring.
19 ACADEME – A = answer, CAME = arrived, around DE = extremely DiscursivE; def. intellectual world.
20 BRIDGE – BRIDE = new union member, insert G = good; def spanner. Not a spanner in the works.
22 HARES – Def. cross-country runners, hidden word in GosfortH ARE Slower.
23 SHADE – Double definition; SHADE = relative darkness; a SHADE is an archaic word for a spirit or ghost.

32 comments on “Times 26169 – more haste less speed”

  1. Needed help for ACETAMIDE, EARWICKER and SFORZATO, and ended up with ELEGIIC after entering ELEGAIC and not spotting the error when the crosser went in.

    Also couldn’t parse EMILE ZOLA until I googled Harry Lime.

    Nice puzzle on the harder end of the scale for mine. Thanks setter and blogger.

    Pip, I assume the down clues will appear in due course?

      1. Ah, didn’t see a comment to that effect. My apologies. Liked the Professor Donoghue story, BTW.

  2. … the two where I had to throw in various given letters in the hope they may make an (unknown to me) word both fell wrongly, and I had adecamite at 9ac, and sfortazo at 16dn. Definite lack of gk, there then (but probably should have thought longer, and may have made connections…) Didn’t get the ABH bit of ABHOR, and didn’t twig Harry L at EMILE ZOLA, but they went in biffed. At 8d I was trying to fit CH in somewhere… good misdirection.

    Good crossie, if somewhat on the literary side.

  3. Not keen on this puzzle with its emphasis upon the arts and too many read-and-write-in clues. We have poets, composers, books, characters from books and films, and obscure musical jargon clued as an anagram.

    ESA is Employment and Support Allowance (or, if you’re so minded, European Space Agency but that’s probably well outside this setter’s comfort zone)

  4. 16:11 with the clock stopped about halfway through to take Mrs bt to Heathrow, so the break probably re-energised me. Good to see AORTA, defined (as I may have mentioned before) in the How to Speak Strine book as ‘The Authorities’, as in ‘Aorta do something about it”.
    1. Reminds me of the story of former PM Menzies being heckled with “Whaddya gonna do about ‘ospitals?”

      His response was “I’m going to put an ‘h’ in front of them”.

  5. Enjoyed this but elegiac does not now indicate written in couplets. And would Joyce – or the select company of his experts – identify FW as a comic work? Is ‘for commentators’ ‘sounding like’? Maybe a need here and there to rephrase.
    1. Quote from the Wiki article
      The work has since come to assume a preeminent place in English literature, despite its numerous detractors. Anthony Burgess has praised the book as “a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page.”[14]

      Obviously Mr Burgess was much better at understanding Joyce’s gobbledegook than I was.

      1. I guess I’ll cede on ‘comic’. But since Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard I’d say the term’s association with couplets is no more than a historical one. The way the clue’s written suggests a bit more than that.
    2. Though “elegiac couplets” are definitely a thing – at least in classicaldom.
      1. Well, rhyming couplets are a thing. A classicist like yourself, I hear the resonance – but just think it’s cast a little airily upon the waters in this instance. Something too much of this.
  6. This took me the best part of an hour to unravel. Didn’t know the FW character but with assistance from checkers the wordplay was clear enough, not that I like linked clues on obscure subjects. ACETAMIDE was also unknown.

    For what it’s worth, I think 11ac is more accurately E.G. (for one), HAM (overacting).

    1. I thought about that, but felt HAM couldn’t be an adjective here, a ham is someone who is a poor actor or one who overacts. But now I see from dictionary corner, it can be used e.g. as ‘a ham actor’. Either way is good for me.
      1. I also wondered, but I struggled to see how E.G. could be simply ‘for’ so I teased out the adjectival sense.

        The example I thought of at 14 for “completely” was “knowing one’s subject inside out”.

  7. 21:16 but wasn’t sure of a few. I got misdirected right at the start thinking of Cole Porter for 1a until I did 1d. I missed LIME in 4d thinking the E at the start was the end of ALE – thanks for the explanation. Having never read FW I had to rely on the wordplay for 12a. I too thought 13a was great and enjoyed the chemical anagram at 9a.
  8. Took my time to enjoy this, especially the literary references. Needed all the checkers for ACETAMIDE of course, and made TREADLE the best of some very good clues. Finnegans Wake has been described as a comic work by some who should know. I think elegiac still has the meaning of being written in elegiac couplets. Collins for one agrees.
  9. 13 mins. I was pleased to find post-solve that my arrangements of the anagram fodder for SFORZATO and ACETAMIDE were correct, and I think they had similar clues even though Jimbo only criticised one of them. I also trusted the wordplay for EARWICKER and biffed ABHOR because I didn’t twig the “Actual Bodily Harm” charge. I finished with AFORESAID after the SHADE/OBSCENE crossers.

    Edited at 2015-08-05 11:00 am (UTC)

  10. Technical DNF as I needed to rely rather heavily on aids for the various literary references, although I did manage all the anagrams unaided, even though the forceful command was a bit of a leap of faith.

    Good crossword, but like some others I thought it was a little over-reliant on GK (but not the Chesterton type fortunately).

  11. I dunno. Allthat science and biology in one grid: AORTA, ANAEMIC, ACETAMIDE… What’s happened to all the Lit stuff we know and love?
    23 minutes, near as dammit, with my last two EMANATE and SHADE, entering at snail’s stroll for no apparent reason, though I thought the later had a fine clue.
    Since I’ve only ever heard the E ledge aye ick pronunciation, I guess it’s a spelling disaster waiting to happen. I knew that and got it right first time. Hooray!
  13. 7:12, so back in the game (where the game is defined as, no more than twice the time taken by Magoo). I had to get EARWICKER from the wordplay, and ACETAMIDE went in on an wing and prayer, but in general I do like these literary, clever-cleverness-rewarding ones…

    Edited at 2015-08-05 01:44 pm (UTC)

  14. 12:03 here, quite pleased until I saw Verlaine’s time 🙂

    Was looking at sub-10 for a while but got stuck on ACETAMIDE/ANAEMIC and EMANATE at the end. Got EARWICKER from the wordplay before getting FINNEGAN’S WAKE (which I initially tried to make into an anagram).

  15. Solved in the garden in 11 mins – I’d certainly have used Tippex instead of writing over entries in my attempts to put the letters in the right order for ACETAMIDE and SFORZATO but I couldn’t be bothered to get up from the deckchair.

  16. I had ELEGAIC too. And DROWN for DRUNK (DOWN with R in). That made EARWICKER doubly impossible (triply since I’d never heard of him, never read FW, and judging by the comments here am not suddenly filled with a feeling that I missed something). Eventually realized that it had to be …WICKER and fixed my other errors.
  17. 48m and an enjoyable puzzle (if a little challenging) for me because of the arty stuff so thanks setter.
  18. About 25 minutes, ending with EGHAM, with which I am not familiar. Nor am I familiar with FINNEGAN’S WAKE, except in song. So EARWICKER from wordplay only. As Pip said, VICTORIA CROSS is a great one, if it happens not be a chestnut. I don’t recall seeing it before, but others may have. Regards.
  19. 17:58. I made a bit of a pig’s ear of this, confidently biffing EPSOM at 11ac and then wasting ages looking for an obscure composer at 2dn. At the same time I had convinced myself that 9ac was going to end in -ITE so struggled with that one too. Eventually I actually looked at the wordplay for 11ac and it all fell into place quickly from there.
    Quite a few others biffed today but I did enjoy the range of references: poetry, chemistry, biology, music, French literature… and whatever you classify Finnegan’s Wake as. Speaking of which, I enjoyed the Prof Donoghue story.

    Edited at 2015-08-05 04:53 pm (UTC)

  20. Had the same experience as others with ‘Earwicker’ and the spelling of ‘elegiac’, but got there correctly in the end. Fingers crossed on ‘acetamide’ too.
  21. 9:23 for me, wasting time (and causing myself minor stress because I couldn’t see an obvious answer) by assuming that the compound at 9ac was going to end in ITE. Apart from that, I found this all pretty straightforward, with perhaps more than the usual amount of biffing – though I did just manage to resist EPSOM.

    [*** Pedantry alert ***]
    Finnegans Wake is one of those trick titles which doesn’t have an apostrophe. (Howards End is another.) Since our blogger led the way with the correct version, there was, to be blunt, really no excuse for getting it wrong!

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