Times 26,186

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
13:11, so not outlandishly difficult based on that criterion (not to mention someone from these parts already solving considerably quicker); and a smooth solve with everything safely worked out before submitting. As always, your mileage may vary, depending on your personal knowledge of Aristotle, the language of Robert Burns, and card games; though I don’t think the vocabulary was especially tricky. Whether I’m right or not will soon become clear.

Across
1 KINSWOMAN – IN(=at home) in (MONKWAS)*.
6 BASIS – 1 in the BASS voice.
9 DOWAGER – WAG(=shake) in DOER(=active type).
10 SHOWN UP – double def.
11 SWOON – W{ife} in SOON.
12 LANDOWNER – where LAN stands for Local Area Network; so if you did terminal mischief to one, you’d be a “LAN DOWNER”, geddit?
13 FORTIETH – (TOFITHER)*, with ruby being another way to express a 40th anniversary.
14 DRAB – (BARD)rev.
17 LATE – {e}LATE{d}.
18 BADINAGE – IN{n} inside [B{ritish} ADAGE]. At first I feared this was going to feature the dread word “banter”.
21 HALF TRUTH – veracity = truth, so our Vera is only half of that.
22 SO FAR – F{eminine} in SOAR.
24 UNITIES – UNI{versity) TIES(=associations); the unities are the dramatic rules laid down in Aristotle’s Poetics.
25 GO ROUND – double def. “Last out” as in “I hope there’s enough wine to go round”.
26 EAGLE – E{nglish}; AGLE{y}, a word I know (as does probably everyone else who happens to know it) from Burns’ words To a Mouse i.e. “The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley”.
27 SINGLETON – double def., “one in a suit” being in the card-playing sense, where it means a single card of a particular suit in a hand.
 
Down
1 KUDOS – (SUDOKU)*.
2 NOW YOU’RE TALKING – a double definition with the cryptic element not being very cryptic.
3 WAGON-LIT – (ALONG)* in WIT. The train sleeping-car sounds even more exotic when rendered in French.
4 MORALITY – lift and separate to get the definition “Good conduct”, and it’s M{ark}, O{ver}, R{E}ALITY minus the E.
5 NOSING – 27ac is SINGLETON; if you want to turn that into “admitted”, i.e. LET ON, you take off the first bit, so there’s NO SING.
6 BOO-BOO – BOO{k} x2.
7 SAN ANDREAS FAULT – (LAASUNDERFASTA{california}N)* &lit. Very clever.
8 SEPARABLE – StEeP, ARABLE.
13 FULL HOUSE – double def. More cards, where a full house is three of one rank and two of another in poker; and the theatrical sense.
15 PATHOGEN – THO'(=but) in PAGE N, i.e. an unspecified page.
16 MINSTREL – MINSTER (=church) with the tail turned to become MINSTRE + L{eft}.
19 STRIKE – S{on} + TRIKE.
20 CURSES – the curé is the French parish priest; put {pray}S in CURES to get the swearing.
23 RADON – R.A.(=Royal Academy) DON(=lecturer) gives the radioactive gas.

40 comments on “Times 26,186”

  1. Did a fair amount of biffing, e.g. 4d where I forgot o=over (it being a down clue didn’t help) and 21ac, where all I could think of was ‘aloe vera’, so I stopped thinking and biffed. LATE took a while, since ‘elated’ hardly seemed a synonym for ‘delirious’. COD to LANDOWNER.
  2. Not as much trouble as yesterday. Thought 7dn was, indeed, very clever.
    CURSES! my last one in; also very well constructed.
    MINSTREL went in pretty quickly. Been listening to The Amazing Blondel (c1970) over the last few days. Highly recommended for excellent musicianship and creative lyrics. Not to mention the odd single entendre.
  3. 21 minutes, or nearly 4 Verlaines. If the lad can adjust his body clock before the big day and arrive at the venue half-cut, he’d definitely be worth a punt at odds.
    1. I didn’t even drink for this one! Might have been my first ever official sub-five-minute time if I had…

      I couldn’t parse GO ROUND at all so lucky it couldn’t have been anything else really. (I did work it out during the long watches of the night later, but I wasn’t totally convinced.)

      1. Whisper it quietly, but I never bothered parsing that one. It is my day off, you know.
      2. It took me a while too but then I remembered it has come up before, clued as “last” if not “last out”.
  4. Only a few moments over my half-hour target were needed for this one but extra time was taken afterwards working out some of the wordplay.

    I thought 26ac was a bit loose in that respect so I was pleased to come here and find a better explanation (albeit a bit obscure) than my version which required the removal of almost all the letters of “English” (i.e. E,N,G,L and S) from Gleneagles (course in Scotland) leaving us with the correct answer EAGLE. It now seems anyway that Gleneagles is a venue for golf rather than a specific course as there’s more than one and they have their own individual names.

    TRIKE for “toy” has come up before and I still fail to understand it, nor can I find it justified in any of the usual sources. I had one as a child and it was a prize possession, a properly designed and engineered vehicle – anything but a toy.

    Edited at 2015-08-25 04:48 am (UTC)

  5. A little over 30 minutes for me. A nice distraction this morning, and I liked Vera – made me smile after recent maternal bereavement.
  7. 11:27 … Like verlaine, I didn’t actually parse GO ROUND, but I didn’t parse it rather slower than he didn’t. That and the UNITIES were the only major hold-ups.

    The Californian fault was so biffable that I hardly noticed how clever it was.

  8. 8m, with loads of biffing. In fact I put 9ac in without looking at the clue. What’s the acronym for that?
    1. Blind-biffing? Besides wasting time by typing in ‘go far’ at 22a, I also wasted quite a bit more as the words ‘This is not Keriothe’s kind of puzzle’ kept assaulting my senses.

      Edited at 2015-08-25 07:13 am (UTC)

      1. I thought that was Pinata?

        Put In Not Acknowledging The Artistry?

        35 minutes for me with BOO BOO LOI. Should have been Boo hoo given the time it took me.

        Edited at 2015-08-25 07:41 am (UTC)

  9. A lax and mildly puzzled 16.24, with FORTIETH my last one in, despite the fact that today is our 42nd (real estate development, in case you’re wondering about a gift). I also had a much more inventive version for NOSING (though the real working is very clever). I’ve seen herself play Bridge, and I’m next door to certain that the cheaty way to indicate a singleton to your partner is to place one finger against the nose: nosing, as it might as well be termed by Blackwood, Stayman et al (I had to look those up).
    San Andreas is the perfect example of a clever clue you’d only parse if you were leading the blog. Well done, Tim!
    I thought LANDOWNER and HALF TRUTH added wit and colour to the mix.
    1. The great bridge scandal involving using fingers to indicate a suit holding was in 1965 when Reese and Schapiro were found guilty of misconduct in the World Championships. Just a year ago two Germans were caught passing messages by coughing!
  10. Another relatively easy one – mainly because the definitions are so obvious. Like many I never parsed 7D for example – a pity because it’s a clever clue
  11. 18:24 with a few biffs. I enjoyed the golf link (or should that be links) in 26a. Also enjoyed 21a and 5d; now I’ve had it explained – thanks, Tim!
    1. See my comment above. It got me to the correct answer but it doesn’t really stand up as an explanation.
  13. 16 mins. I was slow into this one and didn’t have a single answer after my initial read through of the acrosses. KUDOS was my FOI, the K checker helped me see KINSWOMAN, and I built out from there. Count me as another who didn’t parse GO ROUND. The UNITIES/STRIKE crossers were my last ones in. I got UNITIES from the wordplay and when I looked at my Chambers post-solve to check it I noticed that it shows it as “the unities”, although there may be other dictionaries that disagree. As far as STRIKE is concerned I’m with Jack on not liking “trike” being definined as “toy”. I agree that the clue for SAN ANDREAS FAULT was a belter.
  15. The NW corner was incredibly easy, filled in a few minutes. The lower half was harder, but not especially difficult. I reached the twenty-minute mark with some unsolved, finally finishing in 26 mins. Last ones in were 12, 6a and 6d.
    A good set of clues, with nothing to complain about. That’s not been the case with some of the Guardian puzzles that I’ve been tackling over the last six weeks. Re one of yesterday’s clues deemed ‘rubbish’ by some, it was the epitome of purity compared to some clues from the pen of one or two Guardian setters.
  16. 25 minutes, like others didn’t get to parse GO ROUND, or fully understand EAGLE, the poetry of Rabbie Burns being a closed book to me. Is that where Steinbeck got the title from (of Mice and Men) or did RB get it from Shakespeare or ?
  17. Plenty of biffing for me, but very speedy by my standards. A couple of seconds inside my PB of last week I tnink.
  18. 20 minutes so about the same as yesterday. However I own up to a fair amount of biffing. Top half went in quickly – then I got bogged down the the SE.
  19. About 20 minutes, and at the end I just shrugged and biffed in : EAGLE, STRIKE, UNITIES and CURSES, while WAGON-LIT went in from wordplay only, the definition being foreign to me. Olivia, I believe I’m being shanghai’ed to the Dutchess Co Fair on Wed. night. If you’re to be there also, let me know how to try to locate you, if you’re so inclined, thanks. Regards to all.
    1. Hi Kevin. Unfortunately I won’t be there until Saturday morning at crack o’dawn when I go in before the fair opens to set up our stuff in the horticulture exhibit. If you swing by later on Saturday I’m putting in cleome, hydrangea and nasturtiums and hoping for at least one ribbon. It would be awfully nice to see you!
      1. Hi Olivia. The trip to Rhinebeck tonight (written on Wednesday) is grandchild-driven, and as such cannot be avoided or rescheduled without incurring a tsunami of wrath. I’m not at all expecting to return on Saturday right now, pity though it may be. We may have to arrange a rendezvous on our own. Best of luck with the ribbons!
  20. Pretty straightforward stuff, and sheepishly add me to the biffer of SAN ANDREAS FAULT, the enumeration was a giveaway.
  21. 13:08 for me after a couple of weeks of heat and mosquitoes. I knew AGLEY from Burns second hand via Jeeves. Poor Bertie’s best laid plans seem to go agley in almost every chapter.

    Unities guessed at, go round twigged post solve, the fault line biffed.

  22. BIFD – Biffing

    I notice there is an increasing number of references to “biffing” in these comments (no fewer than 15 today), it would seem mostly by those who have failed to solve clues but would like nevertheless to post a fast time or simply to claim to have finished the day’s crossword. It seems somewhat reminiscent of the commuter who simply fills in random letters to impress his fellow travellers with his ability to complete the Times crossword before reaching Waterloo. I believe the term came into being on this site only in January this year – originally, I understand, as an acronym for “bunged in from definition” although in many current examples the “biff” could be reduced to plain “bi”. How did contributors to the site refer to this approach in pre-biffing days? Heuristic analysis, hypothesis, conjecture, guess? I would feel mildly dishonest if I claimed to have “completed” the puzzle without fully understanding all the answers.

    2. Well call me a cad and a bounder, lock me up and throw away the key, but I put the answer in when I know what it is.
      1. There is absolutely nothing wrong with biffing when a solver is going for a fast time. A biff is very different from a wild guess because the solver has broken down the clue sufficiently to be able to see its definition. I remember when I first found this site Peter Biddlecombe would often refer to an answer being entered “without full wordplay understanding”. I always try and parse biffed answers post-solve and for the most part I can. The “Times for the Times” title of this site should be enough to let people who visit the site know what the key driver for the regular contributors is, but maybe the title is a little too cryptic for some visitors.
    4. >I would feel mildly dishonest if I claimed to have “completed” the puzzle without fully understanding all the answers.

      “Completing” the puzzle by getting all the right letters in all the right squares is hardly the same as filling in random letters.

      And what if I’ve used the wordplay to arrive at a word I think has to be the answer but is something I’ve never heard of? Is that dishonest because I’ve put in a word I don’t know?

      Regardless, until the Championships feature a post-solve interrogation to ensure such full understanding I think I’ll probably carry on biffing. Besides, you can’t really mean what you say so you must just be trolling.

      Edited at 2015-08-26 07:25 am (UTC)

  23. 11:31 for me, biffing a few (7dn among them) but wasting time trying to parse others (e.g. 25ac: GO ROUND) which I really ought to have biffed straight away – particularly as I did biff it in the end and only twigged it after I’d finished.

    I’m alarmed by Verlaine’s brisk time, but slightly relieved to be more or less level pegging with Sotira and crypticsue – though the three of us will need to raise our game come October.

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