Times 26200 – rising to satiate an itch

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : Hmm – I submitted this at 16:08 on the club timer, after agonizing over the last three for about 5 minutes and am now told I have three incorrect entries. I can see two of them due to an unfortunate type at an intersection of answers, but the third one has me flummoxed. I’m sure the hive mind will come in and correct me on whatever other misapprehension I have, as there are several all-corrects so far.

And it was almost instant gratification – it was the very last entry I had made a HASH/MASH of

Not a lot to say about this one – I relied a lot more on definitions than wordplay, and in a lot of cases I said “this must be this, I’ll come back and deal with wordplay when I’m writing up the blog”.

Away we go….

Across
1 CROSS: take WORD out of CROSSWORD
4 SCHEMATIC: anagram of CATECHISM
9 (t)AR,CHANGE,L – Anglicized name of a port in Russia
10 SERUM: SHE missing H then RUM
11 PARKIN’
12 HONOLULU: or HO NO LULU
14 DOUGH,TIER
16 SCENT: ASCENT missing A
17 TA,STE(p)
19 EUPHRATES: anagram of (PATH,SURE) after (delug)E
21 HAT,(fel)T,RICK
22 MERGER: the second half of SUMMER followed by GERMAN missing MAN
25 BLEAT: L inside BEAT
26 ABASEMENT: A, T containing BASE(men), MEN(fellows)
27 TEST MATCH: double definition
28 RAN,CH
 
Down
1 CHAMPED AT THE BIT: (BEDTIME,THAT,CHAP)*
2 OSCAR: or an OS CAR
3 S,LAVISH
4 SAGO: sounds like SAY GO
5 HELIOTROPE: HELOT(slave) and ROPE surrounding 1
6 MASCOTS: MS(writing, manuscript) around ASCOT
7 TURBULENT: (yo)U,BRUT reversed, followed by LENT
8 COME UP TO SCRATCH: double definition, one cryptic
13 DISENCHANT: anagram of (CHAP,INTENDS) missing P
15 UPSETTERS: or UP SETTERS
18 ERRATUM: R in ERA then TUM(ble)
20 ROE DEER: sounds like RODE DEER Edit: should write these before four pints – of course it is RODE ‘ERE that it sounds like
23 GREEN: double definition with “new” and where a golfer might be lucky enough to finish up
24 HASH: I have this as a double definition so maybe this is my incorrect entry Of course not – it’s MASH, for a hospital that had a long-running TV show named after it

46 comments on “Times 26200 – rising to satiate an itch”

  1. MASH, a dd indeed, but. I started with ‘hash’ myself, but aside from the apples of Sodom, couldn’t think of ash as food.
  2. Suspect this is MASH, as in M*A*S*H.
    I thought MUSH at first — that’s how our hospital food tends to be!

    Edited at 2015-09-10 04:00 am (UTC)

  3. My LOI was PARKIN, of which I’d never heard; took a lot of alphabet trolling and pondering, and about 4 minutes, to decide on it. SERUM took time, too, even when I had the RUM. Biffed 21ac–I’d forgotten the virtually never heard of (by me) RICK–otherwise things went in fairly smoothly.
  4. Held up by actually putting in ‘champing’. Just managed to spot the five typos thus caused in time. How easy is it to learn to touch type? I assume everyone else can.
    1. Me neither: it’s a b****r, isn’t it? You get to the end of a long one, and look up to see you’ve started in the second square, or worse, don’t notice until nothing else fits. To say nothing of entries going in the wrong direction. And I tried Mavis – it may be that some of us just have untrainable digits. Now where did I put those home keys…
      1. I gaped in wonder not so long ago when I noticed my teenager could touch type. “When did you learn that?” “Oh, that Winnie the Pooh CD-ROM you gave me when I was eight.” Good old Walt!
    2. Learning to touch type is easy: you just need the software. I learned years ago using a programme called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. I’m sure other software brands are available.
      1. Many thanks. Mavis is on order. I spent a fair chunk of my formative years trying and failing to learn to play the piano. My fingers each have a mind of their own. I hope Mavis is up for a challenge.
        I also received advice from Mrs M suggesting that I should take the trouble to read what I’ve typed. Mrs M is unaware of the existence of the Crossword Club leaderboard and is therefore, in my opinion, not qualified to give advice on this matter.
    3. 14:07… not often I get below 15 mins. Quite straightforward, held up only by putting in TRUCULENT for 7d initially and my last 2 – 14a and 3d. I use pen and paper. Would I be any faster doing it online, I wonder? 4d and 15d made me chuckle.
  5. 29 minutes for this rather less than scintillating offering. Held up be wanting to put in ‘champing’ and being unable to think of the past tense, i.e. to parse the clue properly. The unknown PARKIN was last in.

    At 20d, it’s a homophone of “rode ‘ere”, methinks.

    Edited at 2015-09-10 03:38 am (UTC)

  6. Panicked when “champing” didn’t work, didn’t know what else you could do “at the bit”. Eventually solved it by reading the clue properly, a radical approach which I may continue to employ.

    Nervous about PARKIN on submission, but whaddya know, it’s a word.

    Thanks setter and George.

  7. 40 minutes. Straightforward and enjoyable with time lost at 10ac where I thought first of RHEUM and spent too long trying to fathom the wordplay; I could see RUM for ‘drink’ and ‘H’ for hard and the definition was fine but not the rest of it. [On later edit: My earlier problems with LJ are now resolved so I have deleted the details]

    Edited at 2015-09-10 09:47 am (UTC)

  9. A cheerful offering with only PARKIN giving cause for pause. I vaguely remembered ‘perkin’ and it wasn’t a great leap to guess that there might be a variant spelling.
  10. No problems with the parkin (Yorkshire granny) or the mash. Interesting how we automatically think ‘champing’ and so don’t read the clue properly and have trouble fitting the ING in. Just under 8 mins.
  11. 21.59 (under 22 minutes, yay!) having managed to take 1d even further afield, starting with CHAFING (no idea where the F comes from) then switching to CHAFFED (I know, I know – is firkin a cake? Farcin? Surely not farkin?) to accommodate DOUGHTIER before the unknown CHAPPED and finally CHAMPED.
    In the light of that lunacy, I have the temerity to agree with Ulaca that 20d is “rode ‘ere”
  12. 20 minutes. Initially tried to involve HAY RICKS in 21a – Success in the fields and strain? The 6 outside clues went in straight away, so no excuses. Do new golfers reach the green after driving from the tee? Do old golfers, come to that?
  13. 5:30, something of a relief after a tortured post-midnight session earlier in the week where I took about 40 minutes to do two (not particularly hard!) grids. I was so so close to putting HASH in as my LOI, but fortunately the penny dropped just in time…
  14. Was heading for under 10 minutes but got delayed by 13dn, didn’t spot the anagram for ages. Doh. But 8dn the clue of the week for me, had me laughing out loud.
  15. 10.09, but in my rush to come in under 10 minutes I failed to spot a rather apt typo at 18dn. And then failed to come in under 10 minutes anyway. There’s a lesson in this, but I won’t learn.
    Galspray describes precisely my experience on 1dn, but I did know PARKIN from somewhere or other.
    Lots of biffing today.

    Edited at 2015-09-10 08:01 am (UTC)

  16. 17.13. All seemed fairly straightforward. Nice to see ‘doughty’ not merely as ‘brave’ rescued from the tip of oblivion. 20 surely has to be from ‘rode ‘ere’, a lower humour register. Somehow one sees (with respect to same) a setter’s chins wobble. No brilliant sallies elsewhere to answer it that I can find. ‘Having to mix’ in 1.d. seems a bit weary. All worthy enough but surely a solver – and a setter – is always looking for something to set the table on a roar?
  17. 18 min – this went pretty quickly, till at last spent several minutes trying to think of wordplay for HASH (or even BASH) – MASH didn’t seem to work either, but eventually remembered M*A*S*H – which I’d never watched, as I avoid war films.
  18. More of a Monday puzzle, finished in 20 minutes. Still, I enjoyed the clues. I find entries of three or four words are generally easy to get, so 1d came quickly with only the initial C and the last D of the first word in place. No need to shuffle the anagram fodder around. Similarly 8 was obvious with C_M_ for the first word. I’m sure many will have got it without any letters in place.
  19. 19:57 with a good 9 minutes of that at the end trying to get disenchant. For some reason I could neither find a word to biff nor work out what the wordplay was trying to tell me.

    No problem with Parkin as I’m sat sitting here about 6 miles from the centre of Leeds.

    Merger was on my mind too, as I’ve spent most of the morning fannying around trying to get letters out to banks asking for audit information on account of two members of our ownership consortium deciding to merge.

  20. 16m here so an easier one for me with no real problems and a good deal of biffing going on (is that a song title?). Most problematic was 13d – my LOI – and I too enjoyed 8d, my COD.
  21. Nice to be able to finish; although I too was held up for a bit by (impatiently?) sticking in ‘Chafing at the bit’. Maybe it’s because I now have more time on my hands but I suspect we’re on a roll of less than fully demanding puzzles this week
  25. I think 20d may be

    sounds like “rowed ‘ere”

    thanks for all your great blogs

    Geoff Stocker

  27. 12 minutes, was on the wavelength today in good mood after a 5 over par gross round but still paying out. No problem with PARKIN as Mrs K is from up’t north (but thankfully without the Lancashire accent).
  28. I only knew this from looking it up years ago while reading Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night. It was what the young inmates of Shrewsbury College had with their tea or late night cocoa. As a footnote, a tip of the hat to Harriet Walter, a fellow inmate of my boarding school, who made Harriet Vane bearable. Mash was a pretty good satirical movie by Robert Altman. I never saw the tv series because I was working all hours at the time. 14.23
  29. 11 mins, so I was on the setter’s wavelength, but obviously not as much as V and Sue were. DISENCHANT was a biffed LOI, although I did parse it shortly after I entered it. I didn’t fall into the “hash” trap because I’ve seen a very similar clue before. I thought it was in a Times puzzle but it could have been in the Guardian or Indy.
  30. I was on the wavelength and breezed through in about 12 minutes, getting the unknown PARKIN from the wordplay. But alas, I arrive here to find I’ve followed our esteemed blogger into the HASH skillet. Argh. Regards.

    Edited at 2015-09-10 05:26 pm (UTC)

  31. I spent ages looking at 24d and finally, in desperation, bunged in ‘hash’, as M.A.S.H. never crossed my mind, even though I really enjoyed the television series (especially the earlier ones), preferring them to the film. For what it’s worth (which isn’t much) time with error 32m 23s.
  33. 8:03 for me, still feeling tired, with house-buying almost going into reverse at the moment. (Deep sigh!)

    I started well and was wondering if a clean sweep might be on the cards, but when I came to 6dn with just the M in place, I couldn’t get MAGNETS out of my mind and had to abandon the attempt. That lost me a bit of time, but I eventually came unstuck over DISENCHANT, failing (for no good reason I can think of now) to parse the clue correctly.

    At least I twigged MASH more or less straight away as I remembered bunging in HASH for “Forces hospital to provide potatoes (4)” in No. 25,996 and for once managed to avoid making the same mistake twice.

    A pleasant, straightforward solve.

  34. Biffed immediately,but completely in the dark about the cryptic. Our esteemed commentator’s breakdown still makes means nothing to me. Help!
    Otherwise enjoyable and smooth-flowing.
    1. Ho = abbreviation for house
      No lulu = not a remarkable thing, assuming a lulu is something remarkable.
  35. Having spent many years analyzing serum in a hospital lab, I’ve never thought of it being “watery stuff”, but I suppose it basically is!
    Ian

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