Times 26,210

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I am back from my holidays and feeling refreshed for the most part, though I’ve noticed that even a couple of weeks off cryptics really does seem to dull the crosswording instincts (I’d planned to buy a book of Times puzzles at the Eurostar terminal before finding that the bookshop had closed; on my way back I realised it had just moved, rather than closed, but the result was the same, that I had an unscheduled break from solving).

Anyway, rust or no rust, this was a very decent puzzle, lots of thought required and plenty of penny-drop moments; at this early stage, my 21 minutes is well up the leaderboard, so on balance I think this was not just an enjoyable challenge, but a tricky one. As always, we shall see what we shall see…

Across
1 RENT-A-MOB – (ROBMENAT)*.
6 SINEWY – (1’S)rev., NEW {therap}Y
9 MORASS – (OR) Other Ranks in MASS, as said by clergy.
10 RUTABAGA – R.U., T.A., BAG A{nswer}. North American solvers will be at a distinct advantage here, as this is their name for what we generally call a swede. In circular fashion, the Swedes themselves call it a rotabagge, it seems.
11 CHIC – CC=”also to send to”, with the greeting HI inside. In the same way as the symbol for save is a now-defunct floppy disc, the concept of the carbon copy lives on in the days of e-mail.
12 ROAD ROLLER – R{uns} O{ver} A DROLLER.
14 CAPE TOWN – CA=circa=about, PET, OWN.
16 UNIS – UNIS=the educational establishments which are throwing their doors open again, if you were to add a T{ime} you’d get TUNIS.
18 MALI – MALI[CE] minus the C.of E.
19 NOTCHING – C=century in NOTHING(=duck).
21 NOT MUCH COP – N (pole), (TOCHUM)*, COP. Sorry in the sense of weak rather than apologetic, so nice misdirection.
22 NOPE – OPEN=”frank”, move the N{ame} to the front.
24 CALAMARI – (RAM)rev. inside CALAI{S}.
26 COGNAC – COG, (CAN)rev. Hard to spot without checkers, I found – a COG being just a part of the machine, and the CAN, slang for imprisonment, so the sort of cooler that Steve McQueen made his own in The Great Escape.
27 ST PAUL – (LAST UP)*. Capital of Minnesota, and part of the twin cities which will again be readily familiar to North American solvers.
28 SALES TAX – [A=article, LEST=in case] in SAX. Fortunately, I paused for thought here after initially only being able to see SALES TAG, but realising there surely couldn’t be an instrument called a SAG.
 
Down
2 EPOCH – (COPE)rev. + H{ard}
3 THATCHERISM – (ITSTHEMARCH)*. Nice disguise of the anagram indicator “winds”. I had the political sense of “wets” come up in a recent blog: the nickname given in the Conservative party of Mrs Thatcher to the old-fashioned One Nation Tories who were at odds with the zealous reformers she favoured. Thus her premiership consisted of a metaphorical attempt to dry them out.
4 MUSHROOM – MUSH(=”features”), ROOM(=”compartment”), so it’s to rocket in the sense of growing quickly, or mushrooming. One of those impenetrably concise clues for which I needed some/all of the checkers before spotting the sense of the words required.
5 BARGAINING CHIPS – BAR(=”exclude”) GAINING(=”winning”) CHIPS(=”damages”).
6 SATURN – (AS)rev. where AS=”like, TURN(=”go round”). Saturn is a world, I guess, though you wouldn’t want to live there.
7 NAB – hidden in marathoN ABerdeen.
8 WAGNERIAN – WAG=”wit”, then [N{ew} AIR EN]all rev.
13 LAUGHING GAS – LAUGHING(=”cracking up”) GAS(=”jaw”) with a bit of &lit. extra, as the pain relief from laughing gas is usually associated with dentists.
15 AMAZON ANT – AMAZON(=fierce female), ANT{E}; this one went in on trust from the wordplay, so I rely on wikipedia to answer my question as to how on earth ants could be described as slave-owners…
17 ATYPICAL – (PLAY, ACT1)*. Lovely surface.
20 SCRAWL – S{on} CRAWL(=”edge” as in move slowly).
23 PLAZA – LAZ{E} in PA.
25 AVA – lAtViAn.

37 comments on “Times 26,210”

  1. Very American feel today. I’d never heard of a RUTABAGA before I moved to the US. ST PAUL of course. And SALES TAX is VAT in the UK.

    But I messed up biffing SALES TAG and meaning to come back to see if it was really correct and then forgetting.

  2. Happy to come in under the half-hour mark, as this felt like quite a knotty puzzle.

    SALES TAG nearly got me as well.

    Some great surfaces here, but COD has to go to THATCHERISM I think.

    Thanks setter and Tim.

  3. Great stuff, with my largest tip of the hat going to NOT MUCH COP. Horses for courses, I reckon, Tim. Ever since Gallers came back from his sojourn in the land of the banana benders, he’s been on fire.

    A weary 84 minutes for me – just pleased to finish, if the truth be told. How are the mighty fallen!

  4. I don’t know when I discovered that rutabagas are called swedes elsewhere; fortunately, I’d recently Googled ‘swede’ because I’d forgotten what they were the UK equivalent of. Frustration abounding, as I knew e.g. how 9ac worked but couldn’t come up with MASS, how 23d worked but was stuck on the ‘head’ meaning of ‘loaf’, got BARGAINING but could only think of ‘table’, had PET at 14ac but, etc. I don’t know how I came up with NOT MUCH COP, which was, or I thought it was, a DNK. Is VAT simply a sales tax? I thought it was more complicated than that. COD to 3d.
    1. To the customer, VAT is like sales tax but unlike sales tax, VAT is paid by everyone. So if you buy, say, a shirt from a store they charge you VAT. But the company that sold the store the shirt charges the store VAT too (on the wholesale price). The store deducts that VAT from their profits so, in affect, they only pay tax on the value they added (the retail price minus the wholesale price) hence the name value-added-tax. It’s more complicated than that but that is the basic idea.

      Oh, and what the English call swedes are called turnips (or neeps) in Scotland. The vegetable traditionally eaten with Haggis is not what the English call a turnip.

      1. Thanks. The rutabaga question seems as complicated as VAT: we use both ‘rutabaga’ and ‘turnip’, and it’s not clear to me where they differ (my mother evidently wasn’t much for root vegetables; I’ve never had either). Turnips in the US, though, are what you can’t get blood from.
        1. In England of course it is a stone that you can’t get blood from. And despite being married to a Scot, I have never satisfactorily got to the bottom of what the Scots call what the English call a turnip. Perhaps I’ll try again today.

          As Paul says, VAT is somewhat more complicated than that but the good news is that now I am retired, I don’t have to think about the details any more.

          1. The simple explanation was too much for me…After that, the suede thing nearly sent me over the edge. I like pumpkin, though.
          2. When I lived in Edinburgh they called them white turnips.

            Now, what the English call a Scotch Pancake, the Scottish call a Bannock or something. And I forget what a pancake is…my brain hurts

  5. Having been on blogging duty the past two Tuesdays I feel I dodged a bullet on this one. I got there in the end but needed a lot of time to think things through and claw my way around the grid.

    Put me down as another who never heard of RUTABAGA but I enjoyed working it out from wordplay. ST PAUL as a state capital was also unknown but easy enough to be my first one in. I was under the impression that with the passing of carbon paper “cc” had been re-designated “courtesy copy” but I can’t find any official support for this.

    Edited at 2015-09-22 06:14 am (UTC)

  6. I thought this was quite difficult, partly because I struggled to get on setter’s wavelength.

    Knew swedes bore different names in different parts of the world but couldn’t recall RUTABAGA so had to derive it. Thought the THATCHERISM clue very good

    Welcome back Tim – a bit of a toughie on your first day back

  7. Oh dear, 37 minutes and a TAG that I forgot to go back and check. My FOI was RUTABAGA and ST PAUL the only other solved on first pass through the acrosses. Too many clues sent me the wrong way at first so well done setter.
  8. 17m. I started and finished very slowly on this but managed to pick up a bit of speed in the middle.
    I was in Minneapolis a few months ago so ST PAUL was no problem. I thought the THATCHERISM clue was a corker.
  9. Just about my limit. Saw the THATCHERISM anagram but the wet/dry distinction was too subtle for me. Didn’t give up and finished it off since the rain ruled out anything outdoors.
  10. Struggling to see how 13d clues LAUGHING GAS. I got the answer but to me it seems like the clue leads to GAS LAUGHING. Where’s the instruction that leads to putting LAUGHING before GAS?
    1. In the same way that ‘cop cracking up’ could lead to ‘laughing policeman’ if you take gas and jaw to be nouns.
      1. Don’t follow. ‘Up’ is doing double duty in a somewhat awkward way, as it appears.
        Otherwise a cracking crossword, despite it taking me not far short of the hour.
  11. As part of the ongoing “two nations divided by a common language” thing, I suspect you’d baffle most people this side of the Atlantic if your menu offered a mix of vegetables which included eggplant, zucchini and rutabaga. This is before we even get to the gravy…
  12. 1 hour of distraction from the rain. With only 5 written in on the first pass, I knew this would be tough. Some great clues but where would we be without Eva and Ava?
  13. Learned this when my children were small from a Sesame Street song (sponsored by the number 10) that also included eggplants (over easy), black-eyed peas, collard greens and banana squash. The one I didn’t know at all here was MUSH=FEATURES. Excellent puzzle. 25.8
  14. Such a comfort to read the comments as I do wonder lately if I am losing the ability to solve cryptic crosswords as I am having mighty struggles with some of them (not necessarily in the Times).

    11:04 with Tippex.

  15. 27:08. 3d my last one in… oh so clever, that one. I was quite pleased to finish under my 1/2 hour average and not to need aids. Unaccountably, I thought 9a was NOMINE at first – it isn’t even right as an anagram, which didn’t help. I also had BARGAINING POWER for 5d until disabused by 21a – my COD. The discussion on RUTABAGA reminds me I have a haggis in the freezer. Yum. But I believe they are banned from import into the USA since 1971.
  16. I kept dozing off with this (my sleepiness, not boredom induced by the puzzle, so it was an hour before I limped home with 26 my LOI. Never heard of RUTABAGA even after doing the Listener for a few years. Mind you, the Listener editors would insist on an American usage indication.
  17. 20:49. A pleasingly rare case where I think the crossword straightforward then come here to hear others say it was difficult. Almost invariably it’s the other way round.

    I held myself up slightly at the end by having guessed the fierce female was a dragon and so entering DRAGON ANT, with AMAZON ANT being unknown to me.

    My bright streak obviously came to an end when I got here as I genuinely read Tim’s blog as saying that Americans call Swedish people RUTABAGAs (I’ve never heard of the word).

    Edited at 2015-09-22 12:51 pm (UTC)

  18. It wasn’t a case of not being on the same wavelength as the setter – more likely I wasn’t even on the same waveband.
    A dismal day – hardly able to get started.
    Roll on tomorrow.
  19. Odd – I think I was on the correct wavelength, and got through this pretty easily, with only a question mark against CHIC (didn’t see the CC) and MUSHROOM (didn’t see the MUSH) part. I’ve been in the US for nearly 20 years, so ST PAUL, SALES TAX and RUTABAGA were write-ins (though I often misspell the veggie, so thanks for the clear wordplay).
  20. I got there in the end, but found it an enjoyable and worthwhile struggle. I am another who did not know ‘rutabaga’ but, as others have said, the wordplay was helpful. A London upbringing was valuable in parsing the first part of 4d.
  21. 19 minutes dead in an afternoon solve. My American daughter in Law introduced me to RUTABAGA while we were discussing the contents of Branston (other brands available) pickle, specifically the nondescript vegetable cubes.
    We also once tried cooking a swede/turnip/rutabaga that fell off the back of a tractor. Turned out to be sugar beet. Not recommended.
    This was fun, 3d and 24a raising a smile, with what looked like an obsession with Cs. The sequence CHC in 24a looked very odd in the grid, though there are other occasions when it turns up.
  22. 21 mins. I was losing concentration/nodding off in the middle of this one so it doesn’t seem to have been a bad time all things considered. I’ve come across RUTABAGA in puzzles before so I got it as soon as I read the clue. As has been said already there was some very good cluing here and I got sent down the wrong path a few times. MORASS was my LOI after MUSHROOM.
  23. Hello all, good to be back after a bit more than a week away. But I also think the time off took some edge off my crosswording skills, as I found this very tricky and needed 45 minutes to get through, ending with SALES TAX. All the Americanisms were OK here, although I was required to recall that you UK folks call it a swede. NOT MUCH COP was, it seemed, new to me, but for all I know I may have seen it and solved it previously. Also, I couldn’t follow the THATCHERISM clue, so good thing it was an anagram. Regards to all.
  24. 18:35 for me, still dogged by the depressing state of our attempt to move house. (The chap we’re buying from has been in Cyprus for several weeks now, and I’ve just found out that the people we’re selling to are currently on holiday in Majorca!)

    Although I was so far off the setter’s wavelength that I might as well have been on another planet, I can see with hindsight that this was a very fine puzzle with lots of interesting ideas. Like others I was tempted by SALES TAG – but managed to resist; however, I couldn’t resist bunging in DRAGON ANT, which held me up quite badly.

  25. I found this trying because so many of the synonyms were a bit of a stretch (eg Saturn/world, rocket/mushroom). I have been under the impression that ‘swede’ is short for ‘swedish turnip’. One is orange in colour, the other cream. Living in Scotland I can say that both turn up with haggis at Burn’s Suppers (er, not at the same time, thankfully). Thought Rutabaga must be an obscure scandi sexologist or something.
  27. Late I know, but I’ve been catching up with my Times crosswords that I had to save during a busy period. I can assure you that there are species of ants that do enslave other ants. Quite what the evolutionary advantage is for the slaves would need to be explained by David Attenborough!

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