Times 26,215 – Gwlad, gwlad, pleidiol wyf i’m gwlad!

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I’m still in mourning. Thank goodness I didn’t watch the match. Gaskets would have been blown. Maybe the Australia of the northern hemisphere will fare better against their southern counterparts.

As to the crossword, a very pleasant offering which took me 35 minutes. To keep this short, I will do this without any Googling, so, please, no penalties at the breakdown.

ACROSS

1. SABOT – SOT around AB; two crosswordy bits give a crosswordy word.
4. STUCCOED – ‘given decoration’; CUTS reversed + COED. My penultimate.
8. MISUNDERSTANDS – MISS around UNDER (‘reporting to’) + STAND (‘bass’).
10. FUNICULAR – [FUN for part]ICULAR. We had this last Monday, if I recall correctly.
11. THROB -‘beat’; initial letters of five of the middle words. Ever since acting opposite Canon Harold Throbbing in Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, I have had a soft spot for this word.
12. NO-SHOW – NOSH + OW for the opposite of an ‘appearance’.
14. LAWRENCE – LAW + RE + N + CE. Not over-taxing…
17. LONG SHOT – LONGS + HOT. Not likely to get you in a lather either.
18. COGENT – GENT after CO. Cheltenham types wouldn’t even need to look at the clue for this one.
20. SHAKE – S + HAKE. Lots of hake eaten in the Basque Country, as I recall.
22. STAIRCASE – ‘flight’; A in STIR (‘prison’, as in ‘I did my stir, John, even though I was innocent like’) + CASE. One thing I have learned in six years of intense crosswording is that you see ‘flight’ and you think ‘stairs’.
24. A HARD DAYS NIGHT – ‘picture’ as in Academy of Motion Pictures and the Sciences; anagram* of HAT GARISH DANDY.
25. BRETHREN – ‘society members’ (especially in Plymouth); the article is THE (not A or AN), so we have R in THE surrounded by BREN. My ultimate and COD.
26. EERIE – [b]EER + IE.

DOWN

1. SEMI-FINALIST – S + AS FILM TIE IN*. Unlikely to be England.
2. BOSUN – OB reversed + SUN. I liked this, as I was certain it must start AB.
3. TENACIOUS – NET reversed + AC + IOUS.
4. SEEMLY – ‘proper’; the outside letters of the last three words.
5. UPSTREAM – PUTS* + REAM.
6. CHANT – CHAT around N; a Taverner one has no discernible melody, but I guess some chants do.
7. ENDURANCE – EN + [p]UR[e] in DANCE (‘fling’, as in highland).
9. ABBEY THEATRE – BABY TEETH ARE*.
13. SUNBATHER – HEAT BURNS*; a Yodaesque semi &-lit with ‘if careless’ as the anagram indicator acting.
15. RIO GRANDE – ‘river’; O + GRAN in RIDE. Once famous for popping up in countless westerns, it is now better known as a crossing-point for those seeking a better life in the US of A – until the putative next POTUS encases it in a 30-feet wall.
16. CONSIDER – ON + SIDE in CR.
19. CANYON – ‘defile’; YON after CAN. Also popped up in a lot of B movies.
21. EGRET – [r]EGRET[s].
23. ANGER – hidden.

37 comments on “Times 26,215 – Gwlad, gwlad, pleidiol wyf i’m gwlad!”

  1. Solid start to the week. Thanks setter, and U for the pending blog.

    Wonder if this setter knew something about Saturday night’s game? TENACIOUS ENDURANCE by one team, A HARD DAY’s NIGHT for the other. Possibly some EERIE ANGER at being a SEMI-FINALIST LONG SHOT (NO SHOW, some would say).

    Better stop now, there’s another match to be played this weekend.

  2. I knew ‘defile’, except for the meaning part, which came back to me when I got the Y, and I was sure from the start that it was the definition. 9d had me misled a treat, until a couple of checkers suddenly led me to it. I wonder if there has ever been a clue with the word ‘flight’ in it that didn’t refer to a staircase. COD to 12ac.

    Edited at 2015-09-28 06:25 am (UTC)

  3. 21:36 … I didn’t think it was that easy. STUCCOED isn’t a word you see every day, and that meaning of ‘defile’ had to be dredged up from books read long ago.

    I gave myself a huge problem by confidently putting SCARP at 20a. Just me?

    That took a lot of sorting out when I found myself left at the end with an unsolvable 21d (where I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to parse the ‘variant spelling’ PAROT)

    Nice Monday morning brain starter. Thanks, setter. And thanks, ulaca.

    1. I was very tempted by SLING, but fortunately I noticed that the thing David threw at Goliath and the thing he threw that thing with are not quite the same thing.
    2. I had *all* the same problems as you, Sotira. Entered SCARP very confidently, possibly even as FOI, couldn’t see STUCCOED even though I had of STUCC_E_, and agonised over PAROT myself too. Great(ish) minds solve alike?
      1. I’m especially pleased you spent time with a parot, too, verlaine 🙂 Let’s run with the great minds, forget the -ish.
    3. I put SHAKE in very early on but as I did so I wondered if I was missing an alternative and would find myself coming on here asking if anyone else had made the same mistake.

      Just read Friday’s blog Sarah, sorry to hear we won’t be seeing you next month.

      1. Me, too, but family duty calls on this occasion. I trust you will put up a good show for the dark horse brigade!
  4. Dead easy apart from 19dn where I did not have the necessary GK to recognise the correct answer when I spotted it as a possibility via wordplay. If I’d settled for it when I first thought of it I’d have been done and dusted in 20 minutes which is a very good time for me. As it was however, at 30 minutes I used a dictionary to see if there was a meaning of ‘defile’ I didn’t know and found there was.
  5. 13m. I did remember ‘defile’ from somewhere (a past crossword, no doubt*) but the ABBEY THEATRE was new to me. Nothing else to scare the horses this morning.
    *Edit: sure enough, it came up in January, puzzle 26001.

    Edited at 2015-09-28 06:05 am (UTC)

  6. 15 mins – which is as fast as I ever do. Given the rugby result I am glad the setter clued the back half of 4a as “school” and not “dwells in the woods”
  7. 16:39. Quite straightforward, I thought. I remembered that meaning of ‘defile’, but had never heard of the ABBEY THEATRE. 20a my last one in after 21d. 15d mu favourite.
  8. 11.40 and a bit surprised because I came here expecting to find myself at the back of the peloton. Wisely (with hindsight) opted to leave the four-letter fish until I had all the checkers and only slowed by LOI STAIRCASE. Must remember wise words from Ulaca and Kevin re ‘flight’ in future.

    Edited at 2015-09-28 09:14 am (UTC)

    1. 11:35, quick by my standards and likewise I expected to come here and see many sub-10s. Must have been my day today as typically the setter could put flight for STAIRCASE several days in succession and still if he used it the next day I’d miss it, but I saw it quickly today. To put it in perspective it took me an age to see flower = river yesterday despite this device’s popularity.
  9. Made heavy weather of this with some confident bung ins which impeded progress. I was convinced from the anagram fodder that 1d began with SELF-, and had ON SHOW (almost, but not quite unparsable to mess up further progress. SUNSTROKE went in early at 13d, with no credibility except that it fits. Ditto MONOCYCLE at 10a, since the initial F was not available from my essay at 1d. Flight, sadly, has yet to be hard wired in as a default to STAIR, making that a struggle even as LOI.
    I claim a mild disadvantage in that I do know an ABBEY THEATRE in my home town of St Albans, but I rather think that knowledge is beyond parochial. So, no, can’t be, surely? Apparently there’s a more famous one in Dublin. Who knew? On edit: Pip Kirby.

    Edited at 2015-09-28 09:16 am (UTC)

  10. 25 min – I started with SCARP, too, so SW corner was hold-up, with 25ac LOI after realising that the article wasn’t AN.
    I have deduced from the above comments that England had played Wales and lost, but needed to look at the sport pages (which I usually ignore if there’s no cricket) to check.
  11. After verlainesque alcohol consumption whilst staying up to watch the harvest moon turn red a sub 10 min this morning.Slightly concerned however by the freshly hirsute hands and that my dog is under her blanket wimpering.

    Edited at 2015-09-28 09:53 am (UTC)

  12. 21 minutes, I was a regular at the Abbey in Dublin for years, knew defile, but 4a and 25a delayed me for the last 5 minutes.
  13. I seem to have ticked all the above boxes here, namely: confident SCARP, dnk ABBEY THEATRE, saw the Blood Moon at 0330 etc and finally failed at SCUTCHED (given an escutchen, or not). Still I sorted out the Rugby. Seeing that England was long odds-on to win, I stuck money on Wales. Either England won (happy) or Wales won (unhappy but richer). A draw would have been disastrous!

    Edited at 2015-09-28 12:06 pm (UTC)

  14. Did this late last night and found it pretty straightforward, 10 minutes or so with no hold-ups and everything understood, though I needed to write out the anagram to get the theatre.
  15. 14:01. I’m another who hadn’t heard of the theatre but with only BBYEA left in the fodder there wasn’t anything else the first word could be.

    The defile/canyon thing rang a vague bell, or at least I was aware that defile had the potential to be one of those words we’ve had before that has a lesser-known alternative meaning that might fit the clue.

  16. 21m so on my easy side with no real hold ups though a pause at 19d before the right answer floated in. As Vinyl notes the Abbey Theatre, Yeats and Sinn Fein make very interesting reading, though for me much of the drama other than Synge’s (especially Playboy of the Western World ) feels dated now.
  17. About 40 minutes for me, which is about average, with SHAKE my soi (after SABOT), didn’t even consider the possibility of legitimate alternatives, so blinkered am I. I liked FUNICULAR, but hadn’t heard of the theatre, although there wasn’t much else it could be.

    Had trouble parsing NO SHOW, but cleared up by reading Ulaca’s helpful blog. Thanks

  18. As it happens our town has a theatre called “The Abbey Theatre” but this is hardly a phrase meaning centre for plays is it?
    1. It’s an example of a centre for plays, which is itself a rather prosaic way of describing a theatre. Not perhaps the day’s finest clue.
  19. 18 mins. In retrospect I made heavy weather of this one. 1ac and 1dn went in straight away and I thought their helpful checkers would mean half the puzzle would be filled in in no time, but the answers leading off from them didn’t spring to mind on first reading of the clues. That’s pretty annoying, especially with FUNICULAR because of its appearance a week ago. STUCCOED was my LOI after SEEMLY, and I’d like to think that if I’d done the QC first it wouldn’t have taken as long for the penny to drop.
  20. About 25 minutes, the last 5 of those on STUCCOED. I didn’t like that when I got it as I don’t believe stucco is any more decorative than wood trim, terra cotta, stone or almost anything else can be. But probably most upset because it held me up. Yes sotira, I immediately thought of SCARP, but didn’t enter it because the ‘P’ looked weird and didn’t invite an obvious answer to the 21D flier. No problem with anything else, knew of ABBEY THEATRE, actually attended once long ago, and ‘defile’ wasn’t troublesome to me. Regards.
  21. A rather languid 23m 10s today, completing the puzzle in the somewhat distracting environment of a supermarket cafeteria. My last one in was ‘stuccoed’, and I regret to say that this was the case despite having solved the Quick Cryptic first. Not only did ‘stucco’ arise twice today in the crosswords I tackled, but so to did ‘brethren’, which made me think of monks getting plastered – very unworthy.

    Edited at 2015-09-28 08:19 pm (UTC)

    1. How about a priest cracking open a lager?
      See crossword 24692 3-down for a great clue “Unsmiling priest cracks open lager for emigrants (7,7)”

      Very quick except slow at the end – hard to see BRETHREN and a confident SCARP pushing me out to 24 mins.
      Rob

  22. DNF. Everything went in in about 40 minutes (which is so-so for me), but I could not for the life of me see STUCCOED. This is the first time I have failed to get decoratively plastered. I am currently working on a cocktail that combines ice, water and perchlorate, in honour of the news from Mars; my only concern is that adding alcohol will create a potential bomb.

    Fortunately, I didn’t get misled by “scarp” – “hake” came to mind as the fish, and I bunged it in just for the halibut (sorry).

  24. 9:35 for me, tired from further wrestling with solicitors and estate agents. (Deep Sigh!) A pleasant, straightforward start to the week.
  26. I’m very late coming to this. We spent the weekend celebrating a famous victory. I’m resisting the temptation to gloat… 24 minutes. Ann
    1. Top the group and it’s plain sailing to the final.

      England to beat the Green and Yellows on Saturday with two expats cheering them on at 3am in HK!

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