Times 26235 – a thing of beauty

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
The best puzzle I’ve blogged for a while, I think – not least because, as soon as 12d and 10a were sorted, I was admiring the setter’s prescience in clue selection, following the Gunners’ superb win last night. (Yes I know it went in off Giroud’s arm accidentally but it was going in anyway…)
The first third or so went in quickly, then the RHS unravelled slowly, and finally I managed to untangle the SW corner where some trickier stuff was lurking. 35 minutes. I hope y’all enjoyed it as much as I did.

Across
1 SCORCHED – CH inside SCORE, (THANKE)D; D was singer. A cleverly disguised definition needing you to remember a G is not always ‘hard’.
6 CLEAVE – DD, the ‘stick’ meaning of cleave being less usual.
9 PUNT – Insert N (initially nervous) into PUT (place); D kick.
10 YELLOW CARD – YELL = YE’LL = you will, (COWARD)*; D caution.
11 ST TRINIANS – (RANTS SIT-IN)*; D rowdy school.
13 ALTO – key = ALT, O; D singer (with a hard G). At last I am remembering that ‘key’ can be on my laptop.
14 FOIE GRAS – I inside FOE (enemy), GRAS(S) = informer shortly; D luxury food. Fortunately we have plenty of duck farms here in our area so I can enjoy this treat regularly.
16 VOTARY – VARY = change, round OT = books; D one dedicated. Someone who has made vows of dedication.
18 ENIGMA – All reversed: AM, GIN, E; D puzzle. No biffing please.
20 NURSLING – (GIRL NUNS)*; D baby.
22 OGEE – EGO (I) reversed, E (rear of Marble); D arch. The sort with a point in the middle; I dredged this up eventually from depths of memory or some distant previous crossword, but did check it afterwards.
24 SPLIT HAIRS – A DD, ‘cavil’ meaning ‘to make petty or unnecessary objections’ and split hairs being a pileous problem (from which I am unlikely to suffer).
26 GORGONZOLA – Once I had the crossing N I was thinking ‘serpentine’ for a greenish blue mineral, but the next crossers killed that; then the penny dropped – what a magnificent clue! GORGON for ugly woman, ZOLA as in Emile, D ‘that has bluish-green veins’.
28 HAUL – Sounds like HALL; D carry.
29 PLEDGE – EDGE (go slowly) after PL(ACE); D that has been offered to uncle (i.e. pawnbroker). This took me far too long as I was fixated on words like ‘dawdle’ for ‘go slowly’.
30 BELGRADE – (LARGE BED)*; D capital. Today’s gimme.

Down
2 COUNTDOWN – Cryptic definition. Three, two, one, zero.
3 RETIREE – EERIER (stranger) about T; D one out of work, like me; retired, unemployed, unemployable.
4 HAYDN – HAD, N (pension at last), insert Y (years); D composer.
5 DAL – Hidden in BAN(D A L)IVELY; D pulse, a lentil as in Indian dishes.
6 CROSSOVER – CROSS OVER is not happy about; apparently crossover is a sort of blend of music types.
7 ENCHANT – PENCHANT = leaning, remove the topmost part; D transport.
8 VERST – Sounds like ‘VERSED’ I suppose; a Russian distance measure, slightly more than a kilometre. Another one dredged up from the cobwebby corners of the mind.
12 ARSENAL – h A r R y, then LANES reversed; D magazine.
15 ROAD SENSE – (SEASONED R)*, the R from end of driver; D &lit.
17 RUNAROUND – RUN = take charge of, A ROUND = part of quiz; D car. More usually a runabout, I think, but it’ll do.
19 GIELGUD – Today’s groan clue; reverse DUG LEG, insert I (one); D actor. I hesitated between GIELGUD and GEILGUD, neither looked particulary right or wrong, but OGEE settled it.
21 LEATHER – LE (heartless lie), (F)ATHER); D kid.
23 GROWL – GR = grey, OWL = bird, D menacing sound. Who went through a list of birds called the Grey ____ ?
25 TRAIL – R inside TAIL = rear; D be behind.
27 ORB – A Sorb is a sort of sour fruit; not the first; D royal symbol.

48 comments on “Times 26235 – a thing of beauty”

  1. 18:30 … rocking treeware with a single core graphite UI for the first time in ages. Much use made of integral vulcanised undo button.

    Agree with you, Pip — an excellent, testing puzzle.

    VOTARY, CROSSOVER, CLEAVE and VERST the last to fall, in that order. V-very tricky corner.

    I’ve certainly never encountered VERST before (verst time for everything), but somehow felt confident of the answer once I twigged the homophone. Thanks, S&B.

    1. You have inspired me to dig out my Cretaceous stylus and Ordovician tabula rasa for tomorrow’s solve. They work well in black and white. The last time I used them was in 1959 when being taught to read and write in my village school.
  2. ….did I change VERST to VURST? Dunno, it just looked more likely. Oh well.

    Like Pip, I seem to have finally twigged that key might mean ESC or ALT. Which meant that after deciding that DRAGONZOLA seemed implausible, there weren’t too many other hold-ups.

    COD to GIELGUD. Thanks setter and Pip.

  3. … than the last couple of days. I thought 15dn was the best of the bunch.

    Pip: at 19dn, I think we need the implied “up” so that “disinterred” = “dug up” to signal the reversal.

    Couple of notes:
    1. Wondered what “selected” was doing in 13ac.
    2. “Singer” was a nice disguise at 1ac.
    3. 6ac reminded me of yet another Beecham story. He was supposedly in Harrods asking for cleft sticks and was told they had none in stock … but would have some cloven for him.
    4. 24ac: there was lecturer in philosophy I knew in the 1970s who was both German and went by the surname Splitter. You can imagine.

    Edited at 2015-10-21 08:57 am (UTC)

    1. mctext: it would be ‘dug leg up’, not ‘dug up’ to get the LEG reversed as well as the DUG. I sort of thought it was clear enough by saying ‘reversed’ (for ‘up’) but this should now explain it further.
      1. Sorry Pip. I just couldn’t see from your blog entry how the reversal is actually signalled. I read “disinterred limb” as “DUG LEG up”. Any other takers on this? Always happy to be wrong/stupid as ever.

        Edited at 2015-10-21 10:24 am (UTC)

    2. Possibly Beecham but this scenario also pops up in Evelyn Waugh’s book Scoop, where in an unnamed Harrods, the young traveller is invited to meet the in-house cleaver.
    3. I cannot immediately trace it but a staple for blooper programmes is the film of some guys who travelled to Cape Canaveral to record on film a particular rocket launch and only when the countdown got below 1 and nothing happened, discovered that they has set up their equipment to watch the wrong rocket.
  4. Bit tougher this one and experience helps I think – a lot in here that newer solvers may struggle with. Stick with it guys and gals, it gets easier after the first decade

    I also don’t see the need for “selected” in 13A and thought countdowns finished at “one – we have lift off”

    1. I assumed the person giving voice to the countdown would be reading from a visual display on which 1 is followed by 0.
      1. I didn’t cavil about it as much as you guys, but I thought the cry of ‘lift off’ would come a second or two after the rocket motors ignited at zero on the countdown… I feel sure there would be a zero on the display, if not voiced by the chap who got that job. Anyway I’m not changing it.

        And everyone should watch the movie
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_to_Zero

        1. Nor should you – we’re splitting hairs really and the clue is faily obvious – one of the easier in the puzzle
  5. About half of this went in very easily but it was an untidy solve for me apart from the SE corner as all the other quarters had gaps remaining until the last few minutes.

    Actually, now that I’ve looked at it again, this was a technical DNF as I used a solver to come up with VERST which I’ve never heard of and, having found it, I couldn’t even work out what it was supposed to sound like to have the meaning ‘experienced’ though it’s obvious now it’s been pointed out.

    OGEE came from wordplay and I also needed a solver to come up with a letter to go in front of ORB to make a fruit.

    Tricky stuff that occupied me for the best part of an hour.

  6. 30 mins. Very enjoyable. Thought launch countdowns stopped at 1 then Lift off? DNK VERST – Presumably the length of a german sausage.
  7. 13m. For me the two halves of this puzzle were like Bertie Wooster’s first two cocktails of the evening: a quick one, and one not so quick. But I enjoyed it all, in spite of solving at 5.30am without caffeine assistance, so it must have been a nice puzzle. There were some dimly-remembered obscurities (VOTARY, OGEE, VERST) fairly clued, which I always like. And I saw the sing/singe thing relatively quickly: it has caught me out badly in the past.

    Edited at 2015-10-21 08:28 am (UTC)

    1. Are vurst, virst and vyrst not possibilities with no prior knowledge of the word? Without wishing to cause a broohaha (sic) I wouldn’t call that one entirely fair.
    2. I was back to solving at night on 1am with a bunch of beers inside me, and I see our times must have been pretty similar. If you’d have been as caffeinated as I was drunk I’m sure you would have crushed me effortlessly; either that or exploded.
  8. 41:02. Struggled in the SW and NE with LOI VERST. Should verst be a relatively common word or is it now fair game to clue any foreign word?

    I might have struggled with OGEE but as a teenager I worked in a DIY store which sold a range of architectural mouldings and I remember some of the terms which sounded exotic at the time like ogees, scotias and dados.

  9. SCORCHED baffled me. I even had to read your explanation twice before the penny dropped. LEATHER also needed use of the iPad.
  10. Very enjoyable puzzle. I slowed down in the NE corner and finished in 17.20. Can’t agree that VERST is fairly clued. VURST might rhyme with BURST but VORST would be worst. Foreign words as homophones? Harrumph 😉
    1. Agree with you about VERST – get tired of saying (along with several other contibutors) over and over that obscure and/or foreign words shouldn’t be clued by homophone
    2. If the dictionary defines verst as “obsolete Russian unit of measurement”, I don’t think it fair that any of three vowels would fit the homophone. I agree with the harrumph.

      Oofyprosser


  11. OMG an Arsenal blogger (fix!)! It was 21dn that did for 45 mins to get there SE corner far harder than SW corner – in my estimation.

    I didn’t spot the anagram in 10ac thinking the Caution was a ‘card’.

    COD 2dn COUNTDOWN LOI LEATHER

    We had a client in London who’s parents Mr. and Mrs. Head most unfortunately decided to name their son Richard.

    horryd Shanghai

  12. 36:40. I agree this was a bit harder than recent puzzles and had some great clues. I got stuck with 16a/6d trying to make ENTIRE work, which, of course, it doesn’t. VOTARY and VERST unknown but fairly clued, and I didn’t know what ‘cavil’ meant, until I reverse engineered from the answer. I enoyed the nod to the impending oval ball semi-finals with the PUNT and YELLOW CARD. 26a my favourite.
  13. About 40 minutes. Enjoyed this very much; “singer” mis-direction at 1ac, some difficult / obscure vocabulary with “verst”, “ogee”, “votary” and my COD was 19dn “Gielgud”. Fairly clued with good cross letters but a lovely ‘implication’.
  14. Started quickly, thinking it was going to be as easy as yesterday’s, then slowed right up, especially in the NE. I half remembered VERST, but tried spelling it with a W, as if it were a German word. About 40 minutes in the end. Nice clues.
  15. Not too easy, not too hard and quite entertaining. Unsure of the spelling for GIELGUD so had to wait for checkers. LEATHER was cleverly clued but COD to ARSENAL, for the obvious reason. Destiny indeed.
  16. 23:19 so I had a bit of trouble [/Frank Spencer].

    A lot of it stemmed from my invention of the Welsh cheese dragonzola and even then it took ages to see which end of growl held the definition (for too long I was looking for a grey bird that sounded like cruel/peril or similar). Eventually I was then able to get ogee from wordplay.

    I also struggled in the NE corner. I don’t see how “crossover” can be called a sort of music. As as far as I’m aware it’s a blend of more than one “sort”.

    Edited at 2015-10-21 12:17 pm (UTC)

    1. I guess you’d normally think of the term following the genres, such as indie-folk crossover but I have heard it used on its own.
      1. While acknowledging that this is “only a crossword”, it seems to me that you can no more say that you like crossover music than you can say you enjoy eating fusion food, at least without being a bit more precise about what is being combined.
    3. Replying to myself so we don’t get lost here.

      The logical extension of accepting that the clue works is to say that, for instance, jazz with enough of a commercial feel to appeal to pop music fans is the same “sort” of music as a classical piece from a film that gets enough exposure to pop up in the top 40, or a heavy metal song that appeals to blues fans, which clearly isn’t the case.

      Maybe I’m over-analysing but the looseness of the term was enough to put me off solving the clue for a while.

  17. On reflection, I agree with you. I’m not sure why I was so sure of it: possibly because I remembered the word from Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, possibly because my uncaffeinated brain didn’t think it through and got lucky.
  18. I had the same problem staying awake while solving after getting home from work that I’ve been having increasingly frequently. From start to finish it was 32 mins but I honestly can’t say how much of it was solving time. If this carries on there won’t be any point in me posting a time. Anyway, SCORCHED was my LOI because I didn’t twig the soft G and eventually entered it from the wordplay with a scratch of the head. Like Vinyl I struggled in the NE, although VERST was one of the answers in that quadrant that I didn’t have a problem with, but only because I’ve come across it before. If I hadn’t I’d have been very unhappy with the clue, and I agree that it is a little unfair.
  19. Challenging but very rewarding puzzle, LOI the VERST, after CLEAVE. I just guessed at which vowel to insert. I agree that VERST and CROSSOVER may be less than satisfactory as clues, but overall the puzzle was very good. COD to GIELGUD. I was again distracted by watching baseball, but my time would have been quite long without that. Regards.
    1. By the way, what is St Trinians and why is it rowdy? I noticed that no one else mentions this, so it must be glaringly obvious, to all but me.

  20. St. Trinian’s – several late fifties films about a rowdy ‘gymslipped’ gals’ school with Alaistair Simm as the headmistress and George Cole as a delinquent spiv. Very funny stuff!
    In real life Cole was Simm’s adopted son.

    So if you weren’t in the UK im the late fifties and early sixties it would mean nothing!

    horryd – Shanghai

  21. Raced through this until the CLEAVE/VERST intersection which held me up for a while, though I’m glad to see my guess at VERST was correct.
  22. Why thanks horryd. No wonder it meant nothing to me. I got the answer as simply the most logical placement of the leftover letters.
  24. 10:05 for me, as usual making ridiculously heavy weather of some easy clues (20ac being a particular example).

    VERST went straight in, as you would expect from someone of my age/experience. I suspect I may have first come across the word in a crossword many, many years ago, but I’ve encountered it in other crosswords many times since, and I’ve certainly met it in general reading as well.

  25. The weather was clearly even heavier here than it was for Tony Severs, as this one took me 45 minutes. I happily put in “cleave” at 6ac, and wasted 15 minutes before I realised it was wrong. Then I wasted another ten minutes before I realised it was right after all. I also squandered a few minutes in the unsupportable belief that a “grawk” might be a menacing sound. In fact, all in all, I seem to have wasted most of those 45 minutes.

    Never heard of VERST, and glad it wasn’t “virst” or “vurst”. What’s VERST doing in an English dictionary? Interestingly (or not; I suppose it depends on whether you do, in fact, find it interesting), the Wikipedia article on VERST references a book entitled “The Voyage of Semen Dezhnev”.

    I might have made a better job of this if I hadn’t spent most of the morning and much of the afternoon on the London Orbital Carpark that is laughably referred to as the M25. On the other hand, I might not have. In any case, the morning drive meant that I couldn’t drink my usual breakfast, which undoubtedly disturbed the precarious balance of my mind.

  26. No thanks to Foie Gras – a disgusting method of food production.

    In the end I didn’t finish – had Cole (C + Ole) for singer and that made Verst (even had I known it) and enchant impossible.

    Still, encouraged by others saying this was difficult since I managed 90%!

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