Times 26281 – A Stink in the Tale

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Looking at the early times posted on the Crossword Club, I have to say that this was a puzzle where a holiday taken in Bulgaria 35 years ago made all the difference between a Did Not Finish and a finish in an almost Verlainesque time of 12’44”. Every dog must have his day, as Tottenham found when the toon came up to town.

My memories of that holiday at the “Sunny Beach” resort on the Black Sea are vivid, not least because of the Borg-McEnroe tiebreaker we watched in the hotel lounge and even more so for the fact that I was head-butted in a restaurant down the road after being overcharged for a plate of chips I decided to order when I was feeling peckish late one evening.

I forget how much I was quibbling over, but it was likely to have been of the order of several of the little fellows at 17 down (stotinki, as they are pluralised in the Latin script). (A stotinka – a hundredth of a lev – is about half a euro cent.)

So Bulgaria is one of the nine EU countries which wisely opted out of the euro. Your starter for ten: which are the other eight? (Answer at the end of this entry.*)

ACROSS

1. CROW – C (‘about’ = Latin ‘circa’) + ROW.
3. CRISPBREAD – CRISP (‘fresh’ as in weather reports) + BREAD (‘dough’). My last in.
9. OLD MAID – barely cryptic and a write-in if you remember the card game.
11. MAGICAL – MAGI (as in the three wise men) + CAL[l].
12. SWITCH OFF – not tremenjously cryptic, either; the definition is ‘stop paying attention’ and ‘turn away’ the wordplay, which needs to be lifted and separated – if you’re really, well, paying attention.
13. NORMAL – NORMA[l]; the other day, in a Concise, I mixed up my Berlinis (the composer of the opera Norma) with my Berninis (the sculptor/architect). I’m better with music than art. On edit: …but not so good as I thought I was – the composer is Bellini! A nod of the head to my Monday confrère
14. ONE-HIT WONDER – forget your Nenas and Carl Douglases, for me there is only one of the breed, the marvellously named Randy Van Warmer. (Even if he doesn’t make any of the Wikipedia lists, and had other hits, he fits the bill for me.)
18. IN A COLD SWEAT – my original thought was ‘muck’, but maybe that is just a reflection on my mental state at a time when I’m wallowing in nostalgia by catching a few Carry Ons on YouTube. It’s an anagram* of NOW A CITADELS.
21. CLEAR – C (musical note) + [Edward] LEAR.
22. IMPRUDENT – IMPUDENT about R (Latin ‘rex’, of course).
24. OVERDUE – another refugee from Quickie land: OVER + DUE.
25. UNKNOWN – if I was asked to open a book on clue most likely to be biffed (‘bunged in from the definition’), I would give it to this one, using my actuarial skills to reckon that most solvers already have the K by the time they get to this one. For the record, it’s NUN* + OWN (‘at once’) around K (English ‘king’, naturellement). On edit: Or, to be precise, NUN* around K + NOW. Thanks to the sharp-eyed Galspray.
26. SILVERSIDE – long, in an easy (apart from one clue) puzzle, therefore also highly biffable: it’s LIVERS* in SIDE.
27. FETA – hidden there somewhere.

DOWNS

1. CROSSBOW – BOW below CROSS (‘bridge’ as a verb).
2. OLD-TIMER – a not especially challenging double definition. (I used to say that this type of clue was aimed at Australian solvers, before I was told off, so I will say that this type of clue is aimed at some Australian solvers.)
4. RODEO – another ‘Australian’ (note the use of inverted commas to show jocular intent) clue: RODE + O.
5. SEMIFINAL – IF in SEMINAL. Perhaps we should call this one ‘Antipodean’, lest I be thought to be ignoring my mother’s land across the Tasman.
6. BEGINNERS LUCK – IN + N[orthern] + GREEK + CLUBS*. The literal is ‘unexpected success for novice’. In case you are wondering, ODO (Oxford Dictionaries Online) has ‘North or Northern’ for ‘N’. On reflection, I probably lose a lot of money and have to give up my nascent actuarial career, as this one has ‘Biff me!’ written all over it.
7. ESCORT – C (‘chapter’) in E + SORT.
8. DOLLAR – ALL in ROD all reversed.
10. AUCTION BRIDGE – ‘a [card] game’; this time BRIDGE is wearing its ‘join’ hat (as in ‘bridge different cultures’), while ‘lots’ go to (and hopefully from) an AUCTION.
15. WACKINESS – WINE + CASKS*.
16. PENELOPE – a rather straightforward charade (i.e., A + B) of PEN + ELOPE.
17. STOTINKA – TIN (‘money’) in ST + OK + A.
19. ACTORS – [f]ACTORS.
20. REVEAL – ‘show’; A in REVEL. ODO has pushing the boat out as being lavish in one’s spending or celebrations.
23. POUND – double definition: Ezra and a place for containing or confining.

* Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Sweden and the UK.

53 comments on “Times 26281 – A Stink in the Tale”

  1. What a disaster. After 9:55 I had everything done and all but dusted. Just needed to fill in the blanks at 3ac, for my second-fastest time ever.

    BRISKBREAD? BRASHBREAD?…nothing made sense. It was becoming the crossword equivalent of allowing Monty Panesar and James Anderson to bat for a draw at Cardiff. I had convinced myself that I was looking for some fiendishly obscure UK biscuit name (Garibaldi, anyone?), when all I needed to do was to keep my head and bowl at the top of off stump.

    After half an hour I used a helper to get the should-have-been-blindingly-obvious CRISPBREAD.

    Defeated. No excuses. Thanks setter and Ulaca.

    1. I’m in a similar boat. 8.42 but, having gone through the alphabet a couple of times, I plumped for BRISKBREAD in the hope that it might be a foodstuff (related to brisket in some way?). Disappointing.
      1. Makes me feel better. I was close to settling on BRISKBREAD, but then I was also close to settling on IRISHBREAD. In other words, I had no idea!
    1. It was something like this:
      Той не можа да довърши кръстословицата затова му nutted!

      🙂

    2. …. I would like to hear “Peckish’s” version of events; maybe it was her boyfriend?

      30 minutes but never got the coinage.

  2. Most of the way through this I was planning to go back to my Quickie blog posted earlier and recommend it for those wishing to make the transition to ‘the big one’, but then I got stuck and having eventually worked my way through my problems I decided against that course of action.

    STOTINKA was was the final nail in that particular coffin. I got it from wordplay but was not confident when I reached for the dictionary to check. It came up once before, as recently as November 2014, but on that occasion the wordplay was of no help so I cheated, as I note did our esteemed blogger whose holiday in Bulgaria did not come to his aid as it did today: http://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/1214434.html. It was clued as “Foreign bread’s awful smell that’s bound to appeal initially”.

    26 minutes.

  3. A crisp 17 minutes Monday morning stroll most of which was taken in getting Uncle Bulgaria’s money sorted out. LOI

    I had not come across ONE-HIT WONDER Randy van Warmer! Any relation to Hertz van Rental?

    CRISPBREAD went in easier then imagined and A MUCK SWEAT was an early possibility.

    Verlaine should be done in under five.

    horryd Shanghai

      1. After an unusual run of form recently, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Jason on the leaderboard, I was probably due to crash and burn sooner or later. I’d just come home from a 4-film Jean Cocteau marathon, it was late, I’d drunk some wine… the usual story. Anyway deep focus wasn’t really happening, and horrifying I still had a couple of clues eluding me as the countdown ticked inexorably towards the 10 minute mark. For some reason I just couldn’t see _R_S_B_E_D, though surely it had to be something BREAD? I couldn’t see it and couldn’t see it, 10 minutes was dwindling to nothingness in the rear view mirror, and then BRASHBREAD emerged from somewhere, ridiculous surely, but maybe good enough? Oops.
        1. I’m surprised you came out a coma so quickly and could attempt the puzzle after 4 Cocteau films , V.
          1. They were quite magnificently incomprehensible. I have to admit I really quite enjoyed “Testament of Orpheus” which gives an insight into how early Doctor Who might had looked if it had been made by French surrealists.
  4. Pretty easy but I must remember how to spell the almost worthless STOTINKA which often appears in crosswords. When I was skiing in Borovets in 1991 you could get 9 levs to the £ off the waiters at my hotel which made 9 stotinka worth one penny. To say that the food in the hotel was bland was an understatement although you could opt to go a la carte in the second floor restaurant catering for Germans.
  5. 20 minutes on the nail. Despite the vigorous denials, it seems like a typical straightforward Monday puzzle, but with a couple of twists.
    It was either going to be STOTINKA or STATINIA – thankfully I plumped for the right one. And like Galspray CRISPBREAD had me stumped for a good 5 minutes before the proverbial Bulgarian restaurant moment.
  6. 7m. Flirting with PB territory but I got very slightly held up in the NE, and by the coin where like deezzaa I considered STATINIA. Fortunately STOTINKA seemed to fit the wordplay a bit better and (more importantly) rang a bell.
    Ulaca, your list is not quite right in that only the UK and Denmark have an opt-out from the euro. For all other countries joining the single currency is a condition of membership of the EU. However for those who aren’t desperate to join, the obligation is conveniently lacking any sort of deadline. Meanwhile the Danes take advantage of their opt-out by pegging the krone to the euro anyway.
    Surely the ultimate 14ac is the prescient genius who actually named his hit The One And Only?

    Edited at 2015-12-14 08:42 am (UTC)

  7. Same as galspray — I’m not sure I would ever have ‘solved’ CRISPBREAD. It briefly crossed my mind but was dismissed as “bread, not a biscuit”. I guess there’s some overlap in the categories.
    1. The same thought crossed my mind but I wrote it in anyway. Sloppiness can be helpful when it doesn’t lead to careless errors.
      1. However you got there, you were right. Looking at the origin of “biscuit” and its earlier senses it certainly encompasses breadiness. I was guilty of overly conventional thinking, looking for something you might dunk in your tea.
  8. 13:00. Was nearly there in PB time, but took 2 minutes working out the unknown coinage at 17d, my LOI. I think Friday’s quickie was harder than this.
  9. One to be added to the evidence for the prosecution in the ongoing “Mondays are always easy” case, though that _R_S_ bread held me up for a surprising amount of time at the end (as always, I feel better now I see I wasn’t alone).

    Perfectly serviceable, just didn’t last very long, like much in modern life. Another good crossover for Quick solvers, I imagine.

    Edited at 2015-12-14 10:01 am (UTC)

  10. My brain switched off over this. Around here a biscuit is a scone, sort of, a sweet biccy is a cookie and the other kind is a cracker. And I was also thinking of Irish soda bread. Got there in the end at 14.02
  11. A clear PB for me at something less than 20 minutes, allowing me to actually read some of the news articles on the rattler coming into work. I agree that this was more QC than standard 15 x 15 fare – maybe they are buttering us up for the rest of the week.
  12. 14:18 so the dog got a longer walk. CRISPBREAD went in because I could not think of anything else. Clearly, I lead a dull life because on all my trips to Bulgaria, I have not been head-butted even once.
  13. 17 minutes, LOI the Bulgarian penny which, once the checkers were in, I vaguely remembered from passing through there in a soft-top Morris Minor on the way to Teheran in 1967 (sadly we abandoned the unfixable car in Istanbul and went to the Greek islands instead).
    Confess I biffed 6d.
    Nice blog.
  14. 10:51. Very fast going by my standards, only slowing at the end for STOTINKA which we had about a month ago and I couldn’t quite recall at first.

    I’ve never heard of Randy Van Warmer but I’ll have a listen to his one hit later if I remember. I’m not sure what my favourite is; perhaps Down Under by Men At Work? Given the time of year an honourable mention to Jonah Louis and Stop The Cavalry.

  15. A quick solve in 18 minutes, though CRISPBREAD was a very tentative guess for 3. Stotinka comes up fairly often in barred cryptics, so no difficulty there. I like the anagram for 6, though I didn’t actually work it out when I wrote in the answer.
  16. Not often I go sub-10 these days, but I did (by 58 seconds!) today. two crossing OLDs and the coincidence (sloppy cluing?) of join-bridge-cross in 1 and 10 in the down clues made life easier. I thought 3a was a cracker (see what I did there?) but then Tesco’s has it in the biscuits aisle.
    The stand out not-in-the-comfort-zone clue was obviously STOTINKA, which as well as being fringe GK, was by far the most complexly clued.
    My congratulations to Ulaca for creating a blog that was an order of magnitude more entertaining than its subject
  17. Monday’s main cryptic is the only one I seem to have any chance with. Today I did not get 17d but annoyed as the word play is generous. Had a little help getting the first words in 6d and 10d but the rest went in smoothly including 3a.
  18. Should have been a speedy 6:43 but Stontinka didn’t occur to me so I went with the non-existent but plausible Statinia. If I had a Lev for every time that happened…
  19. Thunderclap newman – something in the air, or perhaps embarassingly the first record i ever bought, millie – my boy lollipop.
  20. Usual performance for me, 45 minutes to get to the final three clues (one of which was CRISPBREAD, d’oh), after another ten minutes started Googling things. So I guess a DNF by the real standards, but I’m heartened to see that I actually almost finish this puzzle in about the same time every day.

    STOTINKA was not a problem for me because the wordplay was pretty clear. I think I’ll use it as a nickname for my friends’ two-year-old son Lev.

    Thanks to ulaca and all the amusing commenters.

    Edited at 2015-12-14 03:14 pm (UTC)

  21. Fortunately the wordplay for STOTINKA was crystal clear because the currency was kind of fuzzy. CRISPBREAD last in and a bit of a rocket at 8:05 on the club timer
  22. So Bulgaria is one of the nine EU countries which wisely opted out of the euro. Your starter for ten: which are the other eight? (Answer at the end of this entry.*)

    * Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Sweden and the UK.

    I think most of those countries are on the Euro enlargement programme.

    One or two have hardly been in the EU that long …

  23. About 20 minutes, but like others I got puzzled about my LOI, the biscuit. I thought of ‘brashbread’ though CRISPBREAD sounded better. I confess that I then looked up ?R?S?BREAD in onelook to see if anything else biscuit-related turned up; nothing did. So a slightly aided solve there at the end. I think we call it a flatbread, and I certainly wouldn’t call it a biscuit, but otherwise no problems, even with the coin. Regards.
  24. 10 mins. STOTINKA was my LOI (thankfully it rang a distant bell so I wasn’t tempted by “statinia”), and like others it took a while for the CRISPBREAD penny to drop. Unlike others some of the easier clues took longer to solve than they should have done, particularly that for ONE-HIT WONDER.
  25. 31 minutes for me, which is faster than of late. I put it down to switching my medication to one with a higher proof.

    I wrote in STOTINKA as an interim measure until I thought of something more plausible, but then forgot to discorrect it and was pleasantly surprised to find it to be right. I did half-remember a NHO the operatic Norma, but got it from wordplay.

  26. Very fast by my standards: 12 mins. Pretty much wrote the answers in as I went along. Generous wordplay on STOTINKA.
  27. Well, it seems I haven’t broken my losing streak (last week was so nice, though). GROSSBREAD? (never thought of CRISP…, which I might have recognised). And of course STATINIA (with A1 as “fair”) — the only time I’ve ever been in Bulgaria it was still Communist and I never got off the train to Istanbul, so I spent no money there.

    Edited at 2015-12-14 09:50 pm (UTC)

  28. I was on a train journey today. Got the paper out to do the QC as usual,this one being generally out of reach.But a quick look at the back page revealed a crossword with a lot of what I regard as QC type clues so after persisting I had everything bar 17d. And despite getting most of the bits (St,tin,a ) I couldn’t crack it -very frustrating; not fair in fact. David
  29. Much the same as others. Vague recollection of ‘stotinka’ and slow realisation of ‘crispbread’ but got there o.k. in a reasonable time by my standard.
  30. A sluggish 7:47 for me.

    Despite my usual ignorance of foodie matters, I’d actually heard of CRISPBREAD, since I recall a 1960s (?) TV advert in which the punchline was “We think you will be liking these crispbreads” (or something of the sort) delivered in a charming Scandinavian accent by an attractive blonde young Scandinavian woman.

    A pleasant, straightforward start to the week.

    1. I also had no problem with CRISPBREAD and I was surprised by some of the comments above. To me it was a no-brainer. The leading brand, which may have used the slogan you recall, is or was Ryvita which dates back to the mid-1920s I believe but was certainly heavily promoted as a healthy option to bread or traditional savoury biscuits in the 1950s and 1960s when commercial TV was in its infancy in the UK.
      1. I think the point of the advert was that the makers were actually Scandinavian, which would presumably rule out Ryvita.

        That could be the only time I’ve come across the word CRISPBREAD, but then, as I say, foodie matters are not my strong suit.

      2. I don’t think it was a lack of familiarity with crispbread, per se. It was the ‘certainty’ that a crispbread wasn’t a biscuit. The confusion for some of us came from having too narrow an idea of what a biscuit can be.

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