Times 26305 – None Dare Call It Conspiracy

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
He’s had a go at that awful Kennedy fellow, but is Oliver Stone up for the challenge of his – or anybody else’s – lifetime, attempting to get to grips with the mother and father of all conspiracy theories, namely, “Is the Monday Times crossword puzzle really made deliberately easier on average than any other weekday Times puzzle?” (Even writing that, I got goose pimples, which quickly became goosebumps, as I realised the shocking implications of my question vis a vis the New World Order.)

Have successive Times crossword editors been in cahoots with their setters, successive newspaper editors, successive owners of the Thunderer (not excluding You-Know-Who), the Bilderberg Group, the Masons, the UN, the IMF, FIFA, Amnesty International and Greenpeace to confuse us and torment us, even as they strive for world domination (maybe excluding unwanted bits, like Cambridge, Leeds and Australia)?

Well, you only have to look at the times and read the comments on the Club Website to understand that this is no ordinary Monday offering. But can you trust these people? Maybe they are just potherbs.

40 minutes for me – or so the online clock tells me. But we all know you can never trust anything online…

ACROSS

1. LOCOMOTIVE – the literal is simple enough, but then again so are the wordplay bits, LOCO for ‘round the bend’ and MOTIVE for what a copper looks for along with means and opportunity, so I think we can safely say this clue is not all it seems to be.
6. ICON – Hah! The plot thickens. Just when you think this has got to be ‘hero’, since you revere ‘her indoors’ (indeed, not to revere her is sure to lead to a fate worse than any conspiracy can dish up), and the negative bit in ‘you shouldn’t’ just has got to give you O, a feeling sneaks up on you that you have been sold down the river. ‘I CON you, indeed,’ the setter cries, even as the editor flits Harry Lime-like in the shadows.
9. COMPLIMENT – the first of three clues involving plants. Three is a prime number, there were three wise men, only three of the members of Abba were born in Sweden, so what is the setter/editor cabal really trying to tell us? On the surface, it’s COMMENT around P and LI, but I don’t think anyone’s falling for anything so facile.
10. BASH – many people would say this is a double definition, but that’s just what They want you to think.
12. DOG-IN-THE-MANGER – Clearly the hidden message is being conveyed here by the hyphens. Are they really hyphens, though? They could be en dashes or even minus signs. Or all. Or none. In truth, compared to this, the wordplay is unimportant, but for the record it’s an anagram of DOING followed by THEM (huh!) followed by ANGER (‘are annoying greatly’).
14. EXTEND – deceptively simple is this one: EX + TEND. As every good publisher knows, if you unwind a conspiracy, you extend it. But as only those publishers in the know know, you can’t actually unwind a conspiracy, so the pretended equivalence here is only skin deep and we must hunt for the real message elsewhere.
15. STRESSED – on the surface this would appear to be a simple reversal – of ‘desserts’ – but look a little closer and you will find that if you add the total number of letters in the clue to the clue number you get 1521. Add the coded number in the brackets, purporting to show the word length of the required answer, and you get August 1521. As every conspiracy theorist wannabee knows, this was the month in which the Fall of Tenochtitlan ushered in the end of the Aztec empire…and the rise of the Illuminati.
17. PUBLICAN – there has been a spate recently of instructions to reverse seemingly insignificant prepositions. Insignificant? Pah! Here ‘turning up’ gives us PU, which is followed by LICE without their E in BAR (‘ban’).
19. SLIP-ON – the second hyphenated clue, and, crucially, the first of two in a row, and, even more crucially, the middle one of three. What more need one say? After all, which one of the Holy Trinity grew up at 16 down? LIP in SON.
22. THREE-CARD MONTE – There’s enough material here for an entire conference, so I’ll keep this brief. MONTE, in more or less this sense, came up on McText’s watch nearly four years ago. Significantly, that blog entry has garnered 558 suspicious comments. Nuff said. For the record, it’s CARD (‘character’) in an anagram of REMOTE THEN.
24. AMIN – if I’m not mistaken, recently there’s been quite a bit of this sort of jiggery-pokery whereby you clue AM by saying ‘not PM’, or, as here, ‘AM in’ by saying ‘PM out’. Read into that what you may. Those who think this clue is too easy to be anything other than a front are right: the sum of the letters in AMIN is 37. Check out Psalm 37, verse 24, and you will read: ‘Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him with his hand.’ Even more scarily, though, check out Psalm 24, verse 37. IT DOESN’T EXIST.
25. DEFINITELY – like the serial murderer, conspiracists pride themselves on their superior intelligence. One effect of this is that they can’t resist dropping clues to their identity. In a crossword, life is simple – you just rearrange IDENTIFY around [h]EL[l]. But in real life, things are never straightforward. Unravel this clue and the whole tissue of lies and intrigue will unravel, and the truth will be revealed. But who will recognise the truth after it has lain so long in the Texas School Book Depository?
26. EDGE – hidden in plain sight. Believe that and you will soon be believing an American President can do anything about gun massacres.
27. CHATTERBOX – a magpie is a black and white bird and you know what colour you get when you mix those colours. But are they even colours? And if not, how can two non-colours produce a colour? What is more, Rossini wrote about a thieving magpie, not a garrulous one, and, as for me, I’ve only ever heard an old codger described as a magpie if they never throw things away, and, what is worse, show you what they’ve got whenever you visit them. CHAT + TER[n] followed by BOX.

DOWNS

1. LICK – the fifth 4-word clue and then second to be a double definition. Numerologists will be in a frenzy.
2. COMFORT – the other day I went to see the latest Star Wars film. It raised a number of questions: why does the Darth Vader lookalike use a light sword instead of a light sabre? Why is he always getting in such a strop? How does the girl wangle it so that she avoids the apprenticeship with Yoda that young Luke went through? And talking of Yoda, it’s good to see him make an appearance here, intoning ‘court order supporting cuts’, or CT is cut by OM + PRO.
3. MILLIONAIRES – this setter’s clearly a commie. He/she doesn’t like people who have more than he/she has. He/she should read Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution. The definition is to be found in the first four words, and he/she tries to hide his/her militant tendency with a convoluted parsing, where LION + AIR is hidden in MILES.
4. TOMATO – I’m not falling into the ‘is it a vegetable or is it a fruit’ trap beyond saying that I’ve never seen one in a fruit salad. TOO (‘on top’) is filled with MAT (‘dull’) – a deviant spelling of MATT.
5. VENDETTA – TA propping up END in VET.
7. COAL GAS – hydrogen, methane and carbon monoxide formerly used for lighting and heating. No wonder those Victorians were such a sickly lot. COS (something in mathematics) around ALGA (something in pond).
8. NO HARM DONE – an anagram of ON HAND + MORE.
11. BAKERLOO LINE – overseas solvers who’ve never experienced delays on London’s antiquated underground transport system may have cause to curse the setter/editor caucus, as they try to fit Chincha Alta or Notting Hill into the clue. What we have is an anagram of BEAR + LOOK on LINE (think ‘strand of hair’).
13. PERPETRATE – the Americans love their ‘perps’. My hero Jason Bourne spends almost as much time hunting them down as he does trying to find out who he is. ‘Be responsible for’ is the definition, deviously clued by PER (‘each’) + PET (‘preferred’) + RATE (‘judge’).
16. NAZARETH – You pays your money and takes your choice: the Naze (related to the more familiar ‘ness’) is a headland in north Essex or a headland in south Norway. So far as I know, the second member of the Trinity visited neither of these places (especially Essex), but he may be found in A + R in NAZE followed by TH[en].
18. BARKING – we stay in Essex (well, it used to be however much they’ve changed their mind since), and specifically a place most famous for producing England’s World Cup winning captain. England have only beaten Germany twice: once with the help of the Americans and once with the help of the ‘Russian’ linesman. Another double definition, and another slang term for crazy mad.
20. POTHERB – this word pops up from time to time, but it’s sometimes disguised by means of a hyphen. The literal is ‘plant that’s cooked’ and the wordplay consists of OTHER (‘separate’) + B after P.
21. ADRIFT – ‘off course’; AD + RIFT. Is the setter getting as tired as I am?
23. LYNX – sounds like ‘links’ in every dialect known to humankind. Or not…we shall see.

72 comments on “Times 26305 – None Dare Call It Conspiracy”

  2. … not so good to me. (As Mama Cass sang before she was knocked off in the same place as Keith Moon … talking of conspiracies).

    Had to be NAZARETH, but had no idea about the NAZE so no parsing there. Thanks Ulaca for digging that out for me. And I’m sure (since he also tells me it’s so) that “on top” can mean TOO, but a bit thick this morning so didn’t work out how. “On top of that” … that sort of thing?

    And for the sporting: some chap on the TV called Flintoff tells me that Brits are watching the Big BASH League over their cornflakes. A Norwegian friend has just explained to me why it is so called.

    Edited at 2016-01-11 06:18 am (UTC)

  3. As an overseas solver I am interested in opinions/views as to how much local (UK) knowledge you believe it is reasonable of setters to rely on
    1. As an overseas solver, I expect The Times of London to be just that. Much as I would were I ever to attempt The Times of India, The Irish Times or The New York Times.
      1. So I had better (1) upgrade my UK general knowledge … or (2) give it up in favour of trying the Solomon Island Gazette.
        Thank you
        1. Wot! Nothing decent in The Canberra Times these days? If not, you should write to them and demand a decent puzzle from one of our great setters. I’m sure The Stickler would be interested.
        2. It’s a bit like their cricket team anon….if you can master a few basics it doesn’t matter what part of the world you’re from!
    2. How long is a piece of string? But this one seems fine to me for a British newspaper based in London.
  4. I took a full 5 minutes to find my first answer, AMIN at24ac – this was on my seconds run through the clues, Across, Down and Across again – but after that I managed to get some flow into the proceedings and eventually clocked out at 45 minutes.

    None of the usual sources lists THREE CARD MONTE. At 17 I reasoned that LIC{e}+AN{t} were “crawlers briefly” and if they were in a bar they’d be the PUB LIC{e} AN{t}. I’m sure the blogger’s parsing is correct but this is the one that got me there.

      1. Yes, I seem to have fallen victim to Chamber’s strange editorial policy. With ‘three-card’ and ‘three-card trick’ under ‘Three’ one might have expected ‘three-card monte’ to be there too, but instead it’s under ‘Monte’. In the Oxfords it’s also under ‘Monte’ with a hyphen.

        1. You see, Jack? Even when you THINK you know where to look for the right bit (card, definition), the organizer (dealer, dictionary editor) has moved it somewhere else. There is a life lesson here.
        2. Well as a last resort, having got “three” and “card”, I googled “card tricks” which gave me “monte” straight away. Is that the life lesson, or have I just sworn in church?
          1. Even better, you’re using this place as a confessional. We all do it from time to time, and we even have a priest. But he supports Tottenham and has more to own up to than most…
  5. There was something about Waterloo Line that looked, well, wrong; for instance, that I couldn’t make it fit the clue. There was, no doubt, a still, small voice reminding me that I knew of Bakerloo, but I hear still, small voices all the time and have learned to ignore them. Besides, I was too busy typing in Three-Hand-Monte.
  6. Well Ulaca, I think you’ve made a rod for your own back. How on earth are you going to match that blog for entertainment and erudition? I shall watch for your next one with great interest and alacrity!
    I was beginning to get somewhat anxious with only 4 entered on the first pass, but it all steadily fell into place in 45 minutes.
    1. I have something planned for my 100th, which is coming up very shortly, though I haven’t quite decided when.
  8. 33mins33secs (don’t usually post exact times, but that one looked pleasing…)

    dnk POTHERB or the card trick, but both clearly clued. I have fond memories of childhood trips to the funfair at Walton on the Naze, so 16dn was not a problem. Thanks, Ulaca, for entertaining blog.

  9. Oh my word, Ulaca has raised the bar for us, out-Verlaining Verlaine today with his delightful verbosity and an undercurrent of cynical wit. I’d better decide whether to compose a super-blog on Wednesday, or just do the usual terse this-is-how-it-works Jimbo style report.

    This was a pleasant surprise for a Monday, not the usual almost-a-quickie, thankfully I was on the wavelength in spite of a hangover and knocked it off in 18 minutes, with NAZARETH not quite parsed.

    Wall to wall David Bowie on Radio 4 and elsewhere no doubt; funny how some not especially talented people are eulogised the moment they die.

      1. I didn’t say he had NO talent, but to me it seems a totally OTT reaction today, almost the entire 6 pm BBC news taken up,before a bio-documentary, for a bisexual drug addict who could sing and act. Pierre Boulez died the other day and hardly got a ripple; I suppose ‘popular culture’ is what people want to hear about.
        1. If you are tolerant enough to accept Boulez’s gayness (you knew that, right?), why are you having a pop at Bowie’s bisexuality?
        2. Boulez was all over most of my usual news sources, not to mention social media connections. And what does Bowie’s sexuality have to do with the price of eggs in China? OH, here, let me help you–The New York Times today says “his message was that there was always empathy beyond difference.”
    2. Yes, but what does that have to do with Bowie? A formidable talent, but also a real artist.
  10. 19:52 … It’s clear they have an alogrithm that monitors the forums and when mentions of ‘Monday’ + ‘easy/-ier/-iest’ become > x a tougher puzzle is generated to cover their tracks. Nobody said they weren’t clever.

    Very tasty puzzle with almost no gimmes (for those of us who didn’t know which line Paddington was on). Last in NAZARETH, with the naze ringing a distant bell. Favourite LOCOMOTIVE. Or maybe ICON. Or NO HARM DONE. Lots. Thanks, setter.

    Fantastic blog, ulaca. Thank you!

  11. 10m. No problems this morning, in spite of not knowing the MONTE thing and wondering for a while if CAPERETH might be a biblical town.
    Nice blog, “ulaca”, although it’s clear to anyone who knows where to look that this blog was written by someone else.
    1. I fear your graph of a week ago may have unleashed dark forces, keriothe. They hate graphs. It’s well known.
      1. My graph rather supported Their cause, but I can assure you that I am not a shill for Richard Rogan and his sinister cabal. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?
  12. For underground misery I’d give you the Lexington Avenue line between 3 and 4p.m. when the kids get out of school. Call and raise. I don’t know if the 3card monte dealers are still infesting Times Square or if they’ve all gone over to dressing up as Elmo and Cookie Monster as an easier way to shake down the tourists. I did wonder if this one came from the same devious brain as gave us the 10th anniversary puzzle – Enigmatist. Really good one and I don’t see how Ulaca tops this blog.
  13. Dash it all. Would have been under 10 minutes, but then the 3 year old started yelling about her CBeebies show being over and after I rushed into the living room to change to a new program and back to the office, the first thing I entered was NI HARM DONE, which I think we can safely call a pure typo. Good puzzle though, and even better blog!

    Edited at 2016-01-11 10:32 am (UTC)

  14. Certainly no ordinary Monday offering, crossword and blog but I’m hugely put out that even though a fellow Arsenal supporter, and so a person of taste and refinement, pipkirby lumps David Bowie in with “not especially talented people”.
    1. Even Homer nods, and Pip is just plain wrong. But let’s leave it at that. We know what we know 😉
      1. With an exquisite lack of timing, the Daily Mail today carries a double spread of Bowie’s first wife Angie excoriating him and their son. Do journalists ever get red faces?
    2. SidC You prompted me to read the Wiki article on Mr Bowie, I see he was voted #29 in list of 100 top British people ever, in 2002, so I withdraw my subjective remark. I think I was abroad, away from his influence, in the heyday.
  16. …with a few interruptions. Seemed like a typical Monday puzzle to me, conspiracy or not.

    Very amusing blog U, well done. Nice to know I share a bond with the good people of Cambridge (brilliant place) and Leeds (didn’t they used to be good at soccer?).

    Didn’t mind Bowie myself, sad to hear of his passing.

  17. It took me ages to get anywhere with this. For about 25 minutes my grid was pathetically sparse with just a handful of entries, then I got 3dn and it suddenly all came together. It still took 42 minutes altogether. I almost gave up at one point as I was pressed for time, but I’m pleased I persevered because it was an excellent crossword with some great clues.

    Can’t believe the news about DB. I’d have been disgusted if his death hadn’t received wall-to-wall coverage.

  18. Did this late last night but don’t remember much aside from some pretty extreme biffing – particularly THREE-CARD-MONTE and NAZARETH so thanks for parsing the latter.
  20. 12:49 so this didn’t really strike me as a tricky one. I’m pretty sure it’s not one of John Henderson’s.

    I did get a bit becalmed in the SE corner until potherb opened it all up and in 16 I put Nazareth, then Carapeth, then Nazareth again.

    Re 9 I’d never considered that the “brickbats…” phrase didn’t mean actual or metaphorical flowers rather than compliments.

    Edited at 2016-01-11 01:28 pm (UTC)

  21. I took an age to get on the setter’s wavelength – I thought it very tricky for a Monday and finished in 19:02.
  22. I would have blasted through this one in 12 minutes, if only I’d been 40 minutes faster. Definitely found this one chewy, but perhaps I just wasn’t in the zone.

    22ac took me a long time to see, then I happily wrote in “three card Monty”. But the parsing troubled me, so I rechecked it and saved myself from that embarrassing mistake. Same story for 11d, where I too was tempted by “Waterloo”.

  23. Enjoyed this one very much but don’t understand how ‘too’ and ‘on top’ are equivalent in 4dn ‘tomato. Help?
  24. Sadly have to announce the death of the blogger, who mysteriously cut his throat while shaving with his electric razor tomorrow.
  25. DNF as I didn’t know the trick and couldn’t decode it but a fun and for me stretching 45m, followed by more entertainment from the blogger. Thanks to all concerned.
  26. 14 mins. The two-word DDs reminded me of a Roger Squires puzzle but the lack of cryptic definitions would suggest not. I’m 100% convinced it isn’t a John Henderson. Because I worked in the SE for many years BAKERLOO LINE wasn’t a problem. LICK was my LOI after LOCOMOTIVE.

    Count me as another who was saddened by the news about David Bowie.

  27. About 35 minutes for this tricky offering, and another few minutes to read the tricky blog. Thanks for that, ulaca, if it’s really you. All correct, though I couldn’t parse NAZARETH, didn’t know why COMPLIMENT was correct, and I had to correct my original WATERLOO LINE to actually go along with the wordplay for the right line, my LOI. There must have been sinister forces at work to substitute today’s from its actual planned Thursday slot. Regards.
  28. Great blog for a fine puzzle, solved somewhere over 5 hours (with a huge gap in the middle) and then completely lost on submitting.
    An Arsenal fan of taste and refinement? Now there’s a rarity. Bowie was a one-off: My daughter thinks of him mostly as Jared, I as the man who fell to earth. No newsreader seems to be consistent about the pronunciation of his name, which is odd because David is quite easy really.
  29. Well, I think David Bowie was a protean artist, with much more talent than John Lennon who was almost deified after his death. The great art critic Robert Hughes wrote of Caravaggio that “there was art before him, art after him, but they were not the same”. You may accuse me of hyperbole but you can say the same of David Bowie.
    I enjoyed THREE CARD MONTE as i discovered afterwards that it is a game of Mexican origin. Señor El Chapo will now have plenty of time to play the game….in between digging another tunnel.
    Thank you ulaca for a splendid blog. You definitely have a job on your hands to follow that. I used to work for an American cargo airline with a maintenance base in Arizona. There are still conspiracy theorists out there who say that the airline was covertly sowing “chem trails” in the atmosphere from one of our B747s. “They” would have you believe that those condensation trails are simply that but “they” know that those trails really consist of chemicals spread in the atmosphere to render the populace below. We had a B747 specially modified as a “water bomber” to fight first fires but I’ve seen conspiracy theories online that claim that it was all part of the great chem trail conspiracy. If you are interested, here’s what Wikipedia has to say. It doesn’t mention either my old airline or its maintenance base.
    1. I thought the white lines were made by the pilot holding a piece of chalk out of the window and drawing on the sky.
  30. I rarely comment, more of a lurker, but this was a joy. Wavelengths are definitely a thing, aren’t they? After 10 minutes I had solved only one, a measly four-letter 26ac. Then I wrestled a couple more into submission, and the setter’s thought processes became clearer. In the end, all done and parsed in 35 minutes, which is about my average. Hugely entertaining blog, BTW.
  31. Many thanks Ulaca for a wonderfully entertaining exposition. I think think this is clearly an Illuminati conspiracy. I liked the Robert Anton Wilson treatise on their influence, but I dont recall him mentioning the Times crossword. It’s probably something to do with his Schrodinger’s Cat trilogy. “The most scientific of all science novels”, according to Playboy. It’s full of wordplay.. like the name of the Cuban athlete Juan Tootreego. There is surely a parallel universe where Mondays really are always easy.

    But I digress. This is a lovely puzzle… My final NW corner held me up for ages until LICK got me started. A rather pedestrian 38:26 but, for once, I managed to parse everything and it gave me plenty of amusement along the way, so thanks to our setter too.

  33. How apt that this word should be construed as I con on a day when it is being applied to a pop-singer
  34. 13:27 for me, decidedly sluggish given that I used to spend a week of my summer hols staying with an aunt and uncle in Filey (where I used to walk along Carr Naze and down onto the Brigg) and now live in West London, near enough to the Bakerloo Line and Barking to have no problem with either. A most enjoyable puzzle to start the week.

    If the Grim Reaper is working his way through the alphabet, then Boy George must be getting worried.

    Edited at 2016-01-11 11:28 pm (UTC)

  35. Well done, ulaca. I have put in for two weeks leave so that I will be well rested for your next effort. On the puzzle, like everyone else, I went through the acrosses and the downs twice before getting a hit. Then it went downhill.
  36. Great blog Ulaca! Almost made me laugh through the pain of the knee joint fitted this afternoon. Can’t see me getting much sleep tonight and didn’t record a time as people kept coming in to offer me analgesia and tea and biscuits and check my vital signs. I was pleased to finish with all correct and my parsing on the ball too. Took me a couple of passes to get started with 19ac falling first and then a steady dribble of answers in random order. Need something else to distract me now. The next shot of morphine is due in an hour. Missed today’s paper so will have a go at Wednesday’s xword if the physio-terrorists leave me capable.
    Regards John Dunleavy (will be retired by the time I come off the sick and might even do the crosswords the day they appear 🙂 )
    1. Just the other day there was a discussion as to whether the patella was made of cartilage or bone. That clue must have been a write-in for you, even if the answer is now “plastic”!
      1. Hi Ulaca, yes I enjoyed Dr Thud’s post on the subject 🙂 my existing patella has been relined with some material or other. Just waiting for breakfast followed by a visit from the physios(shudder)

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