Times 26308 – would you like a little whine with that cheese?

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : A more than slightly distracted 14:44 – I got off to a rip-roaring start, and slowed down right to the end where we finished with one complete biff, so hopefully as I’m writing this up something will come to mind.

There are several faster times than mine on the club timer (Verlaine is already in with half of my time) so I think I made this one out to be more difficult than it actually was.

Away we go…

Across
1 0,VERSE,LL
9 AU REVOIR: (semeste)R, I, OVER, U, A all reversed
10 BRIO: BRIE missing the last letter, O(egg)
11 MESSAGE BOARD: MESS(officers quarters) ABOARD(on ship) surrounding EG reversed
13 FOOTIE: F(ans) and then a 0-0 TIE – not sure I’ve seen this spelling before, though I usually call it soccerball or footgame
14 CASHED IN: CAIN(murdere) surrounding SHED
15 WICHITA: I,CHIT(note) in WA(Washington State). A city in Kansas
16 STROPHE: STROP(outburst of temper), HE
20 GETTABLE: alternating letters in GrEaT then TABLE mountain just outside of Cape Town
22 RUSTLE: anagram of RESULT
23 DISPLACEMENT: CEMENT(sticker) after DISPLA(y)
25 ONUS: reversal of SUN(daily),O(round)
26 ALLIANCE: A, L,L (liberals) then (f)IANCE
27 TENON SAW: (ONE,WANTS)*
 
Down
2 VIRTUOSI: hidden reversed in tennIS OUTRIValled
3 ROOM AT THE TOP: I got this from definition – but now I think I see it is MATTHEW (tax collector cum apostle) missing W(weight) surrounded by ROO(jumper) and TOP(shirt)
4 EXISTENT: EXTENT(area) containing 1’S
5 LAMARCK: sounds like LAMB and ARK – Lamarck had an early theory of evolution as progression that was later contested by Darwin
6 GREENS: odd clue – anagram of ENERG(y) followed by S(small). Don’t think I’ve seen “renewable” as an anagram indicator before
7 SODA: ADO,S all reversed
8 CREDENCE: RED in CE, then (o)NCE
12 ONE-HORSE TOWN: SWANAGE is a town containing NAG and WESTON-SUPER-MARE is a town containing MARE
15 WAGED WAR: WAG(Jester) and EDWAR(d) Lear
17 TURNED ON: E,DON after TURN(period) As pointed out in comments it was probably that “end of period” indicated TURN – video game and board game players know that any period that belongs to you is a TURN
18 HULA-HULA: HAUL twice with the A moved to the bottom
19 LEVERET: E(njoy),T after LEVER(bar)
21 BEAUNE: this wine was my last in and biffed from the definition. A check at Chambers shows I’ve been mispronouncing it all along, since it is meant to sound like BONE, as in “dry as a bone”. Mind you as an Australian who has been living in Canada and the US the last 20 years, there are very few words I pronounce as intended
24 SOLD: SO is the note, and L and D are abbreviations for old currency

57 comments on “Times 26308 – would you like a little whine with that cheese?”

  1. Had a good chuckle at the drag artist in 18dn, though the parsing took a while.
    Thanks George for pointing out the difference between evolution and progress (5dn). They are often conflated, as they were in yesterday’s puzzle (18dn).
    I believe 3dn was once translated into French as “Le Grenier” or some such.

    Anyone here in favour of “Jerusalem”?

    1. My vote’s for Jerusalem, particularly if we can have the Emerson, Lake and Palmer version.
        1. I don’t remember that one from my prog years. I always liked their OTT version of Copland’s Hoedown, responsible for part of my small knowledge of classical music.
          1. It’s not proggy at all, it just happens to be on the same album (Brain Salad Surgery). If I had to categorise it I’d say Chas ‘n’ Dave meets Half Man, Half Biscuit.
      2. Yes! The ELP version is the one to go for if any.

        But I do relish the idea of Test matches opening with a song from the Barmy Army consisting of:
        4 interrogatives to which the answer is “No”.
        4 imperatives which are impossible to fulfil.
        1 boast ditto.

      3. Agreed. Emerson is a musical genius. In this instance he cleverly changes Parry’s original 3/4 time signature to 4/4, which allows the piece to breathe and enables the listener to appreciate the words more fully. Additionally, the fanfare-like synth runs in the second verse underline perfectly the sense of drama and heroic striving to which Blake’s poetry refers. I could go on!
  2. 25 minutes for this, with the interesting @littish AU REVOIR last in.

    The Lamarckian/Bergsonian belief that the human race always moves from a less advanced state to a more advanced one, once dubbed ‘perhaps the deepest habit of mind in the contemporary world’, is a theme of Scruton’s ‘Uses of Pessimism’.

  3. Irritatingly, I had a couple of these (ALLIANCE, ONUS, AU REVOIR), and dropped them because I couldn’t justify them to myself, until rather later. 3d from checkers; didn’t know the expression. 12d ditto; I needed George to explain to me the horse bit. 18d from enumeration, parsed post hoc; a very nice clue, although the word itself sounds awfully out of date–3 years in Honolulu and I never heard it used. I thought 2d was a beautiful hidden and 26ac a beautiful surface, but LOI 6d is my COD. Didn’t Lamarck propose inheritance of acquired traits?
  4. 15 mins. I thought 6 down was a weird clue since I just took “renewable energy” to be GREEN. But “mostly” made no sense. Then I saw it.

    LOI AU REVOIR (it always take a moment for the penny to drop when the answer is in French or Latin).

    2. Same two points as Paul above, plus I parsed SOLD as SOL+D (not that it matters much!). Another good puzzle that took me over the 30mins. By quite a bit…
  5. Another nice middle-of-the-road one, though STROPHE and BEAUNE went in on blind trust.

    I wondered if the definition for TURN was “end of period”, rather than “period”, as in “turn of the century”. Not that it matters much.

    Thanks setter and George.

    1. I think you are spot on with your explanation of TURN and the definition is ‘end of period’- otherwise what would ‘end of’ be doing there? SOED defines TURN (amongst other things) as ‘the transition period from one specified period of time to the next’, so it’s the end of one period and the start of the next.
  6. It didn’t seem hard but I still needed 45 minutes to get to grips with this one, held up at the end by not knowing LAMARCK. I didn’t know him when he came up in 2012 either, however I made no comment at all about NEO-LAMARCKISM that appeared in 2009 which I hope doesn’t imply that I knew all about him then!

    The intersecting GREENS and AU REVOIR also caused delay and misspelling 15ac as WICHETA prevented correct parsing until I returned to the clue after the clock had stopped.

  7. Unlike George, I’d heard of the wine pronounced “bone” but I don’t think I’d ever seen it spelt (you can tell I’m no great oenophile), so I had to guess it started with BEAU.
    Nice puzzle with some clever clueing (COD 12d).
    30 minutes on the nail.
  8. Nothing particularly held me up but then again, not that quick at 31m. I have a leather hat from one of my trips to Australia from what I understand is the down-under version of Barbour (waxed waterproofs etc), namely Driza-bone.
  9. So the trend continues, high calibre puzzle, pleasure to solve, not over taxing. No unknowns but had to trust the cryptic for spelling of WICHITA, a place I’ve never visited unlike BEAUNE which was an immediate write-in.

    I associate Jerusalem with the Women’s Institute – prefer Land of Hope and Glory I think

    1. Yes BEAUNE was a write-in for me too… when my friend told me she was decorating her kitchen in a colour called ‘bone’, she couldn’t understand when my response to her was: ‘oh, you mean a burgundy colour?’! *hic*
  10. 15.32 with an assist from Flanders and Swann. “Cognac, Armagnac, Burgundy and Beaune, this old man (de Gaulle) thinks he’s St. Joan.” I spent too much time looking for a reeve in 3d (too clever by half) and didn’t get around to parsing 9a until post-submit. I’d second Alec on Jerusalem (I’ve always liked Parry’s intro), but could we please also do something about the Star-Spangled Banner this side of the pond.
  11. 22:40. Took quite some time at the end to come up with BEAUNE. Despite being a wine drinker I’m not familiar with Beaune though I do know the name.

    I was convinced I knew LAMARCK because he’d come up recently, so was surprised to see we haven’t seen him since 2012.

    COD to RUSTLE as I thought it a particularly smooth surface.

  12. As Jimbo says, another fine mid range puzzle, I liked the horses in towns 12d. Put in TURNED for 17d but didn’t really see why = period. Maybe galspray’s ‘turn of the century’ idea is good to go.

    BEAUNE = BONE I am a wine drinker living in France, George, but I am intrigued – how else can you pronounce it (in Oz / Canadian / US English)?

    Edited at 2016-01-14 10:10 am (UTC)

    1. It might be BEWNE – I believe Beaufort S. Carolina is pronounced BEWFORT locally.
        1. Thanks Olivia, and ah good point, bigtone. The Montagues at Beaulieu Motor Museum. However my friend Robert Schulte just down the road here owns Chateau de Beaulieu, pronounced BOW-LYUH in these parts, not that it means there’s a right and a wrong.
          1. And when it comes to BEAUCHAMP Road (SW11 inter alia), even the locals don’t seem to agree…
            1. Olivia had it – somewhere between BONE and BEAN would be like BEWNE. I only recall trying one once – there’s a wine store in my town where the owner makes regular trips to France and smuggles for expensive and elite tastings (which I sometimes fall for)
          2. Having recently dredged up the rugby song which confirms how Mobile is pronounced (and what the vicar and the curate got up to there), I am now on the case of the other song, based on the 12 Days of Christmas, where the end of the first verse is ‘ . . . And my Lord Montagu of Beaulieu’.
  13. 8:21. I’m in the US again at the moment (in your neck of the woods actually, George) and I did this on arrival quite soon after it appeared. My time seemed quite good so I had hopes of being top of the leaderboard, and I would have got away with it if it hadn’t been for that pesky verlaine. Grr!
    So I seem to have been on the wavelength for this, but it was another goodie. Thanks for explaining 3dn: it went in from checkers and definition and I didn’t have a clue about the taxman.
    The final K of LAMARCK is arguably a bit harsh if you don’t know of him, but I did so that was OK. Recent research has shown that in some cases the acquisition of acquired traits (transgenerational epigenetic inheritance to you and me) may actually occur, which I find very confusing.
    No problem with BEAUNE. I am something of a Burgundy geek and I was actually there a few months ago. A bit of a one os town.

    Edited at 2016-01-14 11:25 am (UTC)

      1. I’m in Cary. This is now a regular trip for me, and will be for the next few years, assuming I manage to keep my job. Sadly I don’t normally get any time to do anything other than work between flying in one day and flying out the next.
        1. A day sounds like as much as anyone could take of Cary in one sitting. I’m about four hours drive west. Try to get to Big Boss Brewing in Raleigh, they have a rather fun taproom.
          1. Thanks for the tip! So far my experience of the Raleigh social scene has been limited to the Angus Barn, but I will bear this in mind.
  14. Something like 25 minutes for me, though I had a break and left the timer running.

    My only NHO was STROPHE, but I figured that if there was an apostrophe, there had to be something for it to be apo to. This supports my theory that the number of obscure terms for poetic constructs exceeds the actual number of such constructs. No doubt “logy”, “calypse” and “litical” will make their appearances sooner or later.

    As for “Jerusalem” – no, no, no. Since Flanders and Swann have already been mentioned here, how about their “Song of Patriotic Predudice”?

    1. Yes, yes, yes for Flanders & Swann – “The English, the English, the English are best, I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest!”. Great idea.
      Incidentally Jerusalem is about the legend of Jesus visiting Glastonbury when a boy with Joseph of Aramathea. Hardly a religiously inclusive anthem is it?
  16. Pretty straightforward today, the easiest of the week.I didn’t bother to work out the wordplay to 3, so thanks to the blogger for that. No unknowns, and Lamarck was one of my first entries. A very pleasant 25 minutes.
  17. 11:08 for yet another in the run of classy puzzles.

    I didn’t know Lamarck (nor did I in 2009) and was only half-sure of strophe.

    I’m another who was puzzled by green only being “mostly” renewable energy and didn’t parse the dance. I also justified turn as turn of the century/year or whatever.

    COD a toss-up between the seaside towns and the inverted tennis seeds.

    1. Yes isn’t it awful Jerry. I fell for him as the perfect embodiment of the slimy Obadiah Slope in the Barchester tv series. He also has the tiniest part in Smiley’s People as the cloakroom attendant at the Savoy when Alec Guinness drops off the incriminating photo for safe-keeping. Can’t mistake the voice. Oh dear oh dear.
      1. “Slimy Obadiah Slope in the Barchester tv series” was my first encounter with this wonderful actor. I doubt he ever had a better part, huge salaries aside, of course.
  19. 36m today at a steady pace with no major hold ups and some good clues with 12d the pick for me. I was glad of the blog to explain the many biffs so thanks for that.
  20. I can testify that a lucky guess inspired me to enter BEAUNE, my LOI, from the ‘as dry as’ lead in. We US folks sometimes have to resort to inspired flights of fancy when solving, often wrong, unfortunately. But today’s venture worked, despite being entered with a ‘really? Are you kidding?’ kind of shrug. Regards.
  21. 11 mins. I dithered near the end over GREENS and could have kicked myself when I finally parsed it, and TURNED ON was a biffed LOI because I couldn’t see the “turn of the century” meaning of TURN. I confess that I also biffed ROOM AT THE TOP, but to be honest I didn’t give it a lot of thought. I echo the sentiment that this was another quality puzzle.
    1. Glad you mentioned it Andy. Can you help me with why room at the top is work? I see (thanks to George) the wordplay but don’t get the definition.
      1. Hi Paul – I’ve only just re-read these comments and seen your question. ROOM AT THE TOP is a 1957 book (i.e. work) by John Braine that was also made into a 1959 film.
  23. 10:48 for me, held up at the end dithering over TURNED ON – like others not spotting “turn of the century”. Another fine puzzle, which I enjoyed more than yesterday’s. I rather like “renewable energy mostly” for GREEN – a new one on me too.

    My brain is so addled at the moment that I actually bunged in RESULT at 22ac because it fitted. (Fortunately I then read the clue properly!)

  24. Solution WICHITA, reached by a very similar clue, appears in Paul’s Guardian puzzle on January 15. Hmmm
  25. SOLD may also be the note SOL + D for the currency. Oddly enough, the denarius originally represented by the D was part of a decimal system.

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