Times 26,315: The Tequila Rebellion

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Another perforce abbreviated blog this morning, as it’s almost 11 and here I am at work, sorry all! My strategy this week of replacing hours of sleep on a one-for-one basis with free tequila and sodas courtesy of one of our work dos backfired spectacularly, and it took me almost 20 minutes to navigate my way to a successful outcome to this tricky puzzle, which gave up almost none of its secrets without a fight. Exactly the kind of crossword I like though, with lots of allusions to all sorts of interesting things, deceitful definitions and clever &lits. No doubt some will have found it over-constructed, but not me I can tell you. Thanks and top marks to the setter.

FOI 20ac (pretty much the only thing that went straight in on the first pass – I knew it was going to be *that* sort of puzzle pretty early!), LOI the slightly oblique groaner at 13dn. 7dn was the hardest to parse, only becoming clear to me well after the event. Not sure I can decide on a COD but I was pretty fond of the neatness inherent in e.g. 15ac and 15dn. Certainly they are very satisfying to set down the parsing of, in my personal notation style!

Across
1 DATE-SUGAR – sweetener: “originally placed in the palm” because the dates, pre-grinding-up, grew on a palm tree
6 STAIR – step: AIR [carriage] on ST [thoroughfare]
9 CLAUDIO – Florentine count: C LAUD [not exactly | big up] + I{n} O{derzo} [“at first”]
10 POP SONG – PONG [hum], when going about OP S [work | “the end of” {thi}S], &lit
11 FIANNA FAIL – part in Ireland: FI ANNA [two girls] + FAIL [crash]
12 PASS – double def of: I don’t know / a way through
14 BLIGH – old captain dismissed (William Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty and Rum Rebellion fame): B LIGH{t}: [bowled | beamer “mostly”]
15 POMPADOUR – a certain hairstyle: POM PA DOUR [Brit | parent | forbidding]
16 COWRITTEN – cryptic def, “like the novel one couldn’t put down” as in “the novel it took two people to put down (in writing)”
18 KEFIR – drink: {li}KE FIR{ewater} [“take less of that”]
20 SOLD – persuaded: homophone of SOLED [mended footwear “could be picked up”]
21 SIDE EFFECT – fallout: reverse of F FEED IS [“turning back” fine | provender | is] + ECT [something shocking]
25 ADAPTER – AD APT ER [plug | fitting | I hesitate to say this], semi-&lit
26 SHINDIG – SH IN DIG [quiet | at-home | mine], semi-&lit
27 GREED – deadly sin: {a}GREED [as one “that’s been purged of a”]
28 HANDSOMER – increasingly fat: HOMER [old poet] eating AND S [with | son]

Down
1 DECAF – cup substitute missing kick: reverse of FACED [confronted “after upset”]
2 THALAMI – plant receptacles: (HAIL MAT*) [“transformed”]
3 SEDAN CHAIR – litter: (AND*) [“disturbed”] collected in SEC HAIR [dry | mop]
4 GEOFF – chap: GE{t} OFF [to be acquitted “with the passing of time” (i.e. losing T)]
5 REPAIRMAN – one making good: REP AIRMAN [sort of theatre | flyer]
6 SAPS – double def of: drains / trenches
7 AVOCADO – fruit: VOCA{l} [“short” expressive] ADO [song and dance] bears
8 REGISTRAR – hospital doctor: reverse of RARER [done less “about”] containing GIST [matter]
13 PACK OF LIES – don’t believe it! PACK O FLIES = pack zero flies [be forgetful when preparing fishing equipment]
14 BACK SLANG – obscure way of communicating: BACKS LANG [endorses | Austrian film director (Fritz Lang, known for Metropolis, M, etc)]
15 PATRIARCH – tribal head: P ATRIA R{i}CH [quietly | courts | “one fleeing” wealthy]
17 WALLACE – Scottish champion (William, as played by Mel Gibson in Braveheart): WALL ACE [mural | one]
19 FREEDOM – either a novel by Jonathan Franzen, if you “work” (FORMED E{rotic}*), or perhaps work itself (as in “Arbeit Macht Frei”?) if you make (FORMED E{rotic}*) novel?
22 ESSEN – German city: homophone of S N [“read out” “letters from outskirts of” S{outher}N]
23 TIGER – a dynamic economy: TIER [bank] requisitions G [good]
24 STUD – double def of: what makes shoe skidproof / sort of stable

67 comments on “Times 26,315: The Tequila Rebellion”

  1. Very hard work that took me the best part of 100 minutes in all. Unknowns included THALAMI, KEFIR, CLAUDIO (other than just being a name) and DATE-SUGAR. Wasted ages on 23dn thinking there was a substitution ‘g for a’ going on.
    1. I must shamefully confess that my first attempt at 9ac was LEANDRO, who is less a character from a lofty work like Much Ado than a slightly unconvincing lion-man who appeared in the last season of Doctor Who. Oops.
      1. No shame here – I am not learned enough to affect it – but I too had ‘Leandro’ at first, thinking perhaps he might be the progeny of Hero and Leander.
  2. Almost easier to list the words I do know than the ones I don’t. I soldiered on for around 100 minutes only, Devon Loch like, to fall at the final hurdle, having put in ‘Feanne Fail’. Well, if ‘Dunleary’ has that bizarre spelling, then why shouldn’t the final E be pronounced as a schwa?

    But I had already cheated twice, so I suppose it was ‘karma’. My defence is that ‘unwritten’ fits the clue perfectly at 16 across; my less convincing plaintive cry is that I had ‘blue slang’ at 14 down, wondering in just what universe to blue can mean to endorse.

    Though solving the puzzle was like pulling teeth, I have to admit the masochist in me enjoyed it. A tip of the cap to the setter as well as to our man Friday.

  3. Duplicate blog posting (blame the tequila?) deleted. On which barracuda3 posted the following comment:

    “17dn doesn’t really make sense ; mural doesn’t mean wall , as such!”

    I was wondering if it was “mural” as in “of or pertaining to a wall”, rather than the wall art, but it could still be deemed a little dicey, I must admit.

    2. Could someone explain this – I get the IO but the first part of the clue is still gibberish to me. Someone on the Club Forum wondered if this was an Anax puzzle. I don’t think so because his clues are usually smoother. I was idiot enough to open the TLS after doing this and just had to go and lie down for a bit with a non-improving book. Thanks for the blog V. 30.52

      Edited at 2016-01-22 11:52 am (UTC)

      1. C = circa = roughly, not exactly
        LAUD = “big up”, which is how the yoof of today say “praise highly”, allegedly.

        “I want to big up everyone who has shown me support over the years.” – Urban Dictionary.

        I thought this might be a Richard Rogan, as I always think when it’s fifteen minutes in and I’m headbutting my desk (in delight, not anguish, I promise you, though to the external observer it might be hard to tell), but I’ve been wrong about this before.

        Edited at 2016-01-22 11:57 am (UTC)

          1. Thanks guys – didn’t know the slang at all. I just saw the 50’s film version of Lucky Jim with your avatar as the horrible pseud Bertrand Welch – very nice indeed.
  4. 40:34 … with half of that staring at the unfilled SIDE EFFECT / PACK OF LIES intersection. I had to stand up and pace for a while before SIDE EFFECT clicked. I love the conceit of ‘pack 0 flies’, but the definition and the omission of the usual article from the phrase feel a bit below the belt.

    Everything else was tremendous, chewy Friday fare. COD the awesomely misleading COWRITTEN, which didn’t look like it could be a word from the checkers.

    1. Oh yes, I had enormous trouble with SIDE EFFECT… mostly because my brain couldn’t get past the idea that it surely had to be LIVE something, for the longest time.
      1. I was having the same trouble. And not being at all sure what ‘provender’ was didn’t help. In the end I just biffed and reverse engineered it, which I should have tried from the start, innit?
  5. I’m glad it wasn’t just me. I found this very challenging with many words half-guessed before the parsing was sorted out. Still, not impossibly hard and therefore pretty enjoyable. A few new words such as KEFIR and I hadn’t come across POMPADOUR as a sort of hairstyle or THALAMI in relation to plants (rather than the brain) before. I liked DECAF, ADAPTER, and SIDE EFFECT, but COD for me was COWRITTEN – took me ages to see how the ‘one couldn’t put down’ worked.

    A big thanks to setter and to blogger

    1. Yep, I think I agree about COD status for COWRITTEN… if cryptic definitions aren’t great, they’re terrible, but this one was a belter.
  6. Total failure for me, had to give up after about an hour with only half completed. Well done to Verlaine for a: finishing it, and b: blogging it so well. Hats off to all who struggled through – it was beyond me.
  7. A DNF here, as I had confidently scribbled in UNWRITTEN, on the basis that everyone has an unwritten novel in them which has not yet been put down.. This made BACK SLANG a non-starter but did throw up the interesting BLUE SHARK. So SW basically a mess.
  8. Far, far, far too rich fare for me today.
    Completely baffled by the majority of clues.
    One for which I stand cap doffed and in total awe of anyone who completed it.
  9. I had UNWRITTEN too for a long time because I desperately wanted a hyphen for the other – English English seems to have dropped it but not American.
  10. Bunged in THAMALI with a mental note to revisit it, but I never did. If I had, and given it a moment’s thought, I may have switched to THALAMI. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

    Absolutely brilliant crossword I thought. Wrestled with it for almost an hour over two sessions.

    Multiple PDMs, COD to SEDAN CHAIR, with many other worthy candidates.

    Thanks setter, Verlaine and Sacha Baron Cohen without whom I’d never have understood “big up”.

  11. 48m. Crikey that was hard. I almost gave up at a couple of points, but persevered, and I’m glad I did. I associate the helpless feeling I got from this puzzle with John Henderson, but I do named-setter puzzles (other than the ST) so rarely that this doesn’t really mean anything.
    There weren’t very many unknowns for me today, and they weren’t the really hard clues, which I regard as a mark of quality. BACK SLANG is familiar to me more from its French equivalent, ‘verlan’, than anything English, but I remembered it from the last time it appeared here: puzzle 25,391, another real toughie, perhaps by the same setter?
    My last in was THALAMI: I thought it a bit remiss to clue an obscure word like this with an anagram, and I was half expecting the answer to be THAMALI. But THALAMI does look more likely, and I reckoned ‘hypothalamus’ without the hypo must mean something.
    Top stuff setter, thanks very much… you &!$@£#.
  12. A tough end to a tough week but my 22:38 now doesn’t look as shabby as I expected it to.

    I finished with SIDE EFFECT once I had the F from FLIES, after rods, lines, reels, floats, bait, worms and maggots had been eliminated. I’d been working on the assumption that it had to be PACK NO something so I agree with Sotira that this was a teensy bit naughty (but clever at the same time).

    I don’t get teh significance of “substitute” in 1d.

    I didn’t know the trench meaning of sap and the only other one I couldn’t parse was avocado where I saw bears as a link word so failed to justify AVOC, a bit of chaos in Albert Square.

    COD to ADAPTER.

    1. DECAF is a substitute for caf isn’t it? Somewhat tortuous I guess and mostly there to suggest something sporty with the surface as much as possible.

      I didn’t know a sap was a trench, but assumed it was something do with sappers.

      1. It’s pretty flaky if that’s the explanation.

        Good point re sap. I guess the REs must be called that for a reason.

        Edited at 2016-01-22 01:35 pm (UTC)

  13. A wonderful struggle with this one and not a poor clue to be found. COWRITTEN for COD as others have said. Probably wrong but I also thought this more Rogan than Anax. Whoever it is, keep them coming.
  14. Chewier than a piece of badly made biltong (you can tell I’ve been sitting in front of cricket from South Africa again). I got there in the end, in about half an hour, torn between disliking the bits which teetered on the wilfully obscure and very much liking the rest. On the whole, I think the likeable bits win. My final struggle was with 16ac, where I was desperately trying to think of a word which derived from COWs – COW-BITTEN? COW-LISTEN? until the penny dropped in a satisfying manner. Probably the result of many years in an office where I regularly referred to colleagues as COW-ORKERS, though orking cows obviously wasn’t our core business.
  15. Fortunately a day off for me otherwise would have had to file this one as unsolved for revisit.Another unwritten fan who initially missed the singularity direction.A satisfying solve and two new words which like a penny machine will probably push several others into the abyss.

  16. Beyond me with very few answers after 30m and a growing feeling I was wasting my time with this one. There seems to be a growing use of obscure words and phrases in the puzzles. When clued obliquely as with this setter it becomes guesswork, THALAMI or THAMALI for example. For me makes the whole exercise pointless if I can’t work out the answer unless I’ve got a degree in botany. Not a gripe about science clues, I should add. My own specialist field, literature, didn’t help with CLAUDIO either. That he’s a Florentine is hardly central to the play, unlike say Cassio in ‘Othello’ so not very helpful to use it as a part of the definition. Not my sort of puzzle at all! But I very much appreciated the blog!
    1. At least it’s textual:

      LEONATO
      I find here that Don
      Pedro hath bestowed much honor on a young
      Florentine called Claudio. (1.1.9-11)

      1. … copied and pasted from an American edition, I assume :-).

        I’m with grestyman on this one. Claudio does appear in the list of characters as “a young lord of Florence”, but, as I recall, Florence has no significance whatsoever in the play. (Admittedly my Eng. Lit. O-Level, for which Much Ado was one of the set works, is 55+ years behind me, but I’ve seen the play, – and the film, and Berlioz’s opera – a number of times since.)

        1. The internet assures me that:

          “Common forms in the 1500s, before standardisation of spelling, were honur, honor and honour. Shakespeare used both honor and honour but preferred honor. Honour became usual in the seventeenth century but the pendulum swung back in the eighteenth.”

          Shakespeare may have had small Latin and less Greek, but it looks like he was on the side of the angels with respect to the spelling of “honor”!

    2. On the THALAMI front: evidently I know enough science to have heard of hypothalam[uses/i], and as a classicist I understand that the word’s ancient meaning was “chambers”… so it seemed like a safe bet for a botanical term too, even though I’ve never heard it in that context before. I may need to check my educational privilege of course!

      Edited at 2016-01-22 03:29 pm (UTC)

      1. And there’s me thinking “plant receptacle” meant a fancy vase or summat, like an amphora, lecythus or jardiniere.
        2. Until I looked it up post-solve I was fairly confident it was what the Japanese kept their bonsai trees in!
          2. I remember seeing someone boasting that he owned the largest bonsai tree in the world.
            1. Heh. Probably a Tokyo derivatives trader. But as they say in Japan, “Big bonsai, tiny … “
    3. The legitimacy of using of anagrams to clue obscure words and place names has been challenged by a number of commentators in this blog. I seem to recall the editor commenting after one particularly egregious example, that this device would be discontinued going forward. Clearly such sanction was too much for some setters who now actively go out of their way to clue like this. A similar example cropped up only yesterday with TANNHAUSER.

      Tim

      1. Hi Tim. My personal view is that this is OK if it’s reasonably clear which combination of letters is likely to be a word. I thought THALAMI was arguably OK, because of the link with ‘hypothalamus’, but this is of course entirely subjective. I think if I had been the editor I might have asked the setter to have another go at that clue.

        Edited at 2016-01-22 05:26 pm (UTC)

      2. I wonder when that phrase ” going forward ” ( it wouldn’t be discontinued going backwards! ) will appear in a puzzle ?

        Edited at 2016-01-22 07:40 pm (UTC)

  17. Wonderful crossword in every way but an order of magnitude harder than usual IMHO. Probably took about an hour as I got very stuck in the NW corner. Thanks for the blog to untangle adapter and freedom. I’ll back the arbeit macht frei explanation I think even though it is surprising to see this.
  18. Our blogger suggested that someone might find this over-constructed. I do.
    When I see the entire available space in the paper occupied by the clues I know that I am a) in trouble and b) not going to enjoy it.
    In my opinion there was a good crossword here that needed editing.

  19. A very chewy offering, that took me 45 minutes, ending with an unparsed SIDE EFFECT. By that point, once I had identified a likely fit for the crossers and any part of the clue I just put it in and didn’t bother to try to explain why. I agree that COWRITTEN was quite well done, but ‘big up’ requires more current vocab than perhaps the London Times should be encouraging us to possess. I did like the extended definition for DECAF, though. Quite a workout. Thanks to the setter and Verlaine, and regards.
  20. 33 mins. At least I was fully awake for this one, unlike yesterday’s sleep-affected nightmare which I didn’t bother to comment on. Like Kevin above a biffed SIDE EFFECT was my LOI, and like Sotira earlier PACK OF LIES also caused me a lot of trouble. Fortunately I’ve been hearing “big up” for a few years and have even used it myself from time to time, so 9ac didn’t cause me as much trouble as it might once have done. Even with all the checkers it seemed to take an age for COWRITTEN to occur to me, I agree that from checkers only it didn’t look like there would be a word that would fit, and for a while I was even trying to think of alternatives to WALLACE and BACK SLANG. THALAMI was actually one of my first in and I was fairly confident of it.
  21. I loved it but it was hard. Took me forever to get the PACKOFLIES and SIDEEFFECT part, my last two in. Like most of the rest of us I didn’t know THALAMI but I’d heard of hypothalamus (even though I couldn’t tell you want the underlying latin meant) so I got that right. If it turned out that THAMALI was the right answer it would have been very unfair.
  23. 21:14 for me, never really finding the setter’s wavelength.

    I admit there’s some clever stuff in there, but I can’t say I really enjoyed the puzzle as a whole, and there were one or two clues that struck me as substandard, particularly 19dn (FREEDOM) where one can’t be sure whether the definition is “work” or “novel” or even which work/novel with that title is referred to (wikipedia lists three novels, several films and even more songs).

    Is there a reputable dictionary that supports COWRITTEN (without a hyphen), as it looks very odd to me?

    It would be interesting to know who the setter was: somehow it doesn’t feel like one of RR’s to me. One of the first people I heard use the phrase “big up” (some years ago now) was Richard Browne, but it doesn’t feel like one of his either. I suspect the use of “&lit” ought to be a clue.

    1. I didn’t get a chance to solve this one yesterday and so tackled it this morning

      Interesting to read the whole blog after solving (particularly for a puzzle such as this one) and then to find that Tony has written more or less exactly what I had in mind. I was really irritated by FREEDOM.

      As a previous contributor commented – there’s a good puzzle hiding in here but it needs editorial discipline applied to it

      Overall, it wasn’t fun to solve – just hard work with some teeth grinding along the way

      1. note that RR has said 19dn should have read Play… and not Work… – which does inprove the clue no end.
    2. I always feel ill at ease with an unhyphenated/unumlauted (?) COOPERATE, but what can you do?
      1. I tried to look the word up in my 1986 edition of Collins English Dictionary (from the days when Collins Dictionaries used to sponsor the Championship and used to dish them out to prizewinners) but it hadn’t yet made it.

        I keep forgetting that a more up-to-date online version is available, though if it only includes “cowrite” and not “co-write”, it’s in danger of being regarded as disreputable. And for some reason it doesn’t seem to include either “cowritten” or “co-written”!

        On edit:
        Wait a minute. It does include “-written” in the list of derivatives under “cowrite”. But if you try looking up “cowritten”, it says “Sorry, no results …” and then lists various words you might have meant, including “unwritten”, “skywritten”, “ghostwritten”, “handwritten”, “overwritten”, “underwritten”, “rewritten”, “outwritten” and “typewritten”. Hm!

        Edited at 2016-01-24 12:11 pm (UTC)

        1. Well I really don’t know why I am bothering with this Tony, as it is a clumsy word I would try to avoid using anyway. And if I did, I would use a hyphen.. but since both ODO and Collins specifically say cowrite, it does not seem a huge leap from there to cowritten. Having said that, ODO includes a total of 26 example sentences for cowrite and cowriter, and 25 of them do use a hyphen. i am now totally confused, and will opt for joint authorship in future…
  24. The first word of 19dn should have been ‘Play’ not ‘Work’
    Not sure what happened for now.
    Too much editing perhaps 🙂

    Crossword Editor

    2. May I use this opportunity to say thank you to you, the setters and this blog.

      Incidentally, I have spent my life blurring play and work.

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