Times 26325

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
After yesterday’s struggle I was fearing the worst, but it proved otherwise; I whizzed through this in 15 minutes (probably 3 Verlaines) with most of it write-in material. 22a and 14d required a minute or two of thought to sort out the ‘why’.
And my tablet SIM has suddenly decided to run at warp speed (H+) after two weeks of grinding along on E, (apparently worse than 1G) so I apologise to Senor Vodafone. Keep those shares, I’ll be munching through those expensive Gigabytes now.

Across
1 BANANA REPUBLIC – BAN = forbid, (ARENA)*, PUBLIC; D weak state.
9 ENIGMATIC – (MAGNETIC)* around I; D puzzling. Not for long.
10 DWELL – D(ays), WELL = spring; D have one’s home. A chestnut, quickie style.
11 DAISY – DAIS = platform, Y = fourth letter of Marylebone; D composite.
12 THE RIVALS – DD; Play by Sheridan.
13 NUGATORY – NUG = weapon, to the left; A TORY; D futile.
15 STATIC – STIC(K) = nearly all stand, around AT; D stable.
17 BODKIN – BOD = person, KIN = relations; D needle.
19 CRANKPIN – CRANK = nut, PIN = fasten; D part of engine.
22 TARDINESS – Insert DINES (eats) into TARS for sailors; D no quality in fast food, you want it sooner not later.
23 CUBIC – CUB young bear, IC(E) nearly frozen; D like solid.
24 ELFIN – Strip two words; (S)ELFI(E), (O)N(E); D charming.
25 TOMATILLO – TO MILL = to grind, insert A T(ime), O = round; D fruit from Mexico.
26 HENLEY-ON-THAMES – (HE THE MANLY ONES)*; the place for rowing, indeed.

Down
1 BREAD AND BUTTER – Sounds like BRED = mated, AND = with, BUTTER = goat; D routine.
2 NAILING – SAILING has S changed to its opposite; D tacking.
3 NIMBY – NIM is a game, that annoying one where you try to be the one to take the last bit. BY = in reserve; D one wanting to protect area, acronym for Not In My Back Yard.
4 ROTATORY – ROT (rubbish), AT, O(old), RY (railway); D turning.
5 PACKET – A PLACKET is an opening or slit in a garment, it could be the entry to a pocket; remove the L; D a lot of money. But not necessarily a pretty penny.
6 BADMINTON – BAD for offensive, as in smell; MINTON posh china; D game. Once I’d been through and past MATE and PAL it clicked.
7 INEXACT – I NEXT (succeeding), insert AC; D lax.
8 CLASS CONSCIOUS – CLASS = group of students, CONSCIOUS = reasoning; D knowing where one stands. A bit obvious.
14 TUITIONAL – Know your crossword birds and antelopes! A TUI is a NZ bird, TONAL = using keys, insert I = current; D teaching’s style.
16 FRESHMAN – FRESH = somewhat forceful, and cool; MAN = staff, as verb; D first-year student.
18 DURUFLE – (FLEUR DU)*, nice anagrist ‘mal’; D French composer, of whom I had heard.
20 PABULUM – (UP ALBUM)*; anagrist ‘ripping’; D bland stuff. From Latin for food.
21 SENTRY – S(TUCK) = S (no tuck = without food); ENTRY = way in; D picket.
23 CATCH – CAT = lash, C, H; D problem being concealed. Topical surface, if not difficult.

37 comments on “Times 26325”

  1. 18m. I started really quickly on this, with the first few going in immediately, including 1ac and quite a few of the associated down clues. But then I got badly bogged down in the bottom half, which I found much harder. It was partly unknowns (CRANKPIN, DURUFLE, PABULUM, Minton, the tui), partly some wordplay problems (I wanted the first C in 23dn to be Conservative, for instance), partly just me being a bit dim this morning.
    I’m pretty sure I’ve come across the tui before, actually. Presumably the travel company is named after the bird. Edit: no, it isn’t. It’s TUI, not Tui, and it stands for Touristik Union International.

    Edited at 2016-02-03 02:16 pm (UTC)

  2. Easy vanilla flavoured puzzle which was a steady solve with no hold ups. Once you get 1A and 1D it opens up the grid
  3. I found this hard and had loads of question marks in the margins to remind myself to look things up following completion. Unknowns today were the game NIM, PLACKET (despite coming up in a puzzle I blogged myself on 5th January!), DAISY as a composite, TUI, TOMATILLO (I know there are various fruits with strange names, many of them hybrids, but I can never remember them), DURUFLE (despite my degree in music) and even CRANKPIN, though I’m familiar enough with ‘crankshaft’. Toyed with CLASS AWARENESS at 8dn. Not a good day at the office.
    1. ‘Composite’ for DAISY was another unknown for me, too, but it still went straight in on sight based on the wordplay and checkers (I had D_I_Y by that point).
  4. Same hold-ups as the blogger (TARDINESS and TUITIONAL), but for much longer. Same unknowns as Keriothe and Jack.
    But all fair and above board.

    Australia got tuitioned by the Kiwis today, so I’ll make that COD.

    Thanks setter and Pip.

    1. I suspect not too many “Aussie, Aussie, Aussies” heard in Auckland during that game!
  5. More Rocky Road than Vanilla for me, with the same unknowns as Jack, apart from TUI, so I was pleased to complete in 32 minutes, despite missing my target.

    One of those days where starting at the end, as I do, probably had its drawbacks.

  6. About my average time of 40 minutes again, but this was a game of two halves, with the top being easier the easier of the two. It took me ages to see the rowing centre, or indeed the anagram, but once that was spotted, the rest came fairly easily. I never did parse ELFIN satisfactorily, and INEXACT was my LOI, and the recalcitrant exception to the top half is easier conclusion.

    Vardy, wow! the dream continues. Celebrating that last night probably cost me a few minutes this morning.

    1. One of the great goals, for sure. I still think City will give Pellegrini a nice going away present, but we shall no doubt know more on Saturday.

      The Foxes should roll over Arsenal, mind…

  7. Well, I’ve learned a bit today over 18 and a bit minutes. I had no idea why composite and DAISY were synonymous, the CRANK PIN looked a bit weird, TOMATILLO I may have seen before but not with the Mexican connection, PLACKET known only in its Latin version without the K, and the NZ bird- almost any combination of letters will do so I let that pass.
    Fun to solve, though, and all the above gettable.
  8. Took me nearly an hour, I found this really tough, but I persevered and ended up with just one wrong: I had Durlfue. But when it’s an unknown clued by an anagram, it doesn’t really count, does it?
    1. Like Penfold (see below) I am sympathetic: with this and PABULUM I was ready to be outraged if the answer had been something else. However since I happened to get them both right I am of course satisfied that they’re both entirely fair. 😉
  9. I found this a real slog in every sense. I was ready to give up with gaps in the SW corner but eventually crawled over the line in 30:11.

    I went up every blind alley and down every garden path going and couldn’t call to mind things I knew like tui and the play.

    I though the definition for tardiness was flaky and there were some mighty clunky surfaces knocking around.

    You have my sympathy Janie, I expected to have the letters in the wrong order for either (or both!) Durufle and pabulum and was ready to cry foul.

  10. Didn’t really like this one at all and it was a DNF because of 24ac and 14d. Maybe it’s just me but it seemed rather joyless.
  11. I found this rather ho hum but that may be because I went completely off the rails at first. I had “tartiness” because I thought the def. was “no quality”, as in “no class”, the fast food was a “tartine” and the SS were the seamen. Oh dear.

    Edited at 2016-02-03 02:38 pm (UTC)

    1. I like that better than I like Tardiness – too bad the crossers won’t cooperate
  12. This took a par for me 30 minutes but like others I felt strangely unsatisfied at the end. There were too many I couldn’t parse and too many unknown words, even if I did know Durufle and that a daisy was a composite.
  13. Not easy here. This took me a full 40 minutes due to unfamiliarity with many bits of wordplay, such as nim, tui, and definitions, like DURUFLE and why PABULUM seems to me to have an extra ‘U’. But got there in the end after the extended brain workout, ending with PACKET, which doesn’t sound like a tidy sum to me, not nearly as much as the pretty penny. I also thought NIMBY was a purely US usage. Regards.
    1. We we definitely use NIMBY, despite not having back yards. But then we also now routinely “step up to the plate”, despite for the most part having no idea what one is.
  14. The sooner I get over this lurgi the better. It was 35 mins from start to finish but I lost an indeterminate amount of time in the middle of the solve due to drifting off and doing a spot of washing up! Anyway, my thoughts on the puzzle are the same as Penfold’s. The DURUFLE/TARDINESS crossers took a goodly while to see, although it was CATCH that was my LOI because I wanted to parse it before I entered it and I’d been making the same mistake that Keriothe mentioned.
  15. You know that feeling when you just can’t get to grips with whatever it may be that the setter is trying to communicate? That.

    Not helped by managing only about 30% of the answers and then read the word “easy” on this blog.

  16. 16:15, but clock stopped while dog walked so perhaps things fermenting in mind.

    HENLEY is 3 miles downstream from me so a write-in. DURUFLE on the other hand was a complete unknown to me, despite being a Classic FM listener, but forced it out. Others pleasant but not wow moments.

    1. I seem to remember Henry Kelly saying years ago, “Dat was Duruflay, but I’m not sure who it was by.”
  17. I made a hard slog of this one, particularly the last few, TUITIONAL, DURUFLE and the sneaky ELFIN.
  18. My NZ connection (Memsahib) meant I knew the (attractive) bird but it took me ages to work it into a word. Oh, dear. Folks over on the Club Forum speak highly of Durufle’s Requiem. As I’m a member of the Berlin Philharmonic’s online Digital Concert Hall, I shall listen to their recording of it tomorrow. Clever clue but there again, difficult to get Baudelaire into a seven letter answer. 1hr 11m and some seconds.
  19. O.k. Completely failed to parse ‘tuitional’ but bunged it in from definition, and couldn’t be bothered to parse some others (such as 1a and 1d) once the solutions were obvious. On the other hand, I knew Durufle (though I would probably have misspelled the name as Derufle if it hadn’t been for the anagrist) from his Requiem which is often paired with Faure’s, which works very well.
  20. An unusually fast start led me to hope for a decent time, but I slowed badly and finished in a disappointing 12:49. In fact my experience seems to have been rather similar to keriothe’s (except that I had no unknowns) as I wasted time wanting the first C of CATCH to be the “Conservative” in 23dn.

    CRANKPIN, although familiar enough, took me an age to see as my LOI. A pleasant solve, though.

    Oh, and thanks for explaining ELFIN, which I simply couldn’t see until I read this blog entry. (Doh!)

    Edited at 2016-02-03 11:17 pm (UTC)

  21. DNF. I’ve always found Thursdays to be troublesome and confusing days, and this is a point in case. I battled through PABULUM (half-remembered as “pablum”) and even dredged up TOMATILLO from the back of a dusty filing cabinet under the stairs of my memory.

    I was looking forward to complaining about the obscurity of whatever word was the answer to 14d, but now see that it is the completely reasonable and gettable TUITIONAL, so I am denied even that crumb of consolation.

  22. DNF, regardless of which day it was. Figured out many of the words I didn’t know (Latin names for plants now? Help me Lord!) and stubbed my toe on ones I should have figured out. Ah well, tomorrow’s another Thursday.
  23. Having conducted a performance of Duruflé’s Requiem (just boasting) this was a write-in, but I did think he was a bit obscure as an answer, which made me worry about there being other obscurities in the grid. I agree with the principle that obscurities should not be clued by an anagram.
  24. Managed to complete this in about an hour after returning from a session with the physio-terrorist. I surprised myself by managing to parse everything correctly, and catching the letters for the unknown anagrams in the correct order as they tumbled though the air after I threw them up! There were several other unknowns such as DAISY as a composite and TOMATILLO and TUI as a bird which I was able to construct from the clues, so the last few years of reading this blog and sticking at it has certainly paid off. John
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  26. My interpretation was that IC in cubic referred to 1C, which is nearly freezing, as opposed to IC(E). Seems a neater fit and I’m sure I’ve seen it before.

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